Areoborg

I'm thinking that they're designed to be extremely modular inside, so you can have your airline style seating for shorter flights, ocean liner style accommodations for longer flights, and plenty of room for cargo regardless of the configuration. Plus, I'm guessing that since this is the UN Government era, where everything was designed with an Earth First design philosophy, there probably isn't a whole lot of different options for ships. The Earth OKs any and all designs, and the designs themselves are made to be easily modified, depending on where it is going and what it needs to be doing once it gets there. By the time the New UN Government came around and the colonies worlds and fleets are given more independence, we're probably started to see more specialized ships that are optimized from the keel up for colony work, (much like how the VF-25 was optimized for use in the fleets, rather than the monkey model for fleets/colonies distribution of older designs). So instead of designs that are intended to be everything for all customers, specialized designs started appearing, like what we saw in Macross Delta.

Mine has the black boxes, but they're set to be translucent, and I haven't really bothered to go into the settings to see if that can be removed. I know there are settings to change how it looks on the PC at least. *EDIT* Turns out, I can turn the background off to have Open Captions. Doesn't fix the issue that they're the hearing impaired CC rather than just the regular subtitles that we're used to.

I've started watching Frontier on Hulu, and I don't really care for how they're doing the subtitles. They're actual subtitles, so you occasionally get "Upbeat Music" or "Dramatic Music" and having the translated signs be part of the subtitle feed rather than the usual subtitle options. Its better than the nothing we had before, but kinda disappointing.

They seem pretty tough even without the energy conversion armor. In Frontier's episode 12 (I think) Alto and Ranka crashed when an energy pulse knocked out power to the VF-25 and it came crashing to the ground. It was undamaged, and he was able to fly it around in GERWALK mode before another pulse caused it to crash again. Despite 2 unpowered crashes in 2 different modes, the VF-25 was still fully functional once the power came back.

I wonder if SMS's staff quality is because of the political situation on Frontier. I'm pretty sure that Alto said that there were moral and training issues with the NUNS pilots, which is why he wasn't considering joining the military after graduating, and becoming a commercial pilot flying a fixed route is boring. Since Frontier's response to losing 2 units was to send a flight of Ghosts out to investigate, they were probably using Shackled AI to do most of the heavy lifting for the fighter rolls in the fleet (a full AI combat force isn't going to happen thanks to Sharon Apple) Which wouldn't be a problem. unless they run into a swarm of space bugs who create natural jamming fields that interfere with the Shackled AI. That's why I think that SMS was able to get high quality pilots and support staff that weren't military washouts. That's also why as soon as the ran into the Vajra, space bugs who create a natural jamming field that interfered with the Shackled AI they had no choice but to rely on manned valks and pilots with substandard training and poor moral, who ended up getting beat badly. But by the time episode 13 rolled around, they had improved pilot training, and they were able to hold their own using the same inferior VF-171s that were getting so badly beaten in Episode 1.

On the topic of super prototypes, if the super-prototype has a bad habit of crashing and injuring/killing the test pilot (who are, by their nature, highly skilled pilots in their own right), so it gets nerfed in order to make it, you know, USABLE, is that still considered a Super Prototype, or a flawed prototype that needed to be fixed? The YF-19 went through four test pilots before they got to Isamu, and both we and him had to wait until OVA 2 because the YF-19 was in the factory being put back together when he arrived to replace what was left of the last test pilot.

Wouldn't a metallic hydrogen be more like a solid rocket fuel, rather than a liquid fuel (or mostly liquid with the hydrogen slush)? Its not like you can close the valve or anything like that, unless you're going to rely solely on the presence of an oxidizer to turn it off an on when using it in space.

It still seems odd that they planned on fighting hand-to-hand, but just went with fisticuffs. Were the following M. Bison's purity of unarmed combat doctrine? I mean, I can see grappling in order to hold them in place long enough to shoot them with the built-in weaponry, but not boxing machines. At least with the Valkyries. Yes, they're armored, but they're also transformers, and physical blows make it more likely to get stuck in a particular mode, where non-transforming robots would be given a bit more freedom. And be able to be more solidly constructed too, since they don't have to worry about transforming back into a plane.

My theory is that H2H combat was one of those overlooked combat methods in the early designs. Why do you need to carry a stabby bit of metal, when you can shoot them with your head lasers or your hip guns? Much like how the real life military decided that having an onboard gun was a waste of space and weight, when missiles are a thing... right up until they kept running into situations where having a gun was a good idea. Buy the time the Powers that Be decided to start including stabby things as part of their onboard weaponry, they would either have to use a hardpoint to carry it, remove some of the internal fuel/ammo stores to have it built in, or do what we have been doing for hundreds of years and stick a knife on the end of your gun. The YF-19/21 didn't include a knife as part of their built in weapons, because they now had the ability to put a PPB over their mecha fist, making a dedicated knife seemingly unnecessary. Though by the 5th gen, tucking a knife under the shield has become a standard feature, so relying on PPB Fists for your H2H weapons has fallen out of favor with the latest designs. Though the Sv-262 decided to go full bore sword for its H2H gear. Though I'll bet good money that it was something that the Aerial Knights demanded for their rides.