HF MECHANICS & WORLD INTERVIEW NOTES
Mechanical Design Yamane Edition

* Had a rough idea of what he’d be working on and thought he’d be in charge of things like the Galcezon & Kessaria
* Katoki already had sketches of almost all the mecha
* Only large-scale mecha he was allowed to freely design was the Valiant
* Couldn’t make the ship look special since it is meant to be camouflaged
* Looks ordinary but can hold 3-5 MS inside, including 2 Galcezon
* Settled on a two-tier system for storage patterns (Galcezon on top with MS underneath horizontally)
* Staff jokingly started calling it the nori bento style
* Size was an issue. The bigger it was, the easier it would be to store mecha
* Couldn’t make it 300m, so settled on mid-sized, maybe around 200m.
* Ship is more efficient and easier to operate.

* Not all ships in the UC are high-tech. There are still ships like the ones we use today.
* Murase’s film has a modern feel, so he feels it could be a simulation of what would happen if Gundam were made today
* If the Valiant were too futuristic, it would lose its aspect of being an ordinary cargo ship

* Murase didn’t really give feedback (aka an opinion) on the shape of things, but rather how each piece would function in the film.
* Was quite concerned about machines or objects being unnatural.
* For example, wind blowing would cause beam particles to fly away and burn trees
* For mecha Yamane was in charge of, emphasis was placed on the interior rather than exterior
* Murase likes to establish a firm idea of the size and scope of a space so it looks natural when a camera is in the room.
* The cockpit of the Haunzen was made a little bigger than initially designed (Tomoaki Okada was in charge with the original sketch by Katoki)
* If kept the same, camera angles wouldn’t have worked out. Yamane realized this in the second half of the film

* When it came to Lodoicea, Yamane admits that he doesn’t know how much money Mufti has but didn’t want it to look luxurious.
* It was probably the most difficult to design
* First, they thought about using an old EFF base or converting an old harbor dock into a base
* But, their base had to be hidden, and Murase struggled with making up his mind
* In the end, they ended up with a base under the wreckage of a space colony

* Yamane wondered about how to design it, since no one knows the structure of what a colony is like
* Murase jokingly said it was just a “slab that fell to the ground” (he imagined a tin roof blown off by a typhoon falling to the ground with a thud)
* Yamane struggled with what kind of structure to incorporate, so he tried making it light yet strong, so he added a honeycomb structure.
* It looks like a huge steel ceiling
* Sunrise interjects here and says it depends on how much the art directors understand and incorporate such setting material into their artwork.
* Murase gave instructions that he really wanted to incorporate the honeycomb structure
* The rocket launch pad also caused grief because they wanted to make it look simple.
* Yamane proposed floating it in the ocean, referencing what the Germans were doing with V2 rockets and their plans to do sea launches.
* Yamane thought about an underwater silo launch, but Murase ended up taking it further with the “let’s float it on the ocean” concept.

* The beverage vending machine was Yamane’s idea
* If Murase sees something he finds interesting, he uses it.
* Sunrise says that Murase is the type of person that tries utilizing EVERYTHING the designers come up with.

* On modernizing the retro-futuristic Gundam World, a lot of the tech that appears in the series is quite old by today’s standards.
* This is a major difficulty when creating new works
* Sunrise again interjects that if they did things as is, it would be too retro-futuristic, and if it was made to be too modern, it wouldn’t connect to F91.
* A careful balance was struck.
* Giant robots are the symbol of Gundam tech, but they’re also the Achilles’ heel of reality.