Henyo wrote:another possibility would be close ranged weapons. full length swords this time. not like the puny knife of the VF-25. i think it'd fit in with the knight motif that the pilots have going on.
Can't imagine where they'd keep something like that... though it wouldn't be the first time our boy Shoji Kawamori put longswords on giant robots. He's got a history of doing that that goes back to
Air Cavalry Chronicles, an offshoot of
Advanced Valkyrie that ended up becoming two different 90's mecha anime...
Macross 7 and
The Vision of Escaflowne.
Somehow, the Draken III seems like a better candidate for a humongous sword tho... as that VF's operated by a group that styles itself as a knightly order. It wouldn't be entirely surprising if they gave the Draken III a sword with a built-in converging beam cannon the way he did with Caesar's war armor Quo Vadis in
Nobunaga the Fool.
Henyo wrote:a side question: were there earlier VFs with actual close range weapons? or is the VF-25 the first model to have one?
Concepts for a VF with a close-combat sword go back to the aforementioned 1990 design series
Air Cavalry Chronicles, with two of the Kingdom of Fanelia's mecha.
We didn't see a canon VF design with a dedicated close-combat weapon until
Macross Plus's VF-11B Super Thunderbolt and its folding anti-armor bayonet. After that, pin-point barriers were the standard for close quarters combat until the 5th Generation VFs in
Macross Frontier and related titles (
Macross the Ride,
Macross 30, probably
Macross Delta) that had close combat blades equipped either as removable knives or fixed blades mounted in the shield.
Variable Fighter Master File's write-up of the postwar D-variant GU-11 gun pod (which you may know better as the gun pod in the VF-3000's line art) indicates that variant had the ability to mount a detachable bayonet... which may have given the early postwar Valkyries like the VF-1's Valkyrie Plus type, the VF-3000, and possibly VF-4 access to a close combat blade.
