IBO reference notes on . . . spacesuits
For reasons that may or may not be related to fanfic, I decided to do a quick survey of the difference spacesuits -- or 'normal suits', in Gundam parlance -- that appear throughout Iron-Blooded Orphans. There's not really much to conclude from this, but it snagged me a set of reference screenshots that I think worth collating for your viewing pleasure.
The most commonly used normal suit first appears during the battle between Tekkadan and the Turbines, where Atra helps Kudelia out with putting one on, in a scene that provides some gratuitous shots of the girls changing. It's not especially tasteless, in the grand scheme of things, but it's one of those genre trappings that didn't really need to be there. Still, it provides a good demonstration of how the suits fit together, where the zippers and fastenings are, and so on. Plus the hilarious visual of the helmets being repurposed as potato buckets.
This normal suit is clearly a standard type, that turns up in multiple civilian and non-official military settings. Most immediately, we see that the Turbines use it, the orange swapped for a fetching maroon.
Generally speaking, the colour-blocking is the only thing to change between uses. Here are a couple more shots showing the Tekkadan and Turbines versions, including a close-up on the boots.
Beyond these two types, the most usual variant is a black and grey version that appears in various scenarios, including in the flashbacks to Akihiro's family, the Dort colonies, and the archaeologists in Urdr Hunt.
Curiously, Katya also wears this towards the end of Urdr Hunt -- where she must have been given it by Gjallarhorn. So can we take the black, grey and white to be a sort of universal default?
Other colour variants are worn by young!Amida and by Range (under his poncho) in Urdr Hunt, and by the various groups of mercenaries and space-pirates in Season 2.
Speaking of pirates, the ones who attacked Akihiro's family have added a jetpack for easy manoeuvring in zero-g. It's notable that this isn't something we see more generally: Mikazuki has to rely on a hand-held thruster in the Dorts. This, however, harkens back more to the original Gundam series in terms of moving around in space.
Moving on to the second major 'civilian' normal suit, the human debris all wear a slightly simpler, slightly more badly-fitted white version striped in red. We first see this with the Brewers and later with human debris used by the JPT Trust (not shown because it's mainly seen in fairly bloody scenes).
A palette-swap of this is used by 598 and his crew in Urdr Hunt, which I bring up as an excuse to post the bisexual-energy screenshot.
Due to image limits, I won't cover Tekkadan's pilot suit in this post. If you've seen the show, you'll have seen a lot of that, and of Gjallarhorn's equivalent. What I find interesting about the human debris normal suit is that it is clearly more closely related to the general-purpose version than what Shino is wearing here, which is a specialised for an Alaya-Vijnana-user in a military setting.
This of course makes sense given that everything about the human debris is meant to invoke cheapness. Rather than a custom-made battle suit, they just get a standard one-size-fits-nobody get-up with an A-V adaptor stuck on the back. It's a nice visual touch, that also helps emphasise the sense of human debris as little kids forced into situations they shouldn't be in. That being said, the *helmet* is distinctly made for a mobile suit pilot, being something close to what Gjallarhorn soldiers wear.
Tekkadan does use another distinct normal suit variant, with added armour, that shows up for the battle with the Brewers and never again. Or, well, I am not actually sure if this is meant to be a normal suit or more akin to the combat armour we see Gjallarhorn infantry wearing, or if that is a distinction without a difference. Since they are both deployed in space-based operations, we can probably assume they're at least potentially interchangeable with normal suits.
These do notably lack the backpack of the standard normal suit. which I take to be where the life-support gubbins goes. However that goes for the pilot suit as well (it only has the A-V adaptor block; I assume everything else is distributed at the waist and collar) and we see it functioning fine for spacewalks. So I'm grouping this in here as well.
As I said up the top of the post, there's not a whole lot to take away from this, beyond the different ways the same asset is reused throughout the series. It's a neat enough design, although the pilot suits are far more striking. I do like the pirates' jetpack; wish we'd seen more of that (that's actually what I was looking up when I started collecting these).
Overall, I quite like the commonality of design, the sense that someone somewhere is just mass producing these things as a standard piece of kit. That's kind of what you'd need, in a space-faring society, to make these widely available to as many people as possible, just as a matter of basic practicality. Then you'd have different groups that could afford it customising to fit their organisations.
Huh. That must mean the human debris normal suits are also mass produced, if there's a standard-issue version of those.
There we go again with another demonstration of the base-level exploitative awfulness built into this setting.
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