[zephyr325]

Originally Posted by Tano

"Mondo Grosso", the name of the IS International Fighting Tournament that is held every three years, in Italian means "Big World".

Why is it in Italian?
Is an Italian pilot ever shown?

Spoiler for answer:

An actual appearance of Italian IS or pilot is not mentioned in the novel yet.
But a video game based on IS(specifically, Mondo Grosso tournament) which is very popular in this work has Italian IS (Tempest II) portraited as quite powerful IS.

There is a scene in the novel about Dan, Ichika's friend(male) commenting that Tempest is easy to use and has lots of powerful, fancy combos, while British IS (I think the name was Maelstrom) is kind of weak and has overly complex/difficult combo.

It's possible that Italy is considered as one of the top contenders in Mondo Grosso.

Originally Posted by cyberdemon

what reason?

Spoiler for answer:

1. Silverior Gospel is developed from the beginning as a military-grade IS.

This means that SG is designed for taking out other IS in combat, since IS's worst enemy is another IS, and was probably all armed with necessary arsenal during the incident - since it was undergoing overall performance trial.
Considering the fact that ISs used by main characters and heroines are 'test-type,' it is possible that they are usually configured for experiments of tests for collecting data, which doesn't necessarily mean 'optimized for combat.'


2. Silverior Gospel is made by US (Hey, what else do I need to say?)

Despite the sudden change caused by the rise of IS, US probably is still a powerful nation(in IS world) with lots of budget to spend in natioinal defense.

Since IS-related R&D would now be taking a big chunk out of that humongous defense budget, it is probable that the outcome is quite high-end stuff.

And now they don't have to consider the quantitative factor in creating military platform - like in case of Seawolf class boats VS Virginia class boats - because quantity of active IS per nation is already decided.