I was under the impression that in Ep 3, the reason Mikhail sniped the Red manually was because Luca was unable to get a good lock that wouldn't kill Ozma, the IFF systems on the Skull valks preventing them from shooting at each other - which is quite reasonable and in fact a move I support; blue on blue incidents have happened before, and I think whoever's making the VF-25 added this in as a selling point: "Don't worry! With the VF-25, you won't have to worry about team kills!"
It might also depend on how whoever's controlling the bugs is doing it; assuming there are individual human controllers for the bugs out there, each controller will have a different style (this also applies to AI controllers as well).
Upon rewatching that episode, I'm of the opinion that it's an anti-starfighter mine, popped out the back to take out pursuing fighters. The Soviets experimented with something similar in the 50s, using rear-facing rocket pods to fire dumb rockets into the 6 o'clock; what happened though was due to aerodynamics and how the fins on rockets are setup, the rockets would be shot out the back, flip themselves around, and hit the launching aircraft. In space though, that's a moot point, it's going to be going out the back. At any rate it seems that the Vajra don't consider it useful enough to deploy against missiles, possibly relying on their jamming.
...or they could just have run out of those mines during the initial sortie - the smaller bugs might not have the haxxed missile generation systems of the reds.
Anyway further thoughts on the ep: WTF Brera's plane is fast. And pulls some very high-g turns. Sorta superficially reminds me of the VF-21/VF-22 for some reason, sorta like how at certain angles the VF-25's nose reminds me of the YF/VF-19. The interior of the mothership is... interesting, to say the least.
One thing I'm curious about is the lag; someone on Frontier's bridge says that the lag is "Plus 40", so is that 40 minutes or seconds? If seconds, than it's not really much of an issue all in all; Grace did say that the images appear to be real time. On the other hand, if the lag is 40 minutes... the images will still appear to be in real time, sorta, and Grace might be mistaken. The lag would be two ways, so following the 40 minute lag theory, Sheryl's singing would have reached Alto 40 minutes after she sang, which would give some fudge time for the concert and all.
Macross Quarter in Battroid mode pushing open the "mouth" of the mothership to rescue Luca and Alto was pretty cool, although when Bobby did that I was both going "Cool!" and "Oh shit he's gonna tear a huge gouge in the flight deck -_-" Though Sheryl's red dress was awesome.
About as awesome as seeing twin gatling destroids putting up a barrage of fire - and doing better at it than the destroids on the
Asuka II. Then again, there's more of them here
Hmmm. We haven't seen any Battroid mode grunt VF-25s, so I'm not sure if Mikhail's head is the standard head; he's got 1 head gun and a single monoeye sensor that was on the VF-1A, but then again he's a sniper unit. Probably a modded grunt head. About the only differences I can see that the long-range pack gives are a grappling anchor to lock position for stability and the sniper gunpod. Interestingly his shots this time are blue, while the shots he was firing in and around Frontier were yellow. Hi-power mode seems to be pretty darned powerful: 3 shots and the red vajra dies.
The gun turret's on Ozma's Armored Pack aren't for show either; I see them blazing away, and it seems they might be single-barrel autocannons instead of beam guns. Now that I think about it, it appears that kinetic weapons have a higher rate of fire than energy weapons, which may be the only reason why Valks are still using solid slug Gatlings 51 years in the future.