Variable fighter

A Variable Fighter is a series of fictional transforming aerospace fighter mecha primarily designed by Studio Nue's Shoji Kawamori for the animated series The Super Dimension Fortress Macross and later related projects. It is also known as Valkyrie in the Macross universe, due to the great popularity of the first known variable fighter model used during Space War I, the VF-1 Valkyrie.

Design characteristics

Their most notable feature is the ability to transform—usually into a humanoid giant robot called Battroid and an in-between mode called GERWALK (Ground Effective Reinforcement of Winged Armament with Locomotive Knee-joint), in which the nose and wings have a pair of "chicken walker" legs extending underneath enabling VTOL, and two arms reaching forward from the sides. Another prevalent (but not universal) design point is the use of a detachable gun pod instead of an internally mounted gun that can be a hand-held weapon in GERWALK and battroid modes. Variable fighters usually also have one or more trainable head-mounted lasers in battroid mode, which are internally stowed or used as fixed armament in fighter and GERWALK modes.