Who is the best mechanical designer and why is it Shoji Kawamori?

>>23351108 (OP)
>Dude what if F14 had legs

Nah, there is no best.
Kawamori might be the most publicly famous, but what he does is his style, which came from Studio Nue. He certainly has worked on just about everything.
Pre-grease Masamune Shirow probably has had a more global effect than Kawamori.
Mamoru Nagano is also fully developed as a mechanical designer. Unique since the beginning. Immortal.
Junya Ishigaki is also a god.
Matsumoto Hideyuki is a god, but 99% of everybody wont even know who he is.
Mitsuki Nakamura had a massive impact on the industry. Ultra god tier.
Also, can't talk about mechanical design without Kunio Okawara. Especially with this board's Gundam fetish.
Way too many master artists that have had huge effects on mechanical design to even bother listing more for such a shitpost of an OP. No artist exists in a vacuum.

>>23351149
Whoever designed this guy's mom.
>dude what if a fridge had legs

Kazutaka Miyatake
Yasuhiro Moriki
Koichi Ohata
Katsushi Murakami
*mic drop*

>>23351184
>Kawamori might be the most publicly famous
Don't even pretend like it isn't Katoki. Macross has barely any global reach outside of Robotech which is dying with the Gen X'ers.

>>23351108 (OP)
Because he actually models his concepts in Lego form.

>>23351108 (OP)
Kunio Okawara.

>>23354337
>>23351184
This (at least all his designs are memorable)

>>23351468
then why is VF1's cockpit connected to the hips with two strands of spaghetti?

>>23355346
Because he didn't do that until like Zero.
The VF-1 meanwhile was done with paper and balsa.

I think there was a handful of good mech designers in the past that were about tied. Problem is they all fell off the last decade. Maybe it’s corporate meddling and they just want the designs to have more mass appeal to appeal to normies. Idk. But most modern gundam designs look less and less like they’re from the gundam universe and more like generic overdesigned shit in mobile games. Over complicated overly cluttered.

>>23355465
What made them even more impressive back in the day was they were cranking out amazing designs not just for new mainline series but even S tier designs for short OVAs. Love them or hate them (the ovas) you had shit like stardust memories introducing GM cannon 2, GM powered, gelgoog marine, 08th Ms team with the GM ground type, gouf custom…the zaku 2 Kai and kampfer for war in the pocket. Just stuff off the top of my head that people buy 20 years later.

>>23351149
And we (yes, we) will still eat that shit up.

Syd Mead