Mecha

Across Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, giant machines act as both transport and the main instruments of war. The dominant class is the Gunmen, face-centered units whose name plays on the idea of a face surface and whose designs vary enormously, from crude fist-swingers to beam-armed models. Human pilots drive them on Spiral Power, while a Beastman must instead run one on electricity. Beyond the standard Gunmen sit the towering Dai-Guns, the later battleship-scale Space Gunmen, the human-built Grapearls, and the alien constructs of the Anti-Spirals.

A Gunmen's face is laid out to mimic the brain, feeding information straight to the pilot's mind through symbolic readouts while control sticks turn neural signals into movement. Because they were engineered for vacuum combat, no changes were needed to carry them into orbit. The Space Gunmen introduced during the Anti-Spiral conflict follow the Arc-Gurren Lagann template: each houses a smaller Gunmen inside, linked through a cascade interface, and mirrors that smaller counterpart in look and weaponry at a vastly greater scale. The Anti-Spiral machines work on different principles altogether, being unique creations rather than Gunmen, often faceless or carrying a face only in a palm or a toe, and many of them give off unsettling moans.

Team Dai-Gurren fields the heroes' machines, among them Gurren Lagann, King Kittan, the Dai-Gurren, the Dayakkaiser, the various minor Gunmen, and the Tengen Toppa Gunmen. The Spiral King Lordgenome and his Beastmen command a wide array, from Viral's Enki line and generic units like the Gozu to combining monsters such as the sixteen-faced Jurokusen, the disguised Hot Spring Gunmen, and the Mobile Fortress Dai-Guns like Dai-Gunzan, alongside beast-general mechs and Lordgenome's own Lazengann and Dekabutsu. The Anti-Spirals answer with the worm-like Ashtanga dreadnoughts and their mass-produced Pada, Hastagry, and tooth-nosed drones.