It is very much more like Char’s mask than Zechs helmet-mask-thing. The main difference is that it’s articulated, so that Hawkins can slide the visor down ans necessary.
Honestly, I took a whole lot of inspiration from a whole lot of places, and a lot of it got jumbled because, honestly, I’m not a very good artist.
My general intention was to create a real robot setting, and I worked with the grunt Mobile Suits (the GM, Zaku, Jegan) as a starting point, but then deviated from that based on the institutional culture of the fighting forces involved. For example, Imperial Valliers are considerably more ornate, with curved armour pieces and filigreed cooling fins that make it resemble more of a science-fantasy style mecha (think Mortar Headds from Five Star Stories). Likewise, CoDEC Armatures, especially the first generation, are far blockier and more haphazard. I have an ink sketch of the CA-70 Picton somewhere with its exposed torso cage and blocks of ERA around the cockpit, and one of my friends dubbed it the “Space-Killdozer”. Battletech was a big visual inspiration there.
My main inspiration for the Damocles Initiative comes from the more idealistic end of real robot series endings, where the protagonists find some common ground with those of their antagonists still alive and try to build a better future.
Of course, in this case, the “better future” is still one enforced by a loaded gun, just as say, Londo Bell or the Republic of the Sphere (or even, if you squint very hard, the Titans) are still heavily armed security apparatuses which try to enforce that new status-quo through superior firepower. Of course, neither of those examples end up working out permanently in the end. Eventually, they fall to the same institutional corruption, decay, and infighting - or become an oppressive force in their own right.
Honestly, those are fine guesses. I generally try not to be too precise with these sorts of things so players can have some leeway to determine what they want the characters to look like - especially when it comes to ones they want to romance.
Honestly? The signs are already there.
The story doesn’t go into a lot of detail regarding how CoDEC is actually run, or who holds power, but there are enough hints to indicate that it’s more an alliance of convenience by individual colonial governments held together by an ad-hoc military-industrial elite than nothing else. The way (for example) Watanabe’s parents and the rest of the Vedrian Planetary Assembly flee the planet rather than stay behind kind of hints at the likelihood that they’re less in it for a common cause than to defend their own interests. Likewise, the way that WDI and Dr. Chatham are able to direct CoDEC military resources in pursuit of their pet projects hints that they have a lot more power over the Defence Committee (the effective executive body of the entire rebellion) than they really should.
And there’s CoDEC’s original reason for rebellion in the first place, which ties less into any kind of explicit repression or stripping of civil rights, and more over the Empire’s implementation of policies intended to keep the frontier from becoming politically or economically ascendant over the core.
Which is all to say that CoDEC might not become the precise sort of regime the Empire is, but it is already on the trajectory to becoming a different kind of oppressive regime.
One of my key inspirations for CoDEC were the rebels in the American War of Independence, and as I’ve probably mentioned before, I tend to have a rather jaded view when it comes to what the merchant princes of New England, the slave-merchants of Maryland, and the planter-aristocrats of Virginia were really fighting the British Crown over - and whatever you can say about the country that resulted from that rebellion, it certainly cannot be said that there are not millions of people which have suffered under it through the two and a half centuries which followed.