I believe the character designs for the film were done by Yuuki Nobuteru (Lodoss OVA, Escaflowne). I don't want to speak ill of Yuuki, he's a skilled designer and I enjoy his work elsewhere, but it is quite a shame that the OVA isn't closer to Nagano's beautiful designs.

Oh, I hadn't heard about the audio edition, that's pretty cool. Keeping the print on had for the footnotes is a good call though, I have that exact edition and as I recall there's a lot of interesting stuff in the footnotes.

Ro3K is long, but the chapters are pretty reasonable in length, so it ends up feeling manageable.

This is more or less what happens in the Lotus Eaters manga (which is not drawn by ZUN), as it happens.

The last character is backwards. If I remember correctly some versions of the subtitles are able to preserve the "error" in one way or another.

A sensible chuckle can be had glancing over the wiki's "character titles" page, though there are some that could be considered spoilers.

One of the official printworks, Curiosities of Lotus Asia, touches on this idea here and there. I'm fond of the chapter about "a kind of shikigami called a 'computer'".

Barrages in general, I think? Overly literally it's "bullet curtain".

My memory could be wrong, but I think the word is fairly common in mecha as militarybabble.

I think if one is a weeb long enough one eventually becomes a Kamen Rider/Gundam/Precure (or more broadly toku/mecha/mahou shoujo) weeb