actually there's a lot of use of what was then technologically advanced military tech. the SDF-1 while being a mobile fortress it has alot of basis on carrier based technology, steam catapults, CIC decks, etc. as for the idea of a mobile city can be seen as a artistic interpretation of what modern carriers are referred to as (they are often called cities at sea). As for the Veritechs, the funny thing is i noticed this in a weird way. Me and my sister were watching this in the 90's and my sister made the comment that the veritechs look like Marine/Navy F-18's (my sister's husband worked on a military airbase at the time and worked on F-18's). So, long short, if you look at the human technologies in the series you can see the similarities to real world technology. (this is actually the reason i liked the series, the tech they use is actually feasible in our time for the most part)

have you tried animefreak.tv they have quite a library of anime series, it's not always the highest quality. but usually if it's there it has a dub mirror.

Gundam was actually created by the creators of Macross after they wrote this (the Japanese version) Also the large amount of missiles is the signature of the original author (he loved lots of missiles). And some dubs are just so terrible they are not worth watching.
P.S. watch Macross Plus or Frontier if you like this (for Frontier there is no dub and is sometimes hard to find online)