Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-226878-20140818053714/@comment-24891101-20140823022040

That's actually probably unlikely. In normal cases like this, the android in question is a single person's brainchild, and therefore something of a surrogate child by design, upping the probability that they are designed to live a normal life.

However, for Penny, the situation is different. She's a testbed, a prototype, a proof of concept for the Atlesian Military, and her younger siblings will be likewise military property, at least legally. She herself was intended as nothing more than a technology demonstrator, and so she looks the part, mostly, and nothing beyond that. And her younger siblings would be supposed to interact with human officers, and so look human in an attempt to (mostly) climb the far side of the uncanny valley. Being military property, little attention would be paid to being sufficiently anatomically-correct, both for cost-saving, and to eliminate a liability.

The engineers and scientists probably recognize what they have (to wit, a person), but the military isn't looking at the ethics of creating war machines which are technically people, with all the subsequent rights.