Star Wars Rebels Season Three (spoilers)
- Thread starter Reverend
- Start date
It most other situations the AT-ATs would be fine, the Rebels just happened to have cables.
In Rogue One the AT-ACT's legs were help up using magnetic fields and shit, so lt it took was an ion blaster to cause it to fall.
TIEs have the advantage of 1) moving *much* faster and 2) operating in a three dimensional volume. A crawler is slow moving and operates on a two dimensional plane, typically always facing the people shooting at it. Thus affording much greater opportunities for a direct frontal hit.
But this isn't so much about it being a weak point in and of itself so much as a very big and obvious weak-point with the driver sat right behind it. To say nothing of a domed view port being utterly pointless sat between those obstructing tracks.
There's a reason why real armoured vehicles have tiny slits for their drivers to see out of. Even the AT-ATs have this basic precaution.
Well it's space fantasy, not military science fiction and big giant mechanical walkers evoke war elephants and the like. Also, they look cooler than normal tanks (which was the original plan.)
Perhaps Thrawn wanted Kallus to escape and factored this into his future plans.
Yeah, and after the first time that worked, every enemy of the Empire would make sure to have cables on hand all the time, and if the Empire had any sense, it'd abandon the clumsiness of walkers in favor of wheels or treads. Heck, they have levitation technology in landspeeders and speeder bikes, so why do they even need vehicles with legs? As Reverend reminds us, this is not meant to be a plausible, hard-SF universe, but a fantasy where the primary design considerations are looking cool and letting the good guys win.
I wouldn't put it past Thrawn to have thought that far ahead. Even as a backup plan.
Though to be fair, he did expect to capture or destroy the Rebels. A glory hound Admiral and the Mandos he might have foresaw in his calculations. The Bendu, not so much.
The Bendu...expected by no one since 2 BY.
You know what else know one ever expects?
The Imperial Inquisition.
Sorry, spoilers for next season
Outstanding!
It took about 20 seconds of sustained fire from a heavy blaster to crack that armor, and I think that only worked because the cargo walkers aren't as heavily armored as the troop carrier version.
IIRC from the visual guide, it's because the legs of those walkers have some sort of magnetic/repulsorlift component to deal with the heavy loads and that blaster was actually an ion blaster, which shorted out that mechanism and caused the joint to collapse under the stress.
Even with treads and wheels an armored vehicle is relatively vulnerable to the kinds of weapons we see commonly in the Star Wars universe. The higher stance and elevation of the walkers gives them a longer horizon than any of their opponents, so they'll be able to engage most threats from farther away than they can reliably BE engaged. More importantly, if the legs are as heavily armored and difficult to take down as they seemed to be in "Empire Strikes Back" then any sort of infantry assault is basically dead on arrival: you have to get right underneath them in order to get your cables to them, and the walkers -- plus any troops on the ground and any AT-ST escorts -- are shooting at you the entire time. Plus, the higher profile of the walkers basically makes cover irrelevant; by the time they're close enough that you can see their legs, they can basically shoot over the top of any cover you might have.
I think they learned the lesson from the Clone Wars that most armored vehicles can be taken out by a couple of nimble guys with hand grenades if they can just get close enough to climb on top of it. So putting a tank on top of a stack of almost indestructible stilts makes the AT series an almost unbeatable counter-insurgency weapon.
I said the reason in my post, the weight on the legs is relived by some sort of field according to the Visual Guide, the blaster used on its legs was ion based, which caused that field to fail so they collapsed in on themselves.
AT-ACTs are bigger then AT-ATs.
And an almost fanatical devotion to the Emperor.
So, the next time we see the Bendu he'll be voiced by Peter Davison?
Mark
Mark
Niiiiiiiiiiiice.
