Mike Koehler's wants to bring his AT-AT For America dream to reality.
From the Boing Boing Article:
- Heiko Hoffman, a robotics expert at HRL Laboratories in Malibu, CA. says, Making a modern-day robotic walker is not impossible, but it easily could cost $100 million or more.
The first decision is, do you make it just to "look" like an AT-AT or do you build the 50 foot quad-armored walker? The reason being a full scale build may be upwards of a hundred times the model sizes but the materials used in construction would have stresses of up to 1000 times that of the mock ups and that not only stresses the main sections but puts huge stresses on the leg joints. Though the "statically stable" walking method would work, moving anything faster than a slow shuffle would be impossible. As the movie showed even having a working AT-AT is not enough. Rebels took one down with comparatively simpler and far less expensive tech.
Realistically building something that "looks" like an Imperial Walker would be far cheaper and every bit as cool.
Boing Boing Innovation News articleWiki AT-AT page
