This video got me to thinking: at the 0:28 mark, the AT-AT is running faster than a dog. Now this seems very silly, until you look up the EU sources which give the walker a speed of 60kph/40mph -at which point it goes from silly to retarded. That is faster than most dogs can run. Greyhounds are specially bred for speed and they top out at around 45mph. So according to the EU, walkers can run!
Which makes me wonder why they're not called Runners. Am I missing something here (length of stride, possibly)?
How fast would an AT-AT have to move relative to its size in order to achieve 60km/h? I'm 99% certain they didn't get close to that in what we're shown in ESB.
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
Elephants can't really run like dogs or horses or most other quadrupeds, yet they manage @20mph with a kind of fast-shuffle. But this gait is only good for short distances and is still only half the speed of the AT-ATs, which are never shown actually moving in such a way.
Without doing some screen capture measurements, let's just say that a full-sized AT-AT can move 5m in each step. (I've seen its length listed at 20m, I'm estimating based on that.) To move at 60 kph (which is 60 km/h = 60000 m/3600 s = 16.67 m/s) you'd need to take about three steps per second. I really don't think that's very likely. Even if I'm wrong about the stride length by a factor of three, that's about one step per second, which still seems high.
Of course, the speed they were moving on the frozen surface of Hoth might have been a concession to the conditions at hand. I don't think that the AT-AT would have been able to hit three strides per second on the ideal surface, though, but that's just a gut reaction.
73% of all statistics are made up, including this one.
SCRawl wrote:Without doing some screen capture measurements, let's just say that a full-sized AT-AT can move 5m in each step. (I've seen its length listed at 20m, I'm estimating based on that.) To move at 60 kph (which is 60 km/h = 60000 m/3600 s = 16.67 m/s) you'd need to take about three steps per second. I really don't think that's very likely. Even if I'm wrong about the stride length by a factor of three, that's about one step per second, which still seems high.
Of course, the speed they were moving on the frozen surface of Hoth might have been a concession to the conditions at hand. I don't think that the AT-AT would have been able to hit three strides per second on the ideal surface, though, but that's just a gut reaction.
I've been looking at greyhound and racehorse footage since both animals are given top speeds of @45mph - comparable to what the AT-AT is given credit for. A racehorse makes two strides per second of 20-24 (6-8 meters) feet each. So a galloping AT-AT would have to move its legs at similar rates (maybe a little slower due to the longer strides) to the horse's to make 40mph.
Actually, Saxton talked a lot about some of the more detailed telescoping mechanisms of an AT-AT's legs, which were rarely seen on Hoth except when they needed to sidestep and swat that one Snowspeeder out of the air or occasionally when they were moving their legs to brace for firing.
If this mechanism was powerful enough it could mean that the legs of an AT-AT have a significant enough amount of flex to give it a kind of springy quick leg movement and for it's telescoping (or front/back pivoting) legs to push-and-retract as it moves them in sequence. These aren't pogo legs, but that's not a single fixed axle under the AT-AT. If you use the probably-more-likely height of 22 meters and length of around 26 meters then you can upscale the length of each stride a tad.
They were still moving slow as all hell on Hoth so you need to make some serious assumptions about their normal operating conditions to make them move as fast as they say. But you could imagine why they'd want to move slow, as well as be able to imagine an AT-AT moving more than one leg at a time and getting a little bounce-and-flex going.
They were still moving slow as all hell on Hoth so you need to make some serious assumptions about their normal operating conditions to make them move as fast as they say. But you could imagine why they'd want to move slow, as well as be able to imagine an AT-AT moving more than one leg at a time and getting a little bounce-and-flex going.
Even if AT-ATs don't move as fast as the EU says, there's good reason to assume that what we see on Hoth isn't their top speed - they're engaging targets at the same time. A fire control system that can handle fire-on-the-move at anything resembling modern vehicle's top speed has yet to be developed. That's the reason vehicles most often stop to fire. You're far more likely to hit your target moving slow than fast, irrespective of how fancy your computers are.
They were still moving slow as all hell on Hoth so you need to make some serious assumptions about their normal operating conditions to make them move as fast as they say. But you could imagine why they'd want to move slow, as well as be able to imagine an AT-AT moving more than one leg at a time and getting a little bounce-and-flex going.
Even if AT-ATs don't move as fast as the EU says, there's good reason to assume that what we see on Hoth isn't their top speed - they're engaging targets at the same time. A fire control system that can handle fire-on-the-move at anything resembling modern vehicle's top speed has yet to be developed. That's the reason vehicles most often stop to fire. You're far more likely to hit your target moving slow than fast, irrespective of how fancy your computers are.
then there's the fact you probably don't want to move any faster then you have to on what's essentially a clacier when every step you take creates massive tremors that actually damage parts of Echo base, since parts of the corridor roof was seen falling even before the empire opened fire. (especially since Darth Vader wanted some rebels to be captured alive)
I may be an idiot, but I'm a tolerated idiot
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Oh wait, that's marijuana..."Einhander Sn0m4n
