WALKER:
The front legs are very heavily armored, and you can see almost up to the forearm. And again, that’s my take on, “You can’t take these down with a snowspeeder.” They’ve armored up the front or maybe they just cut the ropes because they are too big now.
Not sure how adding more armor to the front legs makes it harder for snowspeeders to tangle them up in cables. A snowspeeder should still be capable of flying circles around one of these things while the Walker is unable to do anything about it just like the old Walkers.
It is not like the weapons of the snowspeeders were shooting out the front legs so... what is the armor actually defending against ?
Benefit of doubt: The armor prevents the cable from latching onto the front leg... so the snowspeeders latch onto the rear legs... and back to faceplanting walker. Not seeing much of a design improvement there.
Logically, if they are going with the idea that Bigger = Cannot be cabled due to more mass then they could have scaled up an existing AT-AT and left it the fuck alone.
If you were determined to put more weapons on it - some point defence, a shield or multi-directional turrets would have been sensible.
The AT-AT was supposed to be a transport vehicle - It seems this got hijacked into turning them into Main Battle Tanks
The way it looks: I would half expect the thing to sit up on it's ass like a Dog so it can fire the cannons into the air / space. Either as a potential artilery option or a very cumbersome Anti-Air function. That or these armored legs can be used as elevators and the Walker forcefully breaches with it's paws.
SPACESHIP:
Kevin Jenkins: Yeah, exactly. I spent a lot of time looking at real-world references. Looking at the big battleships, the Yamato and all those kinds of things from World War II, and the way those guns would lower or rise. So the idea of them coming out the bottom of the Dreadnought became a design feature, because rather than just being there pointing down, we wanted to imply the danger that they sort of unlocked themselves and then moved into position. Just like the big 14-inch guns you used to see on those old battleships. It was a capitol ship. That was what we were kind of going for.
This is the fundamental issue. This ship is being built around the guns and those guns are being built around a specific concept of looking cool.
This is the same shit that Star Trek Nemesis did with the Scimitar's insanely convoluted method of preparing to fire the super weapon.
Star Trek Into Darkness did this as well with the turrets swivelling onto the Enterprise.
The ship looks like garbage and for all the bullshit... it is completely pointless.
If they are that caught up in trying to remain thematic - Keep the old models and either spruce them up with finer details like making them bigger and / or making a refit.
This is even more frustrating because... what are the actual chances of seeing either of these vehicles beyond a few very specific scenes the story requires ?
All the resources being devoted to making these new models could have been devoted to showing the old models doing more.
Specifically: The standard ISD is supposed to be capable of planetary bombardment and logically should be more than capable of doing so. What does this new ship do with 2 guns that the ISD cannot ?
