Actually, the beauty of an ATAT is its psychological warfare component. Here you have this giant freaking weapon walking towards you! It’s obviously tough as heck as it’s not moving very fast and your handweapon isn’t doing squat to it. I can well imagine battlehardened troops breaking and running at the sight of one of those beasties lumbering towards them.
Nitinol/muscle wire is a terribly inefficient way of converting electricity into physical force. And it’s slow. A very good hydraulic system with a suitably high-powered pump unit would probably do the trick.
If the thing has six legs and is fairly low-slung, it could be designed to be inherently stable anyway; no need for clever active stabilising stuff.
Good point. But does this trick work once the masses get really big? You have a lot of inertia both in the robot and the wheels. Plus, you probably have to use electric motors for this trick to work – a mechanical transmission probably wouldn’t be fast enough. So you’d need a diesel generator powering electric motors which might add extra weight to your robot.
If you use large gyros to stabilise a moving vehicle, it will experience difficulty in tilting slightly to traverse an incline.
Of course, you could go with miniature killer robots…lots and lots of miniature killer robots…miniature killer robots that can attach themselves to each other and become a large scale killer robot. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Yeah! And if you blew one to smithereens, each individual smithereen* could pick itself up, shake off the dust, rejoin the other surviving Miniature Killer Robots (MKRs) to build another Giant Killer Robot (GKR)**. Talk about psych warfare!
[sub]* first known use of ‘smithereen’ in the singular. Someone alert the OED!
** In the Hollywood cliche, you would be standing over the impact crater, gloating, getting ready to light a victory cigar. Over your shoulder the camera catches a glimpse of something rising up, looming over you. You hear a sound, spin around and pan up to see the bad-ass GKR as the last of the MKRs click into place. You drop your Zippo, but it doesn’t matter 'cause there’s a thermite-spewing flamethrower pointed at your cigar (and, incidentally, your head)…
But at least by wasting one expendable character (and a fine Cuban), the hero (and the audience) learn just how tough the adversary is.[/sub]
Or it could pull a move similar Aliens, ala the scene where burke gets offed.