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What I'm surprised about is the they never mass produced power armor, lost the blueprints, made a brand new power armor and lost them again. That and they never had battlemechs.

Rule of cool: lightsabers, walkers.........and bulky spaceships.

People love to go on and on about how absurdly easy it is to just trip an AT-AT which makes them completely useless. We only see a single AT-AT get tripped on Hoth at the cost of several speeders getting shot out of the sky while the rest of the walkers get through and overrun the rebel base. We even see the venerated AT-TE, which everyone touts as being vastly more stable, not being able to trip an AT-AT when ramming right into it. They fall into the same trap as stormtroopers. We see a single instance of weakness and suddenly they have a decades long reputation as being nothing but a joke

5 AT-ATs single-handedly Slaughtered Thousands of Rebels at Hoth. Took Hundreds of not thousands of Heavy Laser Cannon shots. And shot Fast Moving Speeders out of the sky. The rebels needed a Fluke from Wedge (1 of the Best Pilots in the Galaxy) to take a Single AT-AT down with a Tow Cable. While Luke had to use the force to take out another AT-AT.

5 Walkers deployed, 2 lost, and An entire Army was wiped out along with the Shield Generator and Echo Base. Literally one of the most OP weapons in Star Wars

shout out to the Umbara walkers, specifically the centipede looking one

I think a simple reasoning is that due to having to wage war on thousands of planets each having different weather, climate, and terrain. It turns out that walking is far more efficient than driving.

Walkers make a lot of sense in scifi series where roads have become more or less obsolete.
The big reason we use tracked vehicles for the military is so that we can drive them to where they are needed, but once deployed we see their disadvantages like getting stuck in terrain, a lack of manueverability especially in tight spaces, and rivers. They are still better than wheels but worse than walkers (legs on the infantry).

In a setting where relatively cheap transports can travel intergalactic distances there is no need to drive the vehicle to where it needs to go.
And roads are generally gone meaning populations are much more condensed in cities and scattered in rough terrain.
You would want infantry support vehicles that can maneuver easily in tight urban areas, and traverse difficult terrain. Going fast or having range is no longer really necessary because they can always be redeployed by transports.

I think one of the best examples of a future infantry support vehicles is the spider tank from ghost in the shell, something which can maneuver around tight urban spaces and is able to survive damage to its limbs

The ATAT would be dramatically improved with a crotch gun. An anti personelle laser turret mounted beneath the belly could protect the underside, sides, and rear of the vehicle from small groups of infantry, and could likely be added with no internal structure taken up.

Ever seen how in Rebels, they just DROP them from like a hundred metres up? AT-RTs leap like grasshoppers. And let's not forget the AT-TE that WALKED UP a cliff!

My favorite movie logic is when a fallen walker just explodes or gets destroyed in 2 shots. That tactical weakness of fall down go boom.

The examples of "weak legs" in Star Wars are some of the worst.

For example the cable incident. As long as the Airspeeder is pulling the cable, it does nothing to the walker. It can just keep moving. Then they release the cable, which would mean it would go slack and fall to the ground, but somehow this causes the cable to tighten and trip it up.

Besides the magic tightening cable there is the gait of the AT-AT. We humans trip because we project our point of balance outside of the surface area that supports our weight, then we let ourselves fall forwards and then catch ourselves with our other leg. If that leg is stopped, we trip.

But that walker does not project it's center of balance outside of the supportive area. It just lifts it's leg and places it forwards. If the leg is impeded it would not unbalance the vehicle and just put it down as far as it got. Then if the rear leg is placed forwards there is suddenly enough slack in the cable to walk exactly one pace, meaning that aside from one step a cable tied around the legs would do literally nothing unless the cable can constantly tighten. Which would mean having an engine in the cable that is more powerful than the engine that operates the leg. Good luck with that.

The AT-ST's on Endor are also bad examples. In one example they get hit by two multi-ton tree trunks simultaneously. These must have been placed there months in advance because the Ewoks would need to lift multi-ton trees up in the air without anyone noticing (and the Empire has zero anti-whatever weapons to deal with those big animals that they invented to explain those traps). You need the right height of trees with the right strength and knowledge of their movements in advance just to hit it in the first place. Besides that it is a light scout vehicle, so it's kinda OK if they can be destroyed by such a trap.

Then there's the one that trips over the trees. What people miss is that it almost remained standing despite everything thrown at it, that other armored vehicles would not have been able to operate anywhere as effective as an AT-ST in that area and that they would also have suffered a mobility kill, especially if it had been a tracked/wheeled light scout vehicle upon which it might have just been destroyed too.

People always say legs are the weakpoints of walkers and this is blatantly false. You can't armor tracks or wheels, at best you can put an armor skirt over it which still needs to expose enough to make sure the suspension can work and to let all the dirt and mud fall away before it stalls or damages the tracks/wheels.

Legs are also the hardest target of a walker. They are the thinnest, fastest moving part that is also moving erratically. The weakest point would be the hip joints, not the legs. And even then: the legs and hip can be better armored than any wheel or track. Even if it is "only" relatively lightly armored.

If the empire's tech functioned in real life like it did in the movies they wouldn't have even got past the starting line.

I love walkers and bipedal war machines but they are not good design in reality if I'd be honest.
1. they can shoot from higher position => can be shot from farther way and they are easy target due to high profile
2. they can be all terrain => not really, for same weight and density, tank style will do better in most of terrain. it never appears in the SW media but heavy walker on snow or sand will realistically cause lots of problem
3. it can carry infantry => tank or APC can too. it is harder for infantry to dismount when the hull is so floated... and if they collapse, they will more likely die compare to tank/APC vehicle's infantry
4. leg is weakness => we can add more armor => then you need to add more legs due to more weight or the leg will move slowly and has restricted movement => we can have shirt like armor => why not tank then?
5. more maintenance and more complicated mechanism than tank/apc

AT-OT has 8 legs.  SPHA has 12 legs

The AT-AP has three legs.

5:00 "AT - TeeHee "👉 👈

People don't remember Hoth for having 5 giant walkers survive potentially thousands of blaster bolts or explosives shot at them by the many, many defenses the rebels had set up. They just remember the one that was tripped and the one that got taken out by THE Luke Skywalker.
If you gave me the choice of being literally anywhere on that battlefield, the place I'd most likely survive is in the AT-AT and it's not even close.

If the empire hadn't used those AT-AT's, then they'd have needed an order of magnitude more soldiers and other assets to do what 7 walkers did.

We don't need tanks we have a giant slow moving camel, it's so intimidating with it's incredibly slow movement, and lack of air support!

12:56 every gun on a tank becomes a potential weak point and adds weight as well as more ammo to be detonated.

Walkers would be such a nightmare to maintain. You definitely need to be in control of a few slave colony planets to keep them working. Look how the ATAT requires the little pad flanges to fuel and unfurl every time it takes a step