These guys do a great job, along with generationtech, love the break downs including using Imperial+Metric+random items that we will recognise all in one take. Hoovered up all their videos, and his voice is perfect to either keep you awake OR put you to sleep. Cannot recommend enough
Still gonna say, it’d be way more effective a weapon if they chopped off the leg and replaced its walking systems with repulsors.
Same with the AT-ATs.
(Based on observed repulsor physics, you don’t even need a jet engine. Just tip in the direction you want to go and increase power to maintain a hover. Chances are you can get to a very high speed that way.)
The St’s would probably come out similar to the Trucks used in rebels, but with much higher “flight” and dropping troops for weapons.
(I’d also make the trucks able to fly a few meters off the ground. And, ah. Able to hold atmosphere. Then instead of landing parties dump them, what are effectively gunships and the big guys from orbit.)
The designs came first, and the detailed lore came later of course. The original designs of AT-ATs came about for the narrative purpose to have a large, imposing, and unique land vehicle which gave the sense of an implacable, grinding assault. Logic as a sensible vehicle of war didn’t factor in, and all subsequent lore basically backfills it.
If you do want more lore on the AT-AT, the book ‘Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina’ has a story from the POV of a stormtrooper who used to be an AT-AT operator, but was demoted when he pointed out flaws in the design.
It might be useful to note, that, the Galactic Empire was never actually meant to last. Palpatine wanted to stoke conflict to allow the Dark Side to get stronger. The vast majority of the Imperial leadership were basically tin pot dictators. Like Tarkin. Who used brutality as a weapon because he thought fear would keep people from acting out.
The reality is, people rebel when they have nothing left to lose; and brutality generally strips people of everything until they rebel.
Palpatine let him do his thing because it served his purpose (further conflict, turmoil and bullshit), but they never really wanted to actually ‘win’. You can kind of see this in the Tales of the Empire shorts where Morgan pitched her TIE variant and most the staff scoffed because they were stupid. Pellaeon scooped her up for Thrawn, though.
I submit, however, they could have had all the dramatic and tension they wanted by loading a bunch of bucket heads in tin cans and dumping them out in a carefully calculated (or not so carefully calculated,) trajectory that would let Hoth’s gravity pull them into position. Just saying. (including a captain/admiral being a dick and refusing to dump the trash first, which would act as a sort of hobo-screen “because we’re the empire! we don’t hide behind trash and we don’t need to!”)
From a strategic perspective, you’d deploy the assault forces, let them hit and secure key points like space ports while the ISD’s cordoned off any ship from making for orbit/hyperspace. Then, with the space ports and what have you, the heavy transports could come in and either recover the troops (job done,) or drop in more reinforcements to take the planet.
Maybe we can give this tactic to the Mandos in some sort of pre-KOTOR live action thing.
Sure, all that stuff about Palpatine making an empire meant to crumble (or at least fall into an inefficient stalemate) has been written into canon, but IRL the AT-AT was designed long before anyone had written any of that backstory. Depends on the angle you look at the lore. I personally try to keep a little bit of looseness when it comes to doing ultra in-depth analysis of tactics, strategy, and practicality of weapons in a setting where the designs originally often came from movie designers who were making interesting and visually communicative designs.
