I mean ffs Rey becomes the Force Avatar and ends up having all jedi ever living inside her now and mastering all the Force elements.
Maybe I just overlooked it in the newer leaks, but I think they ditched that part. Rey will now just get moral support and then defeat Palpy by using Force-"I'm rubber you are glue"-abilities.
I haven't seen any TV spots for episode IX. Strangely I have been seeing a new commercial for Galaxy's Edge playing the last few days. Vi Moradi has a few lines in it, which is exceptional because who even knows who she is? Using Kelly Marie Tran would make more sense.
Also wookie-spedia claims this chick's eyecolor is "gold"
Something about that character and that actress rubs me the wrong way. When I see her face, I can't help but feel annoyed.
Legged vehicles are better over rough terrain than tracked ones.
Depends on what you might call "better" and what you define as "rough terrain". Sure, a legged vehicle can traverse over certain features such as rocks, fallen trees, chasms and so on a bit more easily than a tracked vehicle, but it comes with its own issues:
Due to the relatively small contact area with the ground, weight becomes an issue pretty much instantly, also the speed of a legged vehicle is absolutely atrocious.
They just require more advanced controls since they have to be balanced. But that is why you've seen development into things like the Timberjack and why Big dog/little dog aren't wheeled or tracked
Timberjack is in some part meant to traverse terrain not suitable for wheeled vehicles and if memory serves me correctly, it was also meant to disturb the ground less than wheels or tracks. Smaller variants like Big Dog are meant to be mechanized pack-mules to carry equippement and maybe some firepower, sure. But the field in which they are used is very specific in that role.
If you are the imperial marines of the pan-galactic empire fighting on who the fuck knows what sort of surface, you want to make sure your armor is able to move and manuever.
Legged armor doesn't need roads, don't have to maneuver around ridges or trenches if it can step over them, and you have elevation.
That, precisely, is the issue with legged vehicles. You simply can't make them carry much load, or else their mobility goes to shit, defeating the entire purpose of using legs anyway.
Two words: Ground pressure.
A tracked vehicle can weigh 70 tons and still exert less pressure by square inch on the ground than a
human foot. A legged vehicle of the same mass would need very solid surfaces to walk on, even concrete would be a problem. This means a tracked vehicle will be able to drive over soft mud, maybe even through swampy marshes, and still be alright, a legged vehicle will just sink into the gunk and be stuck instantly.
When you want to carry heavy armament and armor on a land-based vehicle, you need tracks, they distribute the weight much better.
This is why you will never see legged vehicles replacing MBTs, they simply, purely suck at it. They'd carry smaller arms, less armor and be slower.
When you need firepower and endurance, you take a heavy tracked vehicle.
When you need mobility and firepower, you use helicopters. There is no need to built a complex, slow, cumbersome machine to slowly walk past a pile of rocks when you can just fire up an attack helicopter and breeze past that obstacle within the fraction of a second. You can also just hover over an area or fly close to the ground...
Which brings me to my next point: I never argued in favor of the Empire using tracked vehicles in lieu of legged ones (well, I sorta do in this post indirectly), I was talking about hovering ones vs. legged ones. Basically, it's the debate between legged combat vehicle and helicopters. Sure, a legged vehicle can do things a helicopter can't, but the same is true the other way around and a helicopter is more versatile and faster, making it a far superior choice, even if it can't squeeze past trees in a forest without smashing its rotor blades into one.
But here's the knacker: We're talking Star Wars, so building a repulsor-based vehicle that just floats between the trees (without a huge rotor above it, limiting it's mobility in tight spots), and it's not hard to see what the better choice is.
Walkers were the easy way around all these problems; there was no recalibration needed for variant gravity, there's little that needs to be worried about regarding temperature extremes, they can handle swampy, desert, rocky, or rough terrain with ease, and they do everything else you'd want an IFV to do.
It's an interesting idea to contemplate the effects of different gravities on the vehicle, I guess legs might make sense - though I wonder why in, say, a 2G environment, repulsor crafts wouldn't just work either, they'd have to throttle up their repulsor engines, but they should be alright and anything above 2G is going to be a bitch to deal with purely since your soldiers will slowly stop being able to move.
In such an environment, tracks would be superior, too, btw. Especially when you look at the distance one step of an AT-AT covers. I just don't see them stepping over wide obstacles or lift those legs particularly high to step over something. Tracked vehicles would fare a lot better, still, in such a case. And their speed would be higher as well.
Be that as it may, the AT-ATs are a "rule of cool" thing. They don't make much sense when you think about it, but they look badass and them having legs is important for the scene where snowspeeders make them trip using wires, that's a fucking awesome battle with cool machines, so the machines not making that much sense is not important.
The problem with the Track Speeders is that the issues of mobility are much more obvious, that it's just a "20% different" design of a superior old vehicle and that the scene (at least in the trailer) doesn't look particularly cool. It looks silly. That whole "catapulting troopers into the air" is utterly idiotic and makes no goddamned sense. I'm eager to find out in the movie what kind of crafts the protagonists are using. If they are some pleasure ride skiff from one of the Burning Man Muslims, I'm gonna laugh my ass off. Would highlight how shitty that design of the tracked speeders is, if they get outrun by some random skiff.
That's why AT-ATs are awesome and track-speeders aren't, even though both make little sense.
.
