Just yesterday, Zopto and I were talking about ships. While looking at the ships, he expressed irritation with the glitchyness of the Federation t3 walkers.

Why would walkers be glitchy?

A little background here... Spring units exist in a strict hierarchy. Root Object and then Children under that root object. That root object has heading/pitch/etc applied to it. This is fine for tanks. Weapons tend to either be fixed orientation or independently turreted. Not so much for walkers with a distinct top and bottom half. Generally for walkers, the pelvis will be the root object with the legs being children on one branch. The torso will be another branch, and then you would either have arms or guns or whatever. The problem is rotation, and specifically, when this unit is in a fight and being microed, how do we keep the torso pointed towards the target and not glitching and jerking around every time the unit changes heading. If the torso and pelvis pieces could be independently controlled, this would not be an issue. Worse yet, with unit turnrates, you can end up with gimbal lock where the weapons cannot come to bear on the target.

I had mitigated this to some extent by using slower unit turns, even slower torso turns, and allowing weapons to fire with a higher tolerance of whether or not they were dead on the target. Ingame, it looked ok, and glitchiness was reasonably rare, but it also made it so that you had to baby your units in order to get all the guns to be firing.

I had tried to remodel the t3 units in the past with little success. They always looked kinda stupid. Essentially, if you want a walker to be able to have turrets that aim and fire independently of the unit heading, then you basically have to make a walking platform. This isn't an issue with 1 or 2 guns, but the goliath has 4, and the juggernaut has 12, and I need a spot to mount them.

Attempt #1

This was my first attempt:

I mean, I've seen worse. And when in action they looked pretty decent, but compared to the t1 and t2 walkers, they just didn't look that great. So tonight, I went back to the drawing board again and came up with a design that was functional and looked nice.

Attempt #2

Meet the new Goliath and Juggernaut. Took me damn near forever to figure this out, but I'm happy with the results.

So there you have it. All because Zopto just couldn't be happy lol

Bonus Footage

And if you want to see them in action, look no further!

Goliath:

Juggernaut: