General walker stuff from the peanut gallery :o)

A couple of points about "real world" walkers.

The design for he Aliens:2 power loader was taken from studies done by
the US 
government and preliminary designs for a project called "MAN-Amp" in the
50s. 
The materials, and power were unavailable at the time, but the final
project 
report stated that given advancments, there were no show stoppers to
putting 
them into use.

As for balancing the load, the idea was a weight set on a set of arms
that 
would swing out behind to balance the load.

MAN-AMP was also where the DoD is getting it's material for the
exo-skeleton 
they want to build.

The major problem with two legged walker is balance, the mentioned 
"commercial" robot is pretty much just a big toy. MIT and other labs
have 
advanced two legged robots that can move as fast as a human. The major 
problem has always been that the balancer systems are jarred by two limb

motion, (the same reasons humans have so many ankle and leg problems
:o), but 
given things such as laser gyro-scopes they are perfectly practical. 
Multi-leg models give much better stability though, at the expense of
some 
speed and mobility.

Personally, I plan to use walker type tanks in my DSII games. I haven't 
decided yet if I'll give them to the United Planets Federation or the
Sathar. 
I think that the Sathar, whose movement is snake/worm based would have
tracks 
while the Feds might have gone with legs for mobility.

Randy