Pointlessness of the SPHA-T

[Mr. Oragahn]

Since the day I've seen AOTC, I can't stop thinking that the SPHA-T is one of the worst walker designs ever seen.

I'm not talking about the multiple caterpillar minuscule legs.

I'm talking about the cannon, and more precisely the line of sight.

The structure of the craft makes it that it can't aim at the horizon, nor even below the horizon.

It'd have to bend forward to do so, and even then, I'm not even sure it's ok.

Besides, it looks like it can't point it above a 50° angle either.

What's the point of this? Its cannon is slow to swing. So it can't enforce air control safe against lumbering ships such a trade federation cores.

That said, those vehicles would need to cover a large area, to deny air traffic. So you'd need many of them, covering most escape angles.

Their slow cannon makes them unefficient against medium cargos or smaller ships.

According to certain sources, they can't recharge themselves. They're basically a big energy buffer on legs, with a big cannon.

To what use, really? If you've deployed them succesfully, over such a large area, it means that you have a mothership not far, so it's likely that you already control a significant area of a planet, if not all the planet.

Why waste ressources on guns with glaring design flaws, guns that you must deploy, recharge from the carrier's power cores because they're not self powered, and unable to shoot at anything safe big fat targets, which for most of them, will already be in space and rarely land, since likely assembled in space drydocks, or otherwise be stuck on the ground before they had time to ignite engines, but then why not simply send your massive starship and deny take off with its cannons, instead of stupidly landing to drop walkers that are even too massive to be transported by LAATs apparently...

[GStone]

I suppose they're weapons of terror, not war.

[2046]

Theater-shield busters, perhaps, though in a quick review I concur that there appears to be no way for the units to fire toward the horizon.

(The usual side-views might've given wiggle room for the notion that the gun was mounted on the starboard rear, and hence had the option of swinging low, but in the latter parts of the starship-busting scene make clear that the weapon is center-mount.)

Thus, either it's useless against Gungan-size theater shields, or else its entire intent is air defense against large vessels. But it seems illogical to have it on the front lines of a battle on that basis, unless it is severely range-limited . . . which again makes it odd that it would exist.

So yeah, it's frickin' weird.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I suppose they're weapons of terror, not war.

Please, let's leave that to the Goa'uld! :D

Here, it's a weapon of war that's badly designed. Period.