T-rexcavator Mk2

Okay, so remember when I said I wanted to make a dinosaur-based mech for my fictional Mars colonies? And remember when I said I didn't like the first version enough? Well I went ahead and made the Mark Two T-rexcavator! Behold! When I look at my first design, I realized that took more inspiration from real construction vehicles than dinosaurs.  The result looked like, to me, a weird mechanical sauropod. Not bad, but not a T. rex. Then I figured, not matter which way you slice it, T. rex is a big triangle with limbs and a head. I wanted to make it look like a realistic tyrannosaur, with the body and tail out horizontally, so that would be a wide obtuse triangle. The problem was that that wouldn't make for a steady digging steam-shovel like machine. But the old-fashioned T. rex, while scientifically inaccurate by today's standards, is still iconic, especially because of artists like Charles Knight (I always liked his stuff ever since I was a kid). That would make it a right triangle, and structures or machines in that shape can do some heavy lifting. I would still have to make it like everyone's favorite dinosaur. The point of this whole design was that some Martian colonist looked at this thing and said, "Hey, that looks like a  T. rex!" and the name stuck. So maybe he/she was looking at an older picture than the latest paleontology journal. Can you blame them? My favorite line for describing this machine was, "Part steam shovel, part bulldozer, part sixty-five million year old doom monster, and all of it piloted by an angry science geek with nothing to lose."

By the way, for all you 80's kids out there, the CB handle for the T. rexcavator in my story is "Grimlock."