Hello everyone, today I bring to you one of my favorite movie vehicles, (if you could even call it that) the Martian Tripod from Spielberg’s 2005 “War of the Worlds”, a machine of immense proportions, powerful weaponry, versatile adaptability, and overall badass looks.

Now obviously, it’s not exactly 100% accurate to the movie, but compared to other tripods on the website atm, it’s easily the most accurate here.

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The Martian Tripods are equipped with dual Heatrays, a powerful weapon that utilizes heat to incinerate and vaporize anything biological that they hit, most likely human beings. The focused beams can also destroy large structures and knock things around just through shear force as well, as seen in the escape scene of the movie when the bridge gets launched into the air, after being hit by a wave of Heatrays. These Heatrays are canonically invisible according to HG Wells, but in Spielberg’s movie, they are given a white-blue-magenta glow to them, simply for entertainment purposes in the movie, and to make it look more intimidating.

The Tripods have incredible terrain scaling capabilities; they can climb over extremely rough terrain, and can actually move surprisingly fast for how large they are. Not only can they move on land however, they can also walk underwater with relative ease, as seen in the Boat Harbor scene where one of the Tripods is seen under the surface by the captain of a ship. It then proceeds to topple the ship over, and eventually more tripods meet up at this rendezvous.

The Tripods of WoTW have nearly indestructible force fields that are seen to be very effective in the movie. Capable of withstanding 120mm. Shells from an M1A2 Abrams, the autocannon of what appears to be a Bradley IFV, multiple Missiles and what appear to be Hydra Rockets from FA-18’s and AH-1Z’s, along with a Pineapple Grenade that Ray throws when Rachel is abducted, these shields are most likely completely indestructible by human weapons at that time period. There is the chance that a Nuclear Warhead could take out the shield and destroy the Tripod along with it, but there’s also the chance that it doesn’t, and now the situation is much worse due to nuclear waste being thrown everywhere. Unfortunately, I couldn’t replicate this shield in SP, as it is simply not possible for the current state of the game.

These Tripods are sent with the task of annihilating all human life on earth, and basically any other living things that happen to stand in the line of fire. They take over the land by abducting humans for their blood, processing them, and then spraying their blood out, mixed with what is supposedly a fertilizer of some sort. This is important for them, as this changes the land to make it more suitable for the martians inside, much like we would bring plants, water, food, oxygen, and other things if we were to attempt to colonize a potentially life-supporting planet. This blood fertilizer solution grows what is known in the movie as “Red Weed”, a plant(?) that, much like our plants photosynthesize, these produce whateverthehell is necessary for the martians to survive.

Ultimately, the plan seems very well thought out! Destroy all humans, take their blood, create life sustaining terraforming in the planet, profit! But of course, there was one part of the plan that they forgot to consider; microbes. From the moment they arrived in our atmosphere and breathed our air, they were doomed. They had never experienced our bacteria and other microbes that we are naturally immune to, and so they succumbed to the disease, as they had no immunity to it. Eventually, they got too sick to operate the Tripods in a fluent manner, and the shields stopped working entirely. Unable to fight back, the Tripods proved to be very fragile machines, able to be taken out by just a few Javelin Rockets. All over the world, Tripods were failing to operate, as their pilots were slowly dying. As quick as it had begun, the reign of Earth’s new arrivers had ended.

Part of me wonders if in the future, humans salvage these tripods for their technology, and use them for their own purposes. Imagine a futuristic 6-7th Gen. Fighter Aircraft with Heatray technology, and a force field that prevents anything from damaging it! (or better yet, an A-10 Thunderbolt with a Heatray in place of the GAU-8!) Or perhaps, methods of transportation the likes of which mankind has never seen, with incredibly versatile walker leg technology. I imagine even the horns of the Tripod could be put to good use as well, they’re certainly a lot louder than even the loudest fog horns of Container Ships or other massive vessels. Although it would probably be too terrifying to install one of those on a ship, the moment any survivor hears that again, they’d instantly get PTSD over what happens prior.

Now, for the moment you’ve all been waiting for...

Controls:

These Tripods have large searchlights, making it easy to spot things off in the distance at night. AG-1 to turn them on, you’ll notice that they flicker a bit before leveling out, just like in the movie when the first Tripod rises out of an intersection.

AG-2 to activate Heatrays, in the movie, you can hear them revving up as they begin to power on, so it was only appropriate that I simulated that in the replica here. Due to the way the game works, you can fire the Heatrays immediately after activating AG-2, and you don’t need to wait for them to completely power up, unlike in the movie, where they have to spool up first before they’re ready to be used. VTOL Slider and Trim Slider control the Heatrays’ movement; VTOL aims them up and down respectively, while Trim focuses and unfocuses them. (basically, it adjusts how close the impact points of the two Heatrays are to each other)

AG-3 to spray blood fertilizer, not really much to explain here. It sprays a blood fertilizer mixture, with which to water the fields with what really just looks like netherwart from Minecraft lol

Pitch and Roll control the Tripod’s movement, top speed is about 45mph. Yaw turns the head.

There are camera views from inside the cages of the Tripod, which actually look pretty cool IMO. It’s a shame that those cages are kinda the exact opposite of where you want to be in a situation like this, otherwise they’d be pretty cool, their design in the movie is mesmerizing to look at.

Things To Note:

• Before anyone asks, nope. There is no fog horn on my replica, I don’t even know how you would accurately replicate that sound in SP. Sorry for the inconvenience, nothin I can do about it.

• This Tripod is very sensitive in the sense that it can glitch out if used wrong. To elaborate, if you go too fast with it, around 60-70+ mph from what I’ve seen, it bugs out HARDCORE. Like seriously, it’s one of the funniest things I think I’ve ever seen in the game. Worry not, as this is easily avoidable. But if you want to see it happen, try it for yourself!

• I couldn’t find a way to limit the yaw rotation on the head, so just don’t try to turn the head too far, otherwise parts try to go through each other even through their disableAircraftCollisions value is set to false, which can lead to interesting problems.

• The Heatrays can be very laggy if you fire them into the air, atleast from my experience. So if you use a lower end device, be careful.

• I want you to look at this thing’s head in the designer. No seriously, look at the head. Hover over the parts with the part selector or your mouse, and study the geometry of this thing. It is by far, the most intricate and geometrically complicated shape I’ve ever had to make in this game. Some of the angles in the shapes require precision up to the thousandth’s, and even the ten thousandth’s place in the decimals, otherwise it won’t be smooth enough. That being said, lots of areas on this thing lack smoothness, simply because the shape was just too freakin damn hard. My apologies.

Anyway, I think I’ve gone over enough, this project was a huge challenge, I actually started it roughly 2-3 months ago, and I kinda quit it because the head’s shape was just too complicated. Eventually, I gathered the confidence to start working on it again, and here we are today, with the completed work. Before I end the description here, there’s something I must say. This project, while worked on for the most part by me, was actually the work of two people. This was a collaborative project between me and one other person, who chose to remain anonymous. They worked on the FunkyTrees code for the legs, as I understand jack shit about FunkyTrees, and I could never have done this without them. So huge thanks to anonymous for helping me with the Tripod, I wish I could credit them in a more sincere fashion, but I will respect their request of remaining anonymous.

With that being said...

Have Fun, and don’t forget to HRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
FOGHORNTROMBONEWHALEMATINGNOISES