More concept design for pre-production. While often one finds great joy in designing the great, impressive, dramatic pieces of gadgetry, it amazing how many times one can derive great joy from humble little things.

For the Earth Force project I created a family of wheeled autonomous vehicles that plied the hallways, hangers, stock rooms of the fleet. I used the generic name of mule to describe the class. They ranged from four wheels to eight, and as small as mobile file cabinets to as large as small trucks. they were to be an ever present part of the environment onboard the ships of the fleet.

I was lucky that at one time my father worked at Hyster forklifts and I got a chance to look at many of the catalogs and industry related documents related to his job. While industrial tech is rarely sexy like consumer tech, or ominous like military. It does have its own charm and character to it.

One of the things I enjoyed almost as much as coming up the overall design of the mules, was how the mules would actually operate around the crew. One of things my dad did stress while I was growing up is the fact that everyone is stupid once and awhile. Even the most cautious, deliberate individual can find themselves asleep at switch sometimes. You'd think that a large bright yellow cart with a flashing strobe and a large beeping alarm would be very obvious. Yet when one is in a hurry. One is distracted. One has been around them for so long they can become part general background of sight and sound that you start to ignore them, and that is how people can get run over by forklifts and similar industrial vehicles.

So if you accidentally step out in front of these robotic cargo haulers you'll appreciate that it can stop quickly, but you might be less impressed if it comes to an abrupt halt but still dumps its cargo on you or even worse tips over on top of you! So for the freight mules I Put the front anti-tipping bars on them.