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Mechanical DesignsThe first interplanetary colonists were faced with a difficult problem. Their new home planet was similar to Earth, yet was also very different. For one thing, it was more rugged and mountainous and featured uncertain conditions. The best solution was to use the walker type vehicle which was commonly used in construction and other specialized tasks.
The first years of colonization saw the arrival of nearly 1200 Hardhats on Terra Nova. They were adapted to a huge number of functions, and even discarded units were used as spare parts to build conventional vehicles. The Hardhat served as a base for the evolution of the walker on many of the colonial planets.
As the years passed and the city-states were founded one by one, new armies arose to protect them. These armies included walker vehicles in various roles, including infantry support, but they were still essentially modified civilian equipment, not particularly suited for warfare. In 5948, the United Mercantile Federation's engineers started work on a true military walking infantry vehicle, or BOT (Bipedal One-man Tank). The result of this program was the Hunter, a rugged, boxy machine that could be easily produced and fielded. Thousands of Hunters left the assembly line in the next fifty years, many of them sold to the UMF's allies or captured by its neighbors.
It took a whole century for new Gear designs to appear. During that time, the faithful Hunter was modified for a huge number of operational roles and served on virtually all fronts during the many squirmishes between the North, the South and the independent Badlands city-states.
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Because the colonial corporations were unwilling to spend large sums of money to transport important quantities of cargo over to Terra Nova, the mission specialists had to turn toward modular and highly adaptable components which could serve in a variety of ways and yet be easy to maintain using local resources and material. The first of this new line of equipment was the Hardhat, a rugged cockpit/main body system to which a variety of tool limbs could be attached . The Hardhat was self-contained: it carried its own walk-control computer and sensor attachment. Additional sensor and computer modules came with the limbs. 
By 5800, walkers were used extensively on Terra Nova. When the colonial corporations were forced to retire because of the economic crisis on Earth, many settlers armed their machines in the hope of breaking through the spaceports' defensive lines. 
Worried by this new technological development, the Southern Republic tried to acquire a few Hunters by several means -- some legal, other definitely not -- but to no avail. It was not before 5951 that Republican commandos were able to steal one Hunter from an advanced Protectorate force in the Badlands. A mere six months later, the Republic was using its own version of the Hunter (named Jäger) to force its neighboring Southern states into a coalition led by the Republic.