"Wells's Martian Tripods vs. Current (and older) designs" Topic

HG Wells is, uhm, "vaguely specific" about the appearance of the Martian "fighting machines" (the tripods) in his novel. Most attempts I've seen either go with a quasi-Victorian look, or a heavy "mech" approach, and include of course the three legs, some form of tentacle, and the "heat ray."
BUT there's more to the description than that. There's also this:

And of their appliances, perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a man than the curious fact that what is the dominant feature of almost all human devices in mechanism is absent--the WHEEL is absent; among all the things they brought to earth there is no trace or suggestion of their use of wheels. One would have at least expected it in locomotion. And in this connection it is curious to remark that even on this earth Nature has never hit upon the wheel, or has preferred other expedients to its development. And not only did the Martians either not know of (which is incredible), or abstain from, the wheel, but in their apparatus singularly little use is made of the fixed pivot or relatively fixed pivot, with circular motions thereabout confined to one plane. Almost all the joints of the machinery present a complicated system of sliding parts moving over small but beautifully curved friction bearings. And while upon this matter of detail, it is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the disks in an elastic sheath; these disks become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully together when traversed by a current of electricity. In this way the curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder, was attained. Such quasi-muscles abounded in the crablike handling-machine which, on my first peeping out of the slit, I watched unpacking the cylinder. It seemed infinitely more alive than the actual Martians lying beyond it in the sunset light, panting, stirring ineffectual tentacles, and moving feebly after their vast journey across space.

Wait, no "pivots," and thus no pivoted joints? Have you seen *that* in a tripod mini? Almost all depict some sort of circular pivot connection at the joints. But Wells says specifically that they don't have these at all.

Now how you reproduce what Wells describes, I don't know. But are there any tripods out there so alien as to not have jointed legs?

I think the 2005 Tom Cruisian tripods probably come closest to his description: