The cockpit on the original AT-AT has always bugged me a bit. The sides never really stayed closed and there was only room for one minifig (as seen below).
So, I downloaded the building instructions for the motorized walking AT-AT (#10178) and modified the cockpit a little. Here's what the finished product looks like...
The one drawback of the new design is that it makes the "head" look disproportionally large for the rest of the body. But, I did tweak the head to allow it to move up and down (which makes it much easier to shoot down advancing snowspeeders).
I took out the white speederbike from the rear so I could fit six snowtroopers instead of four. It seemed like such a waste to have a large transport for only four people.
Here's a close-up of the "head". The front section is pretty much by-the-book, but I felt the "neck" was a little too exposed, so I added some plates on the back. I like how nicely the panels stay closed on this version, a lot tighter than the original. The strange thing is that the old head was pretty much the same size as this one, but it didn't look as big.
Here's a close-up of the interior. Plenty of room for the driver and commander. It has a nice hinge mechanism for opening the lid for access to the minifigs.
Unless I decide to swap out all the standard grey pieces for the newer blue-grey, I think this one is pretty much done as far was the modifications go.
