Hackworth noted, not without approval, that this one's engineers had put a 
high priority on the virtues of simplicity and strength and a low priority on 
comfort and style. Very Chinese. No effort was made to disguise it as a real 
animal. Much of the mechanical business in the legs was exposed so that you 
could see how the joints and pushrods worked, a little like staring at the 
wheels of an old steam locomotive. The body looked gaunt and skeletal. It was 
made of star-shaped connectors where five or six cigarette-size rods would come 
together, the rods and connectors forming into an irregular web that wrapped 
around into a geodesic space frame. The rods could change their length. 
Hackworth knew from seeing the same construction elsewhere that the web
could change its size and shape to an amazing degree while providing whatever 
combination of stiffness and flexibility the controlling system needed at the 
moment. Inside the space frame Hackworth could see aluminum-plated spheres and 
ellipsoids, no doubt vacuum-filled, containing the mount's machine-phase guts: 
basically some rod logic and an energy source.