Arms Race

I thought I was all done with this Weird Arms series, but these guys
thomastapir.deviantart.com/art…
were bugging me for the fact that the limbs appear adapted to heavy load-lifting but ill-equipped for finer, more dexterous manipulatory tasks.  I finally decided that they need two pairs of arms--the crane-like "heavy lifters" plus smaller, more agile "utility arms" suited for refined detail work.  Metabolically expensive, of course, and I imagine they'd probably need neural "drivers" installed to operate all four limbs simultaneously...But again, I think it'd look cool, and frankly that's about all that matters to me nowadays.  : p

I realized as I was drawing these up that my mental image is probably heavily plagiarized from stylistic motifs you see in a lot of  the "next-gen" mech designs:
flyingdebris.deviantart.com/ar…
et al.  (I should add that "The Fiddler" is one of my VERY FAVORITE contemporary mecha designs!)  But as far as I'm concerned the dual paired arms are highly derivative of Shirow's external master/slave engineering philosophy, so Hey, maybe I'm just revisiting the original source material.  AND PLAGIARIZING THAT INSTEAD

^{(probably a bit of Alien "Queen" in there too)}

Will Scrap oh so soon