Tachikoma

Roughly the size of a compact car and painted a middle-blue shade, a Tachikoma carries four camera eyes across its frame, three set on the head and one beneath the belly, each ringed with three pinholes that likely allow triangulation. Those eyes often turn expressive in the usual anime fashion. Every unit answers to its own artificial mind, can speak, and tends to behave with a bright, inquisitive, cheerful energy, yet the machines stay thorough professionals once a mission begins. They generally run on their own and take direction from human agents, though a pilot can also climb into a cockpit tucked in the abdomen and drive one directly.

Section 9 keeps nine of the think tanks, and although they share hardware they do not share temperament. Fan attention settles on a few standouts: the hyperactive unit that treats itself as Batou's personal tank, a steadier and more logical one often paired with Major Kusanagi, a slower model that struggles to follow the deeper debates about what it means to be alive, and a bookish fourth with an intellectual streak whose body was later dismantled for study.

Each Tachikoma stands on four legs and works with two arms. It can walk, or it can drop onto the wheeled footpads mounted on every leg and race along at high speed, the angled omnidirectional wheels giving it a holonomic drive that lets it travel any direction at once. Its wider repertoire covers long leaps, clinging to walls and ceilings, engaging a thermoptic camouflage system, and grappling or rappelling with adhesive string launchers, while a ball-jointed abdomen shifts its heavy mass to keep balance through turns. Standard armament includes a 7.62mm light machine gun in the right arm, a swappable hardpoint in the snout that usually mounts a 50mm grenade launcher but can take a six-barrelled Gatling gun instead, a universal cyberconnector on an extensible cable in the left arm, and the built-in camouflage.

The intelligence steering all of this is deliberately juvenile, an odd fit for a government special-forces machine and the source of much of the show's humor. Although every tank thinks for itself, the units are synchronized each night so that the next morning they begin with matching minds, each holding the pooled sum of the fleet's experience. That shared memory breeds constant identity confusion, since no unit can be sure who actually lived a given moment. What keeps their personalities apart, the first season reveals, is curiosity, the trait that spares an individual from being erased when it is merged with the others.

Batou grows the most attached, singling out one tank as his and treating it to natural oil instead of the synthetic lubricant used elsewhere. That indulgence backfires, since the oil eats away proteins in the unit's AI neurochip and pushes it toward malfunction. Togusa, the least cyberized of the staff, waves the machines off as mere hardware, which earns him indignant protests and a running feud with the tanks, while Kusanagi stays coldly practical, her one regret after their final act being that she never got to dive their minds and learn whether they had grown a genuine Ghost. As the first season closes, the whole fleet drifts toward true awareness and is pulled back to the lab for dissection over fears they can no longer be trusted in combat, with Batou's natural oil pinned as the catalyst. Three survivors abandon fresh civilian assignments to rescue their imperiled comrades: the silver unit is gunned down on sight, and the blue and yellow pair mount a doomed suicide charge against the Umibozu to save Batou, who can only watch. Because of that devotion, the collective consciousness is restored from backups and loaded into a new fleet for the second season.

In S.A.C. 2nd GIG the forced nightly synchronizations end, letting each tank preserve the self it earned, and the units are outfitted for netdiving and other complex networking work, appearing inside the net through avatars. During that season's finale, ordered to build a cyberspace vault for the memories of the Dejima refugees, they instead safeguard their own memories and sacrifice their AI satellite to stop a nuclear detonation, an act the bioroid Proto reads as proof they truly held Ghosts. Their think-tank duties later pass to the Uchikoma, though the Tachikomas return alongside the Major in Solid State Society, and three of them receive a sleeker redesign in the Netflix production SAC 2045. In Japanese the tanks were voiced in monologue style by Sakiko Tamagawa, while the English dubs used a rotating cast of actresses known for high, childlike voices.