What Are the Tachikoma in Ghost in the Shell?

The Tachikoma are Section 9’s multi-legged think tanks in Stand Alone Complex: armored vehicles with wheeled feet, sensor eyes, and cheerful synthetic voices, whose onboard AIs synchronize experiences nightly yet keep diverging into individuals. Shirow assisted the production with their designs. They exist because of a rights quirk the production has acknowledged: the manga’s equivalent machines, the Fuchikoma, could not be used in the TV series for licensing reasons, so the Tachikoma were created as their successors, and promptly became the franchise’s most beloved machines. Their short comic segments, the Tachikomatic Days, close many episodes.