DarkRha said:

I saw that someone on facebook suggested adding Imperial ground troops during the battle of hoth for scaling purposes, however I like the idea of ground troops only because it will make sense of the rebel ground troops in the trenches since there is no way they could take down the walkers with their blasters alone. Just random ramble as I wait for the final masterpiece!

i too wanted ground troops added to the hoth battle. In my research it was clear from evidence of story boards that I found in the "empire strikes back notebook" published in 1980 that Lucasfilm had story boarded imperial troops battling with the rebels. However it seems to have been dropped.

In JW Rinzlers "The Making of the Empire Strikes Back". There were no scenes filmed with imperial troops in the trenches. No costumes made or extras. The book talks at length about the second unit filming of the rebel trench scenes in finse....no imps. It is Intersting that Rinzler does not show the dropped storyboards and makes no mention of imperial troops at all.

perhaps it was budget, perhaps technical issues with the effects shot. Who knows. the interesting thing is that they planned it and then dropped it at some point.

there was some filmed scenes with a wierd rebel tank That were deleted. i think it is from that recently discovered making of video from Germany? Anyways you can you tube it. Attached is a link to a photo of it.

http://www.therpf.com/f79/esb-rebel-hover-tank-hoth-87501/

And just by googling I found all this stuff.

http://www.starwarz.com/tbone/echo-base-the-battle-of-hoth/

mattcion