All terrain vehicle.
Concrete obstacles aren't a real challenge.
Can cross over rivers.
Why aren't hovertanks a thing?
Jaxon Kelly
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Benjamin Garcia
>To MKill a tank you need some way to disable the vehicle's engine or treads, either of which require a not insignificant amount of explosives or a weapon capable of piercing a not insignificant amount of armor.
>To MKill a hovercraft you need a gutter spike
Sebastian Scott
Skirts are relatively vulnerable and it takes a good amount of energy to maintain chamber pressure. They are also kind of clumsy and have trouble crossing areas a tank can cross.
I'm sad too. Hammer's Slammers was fucking awesome.
Ethan Nguyen
/thread
Carter Smith
The air skirt is way too vulnerable and if that goes you've got a mobility kill.
That said I'm surprised no one's made a non-skirt version with..
I dunno Harrier VTOL systems? Still a lot to go wrong for what can be done with just a low flying helicopter
Jayden Flores
Calm down Skynet.
James Collins
In a dusty or sand environment wouldn't it just blind itself and everybody around it in a giant cloud of dust?
>inb4 beaches are sand
Yes, but the sand is wet and or mostly washed clean of dust. Beach sand isn't full of fine dust like desert sand.
Aiden Roberts
Ducted fan lift systems need a tremendous amount of fuel hover, and strongly limit how much armor you could carry. As you note, this is basically a helicopter.
That said, there are Wing In Ground Effect (WIGE) designs that save fuel by 'hovering' on the air compressed between the wings and the ground in flight. This allows for very heavy aircraft with relatively small wings. This is also clumsy however, and flying 20 feet in the air is sort of dangerous, I don't think anybody has ever seriously proposed a combat version of this.
Leo Moore
Less then you'd think. Air spills around the skirts, but the vast majority of high pressure air remains in the chamber.
Jayden Long
>mobility kills your tank with a AK
Nothin personnel, kid
Dylan Edwards
.3" hole in a skirt won't do shit. The air isn't under that much pressure.
Angel Gutierrez
fucking vanu
Jacob Cooper
And a thousand .3" holes...? Or twenty 30mm holes? What the hell kind of combat environment are you in where you're only ever gonna take one or two shots at a time from rifle caliber rounds?
Ethan Diaz
Based TR poster
Josiah Edwards
Robotech... to the rescue!!!
Thomas Ross
True limitation is power, even with turboshaft engines its less efficient than a fucking helicopter the biggest fuel guzzler ever.
You realize a skirt can be made of materials that would self seal or bounce off anything youd care to fire on it?
Wyatt Parker
>I don't think anybody has ever seriously proposed a combat version of this.
The soviets built one to carry anti ship missiles
Brandon Long
>Low friction contact with surface
>Fire 120mm gun
Hilarity ensues
Luis Nguyen
By the time you strap enough armor on it to strap even something as "puny" as a dushka that bad lad ain't gonna be hovering nowhere.
Juan Allen
>poor understanding of physics.
Cooper Turner
baen.com
>Technology had dragged the tank to the brink of abandonment. Not surprisingly, it was technology again which brought the panzers back. The primary breakthrough was the development of portable fusion power plants. Just as the gasoline engine with its high horsepower-to-weight ratio had been necessary before the first tanks could take the field, so the fusion unit's almost limitless output was required to move the mass which made the new supertanks viable. Fusion units were bulky and moderately heavy themselves, but loads could be increased on a fusion-powered chassis with almost no degradation of performance. Armor became thick—and thicker. With the whole galaxy available as a source of ores, iridium replaced the less effective steels and ceramics without regard for weight.
>The air-cushion principle is a very simple one. Fans fill the plenum chamber, a solid-skirted box under a vehicle, with air under pressure. To escape, the air must lift the edges of the skirts off the ground—and with the skirts, the whole vehicle rises. Fans tilt with the velocity and angle of attack of the blades determining the amount and direction of thrust. The vehicle skims over surfaces it does not touch.
>On tanks and combat cars, the lift was provided by batteries of fans mounted on the roof of the plenum chamber. Each fan had its own armored nacelle. Mines could still do considerable damage; but while a single broken track block would deadline a tracked vehicle, a wrecked fan only made a blower a little more sluggish.
Dylan Morris
Well a 30mm cannon slows down a fucking jet, explain how throwing a shell that much larger doesn't faze a floating fart pillow with little or no forward thrust, Dr. Science.
Brandon Johnson
The kind of speed a propeller would have to attain to maintain such a heavy vehicle would be monstrous. Can you imagine how LOUD it would be?
Levi Reed
Just spitballing here, but the easiest way would be to use the fusion power to heat atmosphere as reaction mass in thermal turbofans.
But that's just lift, you're gonna need some method to control linear and rotational motion, and that necessitates fast response time on changes to thrust vector.
This is very hard to do with turbocompression engines.
Adrian James
You can have proper armor or a hover tank. Not both.
Jayden Barnes
Agreed. Spandexfags deserve to face the might of the terran republic.
Jaxon Miller
This sounds like something Iran would be into
>checks out
Easton Martinez
Boner achieved. Hammer’s Slammers was my childhood introduction to hard SF.
Turbofans or other jets could do it now, no fusion required. Bury the engines deep in the hull, use a network of thrust cells already developed for other hovercraft. Or use a Pegasus from a Hawker Harrier.
Jaxon Sanchez
>mission killed by a single bullet, or maybe some kind of large nail
Chase Bennett
Aren't the skirts of even civilian hovercraft made out of kelvar, or something?
Eli Butler
>Hammer's Slammers was fucking awesome.
was?
You can still play it and read it.
Dominic Ortiz
Just looked it up you can still buy models from the 90stastic website
brigademodels.co.uk
Alexander Rogers
Everyone uses hovercraft dumbass
Jaxson Parker
>All terrain vehicle.
*blocks your path*