GEVs/Grav/Arty

>From Oerjan:

Until you get Mavericks or Hellfires which you can fire indirectly at
ranges of 40 km and above, indirect-firing artillery will have a
niche.

Whenever you have a supply dump (which isn't mounted on grav vehicles)
within 50-150 km of the enemy, indirect-firing artillery will have a
niche.

** That distance might change if you have grav vehicles that need
refuelled once a month, fly at hundreds of kph, and have weapons with
40+ km range... :)

> 2) A tank is loud and noisy. So is a GEV. Either can be made lower
in
> singature by the application of a) money and b) engineering. Grav
> might actually be the quietest and lowest signature possible.

Grav might be low-signature, but I doubt it. If something starts
messing with the local gravity field, I suspect it would be fairly
easy
to detect :-/

** Maybe. Depends. If I can just find a way to create a localize field
to negate my own mass, then it might not be detectable from too far
away. But it might. Who knows? And this would definitely have a lower
*relative* signature than tracklayers which are loud in the audible
spectrum. It'd take higher tech to detect.

It probably wouldn't be anywhere near as noisy as a GEV, but it would
have
other signature problems to cope with.

** Possible.

Considering that even the Challenger (the heaviest of the current
Western tanks) is "only" 62 tons fully loaded, and the various
ex-Soviet tanks average around 45 tons, I'm not entirely sure why
you'd
want to make the GEV tank 80 tons :-/

I'm also not sure why you are talking about GEV tanks, when I wrote:

"... I wouldn't be surprised at all if you could build GEV SPs and
APCs
with today's hovercraft technology. Not particularly economic, of
course, but probably possible."

Note the complete omission of tanks from the list; it was entirely
intentional. Modern 155mm SP guns average around 25-30 tons when fully
combat loaded, ie about half the mass of an MBT.

** D'oh! My bad. Sorry. But my point about any heavy vehicle eating
lots of diesel still applies.

Looking at today's military hovercraft and assuming that track
transmission is about as heavy overall as skirts (the skirts
themselves
are probably lighter, but the extra turbines and fans aren't), we'd
need to increase their cushion pressure by about 75% from the 1989
level to make an M113 APC hover. I'd be quite surprised if this were
not *technically* possible today. Why you'd want to do this beats me,
though <shrug> It'd definitely have severe problems with dust/spray
clouds and noise, too.

** Depending on skirt design, dust spray could be minimized. Noise
might also be minimized - I've encountered quiet high volume fans.
Nothing like a GEV would use, but who knows? I'm not vizier enough to
suggest the technology couldn't be adapted.

An M1A2 would need about four times the ground pressure of today's
hovercraft. This starts sounding a bit too heavy for today's
technology. The most serious problem isn't the energy supply, though -
it is finding space for the lifting and maneuvering fans and air
intakes, preferrably somewhere where they won't be wrecked by the
first
burst of small-arms fire directed at the vehicle <g>

** Admittedly. But we might use some form of air-ram and vectored
thrust. We might develop a lot more fan efficiency. We might heat the
exhaust gas to give us more lift. I don't know how it might be solved,
but it might be solved I suggest. Like all conjectures,it is a guess,
but it seems possible given 180 years.

> 4) GEVs can move through swamps and if packing non-recoil weapons
> could even fight there. I agree CPR arty would be problematic.

There are no non-recoil weapons.

** Laser? Gyrojet? Harsh words?

 Only low-recoil ones...

** What recoil do you see from a HEL?

 and I'd want
to be *very* certain of my platform's stability (and ability not to
drift into various nearby objects) before I fired any large weapons
from it while hovering over a swamp :-/

** Assuming your computer couldn't compensate with vectored thrust.

I didn't have a lot of interest in it until you made me look closely
at
it :-/

** <sniffle> :) <MUHAHAHAHA!>	Welcome to the world of
too-many-things-to-work-on-or-buy..... I've been a resident for
years.... ;)

Thomas Barclay