Re: GEV's

Roger Books wrote:

> I'm a little confused.
> 
> I'm going to assume American/English units here instead of metric
> as I am more comfortable with that.  Also, the "," comma is a 
> seperator, not a decimal point.
> 
> Our GEV tank masses 80 tons or 160,000lbs.

Sounds a bit high, but OK. The Challenger II is about 138000 lbs, and
that's the heaviest MBT in use today.
 
> Just a guess but the skirt would cover 8ft by 12 ft at a minimum.

This is *extremely* small for that heavy a vehicle - solid armour
plate, or ten meters high, or something like that. Triple it for an
MBT.

> 96 square feet or 13,824 square inches, which gives me 11.57 psi.
> I don't see that as being terribly difficult to generate with a
> closed skirt.  

Judging from the mass and size of modern hovercraft, they have cushion
pressures between 0.25 and 0.8 psi. It seems likely that we have
overlooked something <g>

The skirt isn't completely closed - unless you assume an airtight seal
(powerfield?) between the skirt and the ground, you always get leaks.
And... as I've said in several previous posts, the 0.8 psi pressure
hovercraft have problems with noise and dust, but that'd be nothing
compared to what the  11+ psi craft would suffer.

Regards,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry