Re: Hover tanks

On Wed, May 25, 2005 at 03:42:04PM -0600, B Lin wrote:
>If you didn't care about floating on water (as most MBT's don't) then
>you can have larger ground pressures and a more compact footprint.  But
>as you shrink the footprint and increase the ground pressure, you need
>more power to stay aloft until you reach something like a Harrier which
>can be held aloft on pure thrust.

Well, yes. Part of the problem with this argument is that hovertanks
really don't make sense _unless_ you regularly have to sprint at high
speed and/or cross substantial open water, and can make them light
enough to do that; for any given output from your power plant, you can
connect it to a conventional track drive mechanism and get much more
armour into a more compact chassis at the price of going rather more
slowly.

(Hammers' Slammers basically ignore this by having practically infinite
power output, very lightweight armour technology, and terrain that's
peculiarly well-suited to hovercraft.)

R