DISQUS

Atreides1984 · 1 year ago

It is a nice thought experiment, but superheavy tanks have a slight problem.

They can't get anywhere. Roads that are normally stable aren't under that weight, and end up badly damaged; bridges won't hold and most types of terrain are impassable. Such a tank would essentially be stuck to a reinforced firing position, and moving it ( or placing it there ) would be an impressive feat of engineering in itself. Experimental tanks over 100 tons built during WWII also had the problem of a lousy range, but with a nuclear power source the only remaining problems would be size and weight, which are design requisites at the same time. It would be building a handicapped tank... on purpose.

And then, to be a true bolo it needs an AI designed to protect mankind from itself. No SKYNET there, please.

nextbigfuture · 1 year ago

The big mining trucks can move over dirt or in a military conflict in enemy territory where you did not care they could go over roads while wrecking the roads. A nuclear version of the hovercraft could be built with several of the nuclear reactors powering the propellers. Perhaps increasing the power to the propellers of a large hovercraft by say double would be enough to give some more clearance and to go over more than 70% of coastal areas. The other way to go would be to have a combined wheeled or tracked hovercraft. There is room being saved by having the smaller nuclear generator instead of the diesel engine/turbines. Then you could have movement over more land and over rivers/seas/ocean.

Snake_Oil_Baron · 1 year ago

With lighter materials and some other engineering it could very well be possible but there are competing concepts to do the same thing. "Road trains" - long multi-segmented transport trucks used in rural parts of Australia could be hybridized with today's wheeled tanks. And robot armored vehicles that can work in convoy or be driven by tele-presence could deliver diverse weapons systems, equipment and personnel and to a location with less manpower than would be currently used.

And as supportive as I am of military research and development (winning wars fast and deterring new ones saves lives where as demanding peace at all costs leads to bigger and bloodier wars) I would also like to see reconstruction efforts aided by developing large, all-in-one road constructions machines. Something that could drill and even place explosives where needed to remove large rocks, level, grade and pave. Ideally this would all be done at a faster pace than manual road construction and if it could lay drainage and infrastructure piping at the same time - fed supply materials from the back by similar robots - you would really have something important. In today's world, being able to rebuild allied nations while they are still allied is at least as important as being able to defeat enemies.

nextbigfuture · 1 year ago

So would wider scale use of mega-size road/infrastructure vehicles greatly speed up repairing war damage or building up underdeveloped countries.

It would probably help to reduce the logistical load to be able to make things with the material onsite. Taking the dirt and mixing in say just 5% carbon nanotubes or graphene plus polymer to make new waterless concrete. (Like the lunar concrete that was proposed). Increasing the supply and lowering the price of carbon nanotubes/graphene would greatly help with fast onsite construction without water and making the supplies go 10-20 times farther. 400 tons of material going like 4000-8000 tons by mixing in the onsite dirt and turning the resultant material into pipe and road.

Will_Brown · 1 year ago

Over the course of several weeks in the summer of 2002, I think (maybe '03) , retired US Army Colonel and Baen Sci/Fi author Tom Kratman hosted a discussion about this very concept on the Baen publishing blog (I'm unaware of BW's policy re: competing commercial links, but you might try some variation of baen.com :)). Several dozen contributors (each possessed of some more-or-less directly applicable education and/or experience with the particular aspect of technology they commented upon) were able to compile links to then-current day commercial sources for said technology or material resource.

The upshot was that, using 2002 (3?) technology, it was indeed quite possible to construct a faux-BOLO - if you were willing to go without the full up interactive AI and were willing to be a bit forgiving about the particulars of the armament. .50 cal. machine guns aren't even close to being "infinite repeaters" (ask anyone who's ever had the job of running a linker machine, apparently - what do I know, I was an airplane electrician in the Navy) and the distinction between 20mm and 30mm ordinance has a surprising degree of logistics as a preferrentially determining component, for only two examples. I can't recall the specifics now, but it seems there is an appreciable advantage to naval rifle ordinance over rail gun projectiles when operating in an Earth-normal atmosphjere, so while the power for one certainly existed, the pragmatic result at the other end of things weighted the final choice against the rail gun (unless in-vacuum operations were an actual likelihood where the rail gun worked much better apparently).

As to the transportation restrictions, the top speed was figured to be ~ 8 to 12 knots as I recall (tread life and sprocket bearing sustainability were among the principal considerations if memory serves), but the final determination was that any angle of climb that the drive horsepower could overcome was surmountable (if considerably flattened out post transit) and there was very little in the way of human construction that could offer much of a hinderance to a vehicle of this size and physical mass. It literally doesn't compare to any other known human mobile construction that operates on land - the closest mentioned were a super-tanker or a Nimitz class aircraft carrier and their construction is comparatively quite fragile; also, it's not a very good match due the the differences in medium). The mining truck mentioned in Brian's post is about 1/4 the size/mass of the tank envisioned and no tires that rely on air pressure to inflate them (and apparently treads are more flexable than solid tires which is important when designing the vehicle framework) could possibly handle the lateral sway loads the weight of such a vehicle generates when maneuvering.

I can't imagine that the subsequent advances in materials technology (as well as in power generation) in the intervening years has done anything but enhance the "do-ability" of such a project.

nextbigfuture · 1 year ago

Thanks for the good info Will. It sounds like they were trying to make a later model Bolo. The mark XX and beyond were the size that you described. We would need more of the reactors to scale up the hovercraft from 1050 tons to 2800-3000 tons and to provide more lift.

My next speculative article will look at making mobile electric-UAV aircraft carrier, support/charging for a division of exoskeleton suited soldiers.

Will_Brown · 1 year ago

Actually, I think the size was more as a result of that being the smallest vehicle they could fit the desired power, ordinance, armor and crew into. :)

If you're serious about the next speculative article topic(s), may I suggest you consider some variation of dirigable as an airborne drone/RPV platform and frequency hoping RF power transmission for the exoskeletons? One of the big drawbacks most powered armor designs encounter is the conflict between armor/ordinance loads vs on-board power storage constraints. 15 to 60 minutes of internal power (depending upon activity demands) supported by RF power transmission from LEO satellite transmitter (or other air mobile source) for extended operations seems a realistic compromise to me.