More Thoughts on Sci-Fi Tank Design
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- Опубліковано 7 гру 2023
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Spacedock returns to the topic of sci-fi tank designs.
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I don't know if this has been covered in this series before but I think the UEF Fatboy from Supreme Commander universe is the ultimate scifi tank, it's an ultra gigantic mobile fortress and factory shaped like a tank that can produce tanks and other smaller units, it has energy shielding, massive amount of long range firepower and anti air weaponry as well...
I was wondering if there was a way to get your book on paper. I would be interested in buying it for my personal library.
Hi there,can you talk about the design philosophies of the fictional sci-fi aircraft? I think this is interesting to talk about
So amazing to hear an ad for a game I'm actually interested in.
You forget that Object 490 has sequentional quad tracks
to be fair, key reasons that real life tanks haven't increased in size include the need to fit them onto trains for transport, and the effect of length to width ratio on tanks ability to turn
have them being able to cross bridges. the thing that a bigger tank is easyer to hit. not forgeting that a bigger and heavyer tank needs a bigger engine. a bigger engine needs more fuel. things like that is kind of important.
also because we simply don't need to make tanks bigger, its simply very unlikely that tanks are going to be growing in size any time soon, if anything their more likely to shrink in the future as more advanced tech means we simply need less space for the same amount of stuff, just take the abrams tank, the army actually did a study and found out that if they replaced all of the wiring on the tank with more modern power systems it could shave quiet a bit of weight of the tank and the abrams X demonstrator was a little more compact vs the original simply because of its use of more modern components and how it placed the crew allowing for a lower profile turret
@@stickpgethis 10x over
Also practically most si-if tank aren’t very practical if you actually could make them you discover the same problem people in the past have made their was a time in the 1920s where their was multi turret tank like in war hammer and their all suck also to put it in a way you can have large tank that have 8 turret and have that be taken out and have nothing have 8 single barrels tank and lose a few like 3 but you’ll still have 5 guns around I don’t you alway wants practical tank in sci-if not that they’re aren’t going to be cool real tank are cool but it limit you imagination
Don't forget that the lower profile the better, less likely going to be seen and easier to take cover.
Honestly, the amphibious nature of a hovertank would be more in the nature of supporting infantry landings from naval vessels, clearing out both anti-air and anti-infantry defenses to assist securing the beachhead. As for why you wouldn't have blue water (oceanic) naval vessels on a water world: Navy ocean-faring ships are massive. Media does *not* do justice to just how big even smaller classes are, and even pictures (say, from a Fleet Week) only give you a rough idea. Most scifi universes would be shipping oceanic navy vessels in pieces and assembling it at the end of the trip, and that creates a whole new set of strategic concerns. (Read: New supply chains for navy ammunition and fuel, shipbuilding personnel and facilities for assembly, protection of not just the aforementioned personnel and facilities, but the airspace where you're bringing the pieces down the gravity well.)
Yeah, warships are really powerful, but really REALLY big. You'd need something like Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander technology to make them an effective interplanetary invasion weapon. Without those space magic constructor beams/nanolathes, it would take an unfeasible amount of time to build them on site. And even with those, they are still expensive enough that they aren't going to be your first wave units.
Or, you would need even bigger space ships to transport them between planets. And at that point, you would probably be better of just using your massive space ships to bombard the enemy from orbit.
If you're an interstellar nation, why are you conducting amphibious assaults in the first place? If anything, the ocean is quite possibly the worst place for an invading interstellar army to land; the defending force very likely has naval assets in place and you do not and will not until you can establish a foothold(s) groundside that are safe enough for ship reassembly, which essentially means you are dropping your small boats of men and tanks straight onto a bunch of enemies you cannot even engage. If you drop near the shore, not only are you exposing yourself to oceangoing opponents, you also open yourself up to fire from short ranged ground units too (not just anti-spacecraft weapons). You are essentially asking you troops to drop onto an enemy held world or continent in a location in which they have no offensive ability and then asking them to maneuver to make contact with enemies they can fight, all while behind hounded by enemies they can't. And when they finally make contact with enemy forces, they have to clear out their own beachhead at reduced capability against an alerted enemy.
In stark contrast, dropping on the ground allows you to deploy and begin offensive operations immediately after landfall. Yes, you also expose yourself to what is likely the brunt of the enemy's firepower, but it is a far better alternative than staging thousands of men and vehicles where they have little to no offensive capability and the enemy's forces will always outclass and likely outnumber them.
On another note, on a water world, why wouldn't you have conventional oceangoing vessels? Two guys in a missile-armed midget submarine could sink a whole platoon of hovertanks who can't even fight back. The moment you start putting ASW measures on your tanks, they increase exponentially to the point where just having normal boats would be far more efficient than hovertanks. Additionally, if you have a world colonized to the extent where it's worth fighting over, the capability to launch and land 30 meter missile boats and midget submarines probably exists as well.
Thats true. Also, I remember playing SupCom and my ships having issues dealing with swarms of way cheaper hovertanks in certain cases. Also, depending on setting, ships may simply be large easy targets for an orbital strike. However, an idea of waging naval-only war with hovertanks seems off rly.
yeah honestly making any kind of heavy land or sea craft wouldn't be very useful logistically. having an entire force of drones and gunships that can fly themselves would be your best bet. They could deal with the terrain no matter the planet and can even double as the drop ships for your infantry. In a video game or show or whatever a tank or heavy walker might have more armor and firepower and win in an individual battle, but whatever faction that was going up against an faction that only used flying craft would probably eventually lose just by logistics and attrition. not being able to get to a battle on time, having to maintain and waste more resources on extra supply and transport craft. Its would eventually add up.
It would be very easy for flyers only faction to use hit and run tactics with said flyers to attack the transports resupplying the ground vehicles when they can easily just fly back to base/orbit to get resupplies themselves.
That would actually be an interesting concept to see played out in some form of media. old earth stuck in its old days fighting with tanks and its newer walkers. breakaway earth colony/machine/alien faction rejects that as inefficient, beats the shit out of earth over time.
With how scifi works, brining ocean naval vessels should be a no brainier for water worlds. The sheer size and weight of the ships is a non issue when the same scifi fleets crew the same classes of ships for space flights which are often the same weight if not more than a naval ship. The nature of a space vessel being vacuum tight would also mean they are pressure tight and waterproof. It would not take much if any effort to have space fleets transition to a blue water navy. If you have big ass ships as large as star destroyers that can easily maintain flight in atmosphere of a planet, or atlest have massive warships that have engines capable of allowing them the ability to enter and leave atmosphere without much effort,then you can afford to land them in the water. Take a page out of the battleship movie
From a storytelling point of view, I quite like the idea of an “old standard of the line” tank that gets upgraded through the years. You can introduce half-assed upgrades, cheapest vendor upgrades, “we haven’t gotten to your vehicle yet” situations, users customizing non-standard upgrades, etc. suddenly, your protagonists are competing with their own equipment as much as the antagonists. (See real-life soldiers in Iraq trying to armor the undersides of their humvees. Or see the Millenium Falcon’s constant issues with its hyperdrive.)
If you like this an idea, Battletech is the universe for you. there are mechs that have been in service for centuries and sometimes they get. . .twitchy.
And that's what happen on Armored Core 6. You have some of the powerful weapon from beginning and equally difficult enemies too. So you can get pegged by enemy as easy as you shadow realm them
Making the skill matters more than just mindless grinding for stat
@@davidshea6272 That's all story fluff, though. At least up through the Battletech Compendium (the point where I gave up on the increasingly munchkin focus), Btech had few to no game mechanics or rule framework to really implement this in tabletop play.
A GM and RPG approach would be better than a no-GM tabletop rules format, for creative and fundamentally unique/nonstandard stuff like this.
But from a world-building and RPG perspective, I totally agree. I liked to really double down on the details of this, like if a player wanted to kludge Jenner arms onto a Locust, I simplified the skill check with 1 or only a few dice rolls. But the narrative description of the attempt, whether failed or successful, would include scouring Comstar's network for Way Back Machine articles on 200-year old USB-Gamma connections and how to get the electronics to talk to each other. Or the player could take a bonus on the skill check to make it kinda work NOW, at the trade-off cost of suffering a penalty to hit with the weapon in combat because it was basically dumbfire from not being properly integrated with the fire control system.
Desert of kharak comes to mind when talking about hover vs tracked vehicle. And they have a straight forward explanation as to why some group use hover tech and others used the basic tracked and wheeled vehicle. I.e. whether or not you have access to the techs.
Usually force with advantage that significant will just crush an outdated opponent without much of direct confrontation
Vietnam? What’s that?
Loved Deserts of Kharak and the expanded lore elements for vehicles and such. Great read.
@@EverydayNormieMadafackaWhat happens when politics is prioritized over actually winning. You can't win a war like Vietnam by sitting at the border twiddling your thumbs for a decade. If the U.S politicians had *ever* said "heres the blank check, take Vietnam within a year", Vietnam would be gone within a year (like Afghanistan). And only outside interference could save them (or any Viet Con wannabes. Like what happened in Afghanistan).
Not to mention that those differences don't give one side a clear advantage, just situational ones. The hover vehicles are more mobile, yes, but they're glass cannons compared to the wheeled and tracked counterparts. The hover rail guns were super annoying, yes, but get even your lightest wheeled scout in range and it was dead.
For interstellar forces I think it would be interesting to consider how the realities of lifting such heavy vehicles into orbit after a campaign may impact design. That could force the tanks for expeditionary forces to become almost disposable in design and as cheaply made by necessity, or even modular in a way that all the heavy armour plates are regarded as disposable and get jetissoned with only the more expensive and value-dense systems returned to orbit then new armour plates affixed in transit to the next destination etc. In contrast tanks for planetary defence could be a lot more solid.
Doubt they would be disposable. I can't see that being worth it. More likely they'd be relatively light much like the vehicles you see today in airborne formations. Still that entirely depends on how expensive lift is in the setting. Most sci fi settings have fairly cheap lift. And imo that does make sense. Any civilization that is has gotten far enough to require armored formations to invade other planets should have fairly cheap and available lift capacity.
@@XMysticHerox depends on how access to asteroid mining impacts the relative value of metal. I could see a situation where armour plate produced in space becomes cheap enough to not be worth lifting.
You're completely right though, it'd be very setting dependent, but it's one of those unusual factors that I could see having a really dramatic impact on armoured vehicle design in the right circumstances.
why would you bring the tank back into orbit? why not repurpose it or leave it there depending on how active a future threat might be? if there isn't some future threat it can still be repurposed into a utility vehicle and if there is a risk of the ground based threat turning back its better to already have some defense at the ready
@@orionpisces5875 good point too. Maybe that would drive designs in a direction that has more post-combat utility. Less guns and more points to attach a plow etc
Oh that's a wonderful idea, designing things specifically so you can rapidly pull out the valuable components and ditch the rest. I love it. It's not a stretch to imagine establishing a foothold base on a planet which apart from the usual stuff also features huge mines and refineries for just making armour plates and bullets from local resources.
Another comment here mentioned Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak regarding tracked vs hover vehicles.
On a separate branch from them, Deserts of Kharak presents giant tanks, LAVs, and other AFVs and justifies their gigantic size in a way that I wish was more often seen in sci fi.
Tanks on Kharak are monsters. They're 4 story tall crawlers that are appropriately wide enough to not topple over. These vehicles are knowingly designed for this size because unlike real life or realistic sci fi tanks, Kharak's colossal desert doesn't have cover, foliage, or terrain which is too small to conceal a gigantic sandcrawler. Less tanks, these gigantic vehicles are meant to be land crossing warships, and ironically this means they're actually small for warships.
They are very specifically meant to operate in the open desert, much like how a warship is meant to operate across large, mostly flat seas. Their size is used to support crew compartments, facilities, and supplies to protect and allow crew to live in their vehicles during weeks long trips without stopping or needing resupply.
By this point in Kharak's history as well, there are not yet flying spacefaring vessels, [EDIT: nor an atmosphere tolerant of long range flight]. The existence of giant Land Carriers and tracked Battlecruisers are precursors to their spaceborne equivalents, again, much like ocean going warships. It's an idea which is very enchanting, but to knowledge only the Homeworld series has made a convincing and practical argument for giant landships to be relevant over smaller and more conventional vehicles.
Thoughts on your last paragraph - a spacecraft shouldn't need to enter atmosphere to target and fire on a tank that large, if it's accurate to within a 9 city block square, it's accurate enough to hit a tank that size from orbit.
If they move at tank speeds instead of "massive crawler" speeds (abrams vs the "roller" that carried the space shuttle), they would make awesome mobile command centers. If they move at "massive crawler" speeds, that's still fast enough to exit a nuke's blast radius in a day or two - enough to render your command center immune to targeting by strategic level nukes...
The comment wasn’t referring to engagement from orbit; and for that matter, Kharak didn’t have spacecraft of any kind in play, in orbit or atmosphere.
The comment was instead referring to the fact that there was no airborne equivalent to naval warships, and that a tracked vehicle was therefore the most viable.
@@owenbutton3821 I was pointing out you don't need atmospheric craft to make a vehicle that size into nothing more than a target. You are talking about a target that's the size of multiple city blocks, after all.
@@muninrob Which is why Battleships where never retired and Aircraft Carriers that require 5 thousand people on board to operate never took their place. Because a target that big could never be viable with aircraft that can fly around the world at the equator in 16 hours or fly from New York to London in less than 2 hours within atmo. The SR-71 is retired meanwhile 10 Nimitz Class carriers sail the high seas, each 1/5th of a mile long thats up to 10 city blocks EACH.
@@Guardian_Arias Since he specified without aircraft, I was thinking batteries of modern "paris guns" lobbing "atomic annie" rounds with well trained infantry scouts calling down the mushrooms.
Also, you do remember why the battleship went obsolete don't you? Big slow target. And a Nimitz class carrier isn't viable unless you can achieve air superiority and provide a logistics backbone to keep the avgas, bombs, and parts flowing. (aircraft consume fuel and parts at a crazy rate.)
Rule of cool is still a huge factor as one of the greatest features of sci-fi tanks is how they look. No one likes ugly vehicles that don't look good. Even if the design would generally be considered impractical, useless, redundant, or otherwise no fit for battle.
Agree, the only downside of the rule of cool is that... Well, it needs to be cool for Christ sake
Sometimes the inverted rule of cool works, though. Star Wars doesn't have a lot of tanks but many of the ground vehicles, and vehicle designs in general, could traditionally be considered ugly and conceptually ridiculous, but they're still cool and dare I say beautiful. It's as though they somehow earned it by rolling with it. It doesn't always work though. The TIE tank is pretty irredeemable, and the Uglies are unsurprisingly a mixed bag.
thing is, rule of cool is often used in design as a crutch just a way to say fuck you quit asking questions, not to actually make something cool, think of it like this you could transplant modern gen 4 MBT's like the KF-41 panther or the T-14 into a good number of sci-fi universes and they would work just as well and look good doing it (maybe change the main gun for a laser or a railgun depending on the setting if you really must), rule of cool should never be used as an excuse not to make a practical design, remember something cool and practical will always be better then something that looks cool on the surface but stops being that way once you take even a second to think.
Fortunately rule of cool is a rule followed by all real world tanks. Have yet to see an ugly one.
@@caelestigladii the is4 exists
One of the best AFVs I saw in fiction was in the opening sequence of the reboot of the anime film Appleseed. It was basically a robot with a GAU-8 in a turret on a fast chassis. The infantry trying to take it out in an urban environment were at a disadvantage, and took heavy casualties because the weapon system had lightning fast reactions and superior sensors.
Shirow's mechanised fighting vehicles are a cut above the norm for sci-fi IMHO, he's created some amazing classics!
Will watch the movie again
basically a rolling antipersonnel CIWS?
I think that one of the craziest setting that places heavy emphasis on tanks and how they are used is the manga/anime Dominion Tank Police. "Bonaparte" the hero tank will always have a special place in my heart. Though I have always wandered if that type of design was physically possible to engineer, let alone drive.
You Sir, are a man of culture. sm
Huh. I was expecting some absurd monstrosity like the Ratte, but it's just a cute tiny tank. I love it.
Mini-tanks like Bonaparte exist in the real world - they're called "tankettes". And yeah, Dominion Tank Police has a special place in my heart too as one of the very first anime I ever watched. It may not make logical sense to have an all-tank police department, but it's cool enough that I don't care.
Huh. 😮 I learned about something new today.
Thanks for sharing, mate! Gonna look up "Dominion Tank Police" right away! 👍
Bonaparte was a "mini-tank" with a full sized armor & armament, and thus needs access to "hammerspace" to have room for the armor, loader, and ammo in a hull that size. (If they used rail guns or gauss cannons, they could get away with 3-4 rounds "in hull")
P.S. Every soldier in line of sight would die laughing when the "landmines" inflate into giant "cock & balls" flipping over pursuing battletanks - especially friendly soldiers. (Remember, most soldiers are closer to their teens than their thirties - childish humor is to be expected from children.)
Remember that all modern MBTs are designed for combined arms warfare, not near peer dueling. A well rounded vehicle for independent combat (mostly with near peers) can be cool and make sense. There's two main ways to go about this - one is to make a tank very fast and flexible like the guntank. Another is to make the thing a landship with different weapons for different threats, like the octo tank from venus wars.
Gods I totally forgotten about Venus Wars, been years since I watched it, back on VHS tape IIRC!!!!
You are the second person here who cannot write properly in English. Run on sentences galore.
I think this is something a lot of media in general get wrong about modern battle. A good force is made up of thousands of fighters with thousands of different skills and roles to play. Each element having their strengths and weaknesses. It's not Call of Duty where Ramirez is going to single-handedly save every Burger Town by himself.
I think that hovertanks using real world hovercraft tech would be massively inplractical but, depending on setting, antigrav tech could be a great option for navigating difficult terain by allowing the tank to avoid hazards on the ground (mines would probably still work with proximity sensors but anti tank ditches are obseleted by hovertanks). also, in 40k, aeldari, drukari and necron hovertanks seem to have limitad flight capabilities. tanks like this could reach places only acessible by air or fly over static defenses then descent to take advantage of cover and support infantry.
It's also worth noting that very few 40k 'hover vehicles' actually function as bulk-manufacture MBTs. For example, whilst the raider definitely comes out of the comparison with a toyota hilux as the more effective armoured vehicle, it's worth noting that Toyota also haven't caved into conventional wisdom about making effective fighting vehicles either, and they manufactured most real world technicals. Because it's pretty clear neither is actually supposed to be involved in wars, and it whilst 'the Hilux’s reputation for tackling every terrain and overcoming every obstacle is legendary' (Toyota, 2023), there's very little material on the website advertising its capabilities as a gun platform and APC.
@@reganator5000 Primaris marines have a very clear tendency to get hover vehicles, though. The Storm Speeder is larger, heavier, and better armed than the First Born's Land Speeder. The Repulsor replaced the Land Raider. And the heaviest tank of the Imperium is now a hover tank as well; the Astraeus. Pretty sure that's the theme for Primaris Marines and they'll get many more hover vehicles, including more heavy tanks.
@@Nickname-hier-einfuegen given all primaris vehicles were issued in the last century, and the difficulty of re-supply they'd been facing with older equipment, it may simply be a case of 'these might be worse, but they do exist, so we'll take them'. I mean, most marine chapters already struggled with the majority of their armour being modifications to the rhino APC chasis - even their IFV, in the razorback, had below-squad level transport capacity because it wasn't designed to house a gun. New Land Raiders might have been preferable, but given those only came around once a millennia or two, they'd be fine taking hover tanks.
Thanks for including my comment. The problems with weight and bridge crossings are also addressed in Hammer's Slammers. Hover tanks are an overall silly concept though, for many of the reasons mentioned.
Something which I think is often overlooked is that sci-fi tanks ought to be designed to operate in vacuum and lower gravity. A tank designed locally to operate on the moon or Mars is going to outclass any retrofitted tanks imported from Earth, because the reduced gravity allows for heavier weapon and armour. Engineers being engineers, they will absolutely use every last gram. Note also that weapons' ranges on Mars and the moon are insane, for the exact same reasons.
True but wouldn’t recoil have a stronger effect with low gravity you could just make a tank bigger but that also makes it a easy target for aircraft and a massive super tank could also be countered by ship in orbit bombarding the surface
When you mentioned amphibious tanks, I instantly thought of the tsunami tank from C&C Red Alert 3.
I love when you guys reference Gundam.
Yeah me to.
You mean to tell me that ARMORED CORE of all series has fairly realistically-implemented target tracking? Because all you need to do is point vaguely in the right direction and the targeting computer handles the rest.
...Granted, this is because player aiming wouldn't really work when your vehicle is moving like a drunk, supersonic bee, but still.
That's because so many other games involving vehicle combat are slow as hell and only pretend to be tactical to compensate.
Armored Core is only as realistic as it needs to be, it makes sure to be fun.
Yes
And also works on enemy too, making your life a bit more.... Interesting
As for hover tanks. Well you are kinda working from the assumption that any hover tech could be equally applied to aircraft. But thats not generally the implication when we see such tech. It's generally assumed it works only in direct proximity to something to push off of. Which would make it not really work for a helicopter or other aircraft.
The other points still apply to them of course. In most situations they would be beaten by either a regular tank or a ship.
one thing in favour of hovertanks is that they can operate in shallows, bogs, or similar enviroments which are near inpassable for naval or traditional ground vehicles, either because the former would run aground constantly or the latter sink in the mud. And making hovertanks over helicopters could easily be a question of training, a hovertank might need more training than a trad. ground vehicle, but still much less that what is needed for an aircraft, so sacrficing the 3rd dimensional mobility for more crew and faster training, to still get most of the advantages of the craft.
plus, depending the tech's details, are the optimal platform to have fixed main gun which does have real advantages such having a lower profile and removing the complexity of a turret, and with strafing you can move outside cover facing with your front armor. Also hovertanks leave no trackmarks, or no identivables at the very least, either making following or determenting the true size of hover vehicles much harder.
I’ve always enjoyed when settings use multiple vehicles based on settings. Like normally they used tracked tanks but may switch to walkers or hover vehicles that can go over or walk through obstacles.
Especially when they are used together to cover for each other’s weaknesses
What about a hover module for a track tank, it may only be able to sustain hover for 10 minutes at a time (cool-down or power concerns, whatever the setting calls for), but that would be enough to float over a gorge or defensive obstacles. It would also presumably not be intended to use the primary weapons while in hover because the recoil would toss the tank back. Then again, intentionally using recoil to shift about on hover could be an interesting manoeuvre.
This is something I love from the Muv-luv series. While the TSF mecha are what gets the most focus, the story repeatedly makes clear the importance of combined arms with everything having its specific role on the battlefield.
One thing to bring up for neato sci-fi tanks having quad-tracks - the Siege Tank from the Starcraft series has them, as they have an optional mode where the tracks spread out to act as braces, foring an X pattern with additional bracing, for when it deploys the extra-range guns as an artillery platform mode. I think the quad-track design is under-utilized in what it *can* bring to the field in sci-fi, namely that it can provide odd design quirks extra features. Transforming tanks especially benefit from it, and I could see someone making a tank-to-walker with quad track pods that turn into the walker's four legs for crossing terrain the tank could not reasonably cross without legs.
On the topic of hovertanks - they might actually have a good use in low gravity, minimal atmosphere scenarios, where normal VTOL and helicopter style craft don't function due to the lack of atmosphere, but you need to be able to go completely still the way a thrust-based craft like a spacecraft wouldn't be able to, while also carrying just as much armor weight as a tank should be able to. Obviously, there might be other options, and it might not be the optimal choice, but it would be *sensical* in that sort of situation.
There's also the Battletech route to having an impractical vehicle of choice for a setting - in Battletech, the iconic Mechs that mark the series for what it is were not original the optimal fighting vehicle, they just became that due to good propaganda by the original creators, and a series of convoluted treaties, laws, and regulations that hamstrung other options for a couple of centuries. By the time the laws went away due to unending conflict rearing its ugly head, Mechs were *popular* as the weapons platform of choice, in spite of tanks being perfectly viable and many times cheaper than mechs even into the modern era of Battletech.
The thing with hover tanks is, that I think about them like about ground effect aircraft. They fly using efficient technology that works only on very low altitude. They also might be evolution of hovercrafts replacing fradial parts with sci-fi stuff. They can go over water, unstable terrain, snow, because they spread weight over large area, and additionally spread it evenly unlike traditional vehicles having effect of not destroying ground and not activating pressure mines . They also cannot get stuck in mud or many times of tanks traps.
as far as aiming a tank turret like in a video game could work IRL an idea would be for the driver to wear a helmet similar to fighter jet pilots so all they would have to do is look and the turret will automatically aim at whatever the driver is looking at
Tank turrets are a lot bigger than the gun on an Apache, so there'd be a lot of lag, but once someone got the hang of it I could see it working.
Heck, back when I used to play Mechwarrior 2 in the '90s, you coudl get a head tracker to free up your mouse hand. But rather than have the tank turret slaved to the gunner, more likely (and I believe it works this way) the commander will select and highlight targets in a shared HUD, and the gunner will then lay the gun and engage them. Then again, that might be the way to go- allow the gunner to use a head tracker to control the turret and gun elevation. Once locked on target, then the FCS will take over.
I’m going to reiterate a point I made on the last video: river crossings. Tracked tanks are vulnerable, hover tanks are less so. And helicopters are much more susceptible to rockets than tanks are, which are designed to be able to take a hit. Helicopters don’t have the incredible pointed firepower that tanks have, either. Sure, a 30 mm gun and 8 hellfire missiles are is a lot, but doesn’t compare to the 120 mm main gun of a tank, with well more than just 8 rounds. Hover tanks can still work
Funnily enough, Battletech does the organic additions really well. Mechs and vehicles in the setting often get upgrades, service life extension packages and updated electronics/armour/weapons to allow for minimal plant retooling. It almost goes the other way, with mechs like the Thunderbolt or Wasp being in service for literal centuries with iterative upgrades.
There's actually a anthology series called "Legacy" that follows a singular Grasshopper throughout centuries of service.
From its first test drive out of the assembly line to a fight against The Word of Blake. Pretty much every major faction and some mercenary units has it at some point.
As long as the mech isn't cored and you have some sort of manufacturing base to provide parts, you can make the things last.
@@MapleLeaf2501 Dont forget low tech refits! Your world doesnt make fusion reactors? ICE engine it is. No advanced ammo or access to meaningful amounts of modern weapons? No problem, there is always cheaper alternative.
I liked how the Renegade Legion Handled Hover Tanks. They were Grav Tanks that would keep accelerating as they moved. As an added bonus, their anti gravity drive created a shield around the Tank, and allowed them to deploy from orbit to the planets surface, without needing a drop ship.
Renegade Legion was create by the same company that created Battletech, but sadly didn't take off in the same way.
Huh. I'd forgotten that Renegade Legion was a FASA product. I loved the way they used templates for armour damage as an excellent way of differentiating the various weapon types, and overall made the question of which weapon to use vastly more interesting. That and their idea of nigh-invulnerable shields that have to have a flicker rate were really interesting and unique additions to gaming.
As you say, it's a real shame it wasn't as successful, but it has such a rich and unusual world. And it's not (quite) dead still. It seems there was an anthology of stories set in the Renegade Legion universe as recently as 2021. (It was called 'Voices of Varuna' if anyone wants to look it up.)
7:28 Bolos are known for this, eventually they even just decide to make the entire underside to be nothing but a number of track.
In 40K, the Imperial "tanks" were tractors and utility vehicles with weaponized variants. If I remember correctly, only the Baneblade's STC was for an actual tank and even then what the Imperium produces is basically a primitive knock-off inspired by it.
For tractor leman Russ is quite advanced
The tanks of Legend of the Galactic Heroes, though rarely seen, I feel offer a pretty realistic approach to how tanks would look and function in that setting.
Hell I've never seen a tank so meticulously explained to the audience as thr panzers in that one, it's also just as vital to the plot of its ova as Bonaparte from dominion tank police. Hell it has both a tea kettle and a stove, British tankers must've been salivating when they saw that.
The quad-pod track is a requirement for tracked vehicles of a certain weight and size range. From my understanding, after a certain point in the width-to-length ratio, tracks become useless because they're so long and thin that just _turning_ would snap them.
Not necessarily so much snap them, as simply walk them off the drive sprocket and idler...
However, in order for a multi-track pod system to solve that issue, the pods themselfs need to turn and then the tank will not be able to neutral steer.
The problem can be aleviated by making the tank wider to maintain the length to beam ratio, but that will bring problems of its own.
Over all it's probably best not to feature-creep and mission-creep the tanks too much, so that they can be kept relatively small.
While that's true, it's worth noting that the length to width ratio issues go beyond that. The same torque being applied to the tracks when you try to turn is also being applied to the hull. The british Independent was a terrible tank for numerous reasons but one of the most damming was that it would peel itself apart when it tried to turn. Quad tracks wouldn't do anything to fix this, so generally, you just can't make your tank too long relative to its width or it won't work.
@@Bird_Dog00 that depends on what is considered "minimum" in a setting. For example, a setting where you need thick belts of armor means you'll need to use the track pods anyway.
@@TheTrueAdept How do you mean that?
What does the required armour level have to do with the type of running gear?
@@Bird_Dog00 where your main gun flings ammo so fast that it explodes with around 11 times its mass in tnt...
5:56 Reminds me of that one moment in Valkyria Chronicles when Welkin literally drives his tank underwater temporarily and crosses to the other side and outflanks the enemy, taking the enemy by surprise. I had never known that tanks could submerge like that.
Do you think you could do a video about the Umbaran vehicles from Star Wars: Clone Wars?
The Umbaran Hover Tank had great range but when the clones got in close to the flanks and circled behind it, it was vulnerable. Powerful at long ranges until the enemy gets in close.
The Umbaran Crawler Tank or aka the Impeding Assault Tank which was the giant centipede looking tank?
There's also the Umbaran MHC (Mobile Heavy Cannon) which had legs like a spider and the giant cannon on the top?
Love Spacedock's videos. I was wondering if you would talk about the advantages/weaknesses of tanks that have legs? Or maybe there's already a video where we go into a discussion regarding bipedal or walkers from other series?
There are a few tanks that can submerge, the Soviets had kits for some of their tanks that would let the cross rivers that way.
The Germans in WW2 worked on tanks that would use a snorkel to drive the English channel. The Mause was too heavy for most if any bridges so the plan was to have one tank hook up power cables to the other and have it drive under water first then supply power to the other (the Mause used generators to produce electricity to a electric motor in order to move).
There may be other but they escape me for now.
Fun fact: that was actually a massive concern of coalition forces in Iraq during the Gulf War as they besieged Baghdad. Because the only amphibious armored vehicle the US had was the AAVs, armed only with grenade launchers and machine guns. They also had the LAV-25, with a 25mm autocannon, but these were moreso recon vehicles. Meanwhile, the Iraqis' Soviet-made armored vehicles were all amphibious
The primary concern was the Iraqis using their amphibious advantage to ambush coalition forces and supply lines as they crossed the Euphrates and Tigris
Remember folks no matter how spaced out your tank is; always wear your tanker boots and have a cooler full of munchies!
tanks have to have some serious firepower, in combination with good armor/speed, and durability.
or you could just "Break out the Bolos!"
remember: any tank can be called a Rhino tank, so long as it has rhinoceros-like prongs on the front of it.
RAMMING SPEED!
Ancient sea war was basically that until the Romans screwed it up...
We actually have the tech to build Bolos right now- with the exception of the Hellbore. Wait- actually, we could do a laser-initiated deuterium fusion pulse in a cylindrical containment open on one end. Focusing the pulse would be the tough part- otherwise it's just a fusion flamethrower.
@@ostlandr "Fusion flamethrower," you say?
i like the sound of that.
The many things that I consider:
- Treaded vehicles will become more and more obsolete in the future, although not completely removed.
- One thing that I use in my stories are treaded vehicles that can travel underwater or on the water.
- Armor, while still effective, becomes more and more useless as better weaponry is introduced.
- However, vehicles become faster. It's about reaching the target as fast as possible while protecting the troops in the process.
- In space, different planets mean different weights. In low gravity, you can have enormous vehicles. Space doesn't care.
- And as Spacedock even suggested. Use your technology. Tanks can be utterly amazing in the future due to what technology they utilize.
Also consider electronics. Cloaks, jammers, decoys, drones, scanners, interceptor systems, etc. A fast tank that you can basically only hit with splash because it is so hard to target, means that thin armour is doing work. Even if it is only 1-2 tanks per unit that are dedicated countermeasure tanks that have no guns of their own.
Enemy get s ping, tanks incoming, no lock available, no visual confirmation other than dust, so, saturate the area of the pings with explosives/mines, countermeasures detected, half our shots landed outside the grid threatening our own positions and micro- Missiles incoming to our radar.
A few friendlies take near hits and splash, but the formation makes it to the firing position and lets loose drones/infantry/explosives, then vanishes before the enemy can saturate the area once more.
I'm not sure that tracks. Why would treads become obsolete? And weapons and armor keep leapfrogging. New weapons are developed, new defenses are then developed to counter them, etc. etc..
Amphibic vehicles tend to just be inferior versions of both boats and whatever else they are, too. Underwater travel is something they can already do, the only improvements there would be how deep and how long they can do so.
Lower gravity doesn't change that bigger tank = bigger target.
And that last "point" isn't really a point. Yes, technology will continue developing. But that's not unique to tanks and we don't know how it will develop in the far future. It could make tanks better, or it could render them obsolete.
@@Llortnerof It depends. In actuality, I still use treaded vehicles in my stories, just not as much. As for underwater vehicles, there are extenuating circumstances involved where the race that's using them can breathe underwater too. With planets that are mostly water, they make sure that their vehicles can storm beachheads. Yes, they have submersibles and vehicles that travel on the surface of the water, too.
Actually, the argument you made about bigger vehicles being bigger targets are the same arguments in my stories as well, but they can also carry more weapons and better powerplants to use them depending on the size of the race that's using it.
When it comes to hoover tanks, in my universe I'm writing you have both small hoover tanks that are fast and light, hit and run, squadron vehicles crewed by one or two people and heavy large tanks with traditional tracks and are the heavy hitters and even troop transport.
So the hoover tanks are more light fast moving support and scout vehicles. While still having the more traditional heavy tanks and large troop transport vehicles.
With wheeled tanks the crew can sometimes repair them or they can be pulled/dragged back for more repair by another tank, but with hover tanks depending on the complexity of the engines would the crew be able to repair them in the field and any 'tow vehicle' would probably have to be several times as large to lift the tank back drawing fire and if you used other tanks 3 or 4 would probably have to work together to handle the weight
Sci-fi tanks shouldn't be slow. Look at the speed difference between the WWI landships and the tanks of today. IMO the blazing-fast hovertanks in Battlezone 98 is the most realistic portrayal
And once upgraded to twin SP Stabbers and a decent mortar, the basic tanks there are very capable vehicles :)
Like the (lore) Halo Scorpion, which has a top speed of ~65km/hr. Obviously in game play it is much slower. Just like how the on board dumb AI (which should be doing things like; identifying threats and highlighting them on your HUD, prioritizing/targeting and tracking said threats, communicating with nearby friendly forces about said threats, and assisting with driving) is effectively absent.
There are human factors limits to the speed of tanks. You can go only so fast before off-road bumps injure the occupants. You start to be unable to stop before you hit sudden drops.
AYYY Hammers Slammers mentioned, my favorite tanks in fiction are probably the Bolo tanks from Keith Laumer. I am DESPERATE for coverage of them from a channel like this and see it as one of the most underrated sci-fi settings ever. Although maybe they ARE more land battleship than tank, theres still plenty to talk about in the mark 25 and below. The mark 1 was an abrams with a scanner, the mark 3 was a slow moving pyramid shaped thing that could take a nuke. Then the mark 34 is a football stadium on wheels that could defend an entire planet.
And they are programmed to have a conscience, a sense of loyalty, and a sense of personal and even unit honor.
@@ostlandr The fact the bolo are often more human than their human counterparts is such an underrated idea. They are willing to hold to traditions they barely understand for our sake.
for the amphibious hover vehicle, i think that would only come into play if there was a situation where you contently had to go back and forward to and from land. since the transition would be easier then a traditonal vehicle which would physically get out of the water, but i admitt thats about the only benefit
in reality i would have to say that the only real hover vehicles that would be used would be various recon vehicles, since the speed increase would counteract most of the cons, since its just a recon vehicle
Some sort of Island hopping like in WWII, maybe?
I think that's a bit more important than some people would think though. Even in the modern world, rivers are significant barriers to army movements, and defensive lines often form around them as we've seen in Ukraine recently. If it doesn't stop your advance, it will for sure slow it down while you get out the pontoon bridge or convert your tanks for amphibious operation. You could send helicopters, but those tend to be fragile and run out of fuel quickly. So a fast assault hover tank designed to keep the enemy in retreat while your heavier stuff stops to build a bridge or drive along the bottom could be useful.
On a colony world with little road infrastructure hover tanks would have the advantage if being able to use many rivers as natural roads. Rivers tend to be wide enough for a tank and relatively flat along long sections, which means a hovertank transforms a natural barrier into a natural superhighway.
While fully flying vehicles may be even better, if their that common and versatile why bother with non flying vehicles at all?
The Mars assault tank from Battletech is a good example of side-by-side quad treads, though the actual practicality of the overall tank itself could certainly be debated. In-universe, it's terrifying, as it is utterly laden with Clan-tech weapons and equipment (which means more stuff without increasing mass). Out of universe, it's absurdly over-armed, to the point the Imperium of Man might do a double-take.
Now *that* is a heavily armed tank!
It's not just water, but mud, bogs, ice, slush, and permafrost that hovertanks can traverse. There are many places current tanks can't go (even in the current war in eastern europe there are seasons where tanks can't be used). Some of this was mentioned in the lore of the old "Renegade Legion" game that had grav tanks as separate from aerospace forces.
A good place to look to demonstrate the flaws with scifi tank movement parts or weapons is the wonderful world of crossout where everything about a vehicle made can fall off
And they have a wide variety of "wheels"
From actuall wheels of varying size
To tank tracks
To walker legs some of which incorporate wheels
And even hover you can see how certain parts present vulnerability issues
Even screws and helicopter rotors
Hover tanks are fast but fragile and often difficult to control bug provide strafing
Legs also provide strafing and are more protected at a cost of a limited top speed
Screws are the best of both worlds with tracks being a decent alternative and wheels reserved for speedy builds with no hovers
I think a big deciding factor for size would be simply a matter of having to carry more things and possibility those things being larger by nature. A good example is those active defense systems you mentioned, you can only make that stuff so small and if you keep piling more things into a tank at some point its just going make more sense/be easier to increase the tanks size. Then their is the issue on if the tech needed to make a tank competitive are just...bulky in their own right. If a tank needs a fusion reactor to be competitive then your tank is going to be at least big enough to fit that reactor. If modern composite armor is bulky you just have to deal with it. So on so forth. Of course this brings up an issue of tech parity, in that all factions in the setting might not have the same quality of tech, which could dramatically effect the nature of said tanks. It might not be a good idea to use lasers as your MBTs main gun...but your enemy has way better ballistics than you do and your have quite good lasers so...make do with what you have rather than what is hypothetically optimal.
I think tank formations with dedicated role vehicles would be more common. ECM, Targetting, AA, Anti-spaceship, support (recharging, ammo) and command, communications (Since you probably can't rely on satellite systems and need a local web). I imagine a column of identical looking tanks, but in battle one opens the pod to reveal a jammer array, one opens a mast for comms, one is a giant AA array, a few are ballistic guns, laser guns, Scanners/drones, and a few the pod is actually living quarters for crew rotation and medical or supplies.
You have no logistics trucks, only armoured units so no one can target ONLY your logistics (Since the idea of battle lines is probably fuzzy) and survivability goes up.
@@littlekong7685 maybe, the big issue with specialized units is that it means more units you have to bring with you. Cause in effect every fighter that isn't limited to a single planet is a naval invasion. Which means supply lines and limitations.
Man Armoured core 6 doesnt have many but those it has are really cool! You‘ve shown a great one but by favourite is the cataphract with its double quad leg? tracks. It also flys occasionally and has like 4 gatling guns 😅
Though you aren't using tanks in it, Armored Core (at least 6 which is the only one I've been able to pass the first level of) is really good with the FCS. It actually tracks the target allowing the pilot to focus on other things. It's doing what modern FCS does but with being able to swap it out for a different model as needed. Now if that could be applied to games with tanks that would be great.
7:21 IIRC, Most Bolos from the series of the same name feature side-by-side double tracks.
Still love Hammer's Slammers, Bolo series, and Steve Jackson Games' Ogre/G.E.V. since they all heavily influenced my love for future/cyber tanks in my youth. They made me what I am today! 😉
Here's something that could play well from a story and/or gameplay perspective: A hovertank's anti-gravity system *does* allow it to fly, but loses efficiency rapidly when away from a supporting surface. Thus, it stays close to the ground much of the time rather than acting as a helicopter because flying either burns through fuel much more quickly or drastically reduces the vehicle's capabilities in one or more ways because power is having to be diverted from other systems to run the hover system.
So, ground effect vehicles? They basically work that way, the higher you are - the worse is effectiveness of ground effect, to the point where you dont rely on it at all and fly like a plane due to accumulated speed.
I assumed this is how hover tech works in all sci fi, otherwise the tanks would by flying too. I dont know why video creator never realized this obvious explanation. Like of course the tanks can't fly then they wouldn't be tanks thematically anyway
Another comment mentions the real life need to fit tanks on trains for transport (and, I'd imagine the nature of transport infrastructure in general) is a big limiting factor on the practical size of a tank. It is why the T-28 Super Heavy you mentioned in this video had those detachable tracks in the first place. If fitting the T-28 on a train wasn't a concern it no doubt would've just had wider tracks in the first place, less complexity and all that jazz. Needing to fit within the bounds of standardized transports I think is something often overlooked in sci-fi tank design. Ironically, I think its actually more commonly approached with mechs and robots folding up or tucking in their limbs for transport and such, though of course in those cases the Rule of Cool was no doubt a leading factor.
Army officer, and I love these discussions.
Hover tanks over water, yes weight and power supply, but what if enemy has proliferation of ADA (anti air) systems making air attack unviable?
Over pressure system is what protects the crew from CBRN
The Merkava has a rear compart originally designed for a squad, but really used for crew rest, extra ammo storage, or evac
Love these series! Keep it up
Well throughout history anti air systems also happen to be very effective for anti-surface. The fact the projectiles/missiles need to travel fast enough to catch a fast-moving target makes them inherently good kinetic penetrators. Modern SAMs already travel close to hypersonic speeds and in a sci-fi setting there will be an abundance of extremely fast missiles and rail guns capable of instantly hitting a hypersonic missile from several kilometers away. Lasers that could track fast-moving aircraft at long range surely has the ability to accurately target a tank's weak spots at short range. If the enemy has such effective layered anti air systems that are immune to air attacks, they almost definitely have extremely capable anti-tank capabilities.
The back of the Merkava wasn’t originally meant for carrying a squad, it was to decrease the time it took to restock the tank’s munitions. The entire cavity on the back is for extra ammo storage. Deploying a squad from the tank isn’t even part of operation procedures; it’s seen more use as an armored ambulance than a troop transport
Thing is working from the assumption that hover tech can be used for aircraft it wouldn't really make a difference. The hover tanks themselves would be just as vulnerable to it. Or the aircraft be just as capable because you can fit lots of armour on them.
@@SkyWKingA targeting system designed for use against aircraft could struggle to acquire such a low target, particularly if it’s surrounded by spray. And a tank at short range is better equipped to shoot back than a plane at long range.
AA weapons could be used to engage armored vehicles, but it certainly wouldn't be optimal.
@@justinthompson6364 The most crude experimental laser weapon today could hit a spot the size of an RPG warhead from a kilometer away. And an aircraft could also deploy countermeasures to avoid a laser weapon no worse than a tank. In most cases, simply the rail guns used as CIWS against hypersonic missiles could make short work of any armored vehicle. My point is an enemy with an effective layered anti-air system has lots and lots of tools to play with when it comes to killing tanks even if the commander was too incompetent to deploy any specialized anti-tank weapon at all.
This makes me think a bit of the Striders from Tokyo Necro. They are tanks with this really weird track configuration. Four tracks that are separately articulated similar to the Scorpion from Halo, but are rotated in such a way that only a small part ever touches the ground. Additionally, those tracks can move in such a way that the tank can be raise or lowered for greater or lesser ground clearance. And this on top of the fact that they can use those tracks to turn into walkers for really troublesome terrain.
In universe they are known for their speed and agility and for being an all around reliable workhorse.
You know, it would be really nice if you'd include a list with all the various media you've used footage from in the description.
I know that some of it came from Mobile Suit Gundam: MS IGLOO
Look in the top left corner to see the footage sources.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@MercenaryPenand 8th ms team.
An example of hover tanks being dangerous is from a warhammer novel, a traitor marine jumps under one to place an AT bomb and promptly gets crushed by the force of the antigravity engines
I think you are looking at hover tanks as frontline battle units that work with other types of vehicles and inft. That would be a poor use of their capabilities. The BEST thing about a hover tank is it's speed. It's a breakthrough unit. Heavy tanks (and other units) break the enemy line and open a hole. The hover tanks exploit this hole, get into the enemies rear areas and cause a ton of problems. Basically a hover tank has the same purpose as cavalry up until World War I. sm
The main problem is not how hovertanks is being use, is if it can do something better than what other vehicles can do.
If it's speed the hovertank's main advantage, than how will it be better than the speeds of aircraft?
@@redrevise4668 An active air defense system is going to keep aircraft away. Just a crew with a MANPAD can do the job. Aircraft also have a limited time on station nor can they take and hold territory. A a hover tank will be there long after the aircraft are gone and can destroy enemy forces over a much larger area over time. sm
@@mattwoodard2535 Here the thing though; aircraft can also benefit from the hover technology from the hovertank, meaning they'll likely having similar loitering time as the hovertank.
And since aircraft have less armor, that less weight meaning they can go for faster speeds, less fuel consumption or add more armor, weapons and ammo.
Also, they can fly low like hovertanks. If they're still vulnerable to MANPADs, that would mean hovertanks are too vulnerable to MANPADs and other anti-air defense.
We can have both planes and fast hovertanks why are you trying to merge too distinct fun things into 1? It's more fun this way and the hover tech could be limited by a ground effect style effect
A lot of this is covered nicely in David Drake's "Hammer's Slammers" and Keith Laumer's "Bolo" books. Love me some scifi tonks
looking at Supreme commander Aeon actually use hover tanks that are useful. you can do much more Indepth flanking with them over bodies of water against the other factions tracked tanks.
and instead of using helicopters or flying aircraft as you may not have the air suporaity to do so. another up side to aeons hover tanks is that they can move sides ways wels keeping the front amor facing the enemy.
That's one of the main things I would think.
Strafing (or at least what gamers would call strafing)
@@kamikeserpentail3778 Yeah that's the word I was looking for lol, having a tank with very strong front amor that can Straif is very powful basically means you don't need a turret and can't get flanked ( easily )
The Frontline Series had a lot of thought into logistics. A single Wasp or Dragonfly can only fit a single APC, and that was compared with against fourty souls, or four mechs, so generally, there wasn't any point to bringing armour.
Here's an interesting hover tank idea: hover tanks could have elevated levels of evasive mobility than traditional tracked tanks, as they could in theory straif side to side with relative ease.
Additionally, there also lies a potential interesting use for the hover artillery. In a universe which either doesn't have missiles, or where some sort of laser or plasma morter becomes more popular for some reason, the ability for a hover tank to potentially reverse it's engines to suck itself to the earth might be highly useful for maintaining accuracy with a giant barrel and huge recoil, whilst still providing the ability for the artillery piece to easily relocate and fire again. This could potentially give the tank a huge boost in the outermost layer of the survivability onion.
Plus this modulation might be useful to maintain stable and consistent functionality across battlefields with varying gravities. Including a zero G or close to zero G environment.
2 more arguments for hovertanks:
1. If local tech is good enough, then hovertanks are more reliable than classic chassis: no moving parts in exterior are always better for reliability. Hovertanks by default can be armored better and have less vulnerabilities.
2. Their mobility can be helicopter, or even shuttle-level in extreme cases: look mass effect 2 for latter, it could go sub-orbit in low-gravity condition. I believe they still will be tanks, and not aerial vehicles, if they main area of action is near ground due to different reasons: critical engine mode for higher altitude, or main weapon system specs. For example, if it is some kind of plasma weapon, that takes mass for plasma from the water, or some replicators for kinetic rounds right from the soil - it will be excellent spec-ops tanks, and very good ones exactly because of the 'hover' part.
Bolo, Hammers Slammers, and Ogre has some of the best sci fi tanks
In the Bolo universe, Bolos (battleship sized tanks who's afterthought weapon systems included things like nuclear tipped cruise missiles) would often have quad or more tracks that run the full length of the vehicle for both spreading their enormous weight (32+K tons in the largest ones) but also redundancy should one or more tracks come off. Final redundancy provided by all their road wheels being powered and some models being able to hover for short distances to for instance cross canyons and rivers.
For Tanks, read about the "Renegade Legion" Grav Tanks.
There are two levels of tanks.
- close to our technology, so low scifi (The Expanse, Battletech)
- advanced technology, so high scifi (Perry Rhodan, Star Wars, Star Trek)
Where to draw the line between low and high scifi? The manipulation of gravity and method of ftl.
Renegade Legion is funnily in the middle ground I would say.
So, not quite touching the ground but not floating too high up to be considered flying.
So maybe an array of ionic thrusters/foils under a carriage equipped with miniguns or recoilless guns that zooms swiftly across the battlefield.
Oh, am I describing the Robot Tank from Red Alert 2?
Since you mentioned him, you should reach out the Nicholas Moran and invite him to a colab.
Would be interesting to get his take on the future of tanks, especialy from the point of view of the so called "soft stats" like ergonomics or "Führbarkeit" as it's called in german (refering to the overall ease of operating the tank for the crew in a combat situation) and the difference between the theoretical doctrine of tank operation and the gritty day-to-day reality.
A possible topic might also be the use of tanks outside of large-scale combat in a more low-intensity-conflict and counter-insurgency role. A role for the tank that would be highly relevant in the scenario of a planetary invasion, as once you controll the high orbit, the enemy on the ground would find it difficult to amass large troop formations for a big battle without just getting nuked from orbit. So guerailla tactics will be basically all the defenders will have left.
Works for me...
Personaly I think, that the single most important thing for any futuristic tank can be found today, as all major tank designers are slowly moving towards the Modularity of their desing. Each planet will have its own set of unique features and difficulties for any army to deal with, let alone different opponents and their warfare style/weapons use, etc. Even today, we dont have single tank, that is good for every battlefield here on Earth, hence the variations and for any sci-fi army it will only get worse. Thus making tank platform, that is very modular and easily retrofitable/upgradable from the begining in order to face different types of battlefields and enemies at the same time, with diffent needs will be the future of tank desing.
There was a scifi story that had AI assisted landships with a human officer. And they had dual tracks on each side running the length of the vehicle.
I feel like sci-fi tanks are done fairly well in Star Wars in that mostly all their tanks use repulsor tech which has repulsor generators using knots of spacetime in order to hover about. And they manage to keep the tank sizes at least close to real world vehicles most of the time with the exception of things like the HAVw A6.
But then you still have the odd wheeled or tracked design here and there used by major powers as well as walkers so they have the option to use those instead of a repulsor vehicle in case the planetary conditions mess with one or the other or the enemy has base shields, etc.
And if you want something along the lines of quad tracks you might check out the cataphract from Armored Core 6.
First off, thanks for doing a follow up video! It's a cool way to interact with your followers.
That said, not sure "helicopters" is the right counter to hover tanks. The idea of a hover tank is that although it's restricted to just above ground level, it can still carry much of the armour and weaponry of a regular tank and still tackle otherwise untraversable terrain. Helicopters and light aircraft meanwhile can rarely "tank" incoming fire or hold ground, even in sci-fi settings.
Yeah, some times spacedocks “counter arguments” feel completely nonsensical.
One tank design that I like that include quadtracks and twin main cannons is the D-50C Loto from Gundam Unicorn. True, it's a transformable mech. But compared to Mobile Suits the Loto operate quite realistically with a dedicated driver, commander, and communication officer unlike the single pilot Mobile Suits. And it also can carry troops, up to 8 of them. Also, they are used realistically as a IFVs. Drop the troops and able to lay down fire support
And than full frontal chewed them up
Well, there's always the personal tank route such as Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01, or Armored Trooper VOTOMS. but for me it's cute Bonaparte created by Leona in Dominion Tank Police.
Okay now do one on exoplanetary navies, as in seaborne (or other fluidborne) ships on other planets.
If earth like planets is what we seek out, then there will be rivers seas and oceans.
Also there could be something like "airships" on gas giants which act more like a large ocean.
One thing I find myself wondering is why spherical wheels never show up in sci-fi tanks.
They grant many of the benefits of a hovertank, while not suffering any of the down-sides.
And you can essentially cover the underside of the tank with them, so ground pressure isn't necessarily an issue either.
Give it Halo-style pods on the sides, and you even sidestep potential maintenance/repair issues, on top of increasing its obstacle-climbing capabilities..
Something I've thought about, concerning the concept of hovertank and anti-gravity tech. In a setting with omnipresent anti-g vehicles, like Star Trek, would combat-capable, heavily-armored shuttlecraft have replaced tanks entirely? Is there any meaningful distinction to be made between a combat aircraft and a flying tank?
7:25 I’m glad Armored Core finally appeared in a Spacedock video (even if only a single image).
Thanks. Great to see a smidgen of Battlezone 1 there.
Active Protection Systems are prolifrating on modern tanks. For those that do not know what they are its a projectile launching device that is slaved to a small millimeter band radar, once it detects incoming is fires a projectile intercepting the incoming before it hits the tank. For a sci fi tank i can see this idea taken further in the form of a shield generator
I think the vehicle mounted augur systems in 40k are a nice nod to the last point about threat detection seemingly being sort of in the same realm as the millimeter wave radar some of the most modern tanks are starting to boast for target acquisition and then to take a step forward you have the superior interfacing system of the manifold in titans to further better the crew's ability to process the information of their machine.
More settings should definitely do that as the sheer suspense from having a crew that knows they might be attacked at any moments being glued tot he instrumentation hoping to either not see anything or at least see it before it sees them is a great way to build pressure. Something Battlestar galactica for example did so well in an even larger scale with the dradis. Why not shrink it to tank levels as well as a story building element.
True, its often forgotten that 40k tech is pretty damn advanced.
The thing I've always found appealing about hover tanks is in regards to stealth. Normal tanks leave tracks behind, revealing their presence in the area and identifying where they've come from and where they've gone. The amount of tracks can give away how many tanks there are, or how many times they've driven over the path. Fresh tracks in an explored or patrolled area, or the tracks of a recon tank can completely ruin the element for a follow-up surprise attack. A tank can't even get into a secret sniping position without leaving behind tracks that can easily lead enemies to where it's hiding.
Defensively, the presence of tank patrols also makes it far more difficult for a hidden/stealthed base to keep itself hidden.
On top of this, conventional tanks create potentially enormous dust and sandclouds while moving around, especially when in larger numbers, and depending on the tech this isn't an issue at all for hover tanks.
7:42 The T95 :You can't find me because I'm so small to get spotted.
The whole manual aiming / slow moving projectiles thing obviously makes sense for sci-fi gameplay.
But the terrifying nature of futuristic FCS and weaponry isn't really shown often enough in sci-fi shows, only really seems to happen in novels.
When I think of SciFi tanks, my first thought was Warpath from Transformers, followed by Blitzwing.
7:17
Tracks !
And tractor inspired mobility
😎
If you haven't already, consider doing a video on spacecraft that can make a water landing and float. The Bebop from Cowboy Bebop being a prime example.
If your force is on a planet hostile to life or to your form of life then you can create compartmentalized inflatable habitats that can include vehicle storage, so living in the vehicle itself wouldn't be necessary. However, expect tanks to be automatic either via remote control or AI.
Just call the T-28/95 the Doom Turtle like they do in World of Tanks. Saves time.
Honestly, when it comes to tanks in a Sci-fi setting, I think Battletech handles it best. Particularly the part where in a universe where big stompy robots exist, tanks are still far more common and just as useful. Never leave home for a game without a lance of Demolishers or Shrecks.
Tanks are more common in Rifts, too; as long as you have the supplement that mentions that. They are far easier and cheaper to produce than giant robots.
In my Sovereign Species series (unpublished), I have a tank called the Thuntr, it's a tri-barrel tank, and is autoloader but can be manually loaded if need be, and each of the barrels can fire in different direction independently of eachother. One of the tricks up this Main Battle Tank has is that at the end of each of its barrels are projectors that produce a deflection field that disrupts all projectiles that are going to hit it to miss elsewhere, and the three barrels of the Thuntr allow it to project this protective field across its entire radius. Of course this field while very formidable, doesn't make it invulnerable, and while active, the Thuntr's accuracy with all of its weapons is severely reduced. Another trick it can do is to rotate its three cannons equidistant from eachother and fire on a singular target, flipping the repulsory barrier off for the split second the gun it's attached to fires in, and in so doing, deliver triple the fire rate, which is very useful, especially when enemy warships decide to take a dip in the atmosphere to provide air support, it also has very good anti-air capabilities, and overall is designed to control large swaths of open space by erasing hundreds upon hundreds of infantry at a time.
Fun stuff, I'm not entirely sure what to do with the Arek light tank, yet.
And I DO name my tanks! Appearances include so far...
Fatty Flogging Paste, Angry Macroplastic, Hair Trigger Anus, and more!
I'm not going to lie, I kind of cringed a bit reading your description, and here's why:
Your defensive mechanism just seems like a step backwards from currently existing measures for tanks. Modern MBTs already feature things like active protection systems, kinetic defenses, and reactive armor to disrupt incoming rounds. This isn't foolproof of course, especially with all the examples from Ukraine (though one could certainly argue against the quality of the vehicles being deployed...), but all those can already work in tandem to protect the tank, WITHOUT sacrificing its offensive capability. There will always be an arms race between defensive measures and ways to defeat armored vehicles, but your solution just seems worse than what already exists.
I don't think your tank actually has good anti-air capabilities, because enemy warships would never actually get that close to engage. The air threats to your tank will be fast moving, high altitude craft that can lock and fire AGMs without the tank even knowing its there, and your tank will NEVER hit them, regardless of how much firepower it has. That, or much more likely, it will be attacked by other armored vehicles, infantry, or most deadly of all, artillery.
Lastly, tanks ALREADY control large swaths of open space against infantry, by virtue of being tanks. I have no idea what your tank is actually firing, but it's almost certainly overkill because simply by being a tank you control open space on a ground battlefield (that, and having artillery).
@@whydidimakethis111
The whole point of this system is literally to shrug incoming fire off to the side. The whole point of the Thunt is to be able to endure the overwhelming amount of firepower the enemy KNOW to throw at it, like the aforementioned artillery. It works like the Covenant's warship shields from Halo: essentially a Sci-fi forcefield that can be flipped off to fire at any time, and since there's three of them, only one needs to be flipped off for that instant in order to shoot.
As for its Anti-air: lazers. It has two literal lazers like the ones Israel is using in their air defense systems. And I mean ACTUAL invisible to the naked eye lazers and not what the people of Star Wars shoot eachother with.
On warships: the warships are going to be thousands of feet in the air, they won't be very close, and while the Thuntr can take potshots at the ship, these actions are surgical in nature, intended to snipe the Aldokk ship's engines, or weapons, and after it unloads those three shots, get the Hell out of dodge. The Arek do have dedicated ground to orbit defenses that are extremely mobile and much more powerful.
Thank you for the feedback. I assure you, it's *not* an OP Mary Sue vehicle.
In star trek there was one game with ground tank combat. Tanks would be mostly useless in the Star Trek universe if you have control of space around the planets you can just blast the opposition from sky and space.
Yeah, i think hover tanks generally occupy a role more similar to attack helecopters than actual armored vehicles. I will also say that one setting that does (sort of) justify the tanks with more than one main gun is Battletech. If i remember right, there are several tank models which have 2 or more of the same weapon (autocannons or particle beams) because the weapons themselves were more or less standardized pieces. So they couldn't put a bigger gun on the tank, because there wasn't a bigger gun.
I really like the tank designs of the UMC or whatever from Dropzone Commander.
Small, very low profile, and the weapons are actually mounted on arms that are attached to the tanks on a swivel. They can adjust the height of the gun by multiple stories, and even stick it around the sides of a piece of cover like the corner of a building.
I think the weapons they use on their tanks are mostly energy, so they don't need to feed shells or sabots through the multiple segments of the arms and all the joints. I think I remember them having a dual minigun weapon too, but bullet sized ammunition is much easier to feed.
I figure hovertanks would be designed similar to mechs. Focusing more on speed and maneuverability than armor or firepower. Like in Battlezone, or even the hover legs in Armored Core. Instead of just having whatever engine keeps them floating as their only propulsion, they should also have powerful thrusters of some sort. This would let them change direction horizontally quickly, and could even allow for limited flight.
Like that, they could function as a sort of hybrid of a gunship, and a ground vehicle. More armor and firepower than a dedicated aircraft, but also more agility than a dedicated ground vehicle. Plus, if it was designed right, it could do the same thing a tank does when it is immobilized, and act as a turret.
The most ridiculous ‘tank’ for me is the Capitol Imperialis of 40k - essentially a massive, mobile command bunker
The Leviathan was and always will be the most ridiculous tank I’ve seen in 40k. They’re not built by humans yet they’re used as the mobile battle fortress of regimental command.
The gun is so big the shells it shoots are bigger than tanks.
5:08 The crew might have to wear space suits also. Meaning that internal space has to be inflated to allocate for this. kinda like how space marine tanks have to fit giant genetically altered supersoldiers inside of power armor.
I’m honestly surprised the Armored Core 6 cataphract was never mentioned considering it is a ROCKET BOOSTED TANK
With modern tech, I feel like we could see a shift from proper tanks to more disposable "heavy drones". Especially if we get to a point where more armor just doesn't help.
Imagine a fleet of AI managed, armoured golf carts armed with a minigun and a small cannon with a couple of tank calibre rounds. Doesn't matter if you can cook one with an RPG or main cannon from a more traditional tank, the others can take revenge.
Then tanks will use high-caliber miniguns instead of cannon. Lots of low-armored units vs one good armored one is not equal to auto-win.
Hovertanks are extremely useful in marshes and muddy terrain. Particularly if there is tree cover. Additionally their speed makes then highly adept at manoeuvre warfare. Helicopters have trouble here since trees tend to get in the way and WIG aircraft are not manoeuvrable enough to actually avoid crashing . Often the only vehicles capable of traversing this kind of terrain are hovercraft. The US Army in the pacific during WW2 would have sold their soul to get their hands on hovertanks, not only allowing them to quickly take beaches, but also use armour in the mangrove swamps and muddy terrain where normally vehicles simply couldn't go.
Additionally sealing a tank isn't an airtight seal, most modern tanks aren't rated for vacuum, unlike scifi tanks that may have to perform maintenance, extended patrols (lasting days), and more importantly reloading, in a vacuum environment. Having a little more room to move inside such a tank is beneficial in such cases, and vacuum rated tank will likely balloon in size sonely because air recycling systems are bulky as hell
Why seal the tank for vacuum when you can seal the crew in vacuum suits? Depending on the tech, the suit might handle waste issues as well.
Would’ve liked to see spider tanks mentioned, like the Fledress from 86
I remember reading a series of sci-fi books about these self-aware AI tanks called Bolos. Starting with the Mark III, they had two sets of treads, inner and outer, that ran the length of the hull as in normal tank design. There were separate drive trains for both sets as I recall. It was so effective that the massive machines left imprints no deeper than a foot soldier's boot print.
I recommend the novels to anyone who likes sci-fi tanks. The books are usually in anthology format save "Bolo Brigade" which is a stand alone novel.
On the topic of upgrading equipment, Gundam 08th MS Team has some fun examples of the machines being modified, repaired, and even fully rebuilt throughout the series. There's the GM head which used the spare head of a GM instead of the original Gundam head due to a shortage of replacements also showing off the compatability of parts between the similar GM and Gundam lines. Later on Zeon would introduce the United Maintenence Plan that aimed to standardize a number of parts including hands, joints and internals, and cockpits(which aided in allowing pilots to more easily cross train between different units.)
That is a nice bit of realism, MS were supposedly pretty recent innovation so it makes sense that developers will continue tweaking their design and standardized parts will be used as much as possible instead of coming up with a totally incompatible new version.
Speaking of 'land battleships', when do we get THAT list/breakdown? Or did we and I missed it? There better be Bolos!
Bolos make no sense, they would all be vaporised from orbit.
Took me a while to think of this. Hoover Tank Technology can be used to mitigate the sheer mass of a super heavy tank or land ship. Tanks have enormous staying power. The bigger they are, the more they have. But they are limited to how big they can be without hoover technology to offset their mass. Or else they sink into the ground or are too heavy to get over moderate obstacles.
Setting I tinker with uses a kind of stryker or imperial rhino method to its armored vehicles, namely all of the ground vehicles are the exact same armored box subjected to the private schmuckattelli test with aftermarket parts for whatever actual mission they're doing. The tank/tank destroyer is basically the same mod pack with different ammo loaded, the wrecker replacees it with a crane and tools. The transport puts becnch seats where the gun system sat in the other one etc.