Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!bellcore!att!cbnews!military
From: gwh%volcano.Berkeley.EDU@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (George William Herbert)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Superheavy tanks
Message-ID: <9880@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 3 Oct 89 13:07:38 GMT
Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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Approved: military@att.att.com



From: gwh%volcano.Berkeley.EDU@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (George William Herbert)
Bill posted a good and long article giving some new insights into
really big tanks.  There are a few things i'd like to add...

First, a correction: Bill stated that today's MBT's are in the
35-45 ton range.  This is not the fact: they are in the 45-55 
ton range, and likely to grow in the immediate future, if mobility 
(bridges giving way beneath) problems can be overcome.
This is mostly due to new cannon developments.

Okay, now on with the new stuff:
All fiction aside, hovertanks are a good idea, with certain limitations.
They do take an enormous amount of power (gas turbines can supply it,
but an armoured hovercraft is a hole that you pour fuel into).  They
have difficulties with broken ground and slopes.  And forests.
	They are best used in flat terrain, or where there is enough flat 
open terrain to give them a mobility advantage in one way or another.

And a final point about Real Big Tanks:
Like all other warfare, there is a point where concentrating firepower
suddenly becomes a very bad idea.  Given a unstopable tank, for instance,
the logical countermeasure is a nuclear bomb.  The fine line to be
walked is designing and using these such that there is no inscentive to 
escalate combat in that manner...


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George William Herbert  UCB Naval Architecture Dpt. (my god, even on schedule!)
maniac@garnet.berkeley.edu  gwh@ocf.berkeley.edu
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