Striker Vehicles - Are they really that BIG !!! ??

[Thunderbolt]

I've just come back from Bovington Tank Museum down in Dorset - what a fun day it was!

You kind of know that tanks are big, but until I actually stood next to one, never realised just how insanely enormous some really are.

My favourite in the insanely enormous stakes has to be the British Tortoise, which is stupefyingly big in every way imaginable, yet when compared to the Imperial APC design in Striker Book 3, appears to be positively svelte.

So you Striker gearheads, is the Imperial APC just another design anomaly, or is that really how big a tank has to be to carry just eight troops ???? !!!!

 

[sabredog]

Yup, as armor gets heavier, the weapons need more power, and the thing has to go faster the beastie gets bigger. It needs a bigger powerplant for all that and more fuel.

Its always been like that for AFV's - trying to always find that balance between power:weight (speed and agility), protection (adds weight), and firepower (adds weight and takes up space), and still be able to have it cross a bridge without collapsing the bridge. Or just cross a rough field at more than walking speed without breaking the suspension.

Add some battledress or combat armor equipped troopers and their associated gear and it gets even bigger.

The smallest TL-15 MBT I have is 12m long, 3m high, and the turret is 6m long in itself. And that's all just to carry and use a Fusion Z gun with coaxial 2omm 5-bbl coaxial autocannon to fire collapsing rounds. Oh, and 4 crewmen. It would have gotten even bigger but I had to try to make sure it fit in my existing assault vehicle landers.

The grav IFV's are not much smaller, either, just lighter, narrower, and faster. But with less armor, lighter weapons (if you can call a collapsing round "light"), and carrying 8 troopers in back.

 

[tbeard1999]

So you Striker gearheads, is the Imperial APC just another design anomaly, or is that really how big a tank has to be to carry just eight troops ???? !!!!

I haven't reverse-engineered the TL15 APC, but it IS huge -- twice as long and nearly twice as wide as an M1 Abrams, making it four times the footprint.

This seems awfully huge to carry just 8 men into combat, but I note that grav vehicles are not restricted in size like tracked and wheeled AFVs (which are limited to a size that can traverse typical bridges).

 

[Thunderbolt]

I wondered if it had sloping armour all round, taking so much volume from the vehicle that it ended up being enormous to compensate.

 

[aramis]

Naw... it's actually more of a grav IFV than APC.

The 10ton astrin is an 8 man craft, essentially a star trek shuttle, complete with mid term LS, room for 8 battledress troops , 2 crew, the fusion power plant, and a mount for an anti-vehicular weapon. Troops are gonna be in this thing for up to 20 hours, with no place else to go. Not even "on the deck".

 

[sabredog]

I wondered if it had sloping armour all round, taking so much volume from the vehicle that it ended up being enormous to compensate.

I imagine it has at least moderate sloping, if not radical slope. With the heavier bonded superdense armor you practically have to use radical slope just to keep the weight down to reasonable levels, but then you still have make the thing big to carry all the gear.

Besides, as tbeard1999 pointed out: once you are using grav tech weight and size are not that much of an issue except for getting the thing into a transport ship - which is the biggest challenge IMTU. An MBT that's 40' long and weighs 500 tons with the grav off is still a problem for transport ships when its in the hold unless the grav generators are going to be on all the time.