I still vividly remember as a kid playing the Clone Wars game and accidentally driving my TX-130 out over a partially frozen lake on Ren Var and just gliding over the surface. It was like the moment in the Incredibles when Dash realizes he can run on water. I have loved hover tanks ever since.
That was a fun game, but there is a potential problem with hovering over surfaces like water or ice. It hinges on whether or not the vehicle in question hovers by magic or hovers by displacing its mass. If a vehicle hovers by magic or by being pulled from above, there is no problem. However, If the vehicle hovers by pushing off the ground, it's no different than convential tracks pushing off the ground. It will still sink into mud or crack ice. See the book series Hammers Slammers for examples. Interestingly, though, a hover system might distribute its load over a wider area than tracks, meaning it wouldn't sink as easily. But even if it didn't, a hover vehicle presumably does not rely on ground contact to move the way a tracked vehicle does. This would mean that, even if it did sink, it would just float a couple feet down in the mud or water. It might get stuck, or might push the mud or water out of the way like the bow of a ship. Truly though, the advantages to hovering sans magic are zero point turns (if the vehicle is designed right. Notice that the hovering vehicle known as the airplane cannot zero point turn), and decreased risk of a high center. In other words, what's a tank trap? Never heard of one. Obstacle? Shmobstacle.
@@iivin4233 ww2-era tanks did not sink in the mud in which humans - did. Imagine if load was distributed over entire projection of bottom of the tank on the ground. Like if we had "gravity projectors" or something. Such vehicle would be able to go over mud and thin ice which would be very beneficial.
Based reasoning but I disagree. I just prefer the brute industrial vibe of a tank with treads or big wheels. Hovering is cool, but not often what I’m looking for
Another thing that limits the turning speed and maneuverability of a hover tank with no turret is the impact on its crew. A turret can spin as fast as it wants, but the people inside won't be happy if the whole tank is spinning as fast.
@@kenbrown2808 That depends on the tank and also isn't how tanks were crewed in the past. Who says futuristic fictional tanks don't have to turn their gun significantly faster to hit targets? Then a tank that has to move its whole hull seems pretty impractical for the creatures inside.... assuming it's crewed by organics.
@@Cold-Blooded-Jay well, yeah, the early interwar tanks didn't have a turret basket. so the gunner, loader, and commander had to run around as the turret turned. but then they figured out that you didn't bang up your loader, gunner, and commander, if they rotated with the turret they were inside. I mean, yeah, Keith Laumer's Bolos had the tank commander in the hull, but in David Drake's panzers, the driver was the only crew member not in the turret. maybe you'd like to read some documentation of how real tanks are built before you start making pronouncements.
@@kenbrown2808 Tanks with automatic loading exist.there are good reasons to give the commander the highest place that he can look out. Depending on Technology you don't need it. With electronic sights you don't need to have the gunner in the turret. Today it's totally possible to build a tank with an unmanned turret. just the difference between advantages and trade offs is not so high but with advancing technology the crewed turret will loose most advantages.
Hovertanks would be pretty good at amphibious assault too. Crossing rivers or lakes or even ocean straits would no longer require long chokepoint bridges or pontoon bridges which can be destroyed and sabotaged.
Assuming repulsor tech works the same on water as it does on land. See also: Back to the Future. Best make sure your system is rated for liquid surfaces!
@@warmachine5835 current generation hovercrafts work in both water and land, so this is an option for an atmosferic rated machine. Considering that most locations worth fighting for would have an atmosphere (breathable or not, it does not matter), we can use this. In vacuum bodies (moons, asteroids, stations, you name it) almost everything would be solid (or at least gelatinous) or even very high density liquids as most of its heat would be lost into space and the low density volatiles would be already evaporated. In every moon that scientists had discovered any sort of liquid, be it water or liquind methane, it is eyther underground or under an atmosphere of some sort.
Yeah, that's a point I raised in Spacedock's previous video addressing hovertanks. With conventional forces, river crossings can end an entire battalion like feeding it into a wood chipper if done poorly, and even best-case scenarios still limit a force's movements to a handful of places where bridges already exist or can be easily set up. Being able to instead just skim across a river with hovering vehicles practically wherever you want is a huge advantage.
I think the fundamental issue people have with hovertanks and mechs is they compare them to regular ground vehicles instead of thinking about what new battlefield roles they could fill.
on one hand, the comparisons are usually to see if they could hypothetically be more practical and useful than using tried and proven vehicles, to see if it's worth investing on their development. on the other hand, your point is right: they tend to take the mindset that these new machines are going to replace old ones to make these comparisons and conclude they are worthless, instead of considering their potential worth if warfare is going to change and evolve
One of the other ones I always see people raise is the whole 'They wouldn't be able to climb hills' and such nonsense, as if they are being powered by fans or something like RL air cushion hovercraft. Ignoring the possibility of using whatever is holding up that 30-40-50 ton tank off the ground, to move it forwards and up hills and whatnot...
@@Maktumekal_Ilzrei again, if you can force gravity to obey, then you don't need to worry about speed especially when your power is focused forward and not downward.
Well, you should tell that to sci fi writers whom are constantly replacing conventional vehicles with walkers and hover tanks that just inevitably end up being worse. Gundam for example literally tries to have mechs replace space fighters and a lot of ground vehicles using technobabble nonsense minovsky particles that falls apart upon closer scrutiny, because the universe had to resort to making everyone too dumb to invent UV or X ray laser based sensors (which totally exist today). And it rely's on the rather shaky logic that having super stealth /jamming in space means everyone is going to go back to close range dogfight where manuverability is the most important thing ever (which it is not.) Or look at star wars where wheeled and tracked vehicles are incredibly rare because everyone likes walkers and hover vehicles, despite that in most use cases for star wars vehicles, tracked and wheeled vehicles would be better.
@@ryuukeisscifiproductions1818 None of these are hard sci-fi settings, whether or not it's practical literally doesn't matter anymore once you step into the rule of cool.
We have hovertanks irl, we just call them helicopters. In all seriousness though hovertanks would likely fill a similar role to Light Armoured Vehicles like the Stryker or the LAV series. A fast attack vehicle that is capable of rapid maneuvers and repositioning.
The helicopters thing is pretty much what I've said about hovertanks in previous videos, but I felt that was being overly mean to what is a pretty common vehicle trope. - hoojiwana from Spacedock
@TheAnticlinton We already do, Modern Attack Helicopters can bounce 50 Cals and about 1-2 rounds from an autocannon. The problem is, and the same problem would exist for a hover tank, any rounds that pierce the armor is going to hit something important. That is of course if the round didn't airburst in front of the vehicle and peper the delicate/important bits with metal shards or bend something necessary from the shock wave. You also can't put ERA on a Helicopter for that exact reason and I would dare you to be in a Scimitar/Etc shot with a burst of 20-30mm cannon fire.
Also, the Batmobile in Batman Beyond is a hovercar that also flies. Though it takes more energy, according to supplemental materials I saw decades ago.
"Let's use lightly armoured, high-profile walkers to scout on difficult terrain. Never mind that all of our other vehicles are some form of hover tank or another, rendering those walkers completely pointless. But who cares, because the walkers look cool!"
Tbh, Most hover vehicles in Warhammer 40k are low flying aircraft with the ones the Tau use even has "gunship" in its name. The only exceptions are prolly those Primaris tanks.
@@cleeiii357Because the imperium also respect the rule of cool....in all seriousness most of the primaris hover vehicle aren't anti-grav tank like the one in horus heresy era they utilise a more direct approach of pulse engine in the sense of they act more like traditional air pushing engine (in one of the book a chaos marine got squished by the tank because he thought it was using anti grav engine turn out it wasn't)
Not only does hober technology make more sense in low-gravity environments, but in higher realism settings with variable gravity between planets it would also be more versitile than vehicles with mechanical suspensions. Adapting the vehicle for higher or lower gravity becomes a factor of power output rather than refitting or adjusting physical suspension systems on every vehicle.
I think the Mako from Mass Effect does a mix of that where it has wheels but can use Mass Effect Fields to increase or decrease its weight/mass to maintain consistent (but still terrible) performance on worlds with different gravity levels.
This is actually brought up in one of the old Star Wars RPG books talking about why walkers and tracked or wheeled vehicles are use.Because repulsorlifts aren't perfect, and some natural phenomenon can cause sudden performance changes. Plus they are vulnerable to certain mines and other guidance methods.
It's not as dramatic as you paint it, as the specific technology also needs to be rated for the power output you're giving it. You still need repulsors rated for a 6G environment if you're going to put enough power through them to compensate for 6x Earth gravity. Otherwise you're going to just have a bunch of burned-out repulsors.
I would imagine that a system that can hover with more weight would itself be larger, more massive, and more expensive. So a hover vehicle designed for high gravity would be able to handle low gravity by simply using less power, but the hover vehicle designed for only low-gravity would be cheaper and more efficient. Of course that depends on the rules of your fictional universe.
@@warmachine5835 sure, but if you're bringing your tank into a 6G environment, it also needs gravity compensators for the crew. I believe the original commenter's point was that a 1G hovertank can be used in any environment from 0.1G to 1G without changing the repulsors. So, if you have a need for an army which can fight on any planet in your galaxy, then you spec that army's hover gear for the heaviest environment your soldiers can fight in with standard-issue equipment (say, 1.5G), and that will cover the overwhelming majority of your deployments. for anything over this limit, you will need specialized equipment for the soldiers to survive/fight, so you may as well use that as the breakpoint between your "general purpose" and "high gravity" vehicle variants as well.
There's one issue that gets rarely mentioned: Energy budget. I would assume a hover vehicle, regardless of the hover technology (realistic or ant-grav/repulsor) will have a higher energy requirement than a wheeled or tracked vehicle. Thus needing a bigger powerplant. And this will give it a larger signature, making it easier to detect.
Not only that, but unless whatever powerplant being used is a fully selfsustained source of infinity energy, it also means it's an absolute fuel hog which would drastically increase it's logistics footprint.
Never mind the fact that they'd consume fuel just floating there. Real tanks are so fuel hungry even when idling a lot of them have a smaller secondary engine that just runs a generator for the electronics so they can turn off the engine if they don't need to be ready to move.
@@commandoepsilon4664If you’re just idling, you don't necessarily need to hover. If you have to build up air pressure again, it might take an extra second or so, but just settling on the ground is an option.
Yeah that just depends on what you want your hover tank for. Something like the panzers from hammerslammers, which are already hauling around a fusion reactor to power their sensor suites, active defences, and plasma weapons, might as well just be a hover tank anyway since the power technology is available and youre never going to hide the thing while its at power anyways. If youre looking for a sneaky scout vehicle on the other hand, that gets much trickier to pull off and youre likely better off with conventional propulsion
One justification I see for hover tanks is since they are cools and politicians will pay for cool. That means the politicians will pay for the hover tank even if the normal tanks makes sense financially.
The problem is... video games, movies, etc.. rarely if ever use real military tactics... and as such hovertanks tend to just get done as "ground fighters". Picture instead... hover tanks being dropped with powered armor infantry. using breaking thrusters and their hover systems to arrest their fall then sprinting forward to hit their targets using terrain to limit what can shoot at them... Coming up a hill side and firing... grounding charges... infront of them and dropping hull down, into the hole, so only their turret is shoving over a ride line. now they play a game of raising up to fire and dropping back down into the hole to reduce counter fire while the powered armor moves to flank defending forces once the powered armor has fixed the enemy in place, the hover tanks can then popup up and charge forward again. by using a hover tank as... a tank... that can dig in, entrench, pop up to fire and drop into holes... has a turret allowing it to cover a wide area infront without revealing its sides you have a viable fighting weapon. Next, apply the same tech to APC's, again with power or jump infantry. picture a hover APC zipping along at 100 mph, as it passes behind a ridge, it opens its rear doors deployng bounce/jump infantry who leap out the back and use their thruster packs to arrest their momentum then move up the ridge to firing positions... closing its door the apc continues on... and the enemy doesn't know its deployed infantry for a sneak and peak and laser targeting for indirect fire weapons. the IFV/APC could then set up under cover and start firing indirect weapons based on the infantries information, while it drifts, moves around and keeps relocating after each shot to prevent counter battery fire.
It may be potentially quicker to rotate a turret than an entire hovertank due to lower mass, but the turret itself adds both mass and complexity to the whole vehicle, so a turretless hover vehicle will have overall better performance and lower maintenance. That may be a reasonable trade-off for a fractional reduction in tracking speed.
The complexity you lose by removing the turret you add because you have to build a hover tank that can move in 360 degrees without turning and at the same speed instead of something that goes forward, backward and can make a turn. Otherwise you lose the ability of a tank to move in a different direction than where its shooting at, which would be a terrible design flaw for a tank. To add to that, a vehicle that moves 360 degrees without turning would be pretty horrible for the crew, making the tanks even less effective. The drawbacks do not outweigh the gains of removing a turret.
That in mind, if a hovertank had side-facing guns to compensate for the main gun being fixed, that would lean into the hovertank's potential affinity for strafing runs by enabling broadsides/drive-bys. (drive-bys are kinda like broadsides anyways)
If you have ever read the Hammer's Slammers series (and if not, I'd recommend you do), this is one of the many reasons that the super-heavy hovertanks the Slammers use are the most effective military unit for hire in the universe. Their tanks have turrets and cupolas both, with the cupola carrying a tri-barreled 2cm powergun (plasma gun) and the main turret has a 80cm powergun. Plasma bolts travel at basically the speed of light, their turrets are deceptively quick, and their tanks can also rotate in place fairly quickly due to the eight gimbal-mounted fans. The quickness of the tanks hull aids the even quicker turret and quicker than that cupola make unbelievably fast shots, and the training, expertise, and computer-aided targeting systems allow the tank gunner/commander to fire both main gun and tri-barrel simultaneously.
Can you please expain this reference for an uncultured (or *that* forgetfull) me? Maybe I will get into that source!... *later, without any time specifics.*
@@Taron_HaiTar it's from the videogame Star wars Empire at war forces of corruption there's a unit for the zann consortium faction the canderous assault tank and when you move it about the quote is one of the dialogue lines
My favorite version of the concept, is when a faction goes fully off the deep end. And takes the concept of a Land Battleship to its logical and thoroughly insane conclusion. By placing a fully militarized Hive City on a hover platform with the full arments of a proper Space battleship. And has it slowly moving at the thoroughly suspecting and royally screwed sods tasked with holding the line against it. Before rearranging the landscape with idiotic levels of overkill.
Sorta like the Ancient's city of Atlantis in SG:A, eh? Though that one is really just a giant militarized hive city that also happens to be capable of intersteller flight rather than designed to be used as a flying city.
@@Aotearas I don't think Atlantis was ever intended to hover menacingly above the ground, but if the SGC ever wanted to make a statement that'd be a hellava way to do it!
Weird idea I have for the Hovertank being more technologically advanced is that the shield system it employs is the mechanism that enables the hovering in the first place.
reminds me of one of david webers series, where the spaceships had an intertialess drive system that bent space to move the ships in any direction, which as a helpful side effect also doubled as really, really strong shields, to the point that they started hurling anti matter bombs at them just to break through the shielding on larger capital ships because it got to the point where regular old nukes just didnt do much to them
First thing I thought of was the hovertanks from Battlezone 1998, love seeing those clips pop up throughout the video. That game is still awesome 25 years later.
The Strv-103 or S-tank actually wasn't really slower to take aim with than its contemporaries with turrets, especially if going from moving to a standstill and then aiming. IIRC it was something like 3-4 seconds from driving full speed forwards, to having stopped and swung the gun around to hit a target that was a certain number of degrees to the side. Stabilisation tech of the time was insufficient to make it possible to fire accurately on the move anyway, so the limitation of not having a turret wasn't significant. Especially when considering it was developed very specifically for the terrain and geography of Sweden, as well as the Swedish doctrine of the time, which was defensive. Hide behind terrain, pop up, showing a tiny sliver of hull, take your shot, and scoot back, relocating to the next defensive position before enemy fire can be trained on you.
Your comment on the technical aspect is correct, but sweddish tank doctrine was not to have tanks act as a tank destroyers. Swedish tank doctrine was identical between the strv 103s and centurions. They were used highly aggressively and meant for the offense. When the 103 was created, the removal of the turret was not seen as a compromise but as removing a flaw of turreted tank (high profile) by compensating with new technologies. The first mission of all swedish tanks was to attack air and sea landing zones to drive the enemy back before they could establish themselves on swedish soil
I often use hover tanks as a quick, rapid-deployment craft. They can intercept and dispatch small threats, even deploying anchors to clamp onto the ground and fire heavy munitions. They're perfect for blitz-style attacks and as fast APCs. However, they also make poor standoff attack vehicles. They aren't fragile, but there are other vehicles for slower sieges that can work better and, more likely, survive in prolonged conflict.
I think a key concept to remember when discussing sci-fi tech is to remember that authors can always set up special tech handwavium to explain why stuff works in their settings. In a mech setting I'm creating, there's a specific type of gravity manipulation tech called repulsors that enable cheap hover-vehicles. The repulsors do some interaction with a planets gravity and surface beneath them to make the vehicle hover. This effect can only lift less than ten feet or provide jumps. The effect makes it almost impossible for the vehicle to touch the ground, like two powerful magnets of the same polarity being pushed together. So that's why human rebel militia can have cheapish hoverbikes and mechs can skate across the ground for traversal.
I always liked that idea, that the tank isn't really "hovering" per say but being pushed away from the ground due to magnetic manipulation. It would probably be less power consuming than constantly creating a "thrust" that keeps the tank off the ground.
One of my very first video games was a PC game called "Thunder Brigade" which was a very early Hovertank game. The Battlezone 98 Game looks very similar. It had a great setting and story about two space colonies going to war eith each other after being cut off from earth, before earth shows up near the end to pacify them both.
THANK YOU. I loved that game. Messed around with the scenario creator a bunch. For a game that was essentially a tech demo (iirc), they put a lot of effort into it.
@@LouseGrouse The soundtrack for it was amazing. I also messed around with the senario maker too. In particular i remember turning the volcano in the middle of lava map into a foretress.
I was continually reminded of how Vehicles in Battletech operate during this video. While 8-12 meter tall Battlemechs are srill the focus in Battletech, combined arms is very much a possibility. When designing a unit in Battletech if you want to reach a given speed you need an Engine of a certian power output rating. Wheeled, Wing in Ground Effect, and Hover vehicles can subtract from this rating on account of their more efficent *Motive Type.* the downside is that such vehicles can "sideslip" if going too fast and there is terrain they are unable to traverse without crashing
David Weber's Mutineers Moon had that. There was a lot of gravity manipulating tech, so the "tanks' had full flight systems and only deployed their treads when they got to the battlespace... and also because they had jammers to counter the gravity manipulation tech, making some rather nasty weapons useless.
I’d just like to thank you for putting the names of the games and media on screen… so many creators don’t bother and then you see something cool, or a game you’d like to try and you have to try to figure it out or ask for help. It’s really nice having the names up there, and I really appreciate the effort. Thank you!
One of the vehicles in the video seems to show a good solution: a remote-controlled recoilless rifle. There'd be no recoil to knock the hovertank sideways and the turret:hull mass ratio would be low so it wouldn't take much steering power to correct the torque reaction when it turned. Mauser produced a recoilless 30mm autocannon called the RMK-30 ages ago now, the intended mounts being helicopters and very light fighting vehicles like the Wiesel. Combine that with vertically-launched missile, which, being low-density, take advantage of the hovercraft's large footprint:weight ratio, and you might have a useful vehicle.
I feel like something that gets overlooked is how easy they are to repair, especially in the field. A tank crew might be able to do a quick fix on their tracks when they break but a hover tank? Kind of a tall order I reckon.
There is a point that was not adressed in this video, but was in the movies Sgt. Bilko (0:18 and specifically at 4:25): The gun's recoil mitigation sistem. On a normal tank, it's job is to tranfer the energy to the turret and chassi, so it will be absorbed by the ground. In a vehicule that does not contact the ground it will be useless; in fact, it is even worse than useless, it is detrimental. Without the friction of the ground, the recoil recuperator would act as a spring-loaded inercial hammer, kicking the tank back even harder. Sure, you can handwave an "inercial dampening" or whatever on a low sci-fi setting, but for hard sci-fi there is variety of options already available IRL: recoiless guns, kinetic missiles (they are very cool), standart missiles, laser guns (a little further to the future), reactive propulsion sistems.
I think that pitch-only turret manipulation makes a lot of sense on hover-tanks. If they’re able to rotate on the spot, and able to strafe a bit, then they can fire on the move without yaw, because they can just drive diagonally/laterally and face the enemy. Admittedly yaw+pitch control will always be great, but if there was ever a tank that didn’t need it, it’d be a tank that can strafe.
A sci fi series called "hammers slammers" written by an actual ex armoured cav trooper had hovertanks, the logic was that with virtually unlimited power generated by cold fusion reactors you could use an air cushion to achieve even more distributed ground pressure than tracks. Thus many of the heaviest MBTs used hover technology.
1950s War of The Worlds used three beams of energy that acted as legs. Probably one of my favorite war machines with awesome tension building sound effects and a ton of rotoscoped energy weapons.
In the end, I think it comes down to what other technologies exist and the planned use of the tank. Not everything can be super specialized though. It is very expensive to make lots of specialized equipment and have logistics supply lines to keep them all operational. On the other hand, advancements in construction, machining, repair, etc. might make it cheap and easy enough to make it viable. A hovering weapon platform might be better to forget the "tank" aspect as a whole too. There is a lot to be considered and tgat you can do.
I think more important than forgetting the tank aspect is realizing that the "Main Battle" in front of some tanks has a reason and that these are not the only tanks.
@@DieselsVideos the "main battle" in main battle tank means that it's the most standard tank of an armed force. Light, medium, and heavy tanks only really existed due to technological limitations of their day, and I'm willing to bet that advancements in the future will keep the practice of having one type of tank going.
@@moekitsune Ah you're right. Should be more careful by discussing in a foreign language. I forgot that in english a tank is only what sums up under "KampfPANZER" not "LuftabwehrPanzer", "TransportPANZER", "ArtilleriePANZER", "BergePANZER", all sorts of "RadPANZER" and so on. But if we take this narrow english definition every discussion about hovertanks is baseless. Because then it's only a tank if it has tracks. Then we are only tanking about "HAFV"s Hover Armored Fighting Vehicles and where these maybe can replace or support real tanks with tracks.
@@moekitsune no, light tanks still exist. main battle tanks are just re-branded medium tanks. the idea of the universal tank, the orginal idea for mainbattle tanks, actually died off pretty quickly as it requires a specific comparative level of various technologies. its simply too hard to have a tank be a heavy tank, a medium tank and a light tank. technological advancement is likely to result in more diversification, complexity has become increaseingly cheap and there is no reason for this trend to stop, and circumstances for getting a well balanced tank are only going to become less likely. infact the current public dirrection NATO tanks are going is diversification. they are expecting to replace current MBTs with 3 or 4 different more specilized vehicles by 2050. and as already mentioned light tanks are still a thing, so its a turn towards a more diverse set of vehicles.
For low-G environments, it _is_ very important that there _is_ a (lot of) atmosphere. If you can blow air down, you can't lift up the tank. Unless you use anti-gravity sci-fi, but then you might as well go for a plane instead.
The Hover MLRS from the Command and Conquer series has always been my favorite example of a hover tank. A high mobility AGTM carrier that complements GDI's slower armor by raiding from unexpected directions or skirmishing with the traditionally higher-mobility brotherhood around the flanks of a battle makes it feel like it's filling a very important tactical niche in the command and conquer setting.
As for hovertanks encountering less resistance and being faster than wheeled or tracked vehicles, that leads to another possible benefit. If the excess speed is not necessary for the vehicle to perform its job, you could put lower power, more efficient engines in the hovertank, resulting in reduced operating costs and/or longer range.
I know we're trying not to overlap hover tanks with aircraft. But if a hover tank could utilize the ground effect, it would become more efficient while in motion than hovering in place.
@@erikschaal4124 That only applies to aerodynamic lift from wings operating within ground effect. If they are using skirts or vectored thrust to hover (It's a combat hovercraft), then they are already exploiting the ground effect but not in a way where horizontal movement would help. If they use space magic to hover then ground effect probably isn't relevant. You might add wings to benefit from it and reduce the load on the static lift while moving but it seems like a horrible trade off for a tank.
Also there is very rarely a point where you actually want to go faster in a ground vehicle, because even a hover tank would have a certain maximum speed just due to crew safety reasons (if it doesn't, then it's just a plane/helicopter again), and if you're actually in a situation where you have a large flat open area to get up to full speed, congrats you're now in the second worst place any vehicle could be, right out in the open with no cover at all
The hovering mechanism is what gets me though. If it isn’t just an engine for flying at arbitrary altitudes, it’s gotta rely on ground effect, and that’s a fine line to tread unless you have a skirt. Being on an airless body further complicates things, you have to generate that thrust by using reaction mass directly. Maybe there’s a setting with a moon that has an extreme magnetic field, but I’ve not seen one. Also now I’ve got the 08th MS team OP in my head.
Another point for hull mounted armament. By laying it as a spinal mount you can get a much larger main gun without increasing the profile of the vehicle. There’s a reason most of the mid-century tank destroyers used the layout. Makes even more sense if you have something as maneuverable as a hover tank.
0:49 hey its Brigador! That game really doesn't get enough attention. Its a near perfect 'mech' game with great music, vehicle designs, and world building
I do want to take one issue with an assertion in this video, and that is the notion that video games hovertanks are usually turretless for the sake of gameplay differentiation versus a normal tank. I believe it's actually more a UI issue that leads to this, to simplify the gameplay of a hovertank to make them more accessible. Most humans already find "tank controls" clumsy and unintuitive, and adding another axis of movement to that on top of an independent turret would likely feel frustratingly "uncontrollable". In addition, for games meant to for a console audience, there are only so many buttons on a controller to budget between movement controls and other functions. And so with all this in mind, hovertanks end up being given essentially a variation of normal FPS controls and regular tanks get the more typical "tanklike" control scheme, and the gameplay differences are driven from this choice rather than the other way around.
That Moon Dust Problem is a interesting problem I think I have not heard mentioned or even tackled in a lot of situations. But I do feel like Hovertanks are primarily a parade vehicle with a few special applications. Hoverbikes and Hovertrucks, on the other hand....
You should also consider mines. Depending on the type, they need the enemy vehicle to either make direct contact with them, or be really close to the ground with their juicy parts.
Another potential advantage of hovertanks over other vehicles is that (setting permitting) they can more easily cross water and even take place in naval combat. I think of this mostly because of those giant swarms of Aeon and Seraphim T1 hovercraft from Supreme Commander that come out onto the water and wreck fleets.
Just be carefull. Low gravity means other elements or less air to use for traditional hovering solutions. In Low gravity / low air preassure envrionments you would need some space magic hover technology. but that should not make hovering easy enogh to just make an air-/spacecraft.
Depends on how they hover, if it's antigravity then dandy but if it's anything else then they'll still set off mines, stir up dust, and be subject to bad terrain because to lift something you need to press the air down equal to its mass. 50 ton tank goes up, 50 tons of air pressure goes down.
The earliest *distinct in my memory* hovertank was probably Hovertank from Battlefield 2142... *it was so long ago, but still cool!* Ah, I still remember downloading from old Torrent this game and enjoying singleplayer, even if relativly not that long!
Are you going to do a separate video on hover mechanics? Those can make a big difference in the advantages and disadvantages of a hover tank. I can think of a few from realistic (static hover skirt, dynamic ground effect, really big fans or jets without skirts, or rockets in space) to speculative (superconducting magnetic levitation, repulsor?) to imaginary (gravity cancellation, anti-gravity, enhanced gravitational attraction to a mass overhead like a moon or space station or mothership). The mechanics can make a differences in how it works with the ground. A more balanced sort of system for fiction or gameplay might be some sort of repulsor tech that allows it to have friction with the ground while allowing it to spread out its mass so that it can use a turret, but it might not allow it to traverse water which can move out of the way like the Red Sea, which means it might work in mudd, but the mud would still be displaced but more evenly than tracks. A more realistic system might be more like a hover and/or ground effect vehicle with no or minimal armor and a big gun: a hover tank-destroyer that can fly high enough to clear minefields and fast enough to surprise infantry with ATGMs and fast enough to evade drones and artillery.
Now that I think about it, an electrostatic suspension system might be practical on a low-gravity, no-atmosphere environment. Like charges repel, so if you charge the hull of the tank and the dust under it to the same polarity, the hull would be repelled. In solid rock environments, this wouldn't work as well, because the charge would equalize through the rock, but in dusty/powdery environments, the particles would retain charge and repel each other, creating a charged particle cushion between the tank and the surface. You'd need fantastically high voltages, which is challenging but not insurmountable. A greater problem would be electron leakage into vacuum sapping your power away. You could mitigate this by insulating the tank's top and sides, but you'd still lose quite a lot of energy even when stationary, never mind the energy lost to charged particles left in your wake.
Hovertanks have some major flaws. 1. You can't go up and down hills with them, unless they basically fly. Anything using ground effect can't do that if part of the vehicle is way above the ground. Hovercraft skirts won't work well on a steep slope; they'll lose too much compression or spill air. Hovercraft deal with small slopes by having those big soft skirts, and these come with their own problems- covering them in armor would defeat their purpose. Magnet-repulsion systems will hit the cube law, in terms of power input vs. output; it's sooooooo much more energy lifting a hovertank 10 feet up than 1 inch. Magical super-jets / rockets / plasma engines / etc. that produce massive thrust will work in all aspects, but then you have an armored "tank" that's really just a VTOL with a ton of armor. How about Magical Tech Stuff like anti-gravity engines? One presumes these also suffer from the cube law issues, but maybe not, because agrav would have a relationship with a very large mass (the planet). But frankly, if you have agrav, why do you have hovertanks? IDK, something something about sensors, handwave, etc. 2. Turrets wouldn't have much effect, torque-wise; their mass is considerably less than the tank itself. That's not a real problem. The real problem is that the amount of energy involved is mind-blowing. Ground-based tanks have struggled with this problem since they were invented; tracks aren't efficient, but they spread the ground pressure of the tank out, allowing it to cross soft ground. Hovertanks would have even more problems, because while they're spreading the ground pressure better (in theory) they must completely defeat gravity every moment they're in motion. David Drake got it right by insisting that his hovertanks have a fusion powerplant; it'd take that kind of energy to make it work. What he didn't deal with (largely because it wasn't known when he wrote Hammer's Slammers) is that fusion plants aren't clean; they're quite radioactive- a problem nobody's really gotten around yet, and that shows no sign of going away when they're finally operating as a viable power source. So there's a major problem here with shielding, etc. That's a lot of mass. 3. The S-Tank hovertank isn't completely insane, for the same reason the S-Tank wasn't insane. For a defensive hovertank, or a hovertank used for very long-range fighting where side-shots would be pretty rare, or a hovertank that could turn as rapidly as a modern turret, it'd actually be a great idea. If you're putting out the kind of force needed to make the tank hover, you have the control tech necessary to unbalance the forces involved and turn pretty rapidly, one would think. 4. However, hovertanks would still have a major problem: acceleration for moving forwards / backwards would be awful. Remember, you're using enormous amounts of energy keeping it from touching the ground. None of that force is moving it in any particular direction. For small motions or turning, it's OK; just unbalance the forces briefly. For long-range movement, it's a no-go; you need another force to propel it. Let's say your hovertank uses magnetic repulsion. OK, so now it's a giant electromagnet powered by a fusion reactor. To get it moving forwards, though... you'll need a huge jet engine or a rocket or something. Maybe the magnets turn on and off super-rapidly and pull / push it along, or something. David Drake's version used tilted fans; that would not really work well. Modern hovercraft use huge propellers in one or more pairs, so that they can turn and go backwards. No matter how you do it, there are huge forces involved... and none of of them are remotely healthy to be around, if you're friendly infantry, vehicles, even buildings! 5. Hovertanks using conventional atmospheric forces like jets, hovercraft-like pressure, etc., are on a totally different level in terms of the damage they'd do to everything around them. This is in addition to the problems outlined in 4, above. A real-world hovercraft pushing around lots of tonnage is seriously dangerous to be near (as well as unbelievably loud) but it's a big mass spread over a comparatively large surface area. A tank? You're trying to concentrate the mass into the smallest area possible; this comes with serious caveats. A real-world hovertank would probably destroy nearby objects quite readily by throwing stones from the edges of the skirts; we're talking about forces 10-20X more powerful than the downdraft from a big helicopter concentrated in a much smaller area- the velocities implied are pretty huge.
ground based vacuum units... very interesting idea. hover tanks as fast attack craft like the GDI sandstorm and it's hover MLRS are still my favs with the clone wars game fighter tanks in second/third? place. I guess i've personally a fan of the AAT too. those things had absurd numbers of weapons and were purpose built as frontal seige weapons to put as much fire power down range as fast as possible and could NOT take a hit :D
Recoil and inertia, every action has an opposite and equal reaction. Unless a hover tank has some way of bracing each time it fires its big gun, it's going to have to spend a lot of time repositioning after each use of its primary armament.
A turret is a pretty major weak point. If you eliminate the turret you can automatically get a stronger basic structure, lower cost, accommodate more powerful weapons and thicker armor, have a lower profile, and fewer points of failure. If a hovertank can rotate quickly and precisely, even if not quite as quick as a turret, I could see a fixed weapon being the clear choice. The fact that you don't need a turret might be one of the major upsides of the hovertank, especially on those airless worlds where any moving part is likely to fail due to the dust.
The energy requirement to power a hover tank will be many times higher than a tracked tank. Also it would have to be anti gav to work in low or no atmosphere. and the Gforce when monoveuvring would be rib crushing. Turning in a circle at speed would be like turning in an aircraft long and wide.
The Vanu Magrider (from Planetside 2, appears in video around 1:43) is an interesting compromise to the turret issue, though probably for game design reasons first. The main gun is a "casemate" forward-firing gun, but the secondary weapon is on a turret (like every other faction's MBT), which is much lighter and shouldn't significantly interfere with the vehicle's momentum, fire control, etc. The secondary turret (by default, a heavy machine gun) can respond quickly to infantry, light vehicles, and aircraft that could easily outmaneuver or overwhelm a casemate-only tank. It would also allow that quick response *without* giving the crew severe motion sickness. The main gun would likely be the weapon pointed at fortifications, enemy armor, etc., and those are targets you want your front armor facing anyways. The main rear-facing thrusters in combination with the fixed gun probably minimize the disruptive effects of recoil. Recoil. Ah, that's why they'd mount the gun as centrally as possible. The torque from recoil above center-of-mass applied across 360 degrees of travel and varied further by elevation...that would make a very inaccurate tank, wouldn't it? No matter how well the thrusters and computers make up for it, the recoil on a vehicle without the support of terrain or grip would be adding another variable to accuracy, and that's the last thing you want to add. Ramble conclusion: Casemate hovertank with light turret is a strong combination.
I've loved hovertanks since I drove Magrider in Planetside 2 at the fisrt time. It also has a fixed gun that can aim only up and down. That MBT was my favorite one, with Prowler being second (2 guns go PEW-PEW).
One quite justifiable omission is the fact that _hovercraft_ tanks wouldn't work in an airless environment. This isn't particularly relevant, however, since in most cases, if you're making up science fiction, you can make up antigravity or contragravity tech, or something similar, to produce a hovering vehicle that doesn't use an air cushion. I missed the original video, but something far more relevant I'd have liked to have heard mentioned is that _stopping or steering_ a ground vehicle that isn't in contact with the ground is quite difficult. In one of the silliest books he ever published, _Profiles of the Future_ (1963), Arthur C. Clarke has some surprisingly good counter-arguments against the future ubiquity of hovering or flying passenger cars. Most of those would apply, or perhaps be seen to apply, to hovertanks. One workaround would be a sort of "active inertial damper" that could mimic friction and road interlock, or even allow the tank to move in even weirder or cooler ways.
Using Gundam is always an interesting choice when talking about tanks vs mechs. When the Zeon created the mobile suit and the Zaku they dominated space warfare but once they landed on Earth with gravity they had a lot of trouble so created the weird Magella Attack tank/artillery/attack aircraft. While trying to build a replacement for the slow lumbering Zaku's in the hovering Dom.
one thing to note on turrets and just to be clear turrets are great. a thing to note on full degree turrets is that a lot of internals have to work around the turret mechanism while a much shorter firing cone can have more systems behind it or just a lower profile craft
The other consideration of being turretless is that a hover tank would be higher off the ground than a tracked vehicle so having a turret on top of that would make it harder use gullies or low banks to screen your movement from observation and fire. The same reason why the design of American tanks like the M 60, with commander machine turrets on top of the main turret, never really caught on.
I play From the Depths, a design-your-own weapons simulator. Any weapon that operate on physical principles (ie not pure magic) can be built. In the game's meta, fast aircraft rely entirely on maneuver for survivability, helicopters have medium-low survivability and excels at shooting down with a height advantage. Hovertanks are extremely good, they can evade a number of threats using rapid maneuver, and excels at shooting up. Land tanks are the sturdiest things that can be made, but loses out on rapid strategic maneuver, and being able to run away from a bad situation. Being able to turn the entire vehicle to quickly face the enemy is an advantage, it means you always have the strongest armor facing the threat. Of course you need to rely on other forces to avoid being flanked. I imagine in a realistic scenario, hovertanks would be a form of cavalry / reinforcement unit, where enemy disposition and locations are known, and can rapidly support other types of forces to achieve a breakthrough.
I'm personally fond of how webcomic _Schlock Mercenary_ handled tanks. Basically a compact blob of power, propulsion, weapons, armor and a one person crew compartment, a tank was also close air support, space escort fighter and on one occasion time machine.
A couple advantages of casemate vehicles which a hover tank would be able to use to one extent or another is the lower profile, reducing the area the enemy has to aim at and making it easier to hide for ambush-type vehicles, and focusing all the armour(Or shields) in one area, reducing weight compared to a turret and upper glacis, these were two of the reasons the S-Tank was turretless as in practice it was designed more as an ambush-type tank destroyer so the slower traverse speed on the gun wasn't as big of an issue. While not a reason for the S-Tank, multiple other casemate vehicles in history have made use of the ability to mount comparably larger guns on the same sized platform and increase reload speed by providing more room for the loaders or autoloaders. For hover tanks specifically, an ATGM carrier design would probably be quite good, fast in while low to the ground, reducing chance of being detected or hit, launch a barrage of vls/at an angle(think Swingfire) top attack missiles from behind cover and get out of dodge asap for rearmament.
You'll likely see helicopters and tanks merge into w/e this hovertank becomes, assuming there's some sort of antigrav tech that makes it feasible. Tanks are kind of in a weird position right now in our own world because munitions exist which render the tanking part of the tank obsolete, but if we ever get to the point where defensive abilities match the offensive ones currently fielded, standard ground tanks will once again be useful again as a damage soaking combatant.
Glad to see the additional look at the concept of a hover tank. These would be amazing tanks. The closes thing I can see on Earth would be a Hovercraft tank but it would just require to much power to lift it unless you went with really really light armor on it. Granted I would still be interested in that concept as a drone like tank on a modern battle field.
I'm assuming that by 'hover' we mean anti-gravity of some form rather than an air cushioned vehicle. It's possible that whatever technology is required for this would have no moving parts to keep lubricated or wear out which would be an advantage and maintenance may be easier. As well as being able to handle a wide variety of terrain they could also transition from one to another easily. They are the ultimate amphibious vehicle that does not suffer from the usual weakness of requiring gently sloping banks to exit the water. They may also be able to double up as in shore patrol boats because of this. I still think that a turret is a good idea just in case the drive is disabled and the vehicle is forced to land. It would be nice to still be able to turn the gun to face in directions other than the one the vehicle ends up pointing in.
There's an added benefit for hover tanks, depending on the type of hover propulsion used. In the WH40K book Dark Imperium, a bunch of Traitor Space Marines encounter Repulsor grav-tanks that enter the scene from orbit, using their anti-grav drives to slow their descent. One of the Chaos Marines, Iron Warriors for the curious, promptly grabs a melta bomb and dives underneath to plant it on the underside of the hull. The Repulsors ... do nothing, because the sheer amount of force require to counteract the weight of the tank and keep it hovering promptly squishes the Chaos Marine flat. The text also makes mention of how their gravitic engines crushes the sand beneath them "to a glassy shine".
I personly think that hovering tech would fit very well with APCs because they only need to get to thier destination fast and drop the soilders inside and usually doesn't carry heavy weapons. But dropship and gunship are still a thing so idk
I still vividly remember as a kid playing the Clone Wars game and accidentally driving my TX-130 out over a partially frozen lake on Ren Var and just gliding over the surface. It was like the moment in the Incredibles when Dash realizes he can run on water.
I have loved hover tanks ever since.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who remembers that game
@@sfs2040 I still play it on occasion
That was a fun game, but there is a potential problem with hovering over surfaces like water or ice.
It hinges on whether or not the vehicle in question hovers by magic or hovers by displacing its mass.
If a vehicle hovers by magic or by being pulled from above, there is no problem. However, If the vehicle hovers by pushing off the ground, it's no different than convential tracks pushing off the ground. It will still sink into mud or crack ice. See the book series Hammers Slammers for examples.
Interestingly, though, a hover system might distribute its load over a wider area than tracks, meaning it wouldn't sink as easily. But even if it didn't, a hover vehicle presumably does not rely on ground contact to move the way a tracked vehicle does. This would mean that, even if it did sink, it would just float a couple feet down in the mud or water. It might get stuck, or might push the mud or water out of the way like the bow of a ship.
Truly though, the advantages to hovering sans magic are zero point turns (if the vehicle is designed right. Notice that the hovering vehicle known as the airplane cannot zero point turn), and decreased risk of a high center.
In other words, what's a tank trap? Never heard of one. Obstacle? Shmobstacle.
@@iivin4233 ww2-era tanks did not sink in the mud in which humans - did.
Imagine if load was distributed over entire projection of bottom of the tank on the ground.
Like if we had "gravity projectors" or something.
Such vehicle would be able to go over mud and thin ice which would be very beneficial.
@@iivin4233 it could also hover by thrust. like a helicopter or VTOL does.
Let it be known that I never doubted the Hovertank. The Rule of Cool is the only design document needed for success.
As a sci-fi writer I despise the rule of cool.
All I ever needed was the word of the prophet, David Drake.
“Let it be known I never doubted the hovertank" sir who even are you
@@philosotree5876 Agreed. Nice as it is, it's an easy cop-out for someone even mildly inconvenienced by physics.
Based reasoning but I disagree. I just prefer the brute industrial vibe of a tank with treads or big wheels. Hovering is cool, but not often what I’m looking for
Another thing that limits the turning speed and maneuverability of a hover tank with no turret is the impact on its crew. A turret can spin as fast as it wants, but the people inside won't be happy if the whole tank is spinning as fast.
That's what inertial stabilisers are for
normally all but one of the people in a tank are in the turret.
@@kenbrown2808 That depends on the tank and also isn't how tanks were crewed in the past. Who says futuristic fictional tanks don't have to turn their gun significantly faster to hit targets? Then a tank that has to move its whole hull seems pretty impractical for the creatures inside.... assuming it's crewed by organics.
@@Cold-Blooded-Jay well, yeah, the early interwar tanks didn't have a turret basket. so the gunner, loader, and commander had to run around as the turret turned. but then they figured out that you didn't bang up your loader, gunner, and commander, if they rotated with the turret they were inside. I mean, yeah, Keith Laumer's Bolos had the tank commander in the hull, but in David Drake's panzers, the driver was the only crew member not in the turret. maybe you'd like to read some documentation of how real tanks are built before you start making pronouncements.
@@kenbrown2808 Tanks with automatic loading exist.there are good reasons to give the commander the highest place that he can look out. Depending on Technology you don't need it. With electronic sights you don't need to have the gunner in the turret.
Today it's totally possible to build a tank with an unmanned turret. just the difference between advantages and trade offs is not so high but with advancing technology the crewed turret will loose most advantages.
Hovertanks would be pretty good at amphibious assault too. Crossing rivers or lakes or even ocean straits would no longer require long chokepoint bridges or pontoon bridges which can be destroyed and sabotaged.
Assuming repulsor tech works the same on water as it does on land. See also: Back to the Future. Best make sure your system is rated for liquid surfaces!
@@warmachine5835 True enough.
@@warmachine5835 current generation hovercrafts work in both water and land, so this is an option for an atmosferic rated machine. Considering that most locations worth fighting for would have an atmosphere (breathable or not, it does not matter), we can use this.
In vacuum bodies (moons, asteroids, stations, you name it) almost everything would be solid (or at least gelatinous) or even very high density liquids as most of its heat would be lost into space and the low density volatiles would be already evaporated.
In every moon that scientists had discovered any sort of liquid, be it water or liquind methane, it is eyther underground or under an atmosphere of some sort.
Yeah, that's a point I raised in Spacedock's previous video addressing hovertanks. With conventional forces, river crossings can end an entire battalion like feeding it into a wood chipper if done poorly, and even best-case scenarios still limit a force's movements to a handful of places where bridges already exist or can be easily set up.
Being able to instead just skim across a river with hovering vehicles practically wherever you want is a huge advantage.
Planetside 1 Vanu veteran here: You are more right than you know.
I think the fundamental issue people have with hovertanks and mechs is they compare them to regular ground vehicles instead of thinking about what new battlefield roles they could fill.
on one hand, the comparisons are usually to see if they could hypothetically be more practical and useful than using tried and proven vehicles, to see if it's worth investing on their development.
on the other hand, your point is right: they tend to take the mindset that these new machines are going to replace old ones to make these comparisons and conclude they are worthless, instead of considering their potential worth if warfare is going to change and evolve
One of the other ones I always see people raise is the whole 'They wouldn't be able to climb hills' and such nonsense, as if they are being powered by fans or something like RL air cushion hovercraft. Ignoring the possibility of using whatever is holding up that 30-40-50 ton tank off the ground, to move it forwards and up hills and whatnot...
@@Maktumekal_Ilzrei again, if you can force gravity to obey, then you don't need to worry about speed especially when your power is focused forward and not downward.
Well, you should tell that to sci fi writers whom are constantly replacing conventional vehicles with walkers and hover tanks that just inevitably end up being worse.
Gundam for example literally tries to have mechs replace space fighters and a lot of ground vehicles using technobabble nonsense minovsky particles that falls apart upon closer scrutiny, because the universe had to resort to making everyone too dumb to invent UV or X ray laser based sensors (which totally exist today). And it rely's on the rather shaky logic that having super stealth /jamming in space means everyone is going to go back to close range dogfight where manuverability is the most important thing ever (which it is not.)
Or look at star wars where wheeled and tracked vehicles are incredibly rare because everyone likes walkers and hover vehicles, despite that in most use cases for star wars vehicles, tracked and wheeled vehicles would be better.
@@ryuukeisscifiproductions1818 None of these are hard sci-fi settings, whether or not it's practical literally doesn't matter anymore once you step into the rule of cool.
We have hovertanks irl, we just call them helicopters.
In all seriousness though hovertanks would likely fill a similar role to Light Armoured Vehicles like the Stryker or the LAV series. A fast attack vehicle that is capable of rapid maneuvers and repositioning.
The helicopters thing is pretty much what I've said about hovertanks in previous videos, but I felt that was being overly mean to what is a pretty common vehicle trope.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@hoojiwana I think that there is much to say about how sci-fi tech can blur lines between various classifications that we think of.
What about making helicopters are armored as a light tank?
@TheAnticlinton
We already do,
Modern Attack Helicopters can bounce 50 Cals and about 1-2 rounds from an autocannon.
The problem is, and the same problem would exist for a hover tank, any rounds that pierce the armor is going to hit something important.
That is of course if the round didn't airburst in front of the vehicle and peper the delicate/important bits with metal shards or bend something necessary from the shock wave.
You also can't put ERA on a Helicopter for that exact reason and I would dare you to be in a Scimitar/Etc shot with a burst of 20-30mm cannon fire.
@@TheAnticlintonThose already exist.
".. without veering into fully becoming an aircraft, which would be kinda against the point."
Warhammer Eldar have entered the chat.
Also, the Batmobile in Batman Beyond is a hovercar that also flies. Though it takes more energy, according to supplemental materials I saw decades ago.
"Let's use lightly armoured, high-profile walkers to scout on difficult terrain. Never mind that all of our other vehicles are some form of hover tank or another, rendering those walkers completely pointless. But who cares, because the walkers look cool!"
Tbh, Most hover vehicles in Warhammer 40k are low flying aircraft with the ones the Tau use even has "gunship" in its name. The only exceptions are prolly those Primaris tanks.
Also ACE Online.
@@cleeiii357Because the imperium also respect the rule of cool....in all seriousness most of the primaris hover vehicle aren't anti-grav tank like the one in horus heresy era they utilise a more direct approach of pulse engine in the sense of they act more like traditional air pushing engine (in one of the book a chaos marine got squished by the tank because he thought it was using anti grav engine turn out it wasn't)
Not only does hober technology make more sense in low-gravity environments, but in higher realism settings with variable gravity between planets it would also be more versitile than vehicles with mechanical suspensions. Adapting the vehicle for higher or lower gravity becomes a factor of power output rather than refitting or adjusting physical suspension systems on every vehicle.
I think the Mako from Mass Effect does a mix of that where it has wheels but can use Mass Effect Fields to increase or decrease its weight/mass to maintain consistent (but still terrible) performance on worlds with different gravity levels.
This is actually brought up in one of the old Star Wars RPG books talking about why walkers and tracked or wheeled vehicles are use.Because repulsorlifts aren't perfect, and some natural phenomenon can cause sudden performance changes. Plus they are vulnerable to certain mines and other guidance methods.
It's not as dramatic as you paint it, as the specific technology also needs to be rated for the power output you're giving it. You still need repulsors rated for a 6G environment if you're going to put enough power through them to compensate for 6x Earth gravity. Otherwise you're going to just have a bunch of burned-out repulsors.
I would imagine that a system that can hover with more weight would itself be larger, more massive, and more expensive. So a hover vehicle designed for high gravity would be able to handle low gravity by simply using less power, but the hover vehicle designed for only low-gravity would be cheaper and more efficient. Of course that depends on the rules of your fictional universe.
@@warmachine5835 sure, but if you're bringing your tank into a 6G environment, it also needs gravity compensators for the crew. I believe the original commenter's point was that a 1G hovertank can be used in any environment from 0.1G to 1G without changing the repulsors.
So, if you have a need for an army which can fight on any planet in your galaxy, then you spec that army's hover gear for the heaviest environment your soldiers can fight in with standard-issue equipment (say, 1.5G), and that will cover the overwhelming majority of your deployments. for anything over this limit, you will need specialized equipment for the soldiers to survive/fight, so you may as well use that as the breakpoint between your "general purpose" and "high gravity" vehicle variants as well.
There's one issue that gets rarely mentioned: Energy budget.
I would assume a hover vehicle, regardless of the hover technology (realistic or ant-grav/repulsor) will have a higher energy requirement than a wheeled or tracked vehicle.
Thus needing a bigger powerplant. And this will give it a larger signature, making it easier to detect.
Not only that, but unless whatever powerplant being used is a fully selfsustained source of infinity energy, it also means it's an absolute fuel hog which would drastically increase it's logistics footprint.
Never mind the fact that they'd consume fuel just floating there. Real tanks are so fuel hungry even when idling a lot of them have a smaller secondary engine that just runs a generator for the electronics so they can turn off the engine if they don't need to be ready to move.
@@commandoepsilon4664If you’re just idling, you don't necessarily need to hover. If you have to build up air pressure again, it might take an extra second or so, but just settling on the ground is an option.
@@justinthompson6364 depends on the surface you're hovering above (see water and other liquids)
Yeah that just depends on what you want your hover tank for. Something like the panzers from hammerslammers, which are already hauling around a fusion reactor to power their sensor suites, active defences, and plasma weapons, might as well just be a hover tank anyway since the power technology is available and youre never going to hide the thing while its at power anyways. If youre looking for a sneaky scout vehicle on the other hand, that gets much trickier to pull off and youre likely better off with conventional propulsion
Didn't expect to see Space Engineers footages, but
ALL PRAISE THE ALMIGHTY CLANG!
Nice video too))
One justification I see for hover tanks is since they are cools and politicians will pay for cool. That means the politicians will pay for the hover tank even if the normal tanks makes sense financially.
GDI would concur, before their funding was cut before C&C 3: Tiberium Wars.
The problem is... video games, movies, etc.. rarely if ever use real military tactics... and as such hovertanks tend to just get done as "ground fighters".
Picture instead... hover tanks being dropped with powered armor infantry. using breaking thrusters and their hover systems to arrest their fall then sprinting forward to hit their targets using terrain to limit what can shoot at them... Coming up a hill side and firing... grounding charges... infront of them and dropping hull down, into the hole, so only their turret is shoving over a ride line. now they play a game of raising up to fire and dropping back down into the hole to reduce counter fire while the powered armor moves to flank defending forces once the powered armor has fixed the enemy in place, the hover tanks can then popup up and charge forward again.
by using a hover tank as... a tank... that can dig in, entrench, pop up to fire and drop into holes... has a turret allowing it to cover a wide area infront without revealing its sides you have a viable fighting weapon.
Next, apply the same tech to APC's, again with power or jump infantry. picture a hover APC zipping along at 100 mph, as it passes behind a ridge, it opens its rear doors deployng bounce/jump infantry who leap out the back and use their thruster packs to arrest their momentum then move up the ridge to firing positions... closing its door the apc continues on... and the enemy doesn't know its deployed infantry for a sneak and peak and laser targeting for indirect fire weapons. the IFV/APC could then set up under cover and start firing indirect weapons based on the infantries information, while it drifts, moves around and keeps relocating after each shot to prevent counter battery fire.
It may be potentially quicker to rotate a turret than an entire hovertank due to lower mass, but the turret itself adds both mass and complexity to the whole vehicle, so a turretless hover vehicle will have overall better performance and lower maintenance. That may be a reasonable trade-off for a fractional reduction in tracking speed.
Also the larger gun you can put in a hull vs a turret.
Also, removing a turret reduces overall vehicle height, so making it a harder target to hit.
The complexity you lose by removing the turret you add because you have to build a hover tank that can move in 360 degrees without turning and at the same speed instead of something that goes forward, backward and can make a turn. Otherwise you lose the ability of a tank to move in a different direction than where its shooting at, which would be a terrible design flaw for a tank. To add to that, a vehicle that moves 360 degrees without turning would be pretty horrible for the crew, making the tanks even less effective.
The drawbacks do not outweigh the gains of removing a turret.
That in mind, if a hovertank had side-facing guns to compensate for the main gun being fixed, that would lean into the hovertank's potential affinity for strafing runs by enabling broadsides/drive-bys. (drive-bys are kinda like broadsides anyways)
If you have ever read the Hammer's Slammers series (and if not, I'd recommend you do), this is one of the many reasons that the super-heavy hovertanks the Slammers use are the most effective military unit for hire in the universe.
Their tanks have turrets and cupolas both, with the cupola carrying a tri-barreled 2cm powergun (plasma gun) and the main turret has a 80cm powergun.
Plasma bolts travel at basically the speed of light, their turrets are deceptively quick, and their tanks can also rotate in place fairly quickly due to the eight gimbal-mounted fans. The quickness of the tanks hull aids the even quicker turret and quicker than that cupola make unbelievably fast shots, and the training, expertise, and computer-aided targeting systems allow the tank gunner/commander to fire both main gun and tri-barrel simultaneously.
"we're an assault tank not a boat"-canderous assault tank
Yo I get that reference!
@@HS-lv6wc ah fellow man of culture 😁
Can you please expain this reference for an uncultured (or *that* forgetfull) me? Maybe I will get into that source!... *later, without any time specifics.*
@@Taron_HaiTar it's from the videogame Star wars Empire at war forces of corruption there's a unit for the zann consortium faction the canderous assault tank and when you move it about the quote is one of the dialogue lines
@@thestanleys3657 Does it say from just moving around, or from moving around on water (if there is any)? Aside that, thanks for telling me!
My favorite version of the concept, is when a faction goes fully off the deep end.
And takes the concept of a Land Battleship to its logical and thoroughly insane conclusion.
By placing a fully militarized Hive City on a hover platform with the full arments of a proper Space battleship.
And has it slowly moving at the thoroughly suspecting and royally screwed sods tasked with holding the line against it.
Before rearranging the landscape with idiotic levels of overkill.
Sorta like the mortal engines traction cities
@@elitper994 Yes. But Bigger.
And hovering.
Yeah, solid example of this is the Gaalsien in Homeworld Deserts of Karak. Their entire fleet is hover tech and it fits nicely.
Sorta like the Ancient's city of Atlantis in SG:A, eh? Though that one is really just a giant militarized hive city that also happens to be capable of intersteller flight rather than designed to be used as a flying city.
@@Aotearas I don't think Atlantis was ever intended to hover menacingly above the ground, but if the SGC ever wanted to make a statement that'd be a hellava way to do it!
Hovertanks: *"WE ARE SPEED!"*
ACE Online's hover tank can be faster on the ground than in the air, even faster than the dedicated air superiority fighter in the same game.
gotta go fast
Can I just say I really appreciate having the title of whatever media is being previewed on screen 👍
Weird idea I have for the Hovertank being more technologically advanced is that the shield system it employs is the mechanism that enables the hovering in the first place.
Checks out. If you can push away a bullet you can push away the ground.
reminds me of one of david webers series, where the spaceships had an intertialess drive system that bent space to move the ships in any direction, which as a helpful side effect also doubled as really, really strong shields, to the point that they started hurling anti matter bombs at them just to break through the shielding on larger capital ships because it got to the point where regular old nukes just didnt do much to them
I'm imagining a kind of hamster ball made of energy shield, lol
This tank: _goes over a mine_
Tank: I think I went over a rock
First thing I thought of was the hovertanks from Battlezone 1998, love seeing those clips pop up throughout the video. That game is still awesome 25 years later.
You should join us for games!
The Strv-103 or S-tank actually wasn't really slower to take aim with than its contemporaries with turrets, especially if going from moving to a standstill and then aiming. IIRC it was something like 3-4 seconds from driving full speed forwards, to having stopped and swung the gun around to hit a target that was a certain number of degrees to the side. Stabilisation tech of the time was insufficient to make it possible to fire accurately on the move anyway, so the limitation of not having a turret wasn't significant. Especially when considering it was developed very specifically for the terrain and geography of Sweden, as well as the Swedish doctrine of the time, which was defensive. Hide behind terrain, pop up, showing a tiny sliver of hull, take your shot, and scoot back, relocating to the next defensive position before enemy fire can be trained on you.
Your comment on the technical aspect is correct, but sweddish tank doctrine was not to have tanks act as a tank destroyers. Swedish tank doctrine was identical between the strv 103s and centurions. They were used highly aggressively and meant for the offense. When the 103 was created, the removal of the turret was not seen as a compromise but as removing a flaw of turreted tank (high profile) by compensating with new technologies. The first mission of all swedish tanks was to attack air and sea landing zones to drive the enemy back before they could establish themselves on swedish soil
I often use hover tanks as a quick, rapid-deployment craft. They can intercept and dispatch small threats, even deploying anchors to clamp onto the ground and fire heavy munitions. They're perfect for blitz-style attacks and as fast APCs.
However, they also make poor standoff attack vehicles. They aren't fragile, but there are other vehicles for slower sieges that can work better and, more likely, survive in prolonged conflict.
Frankly, I'm just amazed that I'm not the only one even aware that Battlezone exists.
Considering the theme music to this channel is from Battlezone II, I'm not entirely suprised he featured them
Do you still play?
Was Hooji being held at gunpoint the whole time? This feels very out of the ordinary for him
Hooji's "how to tell your friends you have been kidnapped, without letting your kidnappers know you are calling for help" moment? 🤣
I mean, you can still try to use the "don't be hit" rule of the survivability onion.
using clips from battlezone is a blast from the past. i grew up making walkers do barrel rolls using the earthquake.
Do you still have interest in playing battlezone?
@calebsmith6160 well there's a remake of it on steam. I played it some
I think a key concept to remember when discussing sci-fi tech is to remember that authors can always set up special tech handwavium to explain why stuff works in their settings.
In a mech setting I'm creating, there's a specific type of gravity manipulation tech called repulsors that enable cheap hover-vehicles. The repulsors do some interaction with a planets gravity and surface beneath them to make the vehicle hover. This effect can only lift less than ten feet or provide jumps. The effect makes it almost impossible for the vehicle to touch the ground, like two powerful magnets of the same polarity being pushed together.
So that's why human rebel militia can have cheapish hoverbikes and mechs can skate across the ground for traversal.
I always liked that idea, that the tank isn't really "hovering" per say but being pushed away from the ground due to magnetic manipulation. It would probably be less power consuming than constantly creating a "thrust" that keeps the tank off the ground.
One of my very first video games was a PC game called "Thunder Brigade" which was a very early Hovertank game. The Battlezone 98 Game looks very similar. It had a great setting and story about two space colonies going to war eith each other after being cut off from earth, before earth shows up near the end to pacify them both.
THANK YOU. I loved that game. Messed around with the scenario creator a bunch.
For a game that was essentially a tech demo (iirc), they put a lot of effort into it.
@@LouseGrouse The soundtrack for it was amazing. I also messed around with the senario maker too. In particular i remember turning the volcano in the middle of lava map into a foretress.
I was continually reminded of how Vehicles in Battletech operate during this video. While 8-12 meter tall Battlemechs are srill the focus in Battletech, combined arms is very much a possibility.
When designing a unit in Battletech if you want to reach a given speed you need an Engine of a certian power output rating. Wheeled, Wing in Ground Effect, and Hover vehicles can subtract from this rating on account of their more efficent *Motive Type.* the downside is that such vehicles can "sideslip" if going too fast and there is terrain they are unable to traverse without crashing
David Drake sends his regards.
Came here to recruit for the Slammer's. Combat cars got chewed up last Op.
Hammer's Slammer's is some classic stuff indeed.
The Gold Standard for hover tanks.
Another idea would be some kind of hybrid. It uses hover to tavel longer distances quickly and relocate, but then uses tracks to fight
David Weber's Mutineers Moon had that. There was a lot of gravity manipulating tech, so the "tanks' had full flight systems and only deployed their treads when they got to the battlespace... and also because they had jammers to counter the gravity manipulation tech, making some rather nasty weapons useless.
H. Beam Piper did that in _Uller Uprising_ (1952), with "air-tanks ... going off contragravity and lumbering on treads to fire their 90mm rifles."
I’d just like to thank you for putting the names of the games and media on screen… so many creators don’t bother and then you see something cool, or a game you’d like to try and you have to try to figure it out or ask for help.
It’s really nice having the names up there, and I really appreciate the effort.
Thank you!
One of the vehicles in the video seems to show a good solution: a remote-controlled recoilless rifle. There'd be no recoil to knock the hovertank sideways and the turret:hull mass ratio would be low so it wouldn't take much steering power to correct the torque reaction when it turned. Mauser produced a recoilless 30mm autocannon called the RMK-30 ages ago now, the intended mounts being helicopters and very light fighting vehicles like the Wiesel. Combine that with vertically-launched missile, which, being low-density, take advantage of the hovercraft's large footprint:weight ratio, and you might have a useful vehicle.
You have no idea how much I appreciate the inclusion of the hover tank from Sgt. Bilko. I'm impressed you know about it!
Thank you for all the Battlezone footage. Good times.
You should join us for games! We play battlezone many times throughout the week
@@calebsmith6160 Im about 20 years out of practice. Gimmie a minute to beat the campaign again. I also just got the sequel on sale on steam
With enough Savavna Masters you can conquer any opponent.
Now we talk! I always loved to throw some Saladin into the mix. :D
I feel like something that gets overlooked is how easy they are to repair, especially in the field. A tank crew might be able to do a quick fix on their tracks when they break but a hover tank? Kind of a tall order I reckon.
There is a point that was not adressed in this video, but was in the movies Sgt. Bilko (0:18 and specifically at 4:25):
The gun's recoil mitigation sistem.
On a normal tank, it's job is to tranfer the energy to the turret and chassi, so it will be absorbed by the ground. In a vehicule that does not contact the ground it will be useless; in fact, it is even worse than useless, it is detrimental. Without the friction of the ground, the recoil recuperator would act as a spring-loaded inercial hammer, kicking the tank back even harder.
Sure, you can handwave an "inercial dampening" or whatever on a low sci-fi setting, but for hard sci-fi there is variety of options already available IRL: recoiless guns, kinetic missiles (they are very cool), standart missiles, laser guns (a little further to the future), reactive propulsion sistems.
I think that pitch-only turret manipulation makes a lot of sense on hover-tanks. If they’re able to rotate on the spot, and able to strafe a bit, then they can fire on the move without yaw, because they can just drive diagonally/laterally and face the enemy.
Admittedly yaw+pitch control will always be great, but if there was ever a tank that didn’t need it, it’d be a tank that can strafe.
A sci fi series called "hammers slammers" written by an actual ex armoured cav trooper had hovertanks, the logic was that with virtually unlimited power generated by cold fusion reactors you could use an air cushion to achieve even more distributed ground pressure than tracks. Thus many of the heaviest MBTs used hover technology.
1950s War of The Worlds used three beams of energy that acted as legs.
Probably one of my favorite war machines with awesome tension building sound effects and a ton of rotoscoped energy weapons.
Appreciate the generous amount of Battlezone footage :>
Please join us for games! We would love to have you!
@@calebsmith6160 thank you but I'll have to pass, sorry. 😅
In the end, I think it comes down to what other technologies exist and the planned use of the tank. Not everything can be super specialized though. It is very expensive to make lots of specialized equipment and have logistics supply lines to keep them all operational.
On the other hand, advancements in construction, machining, repair, etc. might make it cheap and easy enough to make it viable.
A hovering weapon platform might be better to forget the "tank" aspect as a whole too. There is a lot to be considered and tgat you can do.
I think more important than forgetting the tank aspect is realizing that the "Main Battle" in front of some tanks has a reason and that these are not the only tanks.
@@DieselsVideos the "main battle" in main battle tank means that it's the most standard tank of an armed force. Light, medium, and heavy tanks only really existed due to technological limitations of their day, and I'm willing to bet that advancements in the future will keep the practice of having one type of tank going.
@@moekitsune Ah you're right. Should be more careful by discussing in a foreign language. I forgot that in english a tank is only what sums up under "KampfPANZER" not "LuftabwehrPanzer", "TransportPANZER", "ArtilleriePANZER", "BergePANZER", all sorts of "RadPANZER" and so on. But if we take this narrow english definition every discussion about hovertanks is baseless. Because then it's only a tank if it has tracks. Then we are only tanking about "HAFV"s Hover Armored Fighting Vehicles and where these maybe can replace or support real tanks with tracks.
@@moekitsune no, light tanks still exist. main battle tanks are just re-branded medium tanks. the idea of the universal tank, the orginal idea for mainbattle tanks, actually died off pretty quickly as it requires a specific comparative level of various technologies. its simply too hard to have a tank be a heavy tank, a medium tank and a light tank.
technological advancement is likely to result in more diversification, complexity has become increaseingly cheap and there is no reason for this trend to stop, and circumstances for getting a well balanced tank are only going to become less likely.
infact the current public dirrection NATO tanks are going is diversification. they are expecting to replace current MBTs with 3 or 4 different more specilized vehicles by 2050. and as already mentioned light tanks are still a thing, so its a turn towards a more diverse set of vehicles.
@@DieselsVideos there is no set english definition. wheeled tanks is a term in english.
This channel is exactly what i ve been having in my head as i write my own hard science fiction ❤ love it very much
For low-G environments, it _is_ very important that there _is_ a (lot of) atmosphere.
If you can blow air down, you can't lift up the tank.
Unless you use anti-gravity sci-fi, but then you might as well go for a plane instead.
Alternatively, you can use rocket motors, but at that point it's just another spacecraft.
The Hover MLRS from the Command and Conquer series has always been my favorite example of a hover tank. A high mobility AGTM carrier that complements GDI's slower armor by raiding from unexpected directions or skirmishing with the traditionally higher-mobility brotherhood around the flanks of a battle makes it feel like it's filling a very important tactical niche in the command and conquer setting.
Hey thanks for featuring Battlezone 98, I was in one of your clips. Great game!
As for hovertanks encountering less resistance and being faster than wheeled or tracked vehicles, that leads to another possible benefit. If the excess speed is not necessary for the vehicle to perform its job, you could put lower power, more efficient engines in the hovertank, resulting in reduced operating costs and/or longer range.
Except that the hover system itself is consuming power to accomplish what the suspension of a conventional tank is doing passively.
I know we're trying not to overlap hover tanks with aircraft. But if a hover tank could utilize the ground effect, it would become more efficient while in motion than hovering in place.
@@erikschaal4124 That only applies to aerodynamic lift from wings operating within ground effect. If they are using skirts or vectored thrust to hover (It's a combat hovercraft), then they are already exploiting the ground effect but not in a way where horizontal movement would help. If they use space magic to hover then ground effect probably isn't relevant. You might add wings to benefit from it and reduce the load on the static lift while moving but it seems like a horrible trade off for a tank.
Also there is very rarely a point where you actually want to go faster in a ground vehicle, because even a hover tank would have a certain maximum speed just due to crew safety reasons (if it doesn't, then it's just a plane/helicopter again), and if you're actually in a situation where you have a large flat open area to get up to full speed, congrats you're now in the second worst place any vehicle could be, right out in the open with no cover at all
@@KevinSmithGeo If you add space magic to make ground effect irrelevant you get an air- or spacecraft. So it's a very fine line
Finally a video title that affirms my worldviews
The hovering mechanism is what gets me though. If it isn’t just an engine for flying at arbitrary altitudes, it’s gotta rely on ground effect, and that’s a fine line to tread unless you have a skirt. Being on an airless body further complicates things, you have to generate that thrust by using reaction mass directly. Maybe there’s a setting with a moon that has an extreme magnetic field, but I’ve not seen one.
Also now I’ve got the 08th MS team OP in my head.
Another point for hull mounted armament. By laying it as a spinal mount you can get a much larger main gun without increasing the profile of the vehicle. There’s a reason most of the mid-century tank destroyers used the layout. Makes even more sense if you have something as maneuverable as a hover tank.
0:49 hey its Brigador! That game really doesn't get enough attention. Its a near perfect 'mech' game with great music, vehicle designs, and world building
"On the other hand" is always good, especially when you wrap it all back up so well.
I do want to take one issue with an assertion in this video, and that is the notion that video games hovertanks are usually turretless for the sake of gameplay differentiation versus a normal tank. I believe it's actually more a UI issue that leads to this, to simplify the gameplay of a hovertank to make them more accessible.
Most humans already find "tank controls" clumsy and unintuitive, and adding another axis of movement to that on top of an independent turret would likely feel frustratingly "uncontrollable". In addition, for games meant to for a console audience, there are only so many buttons on a controller to budget between movement controls and other functions. And so with all this in mind, hovertanks end up being given essentially a variation of normal FPS controls and regular tanks get the more typical "tanklike" control scheme, and the gameplay differences are driven from this choice rather than the other way around.
"A fine line to TREAD between hover-tank and aircraft"
I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE!
Id love to see a new spacedock analysis of the Borg; their ships, weapons, their tactics, history, and mentality.
That Moon Dust Problem is a interesting problem I think I have not heard mentioned or even tackled in a lot of situations.
But I do feel like Hovertanks are primarily a parade vehicle with a few special applications. Hoverbikes and Hovertrucks, on the other hand....
You should also consider mines. Depending on the type, they need the enemy vehicle to either make direct contact with them, or be really close to the ground with their juicy parts.
Another potential advantage of hovertanks over other vehicles is that (setting permitting) they can more easily cross water and even take place in naval combat.
I think of this mostly because of those giant swarms of Aeon and Seraphim T1 hovercraft from Supreme Commander that come out onto the water and wreck fleets.
"Tanks, I just ride em I don't know what makes em work." --Oddball
Another field a hover tank/IFV would be well suited for: Amphibious assaults. A vehicle coming in at 130kph rather than 13kph is a huge difference
Based. I can't wait to design a hover tank for my IP. The Low Gravity environment is a fantastic consideration for its origin.
Just be carefull. Low gravity means other elements or less air to use for traditional hovering solutions. In Low gravity / low air preassure envrionments you would need some space magic hover technology. but that should not make hovering easy enogh to just make an air-/spacecraft.
Depends on how they hover, if it's antigravity then dandy but if it's anything else then they'll still set off mines, stir up dust, and be subject to bad terrain because to lift something you need to press the air down equal to its mass. 50 ton tank goes up, 50 tons of air pressure goes down.
i *love* when they show of some Space Engineers, just makes a grown man smile
The talk of fixed guns on hovertanks just had me waiting for the VS magrider to show up. And it did.
Im kinda disappointed we got the BF4 tank but not the PAC hovetank from BF2142
I have fond memories of Battlezone. Great to see it used here.
The earliest *distinct in my memory* hovertank was probably Hovertank from Battlefield 2142... *it was so long ago, but still cool!* Ah, I still remember downloading from old Torrent this game and enjoying singleplayer, even if relativly not that long!
The huver tank in BF4 was AWESOME!! so much fun to use!
> "Just remember to stick it (turret) on top so it can aim over things."
Look at you Vanu Main Battle Tank.
Are you going to do a separate video on hover mechanics? Those can make a big difference in the advantages and disadvantages of a hover tank. I can think of a few from realistic (static hover skirt, dynamic ground effect, really big fans or jets without skirts, or rockets in space) to speculative (superconducting magnetic levitation, repulsor?) to imaginary (gravity cancellation, anti-gravity, enhanced gravitational attraction to a mass overhead like a moon or space station or mothership).
The mechanics can make a differences in how it works with the ground. A more balanced sort of system for fiction or gameplay might be some sort of repulsor tech that allows it to have friction with the ground while allowing it to spread out its mass so that it can use a turret, but it might not allow it to traverse water which can move out of the way like the Red Sea, which means it might work in mudd, but the mud would still be displaced but more evenly than tracks. A more realistic system might be more like a hover and/or ground effect vehicle with no or minimal armor and a big gun: a hover tank-destroyer that can fly high enough to clear minefields and fast enough to surprise infantry with ATGMs and fast enough to evade drones and artillery.
Now that I think about it, an electrostatic suspension system might be practical on a low-gravity, no-atmosphere environment. Like charges repel, so if you charge the hull of the tank and the dust under it to the same polarity, the hull would be repelled. In solid rock environments, this wouldn't work as well, because the charge would equalize through the rock, but in dusty/powdery environments, the particles would retain charge and repel each other, creating a charged particle cushion between the tank and the surface.
You'd need fantastically high voltages, which is challenging but not insurmountable. A greater problem would be electron leakage into vacuum sapping your power away. You could mitigate this by insulating the tank's top and sides, but you'd still lose quite a lot of energy even when stationary, never mind the energy lost to charged particles left in your wake.
Hovertanks have some major flaws.
1. You can't go up and down hills with them, unless they basically fly.
Anything using ground effect can't do that if part of the vehicle is way above the ground.
Hovercraft skirts won't work well on a steep slope; they'll lose too much compression or spill air. Hovercraft deal with small slopes by having those big soft skirts, and these come with their own problems- covering them in armor would defeat their purpose.
Magnet-repulsion systems will hit the cube law, in terms of power input vs. output; it's sooooooo much more energy lifting a hovertank 10 feet up than 1 inch.
Magical super-jets / rockets / plasma engines / etc. that produce massive thrust will work in all aspects, but then you have an armored "tank" that's really just a VTOL with a ton of armor.
How about Magical Tech Stuff like anti-gravity engines? One presumes these also suffer from the cube law issues, but maybe not, because agrav would have a relationship with a very large mass (the planet). But frankly, if you have agrav, why do you have hovertanks? IDK, something something about sensors, handwave, etc.
2. Turrets wouldn't have much effect, torque-wise; their mass is considerably less than the tank itself. That's not a real problem.
The real problem is that the amount of energy involved is mind-blowing. Ground-based tanks have struggled with this problem since they were invented; tracks aren't efficient, but they spread the ground pressure of the tank out, allowing it to cross soft ground. Hovertanks would have even more problems, because while they're spreading the ground pressure better (in theory) they must completely defeat gravity every moment they're in motion.
David Drake got it right by insisting that his hovertanks have a fusion powerplant; it'd take that kind of energy to make it work. What he didn't deal with (largely because it wasn't known when he wrote Hammer's Slammers) is that fusion plants aren't clean; they're quite radioactive- a problem nobody's really gotten around yet, and that shows no sign of going away when they're finally operating as a viable power source. So there's a major problem here with shielding, etc. That's a lot of mass.
3. The S-Tank hovertank isn't completely insane, for the same reason the S-Tank wasn't insane. For a defensive hovertank, or a hovertank used for very long-range fighting where side-shots would be pretty rare, or a hovertank that could turn as rapidly as a modern turret, it'd actually be a great idea. If you're putting out the kind of force needed to make the tank hover, you have the control tech necessary to unbalance the forces involved and turn pretty rapidly, one would think.
4. However, hovertanks would still have a major problem: acceleration for moving forwards / backwards would be awful. Remember, you're using enormous amounts of energy keeping it from touching the ground. None of that force is moving it in any particular direction. For small motions or turning, it's OK; just unbalance the forces briefly. For long-range movement, it's a no-go; you need another force to propel it.
Let's say your hovertank uses magnetic repulsion. OK, so now it's a giant electromagnet powered by a fusion reactor. To get it moving forwards, though... you'll need a huge jet engine or a rocket or something. Maybe the magnets turn on and off super-rapidly and pull / push it along, or something. David Drake's version used tilted fans; that would not really work well. Modern hovercraft use huge propellers in one or more pairs, so that they can turn and go backwards.
No matter how you do it, there are huge forces involved... and none of of them are remotely healthy to be around, if you're friendly infantry, vehicles, even buildings!
5. Hovertanks using conventional atmospheric forces like jets, hovercraft-like pressure, etc., are on a totally different level in terms of the damage they'd do to everything around them. This is in addition to the problems outlined in 4, above. A real-world hovercraft pushing around lots of tonnage is seriously dangerous to be near (as well as unbelievably loud) but it's a big mass spread over a comparatively large surface area. A tank? You're trying to concentrate the mass into the smallest area possible; this comes with serious caveats. A real-world hovertank would probably destroy nearby objects quite readily by throwing stones from the edges of the skirts; we're talking about forces 10-20X more powerful than the downdraft from a big helicopter concentrated in a much smaller area- the velocities implied are pretty huge.
you're killing me with the background music. here i go playing battlezone 2 again
ground based vacuum units... very interesting idea. hover tanks as fast attack craft like the GDI sandstorm and it's hover MLRS are still my favs with the clone wars game fighter tanks in second/third? place. I guess i've personally a fan of the AAT too. those things had absurd numbers of weapons and were purpose built as frontal seige weapons to put as much fire power down range as fast as possible and could NOT take a hit :D
David Drake (RIP) had it figured out long ago. (Hammer's Slammers series)
Recoil and inertia, every action has an opposite and equal reaction. Unless a hover tank has some way of bracing each time it fires its big gun, it's going to have to spend a lot of time repositioning after each use of its primary armament.
Thats why you’ll find most hovertanks use energy weapons or recoilless rifles
Born too soon for hover tanks, born too late for armoured warfare... born just in time for BattleZone.
A turret is a pretty major weak point. If you eliminate the turret you can automatically get a stronger basic structure, lower cost, accommodate more powerful weapons and thicker armor, have a lower profile, and fewer points of failure. If a hovertank can rotate quickly and precisely, even if not quite as quick as a turret, I could see a fixed weapon being the clear choice. The fact that you don't need a turret might be one of the major upsides of the hovertank, especially on those airless worlds where any moving part is likely to fail due to the dust.
Yeah, a turretless hovertank could work reasonably well as high mobility self-propelled artillery.
The energy requirement to power a hover tank will be many times higher than a tracked tank. Also it would have to be anti gav to work in low or no atmosphere. and the Gforce when monoveuvring would be rib crushing. Turning in a circle at speed would be like turning in an aircraft long and wide.
I very much appreciate the inclusion of the clip from Sgt Bilko.
Thumbs up for the unexpected cameo by someone's terrifying Sonic the Hedgehog OC fanart.
The Vanu Magrider (from Planetside 2, appears in video around 1:43) is an interesting compromise to the turret issue, though probably for game design reasons first.
The main gun is a "casemate" forward-firing gun, but the secondary weapon is on a turret (like every other faction's MBT), which is much lighter and shouldn't significantly interfere with the vehicle's momentum, fire control, etc. The secondary turret (by default, a heavy machine gun) can respond quickly to infantry, light vehicles, and aircraft that could easily outmaneuver or overwhelm a casemate-only tank. It would also allow that quick response *without* giving the crew severe motion sickness. The main gun would likely be the weapon pointed at fortifications, enemy armor, etc., and those are targets you want your front armor facing anyways. The main rear-facing thrusters in combination with the fixed gun probably minimize the disruptive effects of recoil.
Recoil. Ah, that's why they'd mount the gun as centrally as possible. The torque from recoil above center-of-mass applied across 360 degrees of travel and varied further by elevation...that would make a very inaccurate tank, wouldn't it? No matter how well the thrusters and computers make up for it, the recoil on a vehicle without the support of terrain or grip would be adding another variable to accuracy, and that's the last thing you want to add.
Ramble conclusion: Casemate hovertank with light turret is a strong combination.
I've loved hovertanks since I drove Magrider in Planetside 2 at the fisrt time. It also has a fixed gun that can aim only up and down. That MBT was my favorite one, with Prowler being second (2 guns go PEW-PEW).
One quite justifiable omission is the fact that _hovercraft_ tanks wouldn't work in an airless environment. This isn't particularly relevant, however, since in most cases, if you're making up science fiction, you can make up antigravity or contragravity tech, or something similar, to produce a hovering vehicle that doesn't use an air cushion.
I missed the original video, but something far more relevant I'd have liked to have heard mentioned is that _stopping or steering_ a ground vehicle that isn't in contact with the ground is quite difficult. In one of the silliest books he ever published, _Profiles of the Future_ (1963), Arthur C. Clarke has some surprisingly good counter-arguments against the future ubiquity of hovering or flying passenger cars. Most of those would apply, or perhaps be seen to apply, to hovertanks. One workaround would be a sort of "active inertial damper" that could mimic friction and road interlock, or even allow the tank to move in even weirder or cooler ways.
Using Gundam is always an interesting choice when talking about tanks vs mechs.
When the Zeon created the mobile suit and the Zaku they dominated space warfare but once they landed on Earth with gravity they had a lot of trouble so created the weird Magella Attack
tank/artillery/attack aircraft.
While trying to build a replacement for the slow lumbering Zaku's in the hovering Dom.
one thing to note on turrets and just to be clear turrets are great. a thing to note on full degree turrets is that a lot of internals have to work around the turret mechanism while a much shorter firing cone can have more systems behind it or just a lower profile craft
"Yeah, we stole some parts from Sgt. Hatred's hover tank, which is cool, but broken now."
The other consideration of being turretless is that a hover tank would be higher off the ground than a tracked vehicle so having a turret on top of that would make it harder use gullies or low banks to screen your movement from observation and fire. The same reason why the design of American tanks like the M 60, with commander machine turrets on top of the main turret, never really caught on.
I play From the Depths, a design-your-own weapons simulator. Any weapon that operate on physical principles (ie not pure magic) can be built. In the game's meta, fast aircraft rely entirely on maneuver for survivability, helicopters have medium-low survivability and excels at shooting down with a height advantage. Hovertanks are extremely good, they can evade a number of threats using rapid maneuver, and excels at shooting up. Land tanks are the sturdiest things that can be made, but loses out on rapid strategic maneuver, and being able to run away from a bad situation.
Being able to turn the entire vehicle to quickly face the enemy is an advantage, it means you always have the strongest armor facing the threat. Of course you need to rely on other forces to avoid being flanked.
I imagine in a realistic scenario, hovertanks would be a form of cavalry / reinforcement unit, where enemy disposition and locations are known, and can rapidly support other types of forces to achieve a breakthrough.
Yet another Primaris Space Marine W
The STRV103 was only slow in your video, i've seen those things whip 90 degrees in a second or two.
I'm personally fond of how webcomic _Schlock Mercenary_ handled tanks. Basically a compact blob of power, propulsion, weapons, armor and a one person crew compartment, a tank was also close air support, space escort fighter and on one occasion time machine.
I really like how in Appleseed the tanks used hover as transport and it put 8 wheels down for combat.
A couple advantages of casemate vehicles which a hover tank would be able to use to one extent or another is the lower profile, reducing the area the enemy has to aim at and making it easier to hide for ambush-type vehicles, and focusing all the armour(Or shields) in one area, reducing weight compared to a turret and upper glacis, these were two of the reasons the S-Tank was turretless as in practice it was designed more as an ambush-type tank destroyer so the slower traverse speed on the gun wasn't as big of an issue. While not a reason for the S-Tank, multiple other casemate vehicles in history have made use of the ability to mount comparably larger guns on the same sized platform and increase reload speed by providing more room for the loaders or autoloaders. For hover tanks specifically, an ATGM carrier design would probably be quite good, fast in while low to the ground, reducing chance of being detected or hit, launch a barrage of vls/at an angle(think Swingfire) top attack missiles from behind cover and get out of dodge asap for rearmament.
You'll likely see helicopters and tanks merge into w/e this hovertank becomes, assuming there's some sort of antigrav tech that makes it feasible.
Tanks are kind of in a weird position right now in our own world because munitions exist which render the tanking part of the tank obsolete, but if we ever get to the point where defensive abilities match the offensive ones currently fielded, standard ground tanks will once again be useful again as a damage soaking combatant.
Loved the Hammer's Slammers stories!
For a fiction setting with well developed hover tanks and tactics, I recommend David Drake’s “Hammer’s Slammers” series
Glad to see the additional look at the concept of a hover tank. These would be amazing tanks. The closes thing I can see on Earth would be a Hovercraft tank but it would just require to much power to lift it unless you went with really really light armor on it. Granted I would still be interested in that concept as a drone like tank on a modern battle field.
the closest thing is helicopters
I'm assuming that by 'hover' we mean anti-gravity of some form rather than an air cushioned vehicle.
It's possible that whatever technology is required for this would have no moving parts to keep lubricated or wear out which would be an advantage and maintenance may be easier. As well as being able to handle a wide variety of terrain they could also transition from one to another easily. They are the ultimate amphibious vehicle that does not suffer from the usual weakness of requiring gently sloping banks to exit the water. They may also be able to double up as in shore patrol boats because of this.
I still think that a turret is a good idea just in case the drive is disabled and the vehicle is forced to land. It would be nice to still be able to turn the gun to face in directions other than the one the vehicle ends up pointing in.
Being able to strafe side to side is my personal favorite reason why hovertanks are good. It certainly helps in tight areas like cities or forests.
There's an added benefit for hover tanks, depending on the type of hover propulsion used.
In the WH40K book Dark Imperium, a bunch of Traitor Space Marines encounter Repulsor grav-tanks that enter the scene from orbit, using their anti-grav drives to slow their descent. One of the Chaos Marines, Iron Warriors for the curious, promptly grabs a melta bomb and dives underneath to plant it on the underside of the hull. The Repulsors ... do nothing, because the sheer amount of force require to counteract the weight of the tank and keep it hovering promptly squishes the Chaos Marine flat.
The text also makes mention of how their gravitic engines crushes the sand beneath them "to a glassy shine".
I personly think that hovering tech would fit very well with APCs because they only need to get to thier destination fast and drop the soilders inside and usually doesn't carry heavy weapons. But dropship and gunship are still a thing so idk