Yukonastan wrote:Imperializt Russia wrote:They actually do. Quite a lot, really.
The Abrams burns gallons an hour with engine idling.
Tracks still don't burn fuel when just sitting there, for example when the tank is shut down for whatever reason.
The Abrams is also one of a small handful of tanks with gas turbines, and is backed by the US. Now imagine you have a hovertank, with a large number of fans or ground jets. Imagine what that burns. Gallons per minute.
While a modern tracked vehicle (turbine or conventional engine) may be massively fuel-thirsty compared to other vehicles, they'd be relative lightweights compared to any hovering vehicle.
If you have a hovering vehicle based on a modern hovercraft (air cushion) system it would likely be the least thirsty of the possible options, but would still be incredibly impractical. The skirts would be a massive weakness, as well as the air intakes and forward propulsion fans/thrusters. It would be much more likely to be disabled by small arms fire, and would float around like an air-hockey puck when pushed by anything harder than a mild breeze.
If you were to go with a fan driven, fully hovering vehicle things would get exponentially worse. The amount of thrust needed to lift a tank weighing, say, 50 tons a few feet off the ground would be absolutely insane, and would require very large, very vulnerable fan or jet nacelles. The energy consumption would be positively mind numbing, as well, meaning that you would either have to fill most of the hull with fuel to keep it running for any length of time, or stick some kind of energy generating reactor in it. All of this would mean that your armor would be spread thin and awkwardly laid out, making your hovering tank an easy target for anything down to a basic AT rifle. Besides all this, it would suffer even more from the air-hockey puck problem, and would likely go flying off a good hundred feet in any direction when the main gun was fired.
If you want to go really sci-fi you could argue for the merits of a gravity manipulation system, but unless you're using 100% pure bullshitanium it will have just as many, if not more issues. The thing is that such a system would still be a massive energy hog, as the basic laws of the universe do not take a day off when you put enough science into something, and you're still causing a big heavy bit of metal to levitate several feet off the ground. Besides the same basic energy consumption issues, you'd also have to contend with the massive technological complexity of such a system. Tracks are fairly easy to fix, and it could be argued that most grunts should be able to fix a big fan to at least some degree, but in general one wouldn't consider most tank crews to be able to repair a massively complex gravitational lensing generator. Depending on the type of bullshitanium you fuel it with, you might be able to get away with not having such a system float around like the two other methods, but that's questionable at best.
While everyone else seems to have said it pretty well previously, I just wanted to get a bit of rant in on the subject.
So, in short, if you want a tank that flies, get an attack chopper, because hovering vehicles and tons of armor just don't mix well.
*Edit*
Whups, top of the page, looks like I owe everyone some military porn, right?
