Put this on a wheelchair, please.
Yeah if the weight isn’t excessive it be great for mobility, looks like it could also manage a stair mode with all those actuators.
Darpa Literally Reinvented the Wheel for Army Combat Vehicles
121–130 of 220 posts
Re: Darpa Literally Reinvented the Wheel for Army Combat Vehicles
#122As a military officer, I pray these never make it past Test and Evaluation. They took essentially one part and turned it into 1000 parts. Anyone who has seen what 20 year old Marines do with these machines, let alone what happens in war, will appreciate that this is a fantastically horrible idea in a war zone. I need high reliability, not high zoot. Let NASA have high zoot.
These were my thoughts also. During WW II German tanks were technologically superior to Russian tanks. However Russian tanks were easy to repair in the field and that was one of the reasons why Russian armour prevailed over German armour.
Due to simplicity Russian tanks were also cheaper and easier ti build. Which is why they outnumbered the Germans.
Re: Darpa Literally Reinvented the Wheel for Army Combat Vehicles
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it wasn't symmetrical it would be far more difficult to balance properly for when it's rotating in "wheel mode"
Yah the real trick is seeing that thing spin perfectly at highway speed.
The vehicle in the video was already wobbling around madly at low speed, as it is it’d be completely uncontrollable at highway speed and at whatever frequency the wheel and suspension resonate.
We add grams to balance wheels to prevent damage to suspensions etc, this thing seems just a dream for vehicle applications.
Re: Darpa Literally Reinvented the Wheel for Army Combat Vehicles
#124Isn't the advantage of using tracks supposed to be the increased surface area for traction and weight bearing? This seems to only slightly increase the surface area. It doesn't seem that this would have enough traction advantage to make the complexity worth it.
I feel like, having been really introduced in the WW1 tank, that tracks were mostly about keeping motive force over a much longer distance, which is almost but not quite surface area/traction. This still fails for that purpose though.
Tracks were useful to cross trenches too
Re: Darpa Literally Reinvented the Wheel for Army Combat Vehicles
#125As a military officer, I pray these never make it past Test and Evaluation. They took essentially one part and turned it into 1000 parts. Anyone who has seen what 20 year old Marines do with these machines, let alone what happens in war, will appreciate that this is a fantastically horrible idea in a war zone. I need high reliability, not high zoot. Let NASA have high zoot.
These were my thoughts also. During WW II German tanks were technologically superior to Russian tanks. However Russian tanks were easy to repair in the field and that was one of the reasons why Russian armour prevailed over German armour.
Define technically superior? The German tanks had massive reliability problems, not just ease of repair they broke down under non-striker's situations.
They were technical nightmares.
Re: Darpa Literally Reinvented the Wheel for Army Combat Vehicles
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
These were my thoughts also. During WW II German tanks were technologically superior to Russian tanks. However Russian tanks were easy to repair in the field and that was one of the reasons why Russian armour prevailed over German armour.
Due to simplicity Russian tanks were also cheaper and easier ti build. Which is why they outnumbered the Germans.
I can get another if I break it, so a clay cup trumps a grail. - Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, classical Urdu and Persian poet from the Mughal Empire
Re: Darpa Literally Reinvented the Wheel for Army Combat Vehicles
#127As a military officer, I pray these never make it past Test and Evaluation. They took essentially one part and turned it into 1000 parts. Anyone who has seen what 20 year old Marines do with these machines, let alone what happens in war, will appreciate that this is a fantastically horrible idea in a war zone. I need high reliability, not high zoot. Let NASA have high zoot.
What does zoot mean in this context? I'm not a native speaker.
Re: Darpa Literally Reinvented the Wheel for Army Combat Vehicles
#128With that amount of funding, they'd better.
Re: Darpa Literally Reinvented the Wheel for Army Combat Vehicles
#129As a military officer, I pray these never make it past Test and Evaluation. They took essentially one part and turned it into 1000 parts. Anyone who has seen what 20 year old Marines do with these machines, let alone what happens in war, will appreciate that this is a fantastically horrible idea in a war zone. I need high reliability, not high zoot. Let NASA have high zoot.
You could of course just carry a regular spare wheel or two. If your fancy trackwheel fails, unbolt it, and fit the regular spare wheel. You're still mobile, just without the ability to switch to track mode.
Never mind those folks with the rifles pointed at us! They’d never shoot someone whose busy changing a wheel!
Re: Darpa Literally Reinvented the Wheel for Army Combat Vehicles
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
20 year olds vary. As a 20 year old in the military, I was elbows deep in the B-61 Mod 10 replacing radioisotopic thermoelectric generators. Concession: id be damned if I told you that we didn’t goose the new guy bending over the explosives from time to time.
Nothing against 20-year-olds, I was one. I know what I did and what my friends did. I'm no angel. But if was running the engineering team on this, I'd make sure everyone had in their mind "the driver is maximally amped-up, young, and male.
What does them being male have to do with anything?
Are you implying that being male means that they must be reckless? Or that if they were female they would automatically be careful and gentle? Careful throwing around those negative stereotypes.
EDIT: The driver is likely to be getting shot at. This is going to be an order of magnitude more important than slight gender differences.