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The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

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Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#111

Post by crocodiletears »

dbspin wrote: post #92
crocodiletears wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I believe the US should withdraw from NATO, and many of our other foreign military engagements. We could service our population's worst off so much better if we cut our global footprint to the bare minimum required to secure our most core interests (napkin math, but at ~150 billion usd, overseas bases make up ~20% of the DoD's budget[0]). Even reallocating those expenses by a quarter would be a tremendous…

Do you genuinely believe that whats holding back spending on social services in the US is the necessity of maintaining its military? That seems naive in the extreme.

It isn't at all, however Americans fixated upon some mythical conception of state fiscal responsibility will find the expansion of certain programs more politically palatable if accompanied with roughly commensurate cuts in other areas.

Reducing America's global footprint would also likely have the effect of producing a massive global political realignment, as nations in an increasingly multipolar world would need to adjust their security policies in order to face the potential challenges of existing without a global hegemony interested in fixing national borders and guaranteeing the secure flow of trade good worldwide.

This resulting uncertainty would, I believe increase the relative value of maintaining a presence large internally stable (relatively speaking) markets like the NAFTA, while reducing the viability of complex, brittle supply chains dependent on outsourcing the production of many individual components overseas.

With companies increasingly incentivised to produce where they sell their good, the power disparity between laborers and corporate entities would be reduced, as their labor force and their consumer base would be either the same, or intermingled. With workers better able to negotiate terms with their employers, rather than be forced to increase benefits for their workers, companies might find it more expedient to outsource the provision of a social safety net to federal and state governments through lobbying efforts.

None of this, of course fixes the general administrative incompetency of the American government. But it also sets the stage for a greater latitude of internal reforms by simplifying the machine that's in motion, as well as reducing its number of foreign dependents.

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#112

Post by wtracy »

Animats wrote: post #23

Oh, that thing. Back when I was into legged locomotion, I found out more about that machine than I ever wanted to know. The designer was really into four-bar linkages. The leg mechanism is set up so that one actuator moves the leg in X, one in Y, and one in Z, with a four-bar linkage encoding that into the leg position. This simplifies the control problem, while complicating the mechanics. I suspect they wanted to be…

> It could only walk on flat ground. It was supposed to be able to cross a ditch, but that was manual.

Well, now I'm wondering what they needed eleven onboard minicomputers for. How much route planning intelligence do you really need if you're operating over identical terrain every time?

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#113

Post by hguant »

na85 wrote: post #109
melling wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, a single M1 Abrams tank costs over $4 million, and we have 9000 of them. DARPA R&D money always feels like money better spent than a lot of other military spending. We get future dividends, often civilian.

I dunno, when you consider the design intent of the Abrams (operating environment, crew protection, etc.) 4 million seems like a reasonable price tag to me. Whether the US Army needs 9000 tanks is a separate discussion though.

US DoD had as a strategic goal the ability to fight and win a two theater global conflict against peer or near peer nations up until a few years ago, when it was changed to fight and win one theater, while not losing the other (holding ground until the other theater is won).

If you're looking at needing to fight China and Russia, at the same time, over an extended period of time (2+ years), having 9,000 tanks in your back pocket seems like a good idea.

Also, it's a jobs/pork barrel program. Congress keeps ordering tanks that the Army puts into storage because the M1 is a beast of a machine that keeps a lot of people employed. The US manufacturing base is pretty depleted, and ordering tanks you don't necessarily need is a good way to keep the skills and tool chains you could need in the future around.

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#114

Post by hiddencost »

momokoko wrote: post #101

These are general purpose US funding of research which is done under the "Military spending" banner for various reasons. I understand how people outside the US might not understand this, but it always surprises me complaints about "military spending" from educated Americans that don't understand these are actually enormous investments by the US government into general applied science. The Army did not spend millions…

This is garbage nonsense.

You could just as easily manage this funding process somewhere else with different priorities. We've been moving university research funding out of the NSF towards defense budgets quite aggressively over the last two decades, and it's quite palpable how shifting control of this funding from pure science oversight to military oversight has reshaped priorities.

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#115

Post by momokoko »

hiddencost wrote: post #114
momokoko wrote: post #101

These are general purpose US funding of research which is done under the "Military spending" banner for various reasons. I understand how people outside the US might not understand this, but it always surprises me complaints about "military spending" from educated Americans that don't understand these are actually enormous investments by the US government into general applied science. The Army did not spend millions…

This is garbage nonsense. You could just as easily manage this funding process somewhere else with different priorities. We've been moving university research funding out of the NSF towards defense budgets quite aggressively over the last two decades, and it's quite palpable how shifting control of this funding from pure science oversight to military oversight has reshaped priorities.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/wtos-first-ruling-national-sec...

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#116

Post by na85 »

hguant wrote: post #113
na85 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, when you consider the design intent of the Abrams (operating environment, crew protection, etc.) 4 million seems like a reasonable price tag to me. Whether the US Army needs 9000 tanks is a separate discussion though.

US DoD had as a strategic goal the ability to fight and win a two theater global conflict against peer or near peer nations up until a few years ago, when it was changed to fight and win one theater, while not losing the other (holding ground until the other theater is won). If you're looking at needing to fight China and Russia, at the same time, over an extended period of time (2+ years), having 9,000 tanks in your…

>Also, it's a jobs/pork barrel program. Congress keeps ordering tanks that the Army puts into storage because the M1 is a beast of a machine that keeps a lot of people employed. The US manufacturing base is pretty depleted, and ordering tanks you don't necessarily need is a good way to keep the skills and tool chains you could need in the future around.

Sure, that's nothing new to anyone who's familiar with Cold War economics. The Soviet Union was able to keep its economy crawling along without sanctioning free enterprise by making enormous investments into collectively-owned (i.e. state-owned) products like nuclear submarines and combat aircraft. Turns out you can achieve much the same goal but also benefit the people if you put that effort into state-funded infrastructure. Whether the US body politic will support reducing M1 Abrams production in favour of fixing the USA's crumbling infrastructure is again a separate discussion.

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#117

Post by jcims »

hutzlibu wrote: post #60
jcims wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A modern timber harvester run by a skilled operator is beautifully terrifying.

I once camped wild with a friend in the middle of a forest. The next morning there was sawing in the distance, no worries. Got closer and closer ... so we hurried to pack our things .. just in time to have our camping place vanished as it was in the path of destruction. I was not aware before how fast they could be. (and I don't know, if we just had bad luck, or he had fun messing us, but we were quite hidden)

That’s some nightmare fuel haha

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#118

Post by jcims »

Animats wrote: post #52
jcims wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite a few quadruped robots that use them for legs: https://youtu.be/2k5lOUGenkE

Now that's a more modern way to use a four-bar linkage. The ASV used it to simplify the kinematic problem, which is doing arithmetic with big steel connecting rods. That little quadruped is using it to get two degrees of freedom without the first actuator having to carry the mass of the second one.

Hey you might know this. Is there a term for using what effectively a differential gear arrangement to get two axes of motion as shown in the arm in this video (twice actually, for axes 2/3 and 4/5)?

https://youtu.be/ri8kwOCJnY8

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#119

Post by dmix »

Animats wrote: post #23

Oh, that thing. Back when I was into legged locomotion, I found out more about that machine than I ever wanted to know. The designer was really into four-bar linkages. The leg mechanism is set up so that one actuator moves the leg in X, one in Y, and one in Z, with a four-bar linkage encoding that into the leg position. This simplifies the control problem, while complicating the mechanics. I suspect they wanted to be…

Why didn't they also put wheels under the harvester for road travel?

I'm guessing that'd massively complicate things...

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#120

Post by skylanh »

gdubs wrote: post #70
hutzlibu wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About the timber harvester: I assume better here is meant from a economical perspective, because from a ecological perspective the walkers are superior, as they do not devestate the ground so much. But that is sadly not really a issue for most wood production, but I could imagine, with rising awareness for the forests, market demand for not so intrusive wood harvesting(along with advances in the field in general) cou…

Totally. I want that walker for my woodland, because it looks a lot less damaging to the soil (less soil disruption / compaction). The other thing is it would be nice for climbing to spots that don’t have easy road access. This way you can pick a few trees without devastating a whole area just to reach them.

Draft horse logging; we had it done in a sensitive woodland. It's not particularly fast, and it would be expensive.
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