OK, *this* one should present a bit of a challenge.
I know what it is; I just don’t hardly believe it.
DING! Survey says:
This … thing was a Bell Aerospace design for an armored hovercraft MX launcher. Dating from the late 1970’s or early 1980’s, I know it only from a single three-view included in a Bell report detailing their conceptually similar entry into the Small ICBM (i.e. “Midgetman”) launcher design contest, to show prior art. Performance and most details are at best fuzzy from the limited info. It’s equipped with a multitude of lift jets and propulsive jet engines… and a number of liquid fueled rocket engines, for reasons unexplored in the available information. Presumably for getting-the-hell-out-of-Dodge purposes, but a rocket powered hovertank is going to have a strictly limited range at whatever the hell it considers to be “high speed.” The oddest thing is that there are rockets on all sides… forward, back, side-to-side. Shrug.
Probably make a nifty model. Anybody interested?
16 Responses to “What is this… horrible, horrible monstrocity?”
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My first guess is some sort of Surface Effect ship.
My more educated guess is: the DARPA ISIS airship.
some kind of attack hovercraft ?
Michael — That’s what I though at first. Maybe. But from the schematic, it seems more of a space or high-altitude possibility.
It seems to be a mass of conflicting components, with lift fans and oxidizer tanks.
Obviously it’s an assault hovercraft for use on the moon in conjunction with Project Horizon.
The “Oxidizer Tan” gives it away. It’s the thing they paint folks on the “Jersey Shore” with.
Its a rocket propelled attack hovercraft.
It may sound silly,but is it that new stealth ship or a test vehicle for it?
It does look like one of the hovercraft landing pods off of that odd P-791 airship Lockheed was flying around:
http://www.maniacworld.com/super-blimp.html
I half think its a Hammer’s Slammers tank. As in monstrous fusion powered, death ray firing behemoths made out of iridium.
I made a spreadsheet with equations I found in a book on air cushion vehicle design, according to the spreadsheet a 170 metric ton hovercraft would need about half a million horsepower just to hover, let alone go anywhere.
> I half think its a Hammer’s Slammers tank.
Nope. It’s a “for real” design, but kind of a “they were smoking *what*?” design.
An aircushioned rocket launcher, perhaps for a sneak attack on the Red Menace from the north pole? Nobody sane would add rocket boost to a hovercraft, would they? . . . . or is the fuel and oxidiser tank system designed to make it total stealth, no heat or gas exhaust?
PS- great blog !
An ICBM armed armoured hovercraft?
Well, I can honestly say that I have never remotely thought of such a monster. It looks like one of the monster weapons that the Germans had on the drawing boards.
Any info on the “Sentry Interceptors”? ABMs?
It wouldn’t need much range if the phased array radar picked up incoming ICBM warheads, and the whole thing cut out sideways under rocket power before they could hit within range of it, while trying to hit them with the Sentry ABMs.
The Sentry ABM proposal was developed by McDonnell-Douglas to defend MX silos. Sentry itself was a improved Sprint developed by Martin-Marietta;
http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1983/1983%20-%200384.html
It was proposed in 1981 and canceled in 1983:
http://books.google.com/books?id=CQYAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=sentry+abm&source=bl&ots=foepMBXvpZ&sig=aa08FE-1tWxCI9LA7qYt-meTVRE&hl=en&ei=8me1TcjwDtGWtweMz4HqDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CDoQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=sentry%20abm&f=false
This was a Ball salesmans attempt to pry spending away from other basing measures like “scatterpack, rail mobile, deep basing, reverse inclination basing.”
I think this might be best known as alert ground dispersal, an alternative to Dense Pack:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_Pack
It costs a lot of money to have these fixed ground measures, tracks etc.. Ball probably tried to sell them on the notion that all they would have to do as prep would be to flatten out a grid or some other pattern out in the desert–a land based Boomer, as it were.
No construction costs, no trench-hoes, front-end loaders and the like.
“Thunderbirds are GO!”
What a zany concept. If you unshipped the weapons could this transport a grounded Ithacus ballistic transport?
And yes, a kit would be wonderful, especially if it were to scale with your boosters!