The Landmaster is one of the best sci-fi vehicles ever built, from one of the cruddier sci-fi movies ever made. Its unusual wheel arrangement and body articulation were not pure fantasy affect, but were real-world concepts that were tested and shown to have *some* advantages. Behold:
There’s even this RC Landmaster someone built. Performance-wise it’s unimpressive, but it does show how the wheels work, including the passive “crawl” of the Lockheed-patented “Tri-star” wheels:
But then there’s this…. thing. Produced by a Russian auto modifier, that third wheel does nothing useful but get spun around by the other two. It’s… ummmm… yeah.
When I first glanced at the thumbnail that YouTube threw up I thought that this vehicle had a true Tri-Star system on the aft end, but a half-second’s further examination of the rear wheel well showed that that was impossible. A Fiat with a Tri-Star rear wheel would be a ridiculous thing, but potentially cool; the arrangement it actually has baffles me. Adding a second set of wheels, even if unpowered, could be used to spread a heavy load, but adding a third wheel like this that contacts both of the road wheel seems to do little but add drag to the system, on top of added mass and reduced interior volume.
My gast is flabbered.
But hey, in digging up the Landmaster vids I found this guys channel. He made a Landmaster CAD model and then a 1/25 scale resin kit. It looks pretty spiffy, and seems (at least as of August 2018) to be selling them.