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In lugnet.off-topic.geek, David Laswell wrote:
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If military history has shown us anything, it’s that nothing is immune to
landmines if it moves. It’s just a matter of developing a landmine that’s
capable of being triggered by a hover tank (and trust me, if hover tanks
happen, someone will figure out how to make a landmine to match it). There
have been some absolutely freaky mines developed, including one that is
triggered by boats that travel over it, but only if they go fast. The idea
there was that attacking boats would want to get in, pop open a can of Cream
of Medieval soup, and either get the heck out of Dodge, or plant the flag on
captured territory. Friendly boats, on the other hand, could leisurely putter
into the harbor, unafraid of getting blown away by defensive artillery.
Assuming the hover technology that makes hover tanks feasible doesn’t cause a
downward pressure effect that’ll set off the current leading mines, it’s
still only a matter of time before someone could figure out a way to catch
them, be it a magnetic trigger that picks up on any iron content passing over
it, some exotic trigger that detects the energy used to make the tank hover,
or even converting the radar capsule from explosive shells for use in a
landmine. Of course, since set-them-and-forget-them mines are now banned by
international treaty, IIRC, it should be a null issue anyways.
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I agree on the fact that, no groundforces are immune to mines, but regarding
treaties, they only survive as long as politicians back them up and with
regarding the mines, sorry, the bad guys still have them and won’t sign any
treaty so they’re here to stay, and BTW, looking at how things are run now, I’m
not even sure that there will be any other treatise left to break the future.
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Also, while I don’t think that oceans or mountains make a compelling
argument for hover tank desirabilty,
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Oceans don’t, but beaches do. Being able to launch a hover tank assault from
international waters would go a long ways towards eliminating the need for
specialized beach assault boats, though to completely get rid of them we’d
still need hover Humvees, hover APCs, and hover artillery.
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The Americans is already able to perform that kind of attack, calling it
something like over the horizont... something (I read it in one of my brother’s
books and was foolish enough to give it back to him ;-)), because your fleet can
hide from radar behind the horizont, and the crafts sneak in under, from the
distance of up untill a 1000 nm or so, I don’t think the jump is that great to
trans-ocean or global movement. And the hovertechnology I’m talking about is far
away in the future (zero-g or repulsorlift, zero-g would eliminate the 170 ton):
As I wrote to Larry, you can’t expect to have air superiorty, so the tanks can
end up pretty much on their own (just think of the Iraqi tanks), speed will be
the essence, not armour.
-NB
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