Thank you for adding to my comment things I didn’t think. I did not say various conflict zones that you listed are worthwhile or ok.
I said wat is something we cannot 100% avoid in our current world and reality. Even in Roddenberry’s fictitious utopia of Star Trek there were wars.
My statement was that I wish there were no wars so that we could stop with technological research to advance military abilities and no longer needed militaries at all.
Was that direct enough of a comment for you?
Really? To me it looks like 77 years since we could not avoid a war because we were attacked and 73 years of the U.S. going to kill people who never attacked us.
Tell me again how we can’t avoid war because to me it looks a lot like we have chosen to not avoid war.
No it wasn’t. Why try gaslighting on a forum as short and easily searched as this? Your statement was followed by you saying “but that’s not reality” which any reasonable person would have read as “Sure it would be great but that’s just fantasy” painting your own wish as unreasonable and war as inevitable and unavoidable. That was nothing more than you pushing the “war is inevitable” position of the military industrial complex which sends our boys to die for money and it was done to shame the original poster for reminding us that our military does indeed kill people and innocent ones at that.
If that sort of reminder about the amorality and lack of ethics employed in the business of state sanctioned mass murder are a problem for you, perhaps it is upon you to seek to resolve that internal conflict rather than parroting sentiments of those who profit from killing.
Ah yes, those haven’t given me nightmares in years!
I was just going to say the same thing. Does not look compatible with sand for any significant length of time.
Braking is achieved by the wheels changing to square shapes.
Oh Boy! As a US taxpayer, I can’t wait to help pay for all these exciting technologies, to help global corporations continue to thrive! And I am also proud to help with the top and bottom lines of the proud companies mentioned in the videos such as Raytheon (fifth largest defense contractor worldwide); Singapore-owned Kinetics Drive Solutions; and Pratt & Miller. They are all part of the proud tradition of what US President Dwight Eisenhower dubbed the military–industrial complex in his farewell address, January 1961. More profit to ya, folks!
/s
Which wars are we fighting that need to be fought? Which ones don’t involve driving over corpses? Because it looks like we are engaged in perpetual war for war’s sake with little regard for human life, legality or need.
As long as the road isn’t like this:
Wheel reinvented to allow combat vehicles to easily traverse streets, corpses
Hmmm, i will have to dissent here Rob. I understand that the headline is meant to be provocative (though i have no idea why. A lot of tech we currently use as civilians we owe to the military and DARPA. And this particular project comes from DARPA) but its just flat out wrong as well, this wheel mod is meant for off-road conditions like mud, sand, etc.I’m sure a humvee has no problems rolling down corpse laden streets.
If you’re going to throw a fit over military research and tech i have bad news about internet, GPS, instant coffee, duct tape, artificial rubber, and other things…
I agree completely, but there’s a difference between being critical and snarking about “corpses.” That’s on the same rhetorical level as screaming “baby-killer” at random soldiers.
I always wondered where those dollies that go upstairs pivoting a set of three wheels got their inspiration. This was definitely it.
Edit- Damnation Alley? Never heard of it but it has giant scorpions this thing nuclear Holocaust and Bazookas I am totally all over this like gravy on biscuits oh yeah
We’ve been using tanks in the desert for most of the last century. Is there a reason why these should be more than usually prone to sand infiltration?
Boing Boing has been firmly on the clickbait train for a while. It’s frustrating.
You shouldn’t always assume that a 3-second gif accurately summarizes an entire video.
What’s the YouTube equivalent of RTFA? WTFV?
It’ll never be meant for highway speeds. For one, that’s just a crazy amount of unsprung mass, you might eventually be able to get up to 60 MPH, but the ride wouldn’t just be bad, it’d be dangerous. The reason vehicles try to minimize unsprung mass is that the amount of chassis disruption that happens when you hit an irregularity on the road is inversely proportional to the unsprung mass of the wheel. On a car, the wheels tend to be made out of light steel or an aluminum alloy, coupled with a pneumatic tire. Those two combined to create fairly low effective unsprung mass and helps make cars much easier to drive. (The elasticity of the pneumatic tire compensates for some of the unsprung mass by being able to absorb impact without disrupting the chassis or necessarily deflecting the suspension, and also helps ensure a more consistent contact patch.)
Existing track conversion kits like Mattracks compensate for this by including bogies and rocker-arm suspension which helps compensate for their considerable weight.
These things probably nearly a ton between the four of them, have no apparent internal suspension, and I don’t see anything to enable much in the way of tire elasticity, so I can’t imagine they would ever be used widely. The only usage case I can think of is one where a large contact patch is needed (tracked configuration, probably increase surface area that the weight is distributed over by 4x or 5x) but occasional travel over roads will be necessary. The wheels form would probably become unbearable and dangerous above 30 MPH, but that’s an improvement over how fast the vehicle would be able to go if it had permanent tracks. It also helps when it comes to turning. Tanks. other tracked vehicles, and skid-steer equipment turn by counter-rotating their tracks or wheels, but conventional vehicles usually turn by deflecting the front wheels side-to-side. Tracks have so much surface area in contact with the ground, that this puts a lot of strain on the steering rack and associated components unless you’re turning in place or you’re on a loose surface like snow or mud. Even in those cases, you’re still using the steering rack to drag a huge contact patch around. The differential helps some, but even Mattracks sells a steering assist kit for quite a lot of their models that senses that you’re turning the wheel and automatically jacks the track up so that the contact area is smaller, otherwise you’re just dragging all that rubber over the ground.
Based on what I can see in the video, I’m guessing that these are probably kind of tolerable up to about 40MPH in the round configuration, though on pavement they’d probably start resonating and causing the vehicle to shake very badly. With that said, they would definitely turn much more easily than actual tracks. In track configuration, my guess is that the max speed is probably more like 20. There doesn’t appear to be any kind of internal suspension, which means going much faster seem pretty unlikely.
Overall, I think the usage case boils down to, “I need a Humvee that requires a great degree of skill to get stuck, and only a moderate amount of skill to operate.” Interesting thought, depending on how these are geared, they could actually build an over-speed protection mechanism into them, where the input shaft would start to freewheel if the input speed would drive the wheel over some maximum rating. That’d be pretty clever, and, to use the common phrase, pretty “GI proof.”
