ozoneocean wrote:
I can see how this debate can go on with geeks and nerdy gamers but it doens't last long among actual people who know and work with tanks. It'd go on forever on some forums but one devoted to AFV model building the legs would crash and burn in minutes. Tracks are the easiest thing in the world. There is little to no complexity in their design. It's amazingly simple and incredibly old. Soviet track really is stamped or cast scalloped metal held with pins. It was like that 100 years ago. Modern track goes back to the 1930's. There's been nothing new or astounding since the 1930s! The design of the track on the M1 is only a progression from that of the M26 in 1942 which is only a simple redesign of something developed in the 1920's.
No tanker in his right mind would want to have to maintain a suspension as complex as the turret hydraulics and to suggest adding soemthing like that to their workload is utterly unrealistic and yet another reason it will never be done outside of fiction.
It works when everything is very, very wrong. Can that leg still support weigth and move with 50% of it missing or damaged? (As in a number of road wheels just missing, suspension arms inoperative and track runs decreased because of operational concerns) A tank suspension can. I've done the Battle Damage assessment and repair training.
If you've seen or experienced anything like I have with tracked vehicles in the army and then in construction, it's so simple and you as an operator don't have to do a damn thing. Could legs be made to work with maintenance being a handful of grease points? Ever maintain the arm on a backhoe? And a backhoe isn't weight bearing and necessary for movement.
Imagine a vehicle that had something akin to four backhoe arms as legs. At least four times as many working parts leads to at least four times four more breakdowns and an increase in maintenance time and down time of four times four as least. One problem with one joint and it's done and you can't go three legged let alone two legged. You'd end up with a centipede with ten legs per side so you could and then you might as well have ten wheels so you're back to tracks all over again. That's how things workin the real world with brain dead tankers. You can't write a comic about that because it's so mind numbingly boring.
They've tried legs again and again It doesn't work as simply and as well as tracks or wheels and you can't train a lunkhead idiot like me to maintain it with minimum effort like you can tracks and wheels.
Sadly I'm not the mechanics I've known over the years and live, eat and breathe this stuff and they all agree with me and we're all mind numbingly brain dead because we've played with this stuff and breathing in the hydraulic grease we're just stupid but we know what works and what has worked since before 1916 and it isn't legs.
