Originally posted by tankfanatic:Hi ST, its actuially my fault. the last pic is actually the first. My bad. it is a series of picture showing the ground collapse and the abrams sinking intu the swamp becoz of its sheer weight.
ladang getah i think got very hard soil, but the oil palm plantation have this soft soil....ala what do you call it? its a combination of dead leaf, dead animal, dead trees...very nasty when burn becos you cant see the fire.
Ah I see... suck thumb for the yanks then... but then again I've seen a rover sink into a pit in the ground... dun even have to talk about tanks.
I believe the top layer of the oil palm plantation is called peat... but it does not extend all the way down. The bottom soil is certainly extremely
but in a Mini you know you will only want to drove it on the tarmac. But a tank can go off road silly, and from inside the tank how to know the ground pressure?
You don't need to know... the ground pressure of the tank remains the same no matter where it is... it is the function of the tank's weight spread over the area of its threads... hence a typical western tank usually exerts about 15 psi... which is lighter then your normal car and about the same as a human standing still (the ground pressure for humans increases when we walk).
So technically as long as there are no like previously mentioned underground caverns or the like, the tank will be competely fine and mobile and even MORE mobile the the grunt on difficult terrain.
I think what happened to the Abrams was that the water from the swamp probably seeped in a pocket under the road and created a hidden "deadfall" trap which collasped when the tank drove over. It wasn't so much as the tank being unsuitable for the road then the swamp converting an area of the road into the swamp, but hidden from view.
Hence when the tank drove over that part its weight was not transfered into the ground as it normally would, causing the road to collasp ... lol I'm not sure if I get what i am trying to put across clearly... it's nearly 2am and i'm tired.
Hmm... I guess the easiest way to put it would be to imagine an M1 tank and a grunt. On stable, but muddy ground the tank will actually be more mobile and leave impressions in the ground shallower then the grunt with all his equipment due to its lower ground pressure. However while this is the case, the M1 is unable to drive over a bridge that cannot support its TOTAL weight while the grunt, despite his higher ground pressure with his feet, can easily cross without problems.
Hence sometimes ground pressure matters, and then there's total weight as well.
Well, if the insurgents are out of ideas on IEDs... they could try digging traps like these.
Correction, you cant have insurgents doing this. (digging, well not efficiently)
There are already proper obstacles and traps to be constructed by combat engineers to stop delay armour. There's more to it than just tank ditches,it's all in books.
haha, i was joking about the insurgents digging those traps actually...
Originally posted by tankee1981:Hey guys on the side note with reference from a post by A Malaysian Man...with the rising fuel prices it have just got even more expensive to operate any armoured vehicles even though diesel is cheaper than petrol. We are not oil producing country like Malaysia with their Petronas so to sustain a long term armoured force in enemy terrrain is extremely costly for a tiny nation state like us.
Maybe its time for us to look into alterantive power sources for our armoured vehicles? I mean we do have electric, hybrid, natural gas and hydrogen cars in limited numbers in Singapore already don't we?
dont we have the 10 years peace time and 2 years wartime strategic reserve ?