Myth or Plausible: Flying A Tank?

[MortalWombat]

Am I missing a key ingredient?

 

[Reyesnuthugr]

Out in space, with 1000 shots, maybe

 

[Lost]

ahh Hell nooo

 

[Bronko]

Funny while watching the military channel the other day I wondered about the speed and kind of terrain a hovercraft tank could do. Googled it and found Levkov was working on this in 1930's

 

[Bronko]

Then there's the A-10 flying tank... Been in service for decades.

 

[jefferz]

Then there's the A-10 flying tank... Been in service for decades.

You mean the 30mm gatling gun that they built an armor proof plane around.

 

[norcal313]

This question clearly needed a thread of it's own.

 

[Doughbelly]

Believe it or not, it's totally possible.

That's an M8 MGS, which is an actual air droppable armored vehicle, mounting an M35 Rheinmetal 105mm cannon.

Drunk, back of the envelope math (not all work shown):

Mass of vehicle, roughly 20 tons, or 20,000 kgs.

Acceptable velocity of an airdropped vehicle is roughly 30kph or 8.3 m/s. Down two chutes (assuming the third chute is made of some supermaterial that doesn't immediately tear and collapse) reduced to a third of the square of the surface area, velocity roughly 14 m/s.

Exit the aircraft at maybe 4000 meters is 285 seconds in semi controlled free fall.

The actual M35 cannon mounted on the M8 is hard to find numbers for in a quick Google search but for the comparable Royal Ordnance L7 has a muzzle velocity of 1400m/s for 10kg projectile or roughly 5.75 megajoules of muzzle energy.

Let's say the A-Team spends the last 40 seconds firing straight down. That still gives them 4 minutes of firing time to adjust their course. At 12 rounds/minute (max firing rate of the M8 autoloader and assuming they found extra ammo above the 30 rounds that Wikipedia says the M8 can carry) and being too lazy to do the calculations for a suspended (from the parachute) object firing normal to straight fucking down at 5,750,000 (kg*m^2)/s^2, that's more than enough force for them to adjust proverbial flight path a few hundred meters.

At 14m/s or roughly 30+ mph, the splashdown is also conceivably survivable.

So there you go. The A-Team "flying the tank" sequence is not nearly as crazy as you might think it is.

Or maybe a much less drunk therealdope could do the actual numbers and tell me how wrong I am.

 

[Goodfoot]

Meanwhile, in Russia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_A-40

I came for this.

 

[Katsumi Yamada]

of course.

you think they drove the tanks all the way to Iraq?

 

[Prefect]

No... tanks are meant to fire their guns while in motion so the gun is designed like
most modern field artillery to absorb the recoil. The only thing that would do anything
then is the escaping gas from the explosion which would be next to nothing.

No, even if absorb the recoil you still have to conserve momentum. The change in momentum will be the same but less jarring. It would slow their descent but not much because the amount of momentum the rounds have won't be much in comparison to the tank. You don't see tanks flying all over the place when they get hit by a tank round. If they wanted to slow their descent, I wouldn't be surprised if just dumping all their fuel and ammo would be more effective.

This whole argument is the same as when people get shot in the movies they fly from the bullets impact. If you do the equations or have actually gone hunting, you know that isn't at all how it works. Even with big guns it would more just knock you unbalanced like you were being punched hard rather than lift you into the air.

 

[lts5025]

Am I missing a key ingredient?

Ah, the good old All-Americans. Impressive.