Tracks on armoured vehicles are something I can’t stop thinking about.
Today’s invention consists of tracks which run around subsets of roadwheels, rather than all the wheels on one side of a tank.
For example, in the image we have two (green) wheels, linked by a track. The suspension of the vehicle could have several units. At a minimum, each such unit on each side would need to include one drive sprocket, although ideally I’d like to see every unit with its own separate electric motor.
The track around each unit, being much shorter than normal, could be made of something like kevlar reinforced rubber, or chain, rather than requiring to be solid steel.
This would allow each wheel to be made with hollow internals so that extra coiled lengths of track could be stored inside, as shown. (I will come up with a way to have these coils link automatically, in a future post).
This design still spreads the load of a heavy vehicle quite well (especially with interleaved wheels) and massively improves redundancy when under attack, whilst also allowing for faster repairs.
