:: whoosh ::
**Loach **apparently has no sense of humor when it comes to tanks.
Oh pish. You couldn’t even fit in one you freakish giant 
It is legal to drive an MBT/APC with road wheels on the road in Texas, road size and weight conditions apply. When I win the lottery I am buying one. The regs are posted on the many Tank for Sale websites, legal in several states. I am not planning on winning the lottery, but I just had to know.
Capt
I would happily provide a link but the stupid BB tablet I am on seems to not allow it
I believe I said as much:
[QUOTE=me]
it’s more an issue of the sorts of training these vehicles are involved in rather than their inherent safety.
[/QUOTE]
Here you go: http://www.flickriver.com/photos/psycho_milt/149219520/.
Though technically they’d have to drop the Abrams onto the metal pole, and it’d take several hundred feet of drop to reach that speed (you’d have to drop it off a very high cliff, or something), but they could do it.
Alternatively, I imagine an aircraft carriers launch catapult could probably manage the feat with a few minor tweaks.
Put it on one end of a flatbed train car, use a train engine to shove it into the pole?
As an aside, I read some years ago about a train smashing into a stalled tank in Europe; the train derailed, & the tank just needed replacement tracks. They can probably handle a dinky little pole I’m sure.
Thanks for the photo.
25 mph is only about 11 metres per second or so, I guess your drop height wouldn’t have to be much more than 20 metres (even accounting for drag). But I don’t think such a major change to the parameters of the test would be allowed.
I guess a launch catapult might do the job, if you put the Abrams on a dolly. The decreased speed required would offset the weight difference yes?
While I know that this is factually true. . . I still wanna see it!
But then won’t you have all the added mass of the Train to mess up your results?
As you so though, my moneys on the tank to win this one.
They simulate crashes by dropping vehicles all the time on Mythbusters. Whether or not that significantly skews the results is actually a pretty good question.
Actually, the heaviest aircraft (max. take-off weight) weight almost half as much as an Abrams so the weight difference wouldn’t be THAT significant.
Hmm sideways at 25mph? I have been on tanks at Fort Knox after an ice storm. You would think that a tank would crunch through the ice but the tracks do a good job distributing the weight. I have seen M1s sliding sideways down icy hills. So all you would need is a long enough icy hill for your test.
Driver stop. Words I didn’t want to hear as the driver was already a freaking hard turner/starter/stopper I tried to brace myself but didn’t work. The cost was 2 broken ribs and a loss of 2 teeth. I was up in the loaders hatch, it sucked. I can recall many cuts, bruises, burns, and related injuries doing simple tasks. So no stars from me!
On the road issue when I was on a recruitment detail with the PA National Guard we drove an Abrams to the local mall on a main road with an escort pretty sure they did it for a few years until the unit got shuttered.
More than half, in fact. The MTOW of an F-14 was 75,000 lbs. or 37.5 tons. An Abrams only weighs 62ish tons.
When they go in reverse, do they go beep-beep-beep-beep?
More of a crunch-crunch-crunch.
Well most cars don’t have a gun sticking out the front, which will be a problem for our Abrams drop test. You could rotate the turret first though I suppose.
I have a cousin who drove a tank in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who has never used any mode of transportation at anything less than its maximum possible speed. According to him, yes, that’s conservative (but he had to disable a governor to do it).
A politely worded letter to his congressman probably would have sufficed.
Nonsense. I’m sure the hatch is plenty wide.