Several years ago, I worked as a security guard at a large furniture factory. They had actually put in a large “slanted elevator” for transporting couches and stuff from the actual factory floor (the furniture was finished on the third floor of the factory) to the ground floor of an adjacent storage building. This one was actually the size of those seen in video games. Several smaller “slanted elevators” were also scattered throughout the building and used to transport the furniture to the top of the building as they were gradually assembled. These could probably only hold one or two large couches at a time.
They were actually a pretty good diversion at 3:00 in the morning during the hourly rounds.
Well, in half life, a couple of the slanted elevators are carrying vehicles, Tanks in particular. Can you design traditional elevators capable of doing the same?
I don’t see why not. You might want to give the elevator doors on both sides, to make it easier to drive off, and they’d have to be able to handle the weight, but these are both challanges which normal vertical elevators seem to deal with just fine.
There is one in one of those Armitage anime movies.
They are sometimes called ‘inclinators’. Unlike an elevator that gets pulled up by cables or pushed hydraulicaly, an inclinator seems more like a flatbed rail car locked into tracks in the inclined shaft. The car “climbs” up and down the shaft instead of being suspended in it. Theoretically, it can lift a much heavier weight since the shaft slope bears a portion of the load, instead of just the cables.
There are vertical hydraulic elevators on aircraft carriers than can lift at least as much as a tank.
The other think I forgot to mention is those “inclinators” in the videogames/anime usually descend great distances. If you are making an elevator that drops a mile into the earth, that’s a lot of cable which can stretch and break.