Landships II

PDA · Legend

Concrete Landship

Ironsides · Legend

Morgoth wrote:
I have found a site showing box content:
modelimex.cz/1-72-concrete-land-ship-british-wwi-project
It looks rather simplistic for its price.

Anyway, what's going on? Why is it so expensive? Were there really plans for such a thing?

No one seems very certain see this thread here, I reckon its someones fantasy idea but it does look a bit like some of the other big wheel tanks... I dont believe it was ever a serious project though, the war office must have had a lot of this kind of thing sent to them...

Concrete Big Wheel Landship�see the last post by Roger a set of drawings is supplied... you may recognise the artwork on the box...

�

Cheers wink

�

-- Edited by Ironsides on Tuesday 12th of November 2013 12:59:22 AM

Morgoth · Major

185 Euro? It makes me wonder how big this thing is.

I wonder if they'll also make a kit of a Gyro-Electric Destroyer and Mobile Maginot Line :D .

Morgoth · Major

I have found a site showing box content:
modelimex.cz/1-72-concrete-land-ship-british-wwi-project
It looks rather simplistic for its price.

Anyway, what's going on? Why is it so expensive? Were there really plans for such a thing?

Tonys · Field Marshal

Strategic war materials in the form of reinforcing steel would have had to be used in the project.

Unless there were vast voids cast into the components, if someone wants to work out the approximate weight, work on 150lbs per cu ft for the concrete.� You can also take a stab at the weight of the engines and the guns - again, the use of strategic war materials.

It's all very well for someone to say that they could cast the components on the battlefield, but accelerators were not available in those days, so you would have needed 14 days before you stripped the formwork off - longer if you find that the components do not have voids or it is in winter.

The weight of the two main wheels adds up to almost 1,200t - you would need a MASSIVE gantry to put this lot in place and would be a large target for enemy artillery fire.� It would be comparable to the crawler used to move the Saturn V rocket from the VAB to the launch pad!

The inertia to overcome when this monster started would be immense - put a 600t flywheel on a truck engine and try to start it!

�

It says a lot of the sanity (or lack thereof) of the person who "designed" this monstrosity.

TinCanTadpole · Legend

Morgoth, you ask how big it is? Length of 90' will be 15" (381mm) at 1/72, width of 50' will be 212mm and wheel diameter of 40' becomes 169mm, with wheel width 68mm - so it's pretty big!

Tonys, I used your figure of 150lbs/cubic foot and I get a much bigger figure than "almost 1200t" - the volume of each wheel is around 20,000cu ft (ignoring axles) which means about 3 million lbs of concrete, which works out at 1368.4 metric tonnes (if you prefer other units, that's 1346.4 imperial/long tons, and 1508 short (US) tons PER WHEEL! So if the wheels weighed around 2700 tonnes, the whole thing must be in the region of 6-7000 tonnes, perhaps?

An entertaining idea, even if it is preposterous...

TinCanTadpole · Legend

Incidentally, if you built a 1/72 scale model of this behemoth to scale weight, each wheel would weigh around 3.5kg!

PDA · Legend

So it would have been about as useful as the K-Wagen.

On the plus side, it's a new 1/72 scale WW1 model from Kora.

TinCanTadpole · Legend

PDA wrote:
So it would have been about as useful as the K-Wagen.
On the plus side, it's a new 1/72 scale WW1 model from Kora.

�Probably makes the K-Wagen look incredibly restrained and practical......but yes, another WW1 model kit is good.