Hi ST, its actuially my fault. the last pic is actually the
first. My bad. it is a series of picture showing the ground
collapse and the abrams sinking intu the swamp becoz of its sheer
weight.
ladang getah i think got very hard soil, but the oil palm
plantation have this soft soil....ala what do you call it? its a
combination of dead leaf, dead animal, dead trees...very nasty when
burn becos you cant see the fire.
Ah I see... suck thumb for the yanks then... but then again I've
seen a rover sink into a pit in the ground... dun even have to
talk about tanks.
I believe the top layer of the oil palm plantation is called
peat... but it does not extend all the way down. The bottom soil is
certainly extremely
but in a Mini you know you will only want to drove it on the
tarmac. But a tank can go off road silly, and from inside the tank
how to know the ground pressure?
You don't need to know... the ground pressure of the tank
remains the same no matter where it is... it is the function of the
tank's weight spread over the area of its threads... hence a
typical western tank usually exerts about 15 psi... which is
lighter then your normal car and about the same as a human standing
still (the ground pressure for humans increases when we walk).
So technically as long as there are no like previously mentioned
underground caverns or the like, the tank will be competely fine
and mobile and even MORE mobile the the grunt on difficult
terrain.
I think what happened to the Abrams was that the water from the
swamp probably seeped in a pocket under the road and created a
hidden "deadfall" trap which collasped when the tank drove over. It
wasn't so much as the tank being unsuitable for the road then the
swamp converting an area of the road into the swamp, but hidden
from view.
Hence when the tank drove over that part its weight was not
transfered into the ground as it normally would, causing the
road to collasp ... lol I'm not sure if I get what i am trying
to put across clearly... it's nearly 2am and i'm tired.
Hmm... I guess the easiest way to put it would be to imagine an
M1 tank and a grunt. On stable, but muddy ground the tank will
actually be more mobile and leave impressions in the ground
shallower then the grunt with all his equipment due to its lower
ground pressure. However while this is the case, the M1 is unable
to drive over a bridge that cannot support
its TOTAL weight while the grunt, despite his higher
ground pressure with his feet, can easily cross without
problems.
Hence sometimes ground pressure matters, and then there's total
weight as well.
Well, if the insurgents are out of ideas on IEDs... they
could try digging traps like these.
