Posted 08.22.2012 at 11:15 am
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DARPA's Captive Air Amphibious Transporter
And that's at 1/5 the actual size.
DARPA’s Tactically Expandable Maritime Platform (TEMP) program is a wide-ranging effort to pack standard ISO shipping containers with technologies that can assist during humanitarian disasters or aid military in solving other unconventional, international problems (like piracy). Essentially DARPA wants a modular means to quickly turn any ship into a technology-laden base of operations that can quickly execute ship-to-ship or ship-to-shore operations. We’ve seen the ship-based portion of this before. We’re now seeing the ship-to-shore piece.
Meet CAAT (for Captive Air Amphibious Transporter). The prototype vehicle is basically like a tank with treads made out of air-filled pontoons, enabling it to roll over water (and obstacles in the water) with Abrams-like efficiency and continue its forward march once it hits shore. Perhaps the coolest thing about the video below: this is a 1/5 scale demonstrator.
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Are those pontoons bulletproof? It seems easy to immobilize if they are air filled.
Super cool... I don't think it is very hard to make the inflatable sections bulletproof with the likes of Kevlar
There are kevlar tires in use that help make tires bullet resistent. I'm sure the same can be said about the pontoons. The large majority of the vehicles we use for transport have tires, so we are always taking the risk of becoming immobalized by enemy fire. Really there isn't much of a difference here except you would be in a big steel tank without floatation in the water. Hope they have a good plan for egress lol! Pretty cool concept.
I would expect the vehicle to be positively bouyant without the pontoons, but likely without propulsion (or very slow propulsion) - not unlike a vehicle running on the rims after the tires are gone.
Do we do much in the way of ship to shore assault anymore? The last time I recall it happening, the solidiers came ashore to groups of cameras and reporters filming them.
I'm sure the pontoons will just be filled with foam. Much cheaper and much more reliable than trying to cover each with Kevlar. Besides, to immobilize the thing, you would need to puncture a lot of the pontoons. Maybe more than half.
I wonder if those treads could have a latch on each one that would connect to hooks that they could standardize on all military treaded vehicles so that they could easily transport all ground-based vehicles on water by just rolling over those pontoons.
Seems like kind of a novelty or perhaps better suited for civilian uses than military to me.
Why does this remind me of a paddlewheel steamer?
A pontoon boat with spinning pontoons attached inside of archimedes screws would be more effective. But I think that's already been done.