Quote:
Originally Posted by LostCause
I think it's an interesting mental exercise. Maybe not for a grocery-getting 19mpg Excursion, but for their close cousin: the Humvee...the evil that started it all... 
How could Humvees be modified to return better mileage. I bet 90% of the time they are just tooling around the desert, with the rest spent smashing down gates and outrunning terrorist potshots. I believe the military would be heavily interested in fuel efficiency...it lessens the logistics of supply convoys.
I'm thinking high psi tires, overdrive transmission, regeared axles, TDI (if it isn't already implemented), curved body panels (which would probably help deflect bullets/shrapnel), and a severe weight cutting regimen (kevlar instead of steel?)...
- LostCause |
These things need to be cheap, and that's what steel is. All the great new military tech takes sometimes decades to be available to more than a few units. My university is primarily a military university, and I know many people who served entire tours in Iraq and especially Afghanistan and never had kevlar body armor so we can't expect them to afford it for vehicles.
Besides the steel armor needs to take projectiles much larger than the handgun variety Some JHP bullets out of a high caliber rifle will obliterate kevlar. The bigger threats tend to be rpg's and ied's.
Re-gearing the military vehicles isn't an option usually. They need to haul artillery and things all the time and they usually have a top speed geared to 50 mph, give or take 5 mph.
As a side note my senior project is developing a system to remotely control these things in a convoy in radio denied areas, just so the front one can be destroyed without people in it, by ambushes and ied's. My part is merely the cable tension device for the fiber line so it doesn't hit the ground or become so tight it breaks while the electric motor takes its time to respond.