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Ground Vehicles and Active Protection

Uso

Uso

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An idea based on these two articles.

https://www.tanknology.co.uk/post/combined-arms-aps

https://www.tanknology.co.uk/post/self-deploying-afvs

The two main takeaways being:
  1. Active Protection Systems tend to kill everything on the side of the vehicle being attacked.
  2. Overlapping APS on several vehicles can solve problem 1 if everyone knows where everyone is.
  3. Modern 8x8 wheeled vehicles are too heavy to effectively drive long distances on roads.
One solution for decreasing weight and increasing protection would be to take the APS system and mount it on smaller drone vehicles that position themselves throughout your convoy. This will reduce the weight per vehicle which makes road transport easier and increases the coverage of the APS system which will increase the likelihood that the APS can defeat a missile without also injuring friendlies. It would also mean you could mix a few of these lightweight protection vehicles in with civilian convoys to give them a layer of protection against attack.
 
I like the idea of distributing dumb, automatic tasks to a drone fleet, with a manned mothership. I had this battle doctrine imagined where you have a multirole, manned command tank/armored vehicle, perhaps specializing more in communication and situational awareness, protected by a fleet of drones that do scouting duties and active protection. Though, coming to think of it, you really want a manned vehicle to make the key decisions, so it's probably going to be the vehicle with the big cannon, the main fire power.
 
The Edward Deming plot has different requirement. Since our heroes are limited by what they can bring along in the ship they need to have some more reasonable ground transport. They can't drive around in tanks just to go to the local market. Being able to use local roads, being carried by a Gato lander, and fitting in the ship itself are all important requirements.

If you don't care about weight and are making a big tank type thing I was thinking there might be some other options you could use like hanging an APS system off a tethered drone, and fly it around so that you always have APS coverage that doesn't also threaten your dismounted infantry.
 
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