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wingsofwrath β€” Tambrian cars and APC

Published: 2012-09-03 03:08:00 +0000 UTC; Views: 7639; Favourites: 92; Downloads: 114
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Description A few vehicle designs for Inner Space, two civilian cars and one Armoured Personnel Carrier belonging to the Empire of Tambr.

A larger image can be found here.

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The rear engined two wheel drive ZAZ-968 is one of the most ubiquitous cars made in Tambria, being both cheap to produce as well as easy to maintain and operate due to it's two stroke air-cooled engine. The "M" denotes the public service variant (Taxicabs in the Empire are all owned by the state) which features a lower powered diesel rather than petrol engine, since fuel economy is more desirable than speed.
The car is equipped with standard steel tyres with internal springs.

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The Tambrian company AZLK is a new on the automotive market but their first product was well received for its powerful engine, advanced hydropneumatic suspension and high quality spring/mesh tires which provide a much smoother ride than competing models. Unfortunately the price tag is quite high and the design proved somewhat mechanically fragile.

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Coming from a company renowned for their military vehicles, the R.U.R.-825 8X8 armoured personnel carrier is in fact a hybrid vehicle which boasts excellent mobility and one powerful low velocity high-calibre autocannon.

Once it has discharged it's troop complement of six combat ready soldiers the vehicle takes on duties of "normal" armoured cars such as scouting, close infantry support and light vehicle-hunting.

The engine is mounted transversally in front of the turret and separates the driver's compartment from the main fighting compartment, driving the wheels through an offset drive shaft. Unfortunately, this poses some significant challenges for repair and maintenance, the best way to access it being to lift the turret from it's rollers, something which, of course, is pretty difficult to do in the field.

The weapon chosen for this vehicle was a special low pressure smoothbore semi-automatic gun with a calibre of 60 ht (80 mm) based on the main gun of the VCU-10/60 light tank hunter, but fitted with an autoloader allowing a cyclic rate of fire between 8 and 10 rounds per minute.

It is designed to fire shaped charge ammunition (also called hollow-charge ammunition, high explosive anti-tank, or HEAT) as well as a wide variety of high explosive and anti personnel rounds, so it can be used both in the anti-tank and infantry support roles.

The standard HEAT round was 2.7kg and can defeat 140m of vertical armour up to a range of 750m. Although the efficacity of the round itself does not decrease with range as it happens with kinetic penetrators , the low muzzle speed (520 m/s) means that beyond that range the accuracy drops significantly.


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The road surface in the picture is made out of parallelepipedal blocks of a certain type of native wood called "ironwood" which is both more resilient and more flexible than old fashioned cobblestones or asphalt, allowing for hard wearing yet somewhat elastic road surface, far superior to both aforementioned materials. Another plus is the fact the wood is still somewhat malleable after being cut from the tree and can be easily worked, hardening to its final strength as it dries.
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Comments: 18

SergeantPanther [2019-07-29 00:01:01 +0000 UTC]

Kind of reminds me of how the 20s and 30s thought future cars would look like with a bit of Post-WW2 Micro-car in there.

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Paddle-Steamer [2015-03-24 03:03:14 +0000 UTC]

Ah, I see someone's seen the French Panhard EBR armoured car.

Personally it's one of my favourite ACs, I always found the idea of the cleated steel centre wheels for added traction off road, while still havingΒ conventional rubber road wheels for road operation,Β as a neat and interesting feature of the EBR.

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cullyferg2010 In reply to Paddle-Steamer [2017-12-25 01:08:23 +0000 UTC]

Ya got that right!

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Panzerfan93 [2013-08-19 14:35:47 +0000 UTC]

do you have a better picture of the steel tires?

as a mechanic i'm interested in how they work

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wingsofwrath In reply to Panzerfan93 [2013-08-19 19:41:25 +0000 UTC]

There are quite a lot of real life variants I used as inspiration, so take your pick:
img28.exs.cx/img28/4650/4_1133…
gearpatrol.com/2012/05/24/desi…
www.indiandrives.com/goodyear-…

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KnightofSpades [2012-10-25 09:12:39 +0000 UTC]

Such great level of detail really brings the world the vehicles are in to life!

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wingsofwrath In reply to KnightofSpades [2012-11-22 01:19:17 +0000 UTC]

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed my efforts, these were really fun to design!

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Arianod [2012-09-15 17:58:57 +0000 UTC]

Wow! You did it again. This is great! I love the mash-up of references, and the way they all do work out together... The armoured vehicle is basically a mix between an old Panhard scout vehicle and a Soviet BMP, and the civilian vehicles look like they just might have actually existed in our world. They look kind of dorky, but I suppose that's intentional.

I was mystified by the "clear view screen" until I read the comments: at first I thought the windshields had a "lens" section, meant to work as a magnifying glass, and I was wondering why anyone would do that XD

The wooden road and weird wheel designs are superb as well, and great for creating the feel of a different world. Did you come up with the concept for the "steel tyres with internal springs", or is it something that actually existed at some point?

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wingsofwrath In reply to Arianod [2012-11-22 01:17:34 +0000 UTC]

Yup, you certainly got the influences nailed down!

Let's just say that the Tambrian Empire is not renowned for the "elegance" of their designs and leave it at that...

The steel tyres with internal springs are, of course, born out of necessity, because there is no natural rubber (or rubber substitute) available in this world, and, as such, the design has existed in our world in various forms during shortages of rubber (such as during WW1) or in places where "normal" pneumatic tyres wouldn't have worked (such as the moon). Besides, there also seem to be several designs of rubberless tyres in the works with major tyre manufacturers, even as we speak. But of course, the major inspiration for me were these: [link] [link] and [link]

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Arianod In reply to wingsofwrath [2012-12-01 14:14:48 +0000 UTC]

Who would have thought? No matter how hard we try, reality is always weirder than fiction!

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wingsofwrath In reply to Arianod [2012-12-03 08:42:18 +0000 UTC]

Yes, which is why I find it a lot more satisfying to try and squeeze as much weird reality into the things I draw rather than simply make stuff up out of whole cloth.

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Arianod In reply to wingsofwrath [2012-12-09 19:40:03 +0000 UTC]

Plus it's a lot cooler, definitely.

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kittyexplosion [2012-09-08 03:33:00 +0000 UTC]

I love these cars. What is the circular window for?

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wingsofwrath In reply to kittyexplosion [2012-09-10 10:13:50 +0000 UTC]

It's something called a "clear view screen" [link] . It's simply a circle of glass spun around by an electric motor so that water and snow would be driven off it by the centrifugal force. It's something more readily seen on boats and trains, but I decided to use this technology instead of more "conventional" windscreen wipers to further drive home the point that this is not "our" world.

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kittyexplosion In reply to wingsofwrath [2012-09-11 13:37:58 +0000 UTC]

Aha, that's pretty neat. I saw one in the Queen Mary in Long Beach.

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wingsofwrath In reply to kittyexplosion [2012-09-11 17:58:48 +0000 UTC]

Oh, you saw the Queen Mary? Neat!
Now I'm jealous, because I've long wanted to visit the old girl myself, only for me Long Beach is so far away...10645.4 kilometres or 6614.8 miles to be exact - certainly not worth the round trip cost just for that, as attractive as seeing one of the last great liners in existence might sound.

Pity the SS United States is still decaying and the money for her restoration still hasn't been raised, because she would make an awesome museum as well.

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kittyexplosion In reply to wingsofwrath [2012-09-12 04:26:14 +0000 UTC]

Yes I live near it. The most neat thing is the old Russian Scorpion submarine right next to it.

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wingsofwrath In reply to kittyexplosion [2012-09-12 09:57:26 +0000 UTC]

Ah, yes, I know of her. She is a soviet Project 641 ("Foxtrot" using the NATO reporting name) Class, one of my favourite classes of submarine, and a sister ship of the B-39 which I visited in San Diego back in 2007.
What I like about the Foxtrots is the fact they show a lot of influence from the German wartime Typ. XXI U-boot class but they were considerably larger and built with three rather than two propeller shafts, one of a very few classes submarines to have this arrangement. Of course, this made the submarine pretty noisy compared to western designs, but the Russians have always been more interested in raw power and endurance than such "trifling" details...
Another thing is that, design wise, I like the elongated cigar hull shape a lot more than the teardrop shape that is currently the standard, even though the latter does provide better underwater performance.

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