Armoured Fighting Vehicle Suspension
Military AFVs, including tanks, have specialized suspension requirements. They can weigh more than seventy tons and are required to move at high speed over very rough ground. Their suspension components must be protected from land mines and antitank weapons. Tracked AFVs can have as many as nine road wheels on each side. Many wheeled AFVs have six or eight wheels, to help them ride over rough and soft ground.
The earliest tanks of World War I had fixed suspension with no movement whatsoever. This unsatisfactory situation was improved with leaf spring or coil spring suspensions adopted from agricultural, automotive or railway machinery, but even these had very limited travel.
Speeds increased due to more powerful engines, and the quality of ride had to be improved. In the 1930s, the Christie suspension was developed, which allowed the use of coil springs inside a vehicle's armored hull, by changing the direction of force deforming the spring, using a bell crank. Horstmann suspension was a variation which used a combination of bell crank and exterior coil springs, in use from the 1930s to the 1990s.
By World War II the other common type was torsion bar suspension, getting spring force from twisting bars inside the hull — this had less travel than the Christie-type, but was significantly more compact, allowing more space inside the hull, with consequent possibility to install larger turret rings and thus a heavier main armament. The torsion-bar suspension, sometimes including shock absorbers, has been the dominant heavy armored vehicle suspension since World War II.
Read more about this topic: Suspension (vehicle)
Famous quotes containing the words fighting, vehicle and/or suspension:
“I want to keep fighting because it is the only thing that keeps me out of the hamburger joints. If I don’t fight, I’ll eat this planet.”
—George Foreman (b. 1948)
“Its idea of “production value” is spending a million dollars dressing up a story that any good writer would throw away. Its vision of the rewarding movie is a vehicle for some glamour-puss with two expressions and eighteen changes of costume, or for some male idol of the muddled millions with a permanent hangover, six worn-out acting tricks, the build of a lifeguard, and the mentality of a chicken-strangler.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“If the oarsmen of a fast-moving ship suddenly cease to row, the suspension of the driving force of the oars doesn’t prevent the vessel from continuing to move on its course. And with a speech it is much the same. After he has finished reciting the document, the speaker will still be able to maintain the same tone without a break, borrowing its momentum and impulse from the passage he has just read out.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C)