An M113 style APC in Planetside 2

battlefield 2142 apc its the best

There will always be room for both wheeled and tracked vehicles on the battlefield so long as roads and infrastructure exist.

Wheeled vehicles provide speed and maneuverability in areas with intact roads and infrastructure, that tracked vehicles can not match due to limitations of the tracks themselves. While literally driving so fast your tracks fall apart looks cool, it is a maintenance nightmare. Christie-style suspension attempted to address this, but was more hassle than it was worth.

Tracked vehicles, alternatively, provide speed and maneuverability in areas with poor roads and infrastructure, that wheeled vehicles can not match due to limitations of the wheel itself. While tracked vehicles can certainly get stuck in mud, wheeled vehicles are far more susceptible to it due to the high amount of ground pressure they exert in comparison.

Wheeled vehicles are not lighter because of the fact they are on wheels (per say) - there is no technical reason a tracked and wheeled vehicle could not be the same weight if properly designed. It is that heavy weight and high ground pressure compound to destroy the intact roads and infrastructure you are trying to exploit, and make the off-road capabilities worse (exaggerating the previously mentioned getting stuck problem).

Meanwhile, since tracked vehicles are generally intended to operate in poor infrastructure situations or at low speed, the nature of the track (distributing weight) means more weight can be placed on the system before the same problems present themselves - at the cost that the tracks themselves can not withstand high speeds.

I enjoy talking about this stuff - I am sorry if that was a wordy way to agree with you. However, it is worth mentioning that in Planetside 2 the majority of our infrastructure is sub par at best. Our "roads" are almost exclusively packed dirt, gravel or snow - meaning a larger presence of tracked vehicles would make more sense.

It was a very fun vehicle, and quite frankly, the mechanic (launching pods all up ons) would fit seamlessly into Planetside. Would just have to give them the umpf required to get up onto a biolab landing pad and you are done. Billions of places in Planetside they are useful for.

This is a good idea! It would also make bases like Vanu archives easier to attack!

You do realize the US Army is phasing out all tracked troop transports in favor of wheeled ones right??

They're FAR faster.

And the US Military has never made a bad decision regarding their equipment before.

It also isn't just because they are faster on roads though; there are less parts so they are cheaper to maintain. Which is the main driving focus for the switch; which you will see mirrored across most of the militaries purchasing decisions recently.

The fact is the US Military is transitioning into a peace-time military, and has been for a long time. The United States hasn't participated in a Total War for a long time now, and hopefully, never will have to again. As much as I like the hardware, if War is a thing only seen in Movies and Videogames - I won't complain.

However this means the launch and adoption of largely untested platforms, and a focus on cost and ease of maintenance than combat performance.

That said - Planetside 2 is different, and a videogame. We have all accepted that the status-quo (for example, Sunderers being heavily armored wheeled vehicles) won't change. Atleast not without an expansion pack being released; which so far as we know isn't in development (so, if it is happening, isn't happening soon).

Still - it is fun to speculate and theory swap.

The infantry loved the new wheeled personell carriers... we finally got the Bradleys (as combat engineers) that they'd had while we were still in the M113 dath coffins that'd been in service since Vietnam.

The Bradley was a bastard APC. You give up a ton of carrier room for a small gun that just makes the stupid thing a higher priority target, with still poor armor.

The new wheeled APC is faster over all terrains, and they don't have constant bloody track break issues.

Tracks can carry more over rough terrain... tanks aren't going anywhere... but PERSONELL don't weigh much at all, compared to a 120mm canon and a hundred or so rounds of heavy as **** munitions.

That's why I think we've seen the end of tracked personell carriers. Our advancements in wheeled vehicles since WW2 when the tracked APC was conceived have surpassed the capabilities of tracked vehicles for that weight load.

THIS! SO MUCH THIS!!

the game really needs a vehicle in the form of an IFV: a troop transport with both anti-infantry autocannons and anti-tank missiles in a moderately armored vehicle. it would combine the combat effectiveness of a Lightning and the transport capability of a Sunderer, but without the powerful anti-tank cannons and without AMS, so the IFV would come with obvious tradeoffs

I am certainly not going to argue that wheeled systems are easier to maintain than tracked, nor do I think it is worth debating the merits of the platform - those are largely personal preference to begin with; even the M113 has fanboys. I'm sure you are familiar with "Sparky".

The "advancements" however, have really just been better power distribution and bigger, tougher, wheels to get over the ground pressure issues.

If warfare remains asymmetrical, however, I agree - the tracked infantry carrier is likely not to make a comeback. Though in situations of actual force parity, I feel the tracked infantry carrier provides a useful role.

Again, for reality, I hope the concept of total war is a vestige of our past. I am loathe to call Planetside 2 a total war, however, given the fact there is no economic or civilian element to attack or defend - but it is a parity situation.

Who the hell is a fanboy of that death can???

They obviously never rode in one then

I am really surprised you've been in an M113 and haven't heard of Mike "M113 Gavin" "Sparky" Sparks.

I drove one for a couple years....

and nope.

He is a unique individual who runs a site called "combat reform", and insists the US military essentially needs to replace the Bradley, Stryker, Humvee, and most every other infantry carrier, with the M113. Really, every mobile platform because he also puts forth Tank Destroyer and Artillery platform ideas (besides just the 120mm mortar carrier).

Ah...

bear in mind, I drove the M113 more than a decade ago, back when the Infantry still used the Bradley.

As I was leaving the Army, the Infantry were all upgrading to the new wheeled troop transport, and the Bradleys were replacing our M113's, but as I was out-processing at the time, I never even rode in the Bradley...

I could tell they had less space though, which was kinda dumb for us as Combat Engineers since we had TONS of crap we had to carry.

In any case, the M113 is the First vehicle I'd scrap from US military use, with the bradley a close second. Maybe vice-versa... they're both terrible though

Seems to me like Mr Sparky plays too much Warhammer 40k and loves to use Rhino's.

We had more problems with 113's than you can shake a stick at.

Course, for the most part, all Army equipment was in for a lot of repair... might have had something to do with how hard we were on it.....

For the most part, mechanized infantry blows though. I did everything I could to spend as much time as possible being assigned to light roles

I'm frankly surprised that Sparky hasn't tried to make an argument that we need to replace our aircraft carriers with M113s... really big M113s.

Anyhow, the advantage of M113s is that they can carry more stuff than an M2 and are enormously cheaper. They do, however, lack the firepower and armor of an M2.

So if you're expecting your guys to actually face significant resistance, send in an expensive M2.

But if you only think that there's a 15-ish percent chance that you'll take small arms fire at most, go ahead and use the cheaper M113. That means you can use your more rare and expensive M2s for other stuff.

If you think that there's a really good chance the enemy has set up some mines or IEDs but won't stick around for a prolonged fight, throw in an MRAP.

If you think the enemy is in the next town over and happens to be on vacation, just use a cheap old truck.

These things still have their roles in combat, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future so long as we have degrees of risk and limited resources. It'd be nice to use an infinite number of M2s for everything, but we simply don't have that luxury.

Well, as a living body to get into any given vehicle....

I can tell you that getting into a 113 to go to the front is an unnerving concept.

A 5-ton truck with sandbags piled on the sides to crouch behind is nearly as good protection FFS.

I despised mechanized combat in general though.... I far preferred light combat where your primary strength is in not being seen... compared to an M113 where a 50 cal mounted on a tripod would turn your vehicle to swiss cheese.

Kinda funny... for "requested Duty Stations" coming back from Korea I requested Ft Bragg (Airborne), Ft Cambell (Air Assault) and Ft Drum (Light mountain infantry)...

where'd they send me? Mother Effin Ft Hood Tx... the HEAVIEST Army base.

Gee... thanks.

Got lucky and wound up on an unofficial pet project of our Btn Cmdr, a platoon of "recon engineers" for about 8 months until we all got cycled out cause too many of my platoon mates were getting in trouble so they decided the easiest course of action was replace everybody =\ and back to the line I went.

Still refused to wear that damn piss pot though unless some high brass was around out in the field.

games live for few years only, if every small thing takes months development would be impossible. Big project are all about following procedure and reusing old code. They already got working engine and dev tool. How hard can it be to copy-paste lightning code, fiddle with numbers, slap on a texture (and ps2 textures are not that well-drawn to justify months of work) and pass it to QA?