holy shit this is an insanely cool vehicle that I had no idea about, fucking Soviet Half-Life 2 airboat :sicko-yes:
It would have been so fucking cool to see Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond gunned down by one of these while he was skiing
Snow technical
Tear ducts hate this one weird vehicle
i wonder how many degrees of incline these things could handle. im guessing not many
They were used on rivers and lakes exclusively afaik.
Wikipedia suggests that they can’t handle any kind of grade… but that’s okay if you’re using them to fly down a frozen river super fast.
there’s an alternate reality where the USSR won and Comrades of Duty (it sounds better in Russian) is the most popular video game series and there’s a level where you get to absolutely whip down a river gunning down nazis in this thing
The right Russian with a half-life 2 airboat can make all the difference in the world war and kill a nazi
Wikipedia article about these.
Snowmobiles did exist in this time period, so I’m wondering what the advantage is. My guess is that with the technology of the 30s and 40s, this was actually a cheaper and easier maintain option than trying to make a vehicle with continuous tracks.
You don’t have to manufacture a transmission for one of these - the propeller goes straight on the crankshaft of the engine so that likely saves a bunch of labor time/materials. You’re sort of limited to the redline of the engine, but if it’s designed for high RPMs (rotary engines are great for this) feel like a that’s not much of a limitation.
The article suggests “otherwise-disused vintage aircraft engines and propellers”, so it might simply have been cheaper / easier to find a use for those.
There were a couple of units of vehicles like this, some lightly armored, that were used on frozen lakes and rivers. Frozen rivers become, essentially, free roads if the ice is thick enough.
