Concepts for Vehicles for Off-Road Use in Remote Areas

Specialists met at the U. S. Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station (WES) to consider quantitatively various elements of the entire vehicle mobility problem and to suggest an approach for achieving a substantial degree of solution. One specific purpose of the meeting was to design a number of vehicles capable of operating in remote areas of the world where extremely soft soil conditions predominate.

Methods of design based on research studies at the WES and at the Land Locomotion Laboratory (LLL), U. S. Army Tank-Automotive Center, were employed to specify tractive component characteristics that would yield the desired soft soil performance. This paper describes the application of the design methods and presents the two wheeled-vehicle concepts and the one tracked-vehicle concept that were evolved to staisfy the basic assumptions.