Walking/Air Cushion Ambulance Idea

[Cobra]

Hey Guys, i was surfing Google,and Thinking about Star Wars when an Idea came to me! What If there were a Walking or Hover Ambulance Built? i mention Hover because a lot of the Battletech Technical Readouts include Hovercraft such as Ambulances! think this would be a Good Whif Project? I'm thinking a Walking Ambulance along the Lines of an AT-AT from 'Empire Strikes Back'FYI! Thanks for Looking.Dan

[Weaver]

A hover ambulance would be a good idea in any environment where hovercraft work to advantage anyway. Some British lifeboat stations now have hovercraft as rescue vehicles, where they have shallow tidal flats to deal with that are covered and uncovered at differtent times of day (Morecombe, for example). In these circumstances, choosing between a boat or a 4x4 can leave you in lethal danger if the tide catches you out (these are BUSY lifeboat stations!) so a hovercraft is ideal.

Not sure about the walker, mainly because it's slow and presumably bumpy, although something the size of an AT-AT could have a decent first aid station actually inside it. However if my culture had the technology to build walkers (and the perennial, usually overlooked, question is "why bother?") I'd pretty much expect them to have some impressive VTOL flying machines to wisk me quickly away to hospital as a far more preferable option.

[cataphractarius]

As for the hovercraft idea, well, it's hard to beat the '60s:

http://www.britishpathe.co.uk/video/hover-stretcher/query/stretcher

[jcf]

Ya, mean something like an ambulance version of Syd Mead's original walker concept from the '60s?

[PR19_Kit]

As for the hovercraft idea, well, it's hard to beat the '60s:

http://www.britishpathe.co.uk/video/hover-stretcher/query/stretcher

Cor, I can remember seeing that item in the cinema! Nostalgis rules OK. 

I'd have thought the patients would have been better travelling head first, or being put on oxygen before they lifted off, the hover engine was nowhere near current standards for smoke and polutant generation!

[raafif]

As for the hovercraft idea, well, it's hard to beat the '60s:
http://www.britishpathe.co.uk/video/hover-stretcher/query/stretcher

didn't that thing just evolve into the Flymo mower

Canada had an ambulance that they could put on a tracked chassis for snow use in the late 1980s.

[Gondor]

By the look of that clip they may have gotten the patients to the hospital fairly qyickly but they would have been chokeing on the exhaust fumes.

Gondor

[Doc Yo]

 Every time I see an ambulance struggling to get through rush hour traffic here in Austin, I find myself wondering if the Piasecki Air Jeep
wouldn't have been a good solution.

[dragon]

A hover ambulance would be a good idea in any environment where hovercraft work to advantage anyway. Some British lifeboat stations now have hovercraft as rescue vehicles, where they have shallow tidal flats to deal with that are covered and uncovered at differtent times of day (Morecombe, for example). In these circumstances, choosing between a boat or a 4x4 can leave you in lethal danger if the tide catches you out (these are BUSY lifeboat stations!) so a hovercraft is ideal.

Not sure about the walker, mainly because it's slow and presumably bumpy, although something the size of an AT-AT could have a decent first aid station actually inside it. However if my culture had the technology to build walkers (and the perennial, usually overlooked, question is "why bother?") I'd pretty much expect them to have some impressive VTOL flying machines to wisk me quickly away to hospital as a far more preferable option.

Per the notorious diorama of IPMS USA Nationals 2011 "Some Like it Hoth", apparently that is not the way the AT-ATs "rescue" each other...... :

[Old Wombat]

Hover ambulances would have the advantage of a (generally) much smoother ride under most conditions than a wheeled/walking vehicle, plus the ability to cross water without stopping or finding a bridge.

A walking vehicle would offer the roughest ride under most conditions given current technology, unless the system was set up to try to keep the passenger "deck" absolutely level & free of sudden vertical motion, too. However, it would then become the slowest ride.

Wheeled vehicles we know about, with all their good & bad points.

[Mossie]

Use the LS3 version of BigDog for casevac?  Not the smoothest of rides, but neither is two blokes with a stretcher over rough terrain.
http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_ls3.html

[Weaver]

Hovercraft have plus and minus points as vehicles generally.

Upside: smooth, fast, independent of surface hardness or consistency, mine resistant (but you could easily design an anti-hovercraft mine if there was the requirement).

Downside: noisy, lots of dust/spray, big footprint relative to weight, can't handle steep slopes, can't handle small-scale broken terrain that compromises the air cushion effect, can't maneuver very precisely, can't stop quickly (the last two could be addessed with aerospace tech).

So hovercraft are great for moving quickly and conspicuously from, say, a calm sea to a flat beach and then over a swamp full of mines. On the other hand, they're lousy at sneaking quietly through the rush-hour streets of a city that's built on the side of a hill. Horses for courses, basically.

[PR19_Kit]

......can't stop quickly (the last two could be addessed with aerospace tech).

Not quite true.

When I worked on SeaSpeed's SRN4s one of the drills we had to do was a crash stop and they did it just by dumping the cushion air which dropped the craft onto whatever surface it happened to be over at the time. On concrete this produced a horrendous sound and a big thump and stopped as if it had hit a brick wall! Over water it was a lot more gentle but still stopped pretty quickly with lots of spray and stuff, but on sand it was sensational! It was as if someone had slung an anchor out the back as it came to a swift and remarkably gentle halt.

As I was usually working in the APU section, sans windows or any other way of knowing where we were, they had to warn me over the intercom just before we did a crash stop, in case I bounced off the very hot APU!

[Weaver]

......can't stop quickly (the last two could be addessed with aerospace tech).

Not quite true.

When I worked on SeaSpeed's SRN4s one of the drills we had to do was a crash stop and they did it just by dumping the cushion air which dropped the craft onto whatever surface it happened to be over at the time. On concrete this produced a horrendous sound and a big thump and stopped as if it had hit a brick wall! Over water it was a lot more gentle but still stopped pretty quickly with lots of spray and stuff, but on sand it was sensational! It was as if someone had slung an anchor out the back as it came to a swift and remarkably gentle halt.

As I was usually working in the APU section, sans windows or any other way of knowing where we were, they had to warn me over the intercom just before we did a crash stop, in case I bounced off the very hot APU!

Yes, but that's an emergency stop: if you did that in an ambulance-sized hovercraft every time you would have hit the brakes in a wheeled vehicle you'd wreck the underside in short order and if you did it on roads, you wouldn't be very popular with the council either! You'd also lose the smooth ride which is claimed as one advantage of the ambulance hovercraft.

My point about aerospace tech is that most hovercraft control systems are fairly simple, consisting of just rudders in the propwash. If you had a powerful hovercraft with gas-turbine engines, you could have something like a Harrier's reaction control system, using bleed air to feed variable side and front nozzles which could push the thing around much more precisely. You could also have either a thrust-reverser system or reversable pitch thrust blades (depending on what the craft's thrust mechanism was) to give powerful braking without dumping the cushion.

[jcf]

Notes about Syd Mead's walker concepts from the '60s:
1) gyro-stabilized (Mead worked with Alex Trmulis on the Gyron at Ford);
2) the feet were pneumatic and were to function like an elephants foot, inflating on contact with the ground
to increase surface area thus reducing ground pressure and cushioning impact, and deflating when being lifted
to reduce diameter, thus sloughing off snow or mud;
3) on both the quadruped and biped walker designs the feet could rotate 90 degrees and function as wheels
on smooth terrain.

He originally came up with the concept in 1963 when asked by Mechanics Illustrated to design a Lunar and/or Martian
surface exploration vehicle.

If one use Lucas's lumbering walking tank design as the paradigm of quadruped walker design, well then indeed it will
be clumsy and bone-rattling. 

Of course, Arthropods are probably a more likely model for walking machines, and something millipede like would probably
be the smoothest.