The Really Bad Ideas Thread

[Weaver]

so like a police rapid response narrow boat

Heh - yeah, that's the idea. In the same spirit, you could have racing narrow boats, using sponsorship logos from racing cars. You can certainly buy narrow boat models (start with model railway accessory suppliers) and there's a company that does all the car racing decals too. Of course, the British canal speed limit of 4mph would still apply, so just imagine how exciting it would be...zzzzzz

[Weaver]

Speaking of British narrow canals, the Canal Defence Light (a misleading name for a tank-mounted battlefield spotlight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Defence_Light) gave me the idea for a Canal Defense Fighter, which is a floatplane fighter aircraft with a single float in the middle but an outrigger wheel in place of each tip float, because they'd be running on the towpaths rather than the water. Landings would have to be VERY VERY precise....

You might then imagine an RAF (or would it be FAA? There's a political knife-fight to have...) narrow-boat floatplane tender to look after them....

[Weaver]

This talk of narrow boats makes me think of other non-anarchic vehicles, which in turn brings me to the humble tram. many years ago, somebody (I think he was Puddlingwrestler's little brother? *) suggested a Pirate Tram, an idea which I was so enamoured of that I went out and bought a couple of tram models (old double deckers, naturally - more scope for bowsprits and figureheads) and some pirate figures. I'll get round to building it one of these decades...

In one of Michael Moorcock's War Amongst the Angels trilogy, one of the characters recalls a mispent youth in a different timeline in which they were a highwayman holding up trams on Hampstead Heath in the 1920s ( "Throw down your lever sir! Your money or your life!"  ) Imagine how much more scary it would be if trams full of raffish pirates, complete with 12-pounder muzzle-loaders in the doors, were in the habit of swinging out of the foggy London night to conduct under way boarding actions and robberies, before speeding off on a diverging set of rails to an entirely predictable (because they're on rails) destination? The Met Police wouldn't know what to do. They'd probably have to introduce Police Pursuit Trams to try to go after them...


*EDIT - It was DaFROG, on this 'ere post in the Pirates GB, many moons ago: http://www.whatifmodellers.com/index.php/topic,29542.0.html

[tigercat]

Or undercover Q Trams

Here's a source of buses trams  , steamwagons etc

http://www.knightwing.co.uk/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?next=9&cart_id=1518973141.137&product=OO-HO_Road_Transport_Kits

[tigercat]

Also ok inshore submarines to prey on the Canal Aircraft tenders

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2176938/Homemade-U-Boat-sails-English-canal-goes-sale-30-000.html

[PR19_Kit]

Speaking of British narrow canals, the Canal Defence Light (a misleading name for a tank-mounted battlefield spotlight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Defence_Light) gave me the idea for a Canal Defense Fighter, which is a floatplane fighter aircraft with a single float in the middle but an outrigger wheel in place of each tip float, because they'd be running on the towpaths rather than the water. Landings would have to be VERY VERY precise....

You might then imagine an RAF (or would it be FAA? There's a political knife-fight to have...) narrow-boat floatplane tender to look after them....

It'd need some SERIOUS high lift devices too, monster flaps, and leading slots, with slots on them too, because the 4 mph speed limit would still apply.

Its stalling speed would need to be around 3.5 mph......... 

[tigercat]

Which was part of the reason we got the Canal Defense Helicopter

And of course there was the development of the Area Denial Swan

I think the knifefight would also include the army as well

http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/topic/228607-inland-water-transport-royal-engineers/

[Weaver]

Speaking of British narrow canals, the Canal Defence Light (a misleading name for a tank-mounted battlefield spotlight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Defence_Light) gave me the idea for a Canal Defense Fighter, which is a floatplane fighter aircraft with a single float in the middle but an outrigger wheel in place of each tip float, because they'd be running on the towpaths rather than the water. Landings would have to be VERY VERY precise....

You might then imagine an RAF (or would it be FAA? There's a political knife-fight to have...) narrow-boat floatplane tender to look after them....

It'd need some SERIOUS high lift devices too, monster flaps, and leading slots, with slots on them too, because the 4 mph speed limit would still apply.

Its stalling speed would need to be around 3.5 mph......... 

Now THAT leads to the thought of a James Bond Canal Boat, which being a 'company car' has a pop-out jet engine that allows it to exceed the 4mph speed limit by some margin. Of course that would attract the attention of a British Waterways Inspector (whose name should feature some combination of 'J', 'W' and 'Pepper') who sets off in 'hot' pursuit (i.e. 5mph in his suitably hot-rodded pursuit-narrow-boat) only to see Bond activate the boat's folding gyroplane rotors and sail majestically away into the sky...

SCENE: The two traffic cops from Last Of The Summer Wine are having a break (their shift seems to consist of a closely-connected series of breaks) on a very low canal bridge when they spill their thermos of tea in their lap at the sight of an jet-powered autogyro canal boat flying over the top of the bridge. This is followed by a loud splash: Inspector Pepper was so busy looking at his escaping quarry that he forgot about the bridge and got knocked of the back of his official-pursuit-boat.

One of the cops looks suspiciously at his sandwich and mutters, "I'm going to have words with our Gladys about what she's seasoning the egg-and-cress with these days!"

The other one peers at the sandwich closely and asks, "is that really cress?"

Said it before and I'll say it again: we NEED a James Bond GB...

[Weaver]

Which was part of the reason we got the Canal Defense Helicopter

And of course there was the development of the Area Denial Swan

I think the knifefight would also include the army as well

http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/topic/228607-inland-water-transport-royal-engineers/

That's a great find - I had no idea about the IWT! 

Visions of a khaki narrowboat with the IWT anchor badge on it and one of those high-angle 13-pounder AA guns that they used on lorries in WWI....

[tigercat]

http://www.naval-military-press.com/inland-water-transport-in-mesopotamia.html

Don't get the kindle version it has no photos

[Snowtrooper]

Well, whaddya know. I found my old doodles from senior high school, which contain some improbable and certainly bad ideas. These range generally from highly impractical to physically impossible to "what was I on back then?" I'll try to arrange these into thematic sets, but here are some small appetizers:

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What's the largest gun you could conceivably fit inside a VW Beetle, if weight is not an issue but roughly the available space (let's assume we can change the body shape but keep the size roughly similar)?

Back then I doodled a militarized Beetle that was intended to be a sort of desperate '45 (or '46) plan to have a minimally viable self-propelled anti-tank gun using existing tooling and technology as much as possible. Hey, if you have Volkssturm armed with Volksgewehr, and even Volksjäger, why not Volkspanzer? With rudimentary armour plating, uprated engine certainly not overheating and breaking the transmission, and the cannon sticking out where the windshield would have been on the civilian model I named this deathtrap contraption revolutionary weapon that will surely turn the tide for the Reich the "Jagdkäfer". (Looking at it again after all these years, PaK 36 with Stielgrenate 41 ammunition would fit the general idea, namely that the brave volunteer would have to go outside the vehicle to reload the main gun.)

Of course, then there was the inevitable, completely nonsense, even more heavily armed tracked variant of VW Kleinbus with a big honking gun sticking out the front, rooftop ring mount for a MG42, and Schürzen plates on the sides called the "Königskäfer"...

But wait, the line of last-ditch militarized civilian vehicles does not end there! Then there was the Jagdbenz, an armoured Mercedes W143/W153 with a rooftop ring mount for a Panzerschreck and MG42 and another MG42 firing forward. Naturally, there was its heavier cousin the Sturmbenz, based on the six-wheeled W31 Typ 4 with an enclosed "fighting compartment", armed with a remote-controlled six-tube Panzerfaust 150 mount on the rooftop (how these would have actually been aimed is a different matter), a 2cm KwK 30 sticking out of the former windshield and couple of MG42's shooting to the sides and rear.

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A German-captured Lancaster turned into an anti-tank aircraft... probably... something... well, fitted in any case with a forward-firing Raketen-Werfer 61 L/5.4 (aka the 38cm rocket mortar from Sturmtiger) in the lower fuselage (roughly where the bombardier's station was in the stock model) along with a copious amount of other guns, rockets, and bombs.

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Defiant GR.IV with a turboprop engine, 4x20mm Hispano guns in the wings and the two 40mm Vickers "S" guns from Hurri IID in underwing gondolas, and Avro Lincoln dorsal turret with 2x20mm Hispano guns.

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M3 Lee with a 155mm M2 gun in a hilariously overgrown casemate (but still having that 37 mm turret)
M4 Sherman with the same 155mm M2 gun and a T34 Calliope rocket launcher
One of these two almost manifested in a physical form as I did have a Mbox M40 GMC and Hase's M3 and M4 in various states of disrepair available (Calliope would have just been made of some extra-thin drinking straws), but I never got around to complete it since I couldn't decide between the two - however the parts might actually be still somewhere at the very bottom of the bitz box...

[Weaver]

What's the largest gun you could conceivably fit inside a VW Beetle, if weight is not an issue but roughly the available space (let's assume we can change the body shape but keep the size roughly similar)?

Back then I doodled a militarized Beetle that was intended to be a sort of desperate '45 (or '46) plan to have a minimally viable self-propelled anti-tank gun using existing tooling and technology as much as possible. Hey, if you have Volkssturm armed with Volksgewehr, and even Volksjäger, why not Volkspanzer? With rudimentary armour plating, uprated engine certainly not overheating and breaking the transmission, and the cannon sticking out where the windshield would have been on the civilian model I named this deathtrap contraption revolutionary weapon that will surely turn the tide for the Reich the "Jagdkäfer". (Looking at it again after all these years, PaK 36 with Stielgrenate 41 ammunition would fit the general idea, namely that the brave volunteer would have to go outside the vehicle to reload the main gun.)

Alternatively, mount six 10.5cm LG 42 recoilless rifles, with four spotting rifles, on the back of the Beetle, reloaded by brave volunteer again, and call it the inspiration for the ONTOS....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10.5_cm_Leichtgesch%C3%BCtz_42

Somewhere in a box I've got a white-metal version of one of the German RRs, so models are obviously out there, possibly in the wargaming world. A quick Google search shows that there have also been at least two 1/35th resin ones.

Defiant GR.IV with a turboprop engine, 4x20mm Hispano guns in the wings and the two 40mm Vickers "S" guns from Hurri IID in underwing gondolas, and Avro Lincoln dorsal turret with 2x20mm Hispano guns.

Funnily enough, I've just got hold of an old Aeroclub Shackleton Mk.2 conversion set (redundant now that the Airfix and Revell kits are out) which includes the twin 20mm dorsal turret. I had the same idea: put it on a Defiant. Unfortunately, it's MASSIVELY bigger than the Defiant turret: the latter's glazing will literally fit inside the Shack one with room to rattle about...

An super-defiant makes a certain sense though (I know, wrong thread). Boulton-Paul proposed an updated one called the P.96 with various combinations of Sabre or Centaurus engines turrets or radar operators and two to six 20mm in the wings. Probably have been quite formidable, particularly if turreted and non-turreted aircraft could have been mixed in the same unit.

M3 Lee with a 155mm M2 gun in a hilariously overgrown casemate (but still having that 37 mm turret)
M4 Sherman with the same 155mm M2 gun and a T34 Calliope rocket launcher
One of these two almost manifested in a physical form as I did have a Mbox M40 GMC and Hase's M3 and M4 in various states of disrepair available (Calliope would have just been made of some extra-thin drinking straws), but I never got around to complete it since I couldn't decide between the two - however the parts might actually be still somewhere at the very bottom of the bitz box...

You can buy a 1/76th Calliope courtesy of Airfix now, of course.

[scooter]

M3 Lee with a 155mm M2 gun in a hilariously overgrown casemate (but still having that 37 mm turret)

Proto-proto-Doom Turtle (T28/T95)?

[zenrat]

How about a steam driven Submarine?
You'd need a long snorkel thingy to let the smoke/steam out? (Might be a bit of a giveaway during the day) perhaps best just to snorkel at night?
Or could you just vent it overboard?
Smoke bubbles?  smoke rings
And I suppose the Coal bunkers would take up a fair bit of room, but you wouldn't be short of water for the boiler....

Regards
Keith

british k class of 1913 were steam powered

Isn't a nuclear submarine basically steam powered?  Albeit with the steam generated by nuclear power, turning turbines rather than pushing pistons and being in a closed system.

However, getting back to the point.
Not all bad ideas have to be armed.  I do have a pair of 1/24 Napier Sabres and a number of small Japanese cars in the same scale.  Not sure what transmission I would use.  Not sure that you would require more than one speed, reverse and a clutch.
Turboprop Be2c Royal Flying Doctor Service?

[Weaver]

M3 Lee with a 155mm M2 gun in a hilariously overgrown casemate (but still having that 37 mm turret)

Proto-proto-Doom Turtle (T28/T95)?

Is this some sort of American ritual chant?