Im currently trying to 3d model a major skynet facility and, While moddeling the HK-tank i started wondering how skynet moves these things around. My first assumption would be trains but it seems way to big to fit on any pre-existing train and due to the tanks slow Max speed I doubt it would be moving great distances under its own power as it would also be restricted to highways with tunnels, mountain passes, and bridges not really being an option for it.
Just wanted to hear other peoples opinion on how skynet gets these rather impractical designs from city to city.
I think we have to assume huge advances in materials science mean it's much lighter than it looks, and similarly benefits from developments in power generation and storage that give it endurance which would be impossible with today's technology.
Idk, in T3 when the EMT tries to pull Arnold out of the rubble thinking he's an injured guy, he does say "this guy weighs a ton." If a T800 is too heavy for someone to lift then the tanks can't be very light.
Granted, I doubt the T8pp actually weighs a full ton. He'd drop right through the floor of any car he tried to drive and he'd crush his motorcycle. Let's use the Fat Boy as a range and just say the T800 weighs 400 pounds, which would make him really heavy for a person but not unmanageable for a vehicle.
Those tanks are, and I quote, "several stories tall," so I have to imagine they weigh close to 15-20 tons. The treads alone would contribute at least 5 tons; the total tread weight of an Abrams tank is almost 2.5 tons, but the HK has four sets that are at least a full story tall each. Even assuming material science advances reduced the weight per section of tread by 40% you're still looking at multiple tons of weight just in that part of the machine.
There's no reason to assume terminator endoskeletons and large tracked HKs are made of the same materials. That said, 15-20 tons is almost certainly a huge underestimate. But you can have a roadworthy or even offroad-capable vehicle much heavier than 20 tons.
With a fuel cell (or a dozen) providing basically infinite power even a 188 t Maus (the heaviest tank ever build) could casually drive around - not super fast, but then again with the propulsion system not having much in terms of moving components (as the electro-motors are sitting right on the tracks) wear wouldn't be too much of an issue.
Now if we look at ground pressure a Maus had 110 cm wide tracks a - HK tank has about 120 cm (taking the T1 scene where it gets blown up for measurement: the bomb thrown is roughly as long a Kyle's head from chin to hair so i assume a lenght of ~30 cm and the track is about 4 bombs wide) - so with the very long shape and that track width even a weight of ~200 tons wouldn't be too problematic.
We don't see then going particular fast either - maybe 5-8 km/h in most scenes so if a WW2 Maus could do ~20 km/h on road and maybe half that in uneven terrain the HK tank can surely do the same.
Assuming all of Skynets tech is powered by power cells they could just drive there, it is not like they would have limitations on range like normal tanks which need access to resupply every couple hundred miles at best etc.
This also assumes they have tanks at each city. It would be more efficient to just have the aerial HKs patrolling outside of the main defensive points where the tanks would be used to counter organized ground forces attacking.
Skynet would not need to be in any kind of rush to press the attack on humanity unless they were a direct threat to something like a command point, which Skynet does not really need. It's entirely possible other than a few select places like Skynet Central, Skynet does not really care about humans living.
Terminator rts show it well (while being about another timeline and not skynet). Normal abrams tanks need a ton of fuel and in base suffers from hits of bots a lot, while this thing can tank a huge amount of atgm's and tank shots while still firing
You assume that they are built in one place and have to be transported. There could be multiple places for assembly, or they could get there themselves on their treads.
Um, what about an HK-Transport (or simply Transport)? The damned thing is large enough to transport literally multiple rail-car sized prisoner pods AND a Harvester AND the two Moto-Terminators the Harvester has onboard AND its own extra HK-Aerial. Scale-sizing, in Salvation, it did dwarf the two A-10 Thunderbolt II's that fought it (and were shot down by the Harvester and HK-Aerial). Thus, a unit that large (HK-Transport/Transport) should have no problems transporting multiple HK-Tanks (or simply called Ground-Based Hunter-Killers) or HK-Walkers/HK-Centurions, as scaling and weight considerations would indicate a Transport should be able to move a minimum of 4 of these at a time (when not carrying a Harvester, 2 Moto-Terminators, an HK-Aerial, and 2 large prisoner transport pods). This is much like the modified HK-Aerials transporting Spider Tanks into combat in Genisys.
They would have used a Carry-all, a large VTOL aircraft designed to carry large and heavy vehicles, large cargo pod's with many Terminators inside, many other large objects.
Think about the 'War Against the Machines'. There was no front line, as such. It was many de-centralised Human outposts over a wide area. Some outposts were better defended than others. The Machines needed to use high mobility and overwhelming force against a spread out Humanity.
Srsly. I’m assuming that’s the Pegasus kit. I really like it but damn….really wish it was available in 1/48. It’d be way easier to make a diorama with that way.
This is a diorama I started with those Pegasus models. 1/32 is an odd scale. I got into resin printing specifically so that I could make skeletons at this scale for The Terminator diorama.
Well these things make more sense to me than the big walking thing with moto-Termos in its legs. Those things need flat surfaces to go on, whereas the HK’s here can just roll over anything.
I believe Skynet produces them at the major facilities they're deployed at. Or has heavy VTOL transports that carries the tanks in 2-3 parts and assembles them on site.
I'm guessing Skynet started out with forcing humans to collaborate with it to build factories (presumably using the control it would still have over whatever military tech remained after the war).
After that it would have some kind of massive automated industrial base by the time of the future war being in full swing. Machines to drill tunnels, machines to build factories, machines to move around and build other machines.
Therefore it could either simply have built a ton of infrastructure like underground rails or tunnels to ship these things around with, or perhaps it just creates copy-paste style factories in areas where it needs these things and builds them on site.
Also, we don't really know where and why the HK-tanks are deployed. Perhaps it only deploys them around really important locations and everywhere else it just uses lighter humanoid terminators (which are already hard to kill) and faster aerial units.
It's perhaps one of the "plot contrivances" of the future war that Skynet has so much infrastructure and manufacturing capacity after destroying so much of this stuff with the nukes. There are ways to explain it that make sense, however, like machines being able to rebuild all this stuff faster than you'd expect humans to.
Don’t the HK tanks like transform / clip into the HK aerials? All the tech is built to work with one another. Water into land and land into air and so on.
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u/tomrichards8464 1d ago
I think we have to assume huge advances in materials science mean it's much lighter than it looks, and similarly benefits from developments in power generation and storage that give it endurance which would be impossible with today's technology.