The ability to traverse any open terrain.

 

Power requirements for lift fans would be enormous.

On the military sci-fi post someone pointed out that a hover tank would kick up a lot of dust, which would make it easier to spot.  Perhaps instead of lift fans a hover craft could employ some sort of magnetic lift device that would allow a craft to hover without kicking up a lot of dust.  Such a system would probably be pretty quiet as well. 

Would it kick up that much dust than a tracked vehicle to make a difference in detection?  In a wetter location, you would get no dust at all.

Magnetic lift?  I'm no engineer but if your thinking MAGLEV, then you need a magnetic guide that is the reverse polarity of the magnetic drive of the tank to get lift.  Obviously not practical.

Could a hovertank with say a 120mm gun, absorb all the recoil of firing the gun? You don't want to settle to the ground to fire?  It would seem if you fire the gun, you're going to move very rapidly in the opposite direction from the recoil.

 

Even if you just mount small guns that you're better able to control the recoil from, do you really want to be using a hover tank in someplace Iraq or Afghanistan?  Just imagine the problems with blowing sand. In spite of the skirt you're not going to be able to see much. It will be much like landing a helicopter there today.

 

Nope - don't see much of a future for hover tanks.

As to recoil, i'm sure there's a way to make the gun go bawards like 4 feet from firing posiotn fo stop the recoil then move back before it fires again. Hovercraft will have a tremendouse amoutn of speed comapred to normal armoed veichles.

Most problems with hovercraft based vehicles are due to the fact that there is no friction between the hovercraft and the surface it is transversing.

 

Poor acceleration and deceleration makes sprinting between cover difficult, although you can stop quickly if you "dump the bubble" and slam it down on it's belly (probably not recommended practice).

 

Hover tanks only work well on flat surfaces (level ground, swamps, etc.).  Irregular terrain, like a boulder field, abatus, or tank traps, will dump the bubble and immobilize a hover tank.  A trench may also be effective the same way.  And where a tank can just push though some terrain (small tree's and brush) a hovercraft needs to back up and accelerate to build momentum and ram.

 

On a slope you have to rely on thrust and momentum.  Stopping is not an option, getting moving again is extremely difficult, and lifting after you have set down is worse.  Traversing across a slope requires a hover tank to "crab" it's way, with the bow pointed up the slope, and it's side armor in the direction of travel.

 

The only solution is to increase the thrust to weight ration to in excess of 1 to 1 (and probably greater than 1.2 to 1).  What you will have then is a flying platform than normally operates in ground effect.  Might be a good replacement for the helicopter instead of the tank.

 

 

 

Ever seen the movie Sgt Bilko with Steve Martin?

There was an attempt at a hovertank in this movie.

Hollywood crapjob special effects make it possible, although it looks like a cheap effects budget:

look at the poor distortion in the hover "field" between the lower section of the "tank" and the ground beneath it,...proponents would supportedly argue that's due to any lift fans kicking up debris and dust, and any heat distortion/shimmer by deflecting any engine/turbine exhausts downward under the vehicle...

 

Anyhow, the first glimpse we see it fire near the beginning pretty much sums it up: recoil sends it careening wildly out of control (it's only thru clever manipulation of the testing later that they make it look like it works).

 

No, lift fans and thrust-vectoring jets will never give us reasonable hover tanks (not even the cool-ish Hover-MLRS from the Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun & Firestorm games).

 

We're just gonna have to wait for repulsorlift (anti gravity) technology like almost every non-legged ground vehicle in the Star Wars movies uses (speeder bikes, Luke's landspeeder, those mammoth-like troop carriers, etc),

with "repulsorlift" field technologies so advanced they allow for the same movement capabilities of any wheeled or tracked vehicles today.

Those Trade Federation tanks from the Phantom Menace (fourth movie, but technically Episode 1) were a good indication of a possible course: turreted "laser cannon" and hull-mounted missile tubes.

(Years ago, Popular Mechanics magazine had an issue partially devoted to showing the tech inside of numerous Star Wars machines, drawn up by people the likes of those artists who create the cut-away drawings in countless real-world military books.)

 

Here though, recoil isn't an issue: one would think that any true laser wouldn't recoil at all, suggesting some Star Wars weapons as such are more like particle cannons than lasers per se (pushing some sort of mass that would actually create a recoil behind its acceleration),

but the field technology (anti grav, inertial dampeners, etc) would allow the vehicle to very subtley create some kind of counter-acceleration in the opposite direction to mitigate the effects of a heavy gun's recoil,...same could be argued for countless scifi movies where someone gets shot with a "ray" gun and goes flying backwards (Chronicles of Riddick was good, with the Necromonger handheld weapons).

The idea of counter-acceleration to nullify any perceived recoil is also a key (though often unsung) issue in any scifi venue that requires spacecraft accelerating to warp speed or hyperdrive without turning the crew into primordial pulp at the back wall of the ships as they accelerate so fast so quickly.

 

...But humanity is years away from anything such being fielded in a practical sense...

 

If anything, we'd be more likely to see some sort of vectored-thrust aicraft like the aerial HKs of the Terminator movies sooner than we'd see a true ground vehicle along similar lines.
Biggest problems though still seem to be,

if we want it armored to even the slightest extent (small arms proof), it's going to have a fairly large RCS (ungaily shape and large lift engines), make a lot of noise flying (turbines or large rotors), and generate a lot of heat (jet-powered),

necessary to move all that weight around at a pretty good pace.

Today's attack helicopters are a testament to that.