ShneekeyTheLost wrote:Besides, tracked vehicles are gas guzzlers... while effective at crawling over nearly any sort of terrain, it is not the most efficient means of converting rotational motion into horizontal motion.
But yea, as long as there are no weapons mounted, and you remove the mounts as well, and get all the approval papers and license plates, and have the pavement treads... perfectly legal.
In most places you don't even need to remove the weapons mounts . . . only in the repressive ones like New Jersey.
Pavement treads aren't exactly required either . . . but they tend to call it malicious mischief or something of that sort and require you to pay fines on top of the damages if you don't use them.
BTW, many of the half-tracks have continuous rubber treads . . . essentially giant rubber bands with steel-cable reinforcements inside of them, the equivalent of the steel belts in tires.
GlytchMeister wrote:Seems to me there oughta be a way to put tire-wheels just inside the tracks, so when you gotta switch from "Nothing shall stand in my way" mode to "next stop, the other end of the damn state" mode, just jack the wheels down, lift the whole thing up about six inches, and away you go.
That's been tried any number of times . . . it doesn't work very well, partially because of the weight and the need for separate drive-trains (the needs are too different).
GlytchMeister wrote: . . . Kinda like those bigass trucks I see once in a while where I work that have wheels for train tracks and tires for pavement.
If you look closely, most of those just use the highrailer wheels for guidance and part of the weight-carrying, and the drive wheels of the truck still ride on the rails for the drive and part of the weight support. I own a former one of those trucks, and it's a standard truck once the highrailers are removed.
--FreeFlier