Why Gun Tractor Shape

[Owen Evans]

Thought these photos of supposedly prototype Morris and Guy Ant gun tractors might be of interest. Also, the CDSW gun tractor here: http://www.mapleleafup.net/forums/showthread.php?t=6333 also has the sloping back...sort of.

What's the framework on the back of the Guy GT 'prototype'?

Owen.

[Lang]

After 300 years of towing guns maybe the gunners wanted to keep looking at something that resembled a horse's a.....?

[David Herbert]

Just to throw something else into the discussion, quite a lot of modern Humvees have a sloping back. There is no practical reason for it that I know of but at least early on that was the default rear body design.

The two 'prototypes' in post #18 were obviously only intended to be tractors to directly replace horses. The fact that they could easily be used to carry stuff seems to have not yet been noticed.

David

[rob love]

It's almost like they took the guy ant prototype and simply made it bigger. It looks like the rear deck has brackets that are holding legs similar to that used on mortar tripods. I can't place what artillery equipment used those legs.

Re the HHMWVs, they sloping back is on the "slantback" hardtop only. I suspect the slantback was simply so the gunner in the turret ring had an unobstructed view to the rear if he wanted it, or that the hatchback simply gave a little protected cargo room than a flat cargo bed. Kind of the same reason they made car trunks into hatchbacks.

[Ed Landstrom]

To confirm the theory that the sloping back on a Humvee was to give the gunner an unrestricted view to the rear, I was told the same thing by a Humvee driver, so it was what they were being told in training. Specifically, it was designed so that the gunner could fire over the rear with the vehicle parked nose-down on the reverse slope of a berm, using the berm for cover, with the rear of the vehicle facing the enemy. It seems like a rather infrequent use to base a vehicle design on, unless American forward bases are designed with protective berms that would fit this use.

[David Herbert]

Sorry to divert the original point of this thread but I think in the case of the Humvee that the likelyhood of a berm being of a gentle enough slope or just the right height is not great ! I think that Rob's second theory that it was just a way of covering the cargo bed to keep things dry and secure is much more likely, and that similar reasoning was used with the FATs.

David