Talk:Landship

Sense
This article does not make any sense at all, so I'm editing it so that it does.The Little Internet Kitty 15:41, 11 January 2007 (UTC)


 * That wasn't cute.


 * Wonder Reversion Powers, ACTIVATE!! SAMAS 00:21, 30 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks SAMAS. I know, my drawing is not the best, but I'll try to come up with a better one soon. --Henrickson 05:16, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Fiction
In the fictional appearances section, should the Land Dreadnought "Tartarus" from the video game Tales of the Abyss be mentioned? It seems to fit the bill. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.200.44.97 (talk) 02:59, 22 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Is it big? Is it lumbering? Does it give a sense of great size and power? Then throw it in. CABAL (talk) 02:49, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

A list of fictional landships was created but was later deleted, see Articles for deletion/Fictional landship (2nd nomination). For the reasons given there, no such list should be inserted in this article.

I have only added a mention of Sandcrawler because it is notable enough to have its own article. – Fayenatic  L ondon 11:59, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

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Merger proposal
It as been proposed that Land battleship be merged into this page. Hohum (talk) 01:38, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Makes sense to me - they seem to describe the exact same concept. It even mentions on the land battleship page that they are sometimes called 'landships'. No reason to have two different articles on the same topic. Terraxos (talk) 22:48, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Legs
Well now, it would seem reasonable to take it that the "ship" component of the term meant it actually moved like one, except over land. This would of course exclude legs and have the thing propelled on tracks, wheels, a cushion of air, anti-gravity and whatnot. Unless of course someone's seen or read firsthand some account of a walking machine described as a landship. CABAL (talk) 12:36, 26 January 2010 (UTC)


 * I would say it's closer to "an object of similar size and shape to a ship that moves on land." The Thunderbirds super-walkers are vast, ungainly hexapods that are about as far from any conception of a "mech" (typically a biped or quad, typically at least vaguely humanoid) as you can really get; hence they "could be considered" walking landships. And given the Gundam hover-things are technically land-boats (hovercraft are never ships), splitting hairs seems a little counter-productive. Herr Gruber (talk) 15:30, 28 January 2010 (UTC)


 * I also note from the description: "In fiction, a landship is a very large vessel or vehicle designed for travel over land. They can be of various sizes, shapes, made of different materials and have different methods of propulsion." Not "any means as long as they don't have legs." Herr Gruber (talk) 15:32, 28 January 2010 (UTC)


 * The problem here is that the mecha article claims that "in most fiction in which they appear, mecha are war machines: essentially armored fighting vehicles with legs instead of treads or wheels." The method of propulsion in this case seems to be the main delineation between the two categories in general, since landships are usually typically portrayed as moving on some gigantic version of an existing system. CABAL (talk) 12:57, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Obsolescence; and Size Isn't Important
It should be pointed out here that the term "Landship" is obsolete. It does not even appear in the Concise Collins, Concise Cassell, and Concise Oxford dictionaries. In 1914 the design of British armoured fighting vehicles was undertaken by the Landships Committee, but the word was replaced for security reasons by the word "Tank" in December 1915, and has not been used in the real world since.

The Landships Committee experimented with various types of machine, including one that was designed partly to walk on legs. These columns were known as "Elephant's Feet." It did not prove successful, but it existed. AFAIK there is no qualifying size for a Landship. The Committee was prepared to consider vehicles that looked like 15 foot high tricycles; the best design ( nicknamed His Majesty's Landship "Centipede"), which became the model for the first British Tanks, was only 9 feet high. It is only since the word passed out of everyday speech and became used only in historical accounts and by wargame enthusiasts that the word acquired the connotations attached to it in the article. I'm not even sure that it's worth doing, but maybe the above should be incorporated. BTW, the French equivalent is/was cuirassée terrestre (land battleship), and is similarly obsolete.

Hengistmate (talk) 23:47, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Meh, the concept should be discussed, even if some consider it obsolete. There may well be a need for land vehicles wider and/or taller than standard cars, trucks, buses, and trains. In China, there was a serious proposal for a "bus" (well, I think it's a sort of a tracked vehicle, so "bus" is a dubious term for it) straddling two highway lanes and moving over the traffic. In Nazi Germany, there was a proposal for a super-broad-gauge railroad called the Breitspurbahn. Perhaps obstacles to landship development might be noted more, or perhaps this article should be merged with the discussion of landships in fiction. For example, civilian landships may be hard to develop due to the lack of room for the wide rights-of-way needed for such vehicles. Furthermore, railroad and road trains already occupy some of the niches that a civilian landship would be expected to fill. Torque is only part of the problem; portability over current roads also needs to be considered. (Remember Flight 1549? The fuselage headed from New Jersey to North Carolina overland after the crash, and it had to take back roads in NJ due to obstacles on the Turnpike. I remember it very well due to it having made a stop at High Point Solutions Stadium in Piscataway.) &mdash;  Rickyrab. Yada yada yada 01:07, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

False premise for article
The current most frequent mention of "landship" in the news or literature is of a Barbadan parade and festival, e.g. 1,500 in 'We Barbados' Parade & Procession, First 'Site of Memory' unveiled - The Landship and Exlore Barbados. This seems to be a made up term for a variety of large mobile structures. If the individual references describing those structures called them "landships"—as was originally applied to tanks, then fine. Otherwise, this article is based on a false premise. HopsonRoad (talk) 15:29, 17 December 2019 (UTC)


 * I was just neatening up this page. However, I would most likely believe that instead of outright deleting it, it would be far more appropriate to restructure it in a historical term. The term landship and its use was an actual concept put forward during WW1, however, the technology needed was not there and the practicalities of driving a fleet of 1,000 ton beasts was too impractical even by the standards of the First World War. The landship concept however, continued on as shown from Hitler's ideas on building a fleet of 1,000 ton 'Landkruezers' before it was finally shot down with the improvement of air power. As such, the page should be kept due to the historical relevance that it has influenced over modern armored fighting vehicles, however, the content should be changed IMO. Moreover, the concept of a landship is relevant in the world of science-fiction, with the most notable being the Mortal Engines series or those from the Deserts of Kharak, so it was bizarre to see the fictional section so underused. The biggest problem in my perspective (other than the shocking lack of references), is whether the above mentioned ultra-large land vehicles found in open-pit mining would fit the definition of a 'landship'. In this case, the article is definitely vague in that regards. I have heard/read/watch videos of people comparing vehicles like the BWEs as an 'ocean liner on land' and the F60 as a 'moving Eiffel Tower'. If we want to be technical over the definition of a ship being an extremely large mobile vessel that could transport goods, than in terms of weight, size, length, height and width, most of these vehicles fit that term. Essentially, they are ships in all but name. 42Grunt (talk) 04:45, 18 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Hi 42Grunt, I understand your interest in this topic. Unfortunately, the term, "Landship" belongs to Landship (Barbados). Only if the sources describing the machinery included in this article referred to them as "landships", could they be included. As such, it remains an outdated term for Tank, where the term could be mentioned. You might find it enjoyable to work on the individual articles for the machinery described. Alternatively, you may wish to look in on a project, like WikiProject Transport or WikiProject Mining and see if there are any articles that could use improvement. Since you are new to Wikipedia, I can recommend that you make a practice of looking at the reference, describing the topic first. That's the foundation for any WP article of quality, through paraphrasing and citing its contents. Happy editing! HopsonRoad (talk) 15:09, 18 December 2019 (UTC)
 * I see, maybe we could turn this article into a disambiguation page as a compromise. That way, we could keep some information of the old term whilst acknowledging that it is nowadays referred to the one in Barbados. 42Grunt (talk) 03:44, 20 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your understanding, 42Grunt, and for proposing the idea of a DAB page. As I understand it, the DAB page could have three entries, Landship (Barbados), Landship Committee and British heavy tanks of World War I. Perhaps User:Huon has some ideas to offer on this suggestion. Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 14:11, 20 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Personally I'd suggest we move Landship (Barbados) to this title and add a hatnote along the lines of "For early tank development see Landship Committee and British heavy tanks of World War I." All the tank-related information should have a place in one or another of those articles. As an aside, the Barbados Landship originated in the 1800s and predates the use of the term for tanks by quite a bit. Huon (talk) 17:53, 20 December 2019 (UTC)


 * That works for me, Huon. HopsonRoad (talk) 18:07, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

I have turned it into a disambiguation page. What are your thoughts on this?42Grunt (talk) 06:14, 31 December 2019 (UTC)


 * I appreciate your good-faith idea. However, the redirect idea only works for those entries that have actually been called a "landship" in their supporting reliable sources. Without that the result is WP:SYNTHESIS. Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 14:42, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

I support a rewrite of this article, based on a more accurate definition of "landship" as: "a vehicle designed to travel on land and across variable terrain, whose design and/or operation is significantly influenced by naval tradition." This definition includes the expected WWI British tanks, as well as several other early 20th Century armored fighting vehicle deigns which were designed by naval engineers. I would posit that the original historic definition for "landship" included a design assumption of "moving across land like the sea", in the sense of being able to navigate in any direction across the majority of terrain. This new definition would exclude the apparently-contentious group of super heavy tracked industrial vehicles, which were rarely designed to operate in complicated terrain. This new definition does still include non-combat vehicles. FlintTD (talk) 02:08, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Influence of "The Land Ironclads"
This par is largely untrue. There's no evidence of this tale directly influencing the tank pioneers. At the Royal Commission after the Great War, Ernest Swinton said he had read the story at the time of publication but forgotten about it by 1914. He might have been lying - he certainly did tinker with the truth from time to time - but that's what he said. It certainly played no part in the formation of the Landship Committee. In front of the Commission, Churchill spoke in characteristically flowery but unhelpful terms, acknowledging Wells's prescience but stopping short of saying that he had been influenced by the story. When asked if "at the close of 1914 there was any novelty about the idea of an armoured vehice travelling across country and passing over trenches," he replied, "You may remember that Mr. H.G. Wells, in an article written some years before, had dealt very fully with that and practically exhausted the possibilities of imagination in that sphere." I'm taking that to mean, "No."

Gannon is worse. In a disjointed and error-strewn chapter in Rumors of War and Infernal Machines he describes the Ironclads as being "caterpillar-treaded," which they are not; they travel on Pedrail Wheels, the invention of Bramah Diplock. In speculating that Swinton might have stolen the idea of tanks from a colleague, he weaves together errors and assumptions to produce a, frankly, nonsensical account.

I'm afraid this is not a reliable source. Hengistmate (talk) 14:05, 6 September 2023 (UTC)