This Intro Comes Courtesy Of A Question On Quora
Nobody had answered it, so instead here I am explaining about it. Yes, I could have answered it and then copied the answer to here, yet I am so dedicated to my eager audience that it sees the light of day here first. Also, I managed to lose the question.
Which was: What is the difference between an AFV and an ARV? Art! Ooops. Art!
This mighty mobile mythic metal monster is the Challenger 2 main battle tank a.k.a. 'Armoured Fighting Vehicle'*because it is covered in armour, is intended to fight (not merely terrify the opposition) and is undeniably a vehicle. The tracks give it away. What differentiates an ARV from it, apart from 12 letters of the alphabet?
An ARV is an 'Armoured Recovery Vehicle', and you might consider it the battlefield equivalent of the AA or RAC, because it can traverse the battlefield, preferably after the battle when it's just a field. Art!
Here you see a Churchill ARV, which has had the turret removed, because it's intention is not to slug it out with the enemy but to recover broken down, damaged or abandoned tanks. Removing the turret means it's now several tons lighter, and incidentally also has a lower profile. Art!
This is the South Canadian M31, their first ARV. The original turret was replaced with a different one where the winch came out of the rear. I'm pretty sure the 75m.m. gun is either a dummy or non-functional as there simply wouldn't be room in a chassis now cramped with a winch, cabling and a bigger engine. The Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry once found one of these bogged down and abandoned and, not to put too fine a point on it, stole it. Art!
This is the M32, based on the chassis of a Sherman, towing a Priest as an illustration of how it was done. ARVs were often fitted out with extras like bulldozer blades, and also spades to allow them better grip when towing something extra-heavy. Art!
The Teutons also had a number of what they called 'Berge-' panzers, and here you can see one adapted from a Mk. IV tank. Of course, they ran into trouble with their larger tanks, because a 45 or 60 ton panzer was a pretty weighty item. Thus -
The Bergepanther, adapted from a Panther hull. As usual, the turret has been removed and a square box erected to keep the crew moderately safe from harm. For shifting an immobile Tiger, the Teutons simply used 3 of their largest and most powerful half-tracks all at once. Or, they just abandoned it. Art!
This particular big beautiful beastie is a Challenger Armoured Repair and Recovery Vehicle, being able to act as a metallic Florence Nightingale to ailing AFVs.
Finally, I couldn't resist. Your Humble Scribe has long maintained that the Ukes are brave and clever, and also good at improvising. Art!
From AFV to ARV
So now we all know more than we did five minutes ago.
The Haul
Well well, Dingly Dell. What came today but two of the three trade paperbacks of "The Bunker" that I'd ordered, namely Volume 1 and 3. Art!
It's so long since I last read Volume 2 that I can now read them all in sequence, and Volume 4 is also on the way.
In case you're wondering, it involves five people who are sent information from their future selves about how they're going to cause the apocalypse. The thing is, they have no idea how, nor whether what they're doing is going to avert disaster or cause it. There was talk of a television show - nah, not happened yet and thus unlikely to happen ever.
Saw Doctors
No! Nothing to do with the band. No, this is about another extraordinarily dangerous piece of power tool kit, the Table Saw. We've covered this extensively already, so I don't propose to go into any detail, except to say that the staged photo from Bobvila is both frightening and hilarious. Art!
Yes, he is on his mobile whilst using a table saw. This is a recipe for wholesale traumatic amputation of a complete limb, not merely a finger or two. Potential Darwin Award winner right there. Now you know why this item has 'Doctor' in close proximity to 'Saw'. One hopes he has 999 on speed-dial. Or 911 if across The Pond.
The Other Slo-Mo Trainwreck
As you may be vaguely aware, Citizen Trump is under indictment for two things at present: lying and misfiling campaign expenses when paying hush money to <ahem> 'Adult entertainer' Stormzy Daniels, and stealing boatloads of official government documents. STORMY! Sorry, I meant 'Stormy'. Getting confused with the Storm Shadow.
Of course there are a whole slew of other charges under consideration, including fomenting an insurrection on January 6th. DJ Tango talks a big game about how he's not bothered about any of these trials, because he has an invisible Marmalade Shield and ten thousand Get Out Of Jail Free cards. Except - Art!
What he meant to type, of course - obviously! - was "Espionage Act". So this is an interesting insight into what he's really thinking. Art!
"Donald's turkey impression brought the house down"
"City In The Sky"
The Big Crash is already under way, so the Doctor is attempting to reach the arcologies in orbit to see how they are bearing up under the impact of an Earth-based Armageddon.
First order of business was to get up into
a high enough orbit to radar-scan cis-lunar space and locate the arcologies. The “Arc-ipelago”, as their forced name
dubbed it. The Doctor didn’t want to
waste time ascending in physical space-time and opted for a small time-hop of
minutes into the future, which would be long enough to achieve orbit, whilst
not allowing the oncoming Armageddon to occur whilst they spanned the time
vortex. Being witness to such a huge and
traumatic event would be hideously unpleasant, yet he still sought it as an aching
reminder of what inhumanity Homo Sapiens could mete out to itself.
The Tardis scanners came up with the
relevant objects quickly enough: eight huge returns on the display, with three
minor ones, all scattered across over one hundred and twenty billion cubic
kilometres of space. The biggest of all
was an immense oblate spheroid, easily massing forty-five thousand tonnes
deadweight, with a diameter of nearly a kilometre. Ace picked data from the display screen in
mild disbelief at the scale of the structure.
Her ideas of orbital environments were conditioned by memories of Skylab
and Mir, artefacts that massed a fraction of a fraction of what she could see here in front of her.
Welcome to the future, Ace!
Finally -
Thinking along legal lines, I can defend my purchase of those three trade paperbacks because I don't need to spend £150 on a large-screen stand-alone DVD player now that I can play them via the big-screen monitor, and the three of them came to less than £23, which is about half what they'd cost brand-new in a comic shop. So I am actually saving money overall <Crosses fingers>.
* NOTE THE CORRECT SPELLING OF 'ARMOURED'
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