What on earth....

I have to check. I know there wes also some film fotage.

 

the idea of man powered armor isnt so bad...remember the roman tortuga,da vinci,s horse drawn tank?if the teraine would pemit movement of the thing,it would attract every hienie bullet within a thousand yards.so much the better for the tommys laying prone in a schell hole.the afv is vitually the same thing ,but with internal combustion power.build the same thing on a farm tractor with some m.g. slits...ur in bussiness

 

Do you mean the legionairies' testudo formation? It was only used for siege assaults.

 

seige assaults?would that be like when your attacking entrenched rflemen and machine guns behind sandbags and barbed wire over a thousand yards of open ground....would that be a seige assault?....dang says tommy atkins ..this aint workin so good ...if only we had a way to move foward behind a half inch of hardended steel...these wool shirts arent really cuttin it today...wait...lord beaverbite has one of those new farm tractors...it lays its own track as is travels...and it must weigh 5 tons...hmmmm

 

The motive for the invention of armoured vehicles is clear enough. I was merely pointing out that the Roman testudo formation does not belong in the category, because it was not intended to give protection to troops while they were firing and advancing on the enemy. It was meant only to protect them as they approached walls, after which the formation would obviously be abandoned.

In the field, the Roman soldier bore a scutum (shield) to protect him against arrows, stones and javelins. This turned him into quite a difficult target.

 

roel..i belive an entire roman armie was lost while advancing en testudo...persian mounted archers continued to shower arrows at the feet of the sheild wall until until it stopped walking..the romans hoped that the persians would run out of arrows,but the legion ran out of unpeirced limbs first....of course its hard to catch a mounted man even if u dont have an arrow stuck thru your foot.

 

You are referring to the battle of Carrhae. The Legions there had to deal with the liability of a stunningly incompetent commander, the third man of the First Triumvirate, Crassus (the others being the considerably more capable Caesar and Pompeius). Their enemies were the Parthians, not the Persians (pedantic point), and indeed their arrows reputedly pinned the legions to the ground, literally. It is an exceptionally bad idea to form a formation as tight and immobile as a testudo when surrounded by light, fast troops - see also the Spartan defeat at Lechaion in 390 BC.