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The UEF Fatboy. It's a Submersible Land Battleship Aircraft Carrier Mobile Factory Shield Generator. But does it julienne fries?
Wot's faster than a warbuggy, more killy than a warbike, and flies through da air like a bird? I got no bleedin' idea, but I'm gonna find out.
In the military, innovation has driven military conquest as someone found new ways to do something that was better than what came before. However, in Speculative Fiction, it seems that a lot of people have decided combining previous concepts into one uber-machine is easier than coming up with something original.
Enter the Military Mashup Machine. In reality, some of these would be far more expensive than practical, with other existing military technologies being much easier to get the same results from, but if it looks cool, why not present it as worthwhile?
While generally members of Speculative Fiction or Science Fiction, these can also show up in Steam Punk as well. See Airborne Aircraft Carrier and The Battlestar for specific Sub Tropes.
See My Tank is Fight! before going on to any of the following examples. It's okay, we'll wait.
Examples:
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Land Battleship
The Land Battleship is a landgoing vehicle bristling with heavy artillery, generally the equivalent of a battleship's guns only on land, or rather, a really big tank. Often used in deserts.
Anime & Manga
- Gundam has a slight love affair with these, which have featured from the beginning to the more recent Gundam SEED Destiny. Perhaps the most bizarre version was the Battleships of the Zanscare Empire's land forces, such as the ''Adrastea''-class◊, which were essentially naval ships on enormous motorcycle wheels.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann goes typically overboard, by making the featured land battleship◊ a literal battleship on legs and a Humongous Mecha to boot (ironically, it requires special adjustments to cross water). General Guame's Dai-Gundo is more typical of this kind of thing. Ignore the phallic connotations of its design.
- The Rhinoceros-class ships in Super Robot Wars: Original Generation.
Literature
- The titular Land Leviathan from Michael Moorcock's 1974 novel "The Land Leviathan".
- The original land battleship, from the story "The Land Ironclads," by H.G. Wells, is possibly the earliest example, predating actual tanks.
- Keith Laumer's Bolos: automated (and eventually artificially intelligent) land battleships of the Dinochrome Brigade (called "continental seige units" in early stories) which grew to have more firepower than the space battleships that transported them. The largest models are capable of defending or conquering an entire planet, solo, and they, rather than their commanders, are the de facto protagonists of the stories where they appear.
- The SheVa and Tiger III class tanks from John Ringo's Posleen War Series. The SheVa's are 170ft tall, 468ft long, 385ft wide tanks with a 200ft long 16" gun that are powered by four uranium/helium pebblebed nuclear reactors. They are so huge that their treads (all four of them, each) alone are bigger than most average houses. One of them, SheVa 9 "Bunbun" gets six MetalStorm turrets welded ontop with half a dozen claymore mines embedded under the front armor. The SheVas were actually created specifically because of an event in the first novel, where a battleship is believed to have killed a Posleen lander by shooting it point-blank with a full broadside. The specs for the Tiger III are never given, but judging by its crew size (8 plus commander) is probably about the same scale. The Tiger IIIB model is actually capable of shooting down spacecraft in low earth orbit.
- Robert A Heinlein's short novel If This Goes On— has the major land force of the USA be Land Battleships.
- Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan features Land Frigates, which are essentially actually German Battleships with legs.
Live Action Television
Tabletop Games
- The Imperial Baneblade in Warhammer 40000 is a tank the size of a large house and mounts no fewer than 11 separate weapons ranging from high explosive cannon rounds, laser cannons and bolter (fully automatic armoured-piercing RPG) turrets. It should also be noted that, while still rare, the Baneblade chassis is the standard chassis which Imperial super-heavy tanks are usually based on: as well as a whole slew of variants on the Baneblade chassis, larger examples include the "Ordinatus" (tracked Wave Motion Gun) "Leviathan" (mobile command centre, basically a castle on tracks) and "Capitol Imperialis" (APC for tanks). And let's not get started on the Imperium's Humongous Mecha, the Titans, which are often referred to as "walking battleships."
- Though, to a certain extent, anything built by Orks qualifies.
- Not to mention Chaos has daemonically possessed/traitorous versions of all the above, sporting screaming mouths the size of houses and bladed tentacles the size of trains.
- A Space Marine Land Raider is an armoured personnel carrier crossed with a main battle tank.
- The Ogre, one of several classes of autonomous robotic moving fortresses from the game of the same name (and its successor, G.E.V.) from Steve Jackson Games. The concept is partially derived from Keith Laumer's Bolos (see below), and partially from Steve Jackson's need to reduce the numbers of counters he had to put in each box. In the original game, a combined arms force consisting of powered armor infantry, tanks, artillery, and hovercraft, each of whom, in the game universe, fires nuclear weapons, opposes one unit - the Ogre. In the original scenario, where all the defenders have to do is prevent the Ogre from reaching a specific point on the gameboard, the Ogre usually wins.
Video Games
- The Sunderer (and its variants) in Planetside are basically giant (they're the size of a house) buses, with massive spikes on front, and tank cannons on top. And they can carry MAX units. Oh, and they can use a EMP pulse on anything near them, making them minefield sweepers as well.
- The Landcarrier from the PS3-exclusive first-person shooter Haze is what its name suggests: rather than a Land Battleship, it is best described as a dedicated Land Aircraft Carrier (used to trudge through the jungles of South America, no less!). It is where the game begins and ends. Additionally, the aircraft it primarily carries are also Military Mashup Machines: troop carriers with the firepower, silhouette, speed, and armor of attack gunships.
- The Big Shiee, the boss of mission 4, from Metal Slug 2.
- Metal Slug 5 also has the boss of Mission 4, which is a Land Submarine that can submerge itself in the desert.
- The Fatboy from RTS game Supreme Commander actually mounts battleship calibre guns on rotating turrets. And it has a landing pad on top. Taking it even farther are the Salem Class destroyers of the Cybran Nation which are actual warships which sprout spider legs when they reach land in order to render them amphibious (this troper always thinks of them as the SHIPS ON LEGS, capitals inclusive).
- Command And Conquer's Global Defense Initiative is in love with Land Battleships, typically in the form of their Mammoth Tanks, which are so huge and durable they can run over other tanks. In the Kane's Wrath expansion, GDI also gains the MARV, which is an even bigger mobile treaded deathmobile with three railguns, garrissionable infantry bunkers, and the ability to consume entire Tiberium fields instantly.
- Red Alert 3 does one better, with amphibious battleships. Not a battleship-sized tank on treads, but a literal battleship on treads.
- The Marmotah from Valkyria Chronicles fits this trope to a T.
- Noitu Love 2 has one as its very first boss. Humorously, when defeated, it sinks despite being fought on a city street.
- Basically the entire concept of Armored Core 4 sequel For Answer hinges on destroying incredibly gigantic Humongous Mecha that are land battleships.
- It should be noted that the gigantic carrier-type beasts are, in fact, considered to be oversized and difficult to control in the game universe. They are, however, valuable in that they project an obscene amount of power into an area, and can move to another area relatively easily. They are also extraordinarily frightening to fight: when the 10-meter tall mech that you're piloting isn't as big as the smallest gun on the carrier, you know you're in trouble.
- Talesofthe Abyss gives us a literal land dreadnought, the Tartarus.
- In Chrome Hounds, there's the Tarakian Unidentified Weapon, "M-99 Super Patriot". It is literally a Modern-day Supertanker (you know, the giant, 5 mile long ocean going ship), loaded down with giant (triple barreled) cannons, flamethrowers, and lots and lots of gatling guns. It also is a mobile HQ for enemy forces- and launches a bottomless supply of enemy ACVs.
- Land carriers are used for a few bosses in U.N. Squadron
- The Call to Power series has Leviathans, enormous, heavily armed with most weapons of that particular period in that game, but extremely slow moving. In game, the unit is more powerful in every combat statistic than every other unit, but can only move one square per turn, even on roads. Fusion tanks in the same series might also apply.
- The arcade game series Raiden is chock-full of these, to the extent that in the later games, even the Mooks are a good example of the "smaller" types.
Western Animation
- GI Joe has had a number of these in toy form, although they rarely appeared in the cartoons.
- The Nazi wheel tank from Justice League episode "The Savage Time". These were taken from the old Blackhawks comics during that time.
Real Life
- Truth In Television: there was such a school of thought in 1920s to 1930s advocating the use of powerful vehicles to serve as trench-breakers and infantry support. As the expected pace of warfare was restricted by both technological limitations and the speed of infantry, these largely concentrated on larger and more heavily armoured vehicles.
- Both the British and Germans considered building these during World War II. The Germans prototyped at least one, with several more designs in the works before the war's end prevented their construction. By contrast, the British eventually gave up on the concept due to it being more expensive than it would be worth.
- Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus. "Mouse". The biggest tank of WWII, 188 tons. Yeah, they really built this monstrosity.
- One proposed German design featured a pair of battlecruiser cannon. It's none other than the Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte (Literally "Rat"). Wanna know what it would have looked like? Have fun◊.
- Oh, it gets worse/better than that. Around the same time as the Ratte, they were also working on the Landkreuzer P. 1500 Monster, which would've been even bigger, with a Dora gun◊ mounted on it. Fortunately for the Axis (and to a much lesser extent, the Allies), Albert Speer realized how idiotic both projects were and canceled them.
- French Char 2C. 69 metric tons.
- The Soviet T-35 probably qualifies - a veritable Games Workshop Tank with five turrets, but about as much use as you might expect. This one got into series, though soon canceled as obsolete.
- This was based on the Earlier British A1E1, which was about as successful. Nor was the t-35 the only offshoot, for the Russians also built the T-28 and T-100, the British built the Medium Mk I, and Medium Mk III, and even the Germans got in on the act with the Neubaufahrzeug, though having a greater presence of mind, cancelled the idea soon after.
Submersible Carrier
Submersible Carriers are essentially your standard aircraft carrier, only submersible.
Anime and Manga
- The ''Area 88'' manga features one of these, albeit on land: The land carrier moves on tracks, launches unmanned fighters, and hides itself by burrowing under the desert sand. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is very difficult to cool.
- Gundam and its multiple continuities had several of these serving to launch both aerial and amphibious mobile suits.
- Macross Zero had the Auerstadt as the Anti-UN forces' home base, launching both variable fighters and transforming mini-sub OCTOS.
- The Tuatha de Danaan from Full Metal Panic.
- The Dai-Gunkai of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Notable for being one of the few capable of creating its own ocean when it needs to travel over land.
- The Killer Whale-class subs in Super Robot Wars Original Generation.
- UNS Daedalus from Super Dimension Fortress Macross is a submersible Humongous Mecha carrier.
- At one point, the team manager in Zoids: New Century brags that his already massive, snail-shaped Zoid carrier (overlapping somewhat with Land Battleship above) is capable of functioning underwater. Since it can launch flying Zoids, it pretty much counts.
Comic Books
Literature
Tabletop Games
- The USS Ticonderoga and NGR Poseidon in Rifts.
- The "arsenal subs" of Transhuman Space, though it helps that the aircraft are unmanned.
Video Games
- Supreme Commander has the Atlantis-class submersible carrier for the UEF.
- Ace Combat 5 had a pair of these on the Yuktobanian side, although they were actually ballistic missile platforms that happened to be able to launch their own fighters for air defense. The first one, Scinfaxi, had a rear takeoff area for Harriers and F-35s, while the Hrimfaxi had unmanned aircraft in vertical launch tubes (it can even launch them while submerged!).
- Metal Gear Solid 2 gives us Arsenal Gear, a submersible Humongous Mecha carrier.
Truth In Television
- Truth in Television once again. Everyone from the United States to Japan has toyed with making these at one point. Japan actually deployed at least two dozen such subs of three different designs by the end of World War II. Several were tasked with "doomsday" attacks on the American mainland using biological weapons, but these were never successfully developed and the subs were reassigned to attack the Panama Canal. Before they could actually act on these orders, the war ended and they were seized by the United States. Rather than allow the then-revolutionary technology to fall into Russian hands per war alliance treaties, the Navy chose to scuttle the subs instead. One of these subs became part of the plot for the Clive Cussler novel Black Wind, in which it actually was carrying biological weapons.
Close Submersible Carrier Amphibious Tanks
Aren't just tanks that can travel on water, but often are entirely submersible until they surface on the beach.
Anime
- Perhaps taking the concept from the other direction, the aquatic Zoids known as War Sharks are shown in the third anime series as being capable of swimming through the ground.
Literature
Video Games
- The Fatboy from Supreme Commander is also this. Ditto the Cybran Monkeylord spiderbot (which is more of a Humongous Mecha). Supreme Commander loves this trope, with many more amphibious tanks and mecha to choose from. The UEF Percival, the Cybran Wagner, Brick, and Megalith, the Seraphim Othuum and Ythotha, and the Aeon Galactic Colossus are all perfectly happy going scuba diving. And if you count amphibious hovertanks, you get to count the UEF Riptide, the Seraphim Fobo, and the Aeon Aurora, Ascendant, Asylum, and Blaze.
- Preceding the Fatboy were the "Crock" and "Triton" tanks of Total Annihilation, which also had hovercraft of its own.
- The Cybrans even have a battleship that sprouts legs and walks onto land.
- Metal Gear RAY. A giant, walking, swimming battletank, with an armor-piercing water cutter.
- The Empire Of The Rising Sun in Red Alert 3 will have the Tsunami Tank. The Stingray from the Soviets is a boat that sprouts legs. And there's the above amphibious cruiser from the Allies. The game makes extensive use of amphibious units, as a way to make the inclusion of sea combat less frustrating and complex.
Western Animation
- On GI Joe, Cobra had a couple, the most notable being the Hammerhead◊, which was not only a submersible tank, but also a submersible carrier for its own mini-fleet of smaller vehicles.
- The first Season Finale of SWAT Kats had the Kats use one of these against the alliance of Dark Kat, Dr. Viper, and the Metallikats.
Tabletop Games
- See the Warhammer 40,000 entries above- at least half of those tanks are capable of functioning underwater. The Land Raider in particular has been used for devastating beach assaults.
- In the latest Codex: Space wolves there is mention of the Space Wolves batteling Tau under 5 miles of oceans, after having driven their Land Raiders there, on the bottom of the sea.
Truth In Television
- Truth In Television yet again; several sorts of amphibious tanks were designed, built and deployed in World War II. Likewise, a number of modern armored vehicles include amphibious capability, and most tanks can ford rivers using snorkels.
- A more extreme example is the German "Tauchpanzer" variant of the Panzer IV: a tank capable of driving under 15 meters of water.
- More extreme still was the gargantuan proposal Midgardsschlange for a 60,000 ton armoured, articulated train that could run on land, the bottom of the sea or even drill underground. It was designed by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and got to the vital asking for funding stage before the engineers involved were forced to go work on something sensible.
- The German Seeteufel design was an odd take on the "amphibious tank" concept, being practically a mini-submarine with tank threads. Proposed armament consisted of two torpedoes and a machine gun or a flamethrower. Not a practical design by any metric, but imagine the look on the Allied troops' faces when one of these would crawl up from a lake and start spouting flames at them.
- Don't forget that the Japanese also used them, although theirs floated rather than driving submerged.
- The PT-76 is probably the most successful of modern amphibious tanks.
- Arguably, its biggest success is in being cheap, lightweight, and armored enough to serve as an universal chassis for the whole lot of other Soviet vehicles, from self-propelled artillery to SAM launchers, adding more to its Military Mashup Machine status.
- so, what you're saying is that In Soviet Russia, water full of Tank?
- Sometimes it◊ is. Though not always◊ the same way◊.
Amphibious Jet Fighter
These can fight equally well in the air or in the water.
Anime and Manga
- The VF-0s in Macross Zero can, apparently, fly underwater. For short periods, at least. Ironically, this is the early version that runs on jet engines, as they hadn't got the alien fusion reactors working yet. There is an explicit shot of the intakes closing before it hits the surf, and it appears to be coasting.
- The Hammer Head Zoid can do this.
Comic Books
- Gold Digger gave the villainous Night Flight an entire wing of these.
- From an old comic book.
- Turned Up To Eleven by the Clone Wars comic books, with starships that operate underwater, crewed by Mon Calamari, appearing during the battle of Kamino. As their commander said while piloting one of the damn things:
Film
Literature
Live Action TV
- The "SkyDiver" from UFO was a submarine whose entire front end was a JATO-boosted rocket plane called Sky One. At need, the SkyDiver would flood its rear ballast tanks until its bow pointed upward, and Sky One would launch...from under water.
- The Flying Sub from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was the coolest thing on the show.
- The Puddle Jumpers from Stargate Atlantis take this to it's illogical conclusion: submersible spacecraft.
Tabletop Games
- A number of vehicles in the Rifts Underseas sourcebook.
- The system defence boats of Traveller are capable of flying in space and in atmosphere and can go underwater, at least in the GURPS version. It helps that the vehicle rules of GURPS practically invite people to design vehicles that fit this trope.
- And they were pure eeeeevil in 3rd edition. No RPG should have make the player draw a square root.
- In defence of GURPS Vehicles, it doesn't expect people to be doing this in the middle of a session of regular play. The ongoing design example from the book, incidentally, is more than worthy of inclusion on this page - a Flying Car (kept aloft by Imported Alien Phlebotinum and propelled by a jet engine, which can also give it a bit of extra speed on land) that's also a submarine, has military-grade electronics and is armed with concealed machine guns. James Bond, eat your heart out.
Video Games
- Almost all scrolling shooters allow the player's air or spacecraft to fly underwater without consequence.
- Although Star Fox 64 had a separate submarine for the underwater mission, Arwings and other starfighters in Star Fox Command can do this.
- Red Alert 3's Sea-Wing is a submersible ambush jet fighter.
- XCOM: Terror from the Deep, the second XCOM game, had the player fighting Unidentified Submersible Objects (ie, UFOs that could go underwater) with a small fleet of their own submarine-jets.
- Elite had the Moray Star Boat, because aquatic species need to get shot at by space pirates too.
Western Animation
- GI Joe had the S.H.A.R.K. aircraft.
- The New Adventures of He-Man had a vehicle capable of submersion, atomspheric flight and space flight called Astrosub.
Real Life
- Truth in Television again (to a degree),
- The Soviet Union designed a flying submarine in the 1930s, but it was never actually built.
- Two jet fighter prototypes were built and flown after World War II:
Close Amphibious Jet Fighter Mobile Factory
The is exactly what it sounds like. A factory capable of pumping out mass-produced (often robotic drone) war machines, combat-ready right off the assembly line. This is usually its primary purpose, though it may have other weapons.
Anime and Manga
Literature
- The World Devastators from the Star Wars Expanded Universe not only did this, but ate the planets they were attacking to get the raw materials.
- Not just factories then, but also refineries. You also ought to include EVS Construction Droids, which are walking rather than flying factories.
- EVS droids aren't really military, though. Well, there was that one time Rogue Squadron hijacked one and went on a Kaiju-style rampage to evacuate a section of an enemy city before it could be Kill Satted, but that definitely wasn't the intended purpose.
Live Action TV
- The Cylon Resurrection Ship in the new Battlestar Galactica is a mobile people factory.
- More Galactica: Tyrol actually had his crew build a whole Viper out of spare parts onboard the Galactica, and a damn good one at that. In fact, due to the availability of pretty much any material but metal, it was also their only stealth ship.
- And again: It's All There In The Manual that the Battlestar Pegasus has Viper factories onboard, allowing both ships to shore up their numbers.
- The civilian ships also had sewage treatment ships and mining ships.
- Conversely, in the original Galactica series, there seemed to be a shortage of shuttlecraft. Every shuttle in the original series had the same markings (GAL 356) even when the shuttle came from the Pegasus.
- Voyager in Star Trek had to have this, incompetent writers, or both to have as many shuttle craft as it did.
- It does; in one episode the crew whip up a specialized shuttlecraft, the Delta Flyer, which goes on to feature in quite a few episodes before being destroyed, after which a new one is constructed. Makes sense, really: replicator techonology means all you need is a few handy asteroids for raw materials, and you can make just about any parts you need, as long as they're not too big.
Video Games
- The restored monolith from Dawn of War. The Necron race is badass enough, but really takes the cake when their headquarters building is brought completely back online. It changes from an ominous black pyramid of doom into an evil floating pyramid of doom and green lightning that can suddenly materialize right in the middle of your base. While it holds the award for the single slowest unit in the entire game, it can teleport, has a gigantic cannon, and regenerates. As if that wasn't enough, it still maintains the ability to produce units.
- Supreme Commander's Fatboy is able to construct military units as well. (For those keeping score, that makes the Fatboy a Submersible Land Battleship Carrier (it has a landing pad) that can construct its own support force. And it mounts heavy-duty shield generators. Though it's so enormous it occupies most of the shielded area, leaving little room for its support force.)
- As well as all of its carriers building aircraft, Supreme Commander also has: the Tempest, a Submersible Battleship that constructs smaller ships, although it can't travel on land; the Cybran Megalith, a carrier that can build select Cybran land units, and the Aeon Czar, which is a flying mobile factory and airborne aircraft carrier armed with a Wave Motion Gun, flak cannons, AAM, and depth charges.
- The Protoss Carrier in StarCraft manufactures and launches its own robotic interceptors. The Reaver similarly builds Scarab drones that are used as self-guided bombs.
- The Carrier returns in SC2, the Terrans gain the Raven, and the Zerg the Brood Lord. Could also be broadly applied to Terrans as a whole, since their major production buildings can move, although they can't produce units while doing so.
- The GDI and Brotherhood of Nod both possess mobile factory units in the Firestorm expansion for Command And Conquer: Tiberian Sun.
- Aircraft carriers in many Real Time Strategy games usually operate like this.
- All capital ships (and the carrier-class non-capital ships) are capable of constructing their own fighter escorts in Sins Of A Solar Empire. This is subverted (or averted?) for the Advent faction, as their fighters are merely psionic constructs.
- The mothership in Homeworld games can construct any other type of warship up to and including a destroyer. It can also construct a shipyard, which can then be used to manufacture even larger ships (cruisers and carriers). Carriers themselves are capable of constructing small and medium-sized craft (up to frigates). The downside is that the mothership has no maneuverability to speak of, and its own weaponry is in the peashooter range.
- Partially subverted in the original game's campaign, as the mothership was supposed to be mobile but a surprise attack forced it to begin its journey before the engines were complete (it uses hyperspace jumps to go from one mission to the next). The resulting inability to avoid even slow-moving threats becomes a major plot point.
- The carrier Antaeus in Hostile Waters has a large number of nanobots that can create a helicopter, tank, or a few similar things in about a second. You can only have a dozen or so tanks/helicopters/whatever active at a time but when you lose one you can replace it very quickly.
- One never-ending source of Mooks in Jak 3 is the KG War Factory, endlessly producing robots of the former Krimzon Guard. Granted, why they didn't use this machine in the previous game to put the whole city on lockdown while trying to take out the Underground when they were finally making a real impact, is completely unknown.
- The only way to employ Seaplanes in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is to construct them in Carriers.
Web Comics
- Some starships in Schlock Mercenary are equipped with Fabbers big enough to create other starships. At one point the main characters acquire a particularly big one, and consider fitting it with engines and crew quarters and naming it The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance. (mocking O'Benn naming schemes)
Real Life
- While not a factory, real naval ships have machine tools on board to fix broken equipment. You can do quite a lot of work on a real aircraft carrier.
- Heavy Lift ships, while also not technically factories, can lift other vessels clear of the water to allow their full hull to be worked on, so
The Battlestar
Starships in most Space Opera series, including Star Wars, Babylon 5, and Battlestar Galactica, tend to be a space-borne hybrid of a modern naval battleship and a carrier, possessing heavy armor and lots of large guns as well as a sizable fighter compliment. This is probably more realistic than most of the examples in this article, as launching and landing fighters from a spaceborne platform would require much less "runway" space than a planet-based carrier, and a sufficiently large ship could handle both tasks. Besides, having two ships would violate The Law of Conservation of Detail.
Anime
- Uchuu Senkan Yamato takes this to its logical conclusion, by taking the World War II battleship Yamato, fixing it, adding a (the) Wave Motion Gun, and putting it in space. It still works on water too.
- The Nautilus in Nadia The Secret Of Blue Water turns out to be a spacecraft that just incidentally happens to make a dandy submarine as well.
- Similarly, many spaceships in anime, especially ones featuring Humongous Mecha, are often capable of operating in the air as well as in space, effectively making them a combination of space ships (see above) plus an Airborne Aircraft Carrier.
- Mobile Suit Gundam, in particular, nearly invents an entire ship class: the Assault Carrier, which is a relatively small ship (usually around 300 meters in length) built to service, launch, and support a single squadron of small craft (usually mecha) on earth as well as in space. The Pegasus-class ships of Mobile Suit Gundam and their associated decendants (like the Arghama in Zeta) and Alternate Universe cousins (The Archangel'' in Gundam SEED) are all of this type.
- The titular ship from Martian Successor Nadesico is also an Assault Carrier-type.
- The Hagane and Hiryu Custom in Super Robot Wars Original Generation, which were also submersible. Also the Kurogane, which was not only submersible, but could also travel underground.
- The titular Super Dimension Fortress Macross also fits this trope, plus transformations, and an entire city within its hull.
- The Chouginga Dai-Gurren from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, while having some trouble with atmospheric flight (you don't want something that used to be THE Moon in your atmosphere), fits this trope.
Literature
- Averted occasionally in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, though such over-specialized ships usually don't do well - for example, the escort carrier, which can carry as many fighters as a Star Destroyer in a much smaller and less-expensive ship, is pitifully under-gunned. One could send an escort ship with it... or just send a ship that both carries fighters and can adequately defend itself. This has been a design philosophy that has been common throughout the galaxy for thousands of years, from the ships in the Old Republic to the modern Star Destroyers.
- While single-purpose cruisers and carriers are rare, different cultures do make different design emphasis. A Star Destroyer (and most Imperial vessels) is first and foremost a battleship whose fighters are primarily a defensive screen — the main offensive component of the group is the big guns on the big ship. In contrast, Rebellion and Republic fleet groups favor heavier fighters with less powerful capital ships, or sometimes no capital ship at all.
- Large capital ships in Perry Rhodan are usually this, carrying not just fighters, but larger secondary craft (often smaller warships in their own right) as well. A particularly striking and unique example would be the (Terran-built) SOL, which is basically three such ships (two spherical 'ultra-battleships' and a cylindrical central section) usually linked together but capable of splitting into its component parts if needed. That's right — a battle star made of battle stars!
Live Action TV
- As mentioned, Babylon 5 capital ships often carry fighter complements, as does the titular station.
- There were about two ships in Star Trek that fall under this sub-trope that we've seen—one of which was fictitious (even within the context of the series itself). They were the historically inaccurate recreation of Voyager in the episode Living Witness, and the Scimitar in Star Trek: Nemesis. Other ships don't really count for this, as they primarily carry shuttle craft, which are neither good at nor designed for combat, nor is the compliment in any way considered "considerable" (usually half a dozen at most on the largest ships).
- Stargate SG-1 began introducing these with the Prometheus, a small flying space carrier with eight fighters and a notable array of its own weapons, designed to be capable of challenging Goa'uld motherships. The larger Daedalus class ramps it all up further, particularly when the Odyssey gets state-of-the-art Asgard beam weapons, fully qualifying it as a battle-carrier.
- Battlestar Galactica. Though the Galactica and other Battlestar-class ships seem to operate primarily as fighter carriers, the Galactica has demonstrated repeatedly that it is more than capable of taking on a Cylon Basestar in close combat.
- And, of course, there's the Pegasus, shown to be positively bristling with BFGs.
- The Alliance cruisers in Firefly appear to be multipurpose combinations of warships and fighter carriers, equipped with "gunships" that are used to engage targets, as well as some type of large laser/torpedo weapons system.
Video Games
- The Panther in 3: Terran Conflict is a frigate which carries 25 fighters, and capital ship weaponry. And it turns so fast that anyone on the front of the ship would be pancaked
- Largely averted, then later lampshaded, in Wing Commander, where the carrier is part of a small fleet of offensive, defensive, and support vessels. In Prophecy, when the Midway (an all-purpose battle-carrier fitting the trope) is commissioned, several people complain about the risk of putting all the eggs in one basket.
- Played straight with the Concordia in the second game, however - which was even classified as a dreadnaught rather than a carrier. Phase-Transit Cannon, anyone? Further, cruisers and, on the other side, even Kilrathi destroyers had a "light fighter complement", although the actual strength of this complement is not defined. This troper's impression was that the problem with the Midway was more about its sheer size than its carrier-battleship hybrid status.
- The supercarriers introduced towards the end of Wing Commander 4 tend to fit the trope as well. They have a healthy complement of weapons, or rather should, but the two introduced in the course of the game are conspicuously unfinished, and so are entirely reliant on their fighter wings.
- The Ur-Quan Dreadnaughts of the Star Control series are these (and they look suspiciously like villainous Battlestars).
- Many large capital ships in the Freespace series (for example the GTD Aquitaine in Freespace 2) carry dozens, if not hundreds of strikecraft. They're fully fledged warships that make mincemeat out of smaller capitals and have dozens of anti-fighter and anti-warship turrets to boot.
- In Sins Of A Solar Empire, direct combat capital craft, whilst incapable of supporting strikecraft initially (unlike the specialized carrier capital craft), can gain strikecraft support slots as their combat experience increases.
- The Great Fox in Star Fox is kind of a scaled-down version, being a capable battleship that also carries a small fighter squadron.
- The Titans◊ of EVEOnline (yes, that is to scale) don't just have their own wing of drones, don't just carry, rearm and refit player ships, but also the clones of the players themselves! Its not enough to have a jump drive but it can also jump bridge entire fleets making it a logistical wet dream. Top it all off with enough defenses to shrug off anything but a major fleet attack. Oh, and a Doomsday Device that's enough to make Captain Gloval eat his enormous hat.
Tabletop Games
- Most ships in Warhammer 40000 of heavy cruiser size and upwards are either battleships with a fighter complement, or carriers with potent weaponry of their own, but some dedicated assault carriers exist, mostly in the Imperial Navy.
Real Life
- The Kiev class cruiser-carriers fit here, carrying both anti-ship missiles and aircraft. Rather than a last-ditch self-defence mechanism like most carrier armaments, the design intention was for the Kiev class to be capable of both serving in both ship roles in a fleet role.
Others
- At some point, most silly works will include efforts to make a flying tank. Sometimes this will be to just slap wings on that ever-so-aerodynamic thing, the main battle tank.
- That would include the A-Gears in Air Rivals, which are not so much an aircraft but a flying hovercraft tank that's capable to not only traverse land and aquatic terrains, but also latch itself onto edges of ravines and cliffs. To hammer the point home, one of the equippable armors had wings on it. Predictably though, its survivability drops down once it actually does take to the air, especially when pitted against other, more fighter-oriented Gears...
- Real Life: again, see the My Tank is Fight! link.
- Several countries experimented with this in World War II. Some are doubtless included in the book above.
- If any practical real-world aircraft could get away with calling itself a flying tank, the A-10 is it. The AC-130, whose weapons load includes a 105mm howitzer, also deserves an honourable mention.
- The AC-130 (and it's variants, there are many) is informally classified as a flying artillery platform.
- The A-10 is cool indeed, but the B-17 Flying Fortress lives up to it's name. Unable to manuever effectively, the designers decided the plane still needed to be well protected, and so added ridiculous amounts of armor, six .50 caliber machine gun turrets, and a bomb bay with a capacity that would make a mad bomber faint with delight. It wasn't designed to shoot down enemy fighters, but it sure as hell did!
- And got chopped to pieces on most unsupported raids. Frankly, it doesn't really matter how many guns they stuck on, the gunners themselves were rarely going to be good enough to be really effective protection (flying in close formation worked for a while, before the Germans modified their tactics from hunt-and-kill of individual bombers to simple strafing tactics).
- The B-29 Superfortress, deployed in the World War II Pacific theater after Germany was defeated, was basically the B-17 on steroids.
- Behold the Dragon Tank.
- The Landmaster in Star Fox is a tank with boosters which allow it to roll, hover and generally be much more maneuverable than a regular tank.
Anime
- Humongous Mecha in most Real Robot settings seem to be mashups of your average infantry soldier and an armored tank or jet fighter.
- The Mobile Armors of Mobile Suit Gundam are often even straighter examples: Large non-humanoid units, built with the same technology as Mobile Suits, that acted as submarines, flying tanks, land battleships, and more.
- Zoids are the animal versions of the same principle.
- The Grandia Tank in Nadia is a triple threat: a tank on land, an airship, and a paddle-wheeled boat. It runs off steam with punch card controls!
- Code Geass has airships that are submersible, a Humongous Mecha that turns into a fighter jet-thingie, and another that turns into a submarine.
Comic Books
- Blackhawk comics were in love with this trope. Along with the link to the flying submarine (above), there was an underground fighter plane,tornado-generating helicopter fortresses, combat kites, the obligatory flying aircraft carrier , helicopter pogo-sticks, flying tanks, and some sort of flying on-fire-spinny-thing. And these weren't even all of them! Blackhawk comics had more fuzzy-science-derived plot devices than Star Trek.
- Marvel has the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier◊, which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin. Spoofed by Warren Ellis in Nextwave with theH.A.T.E. Aeromarine◊, which is a bunch of submarines welded together and equipped with oversized rocket thrusters.
- G.I.Joe has the mashup machines; they tended to make a small appereance or two, then explode.
Film
- This was the central plot point of The Three Stooges In Orbit: a professor builds a vehicle that's a submarine with tank treads and rotor blades. When it's stolen, the military has problems figuring out who should stop it. It lands: 'Call the Army!' It takes off: 'Call the Air Force!' Eventually, it goes over the ocean, to the relief of the commander: 'Call the Navy!'
Literature
- Dale Brown's EB-52 Megafortress and other machines that fall into the Cool Plane category are essentially mash-ups of heavy bombers and fighters. Since in real-life the most difficult changes would involve changing some programming lines in a radar's software and adapting the bomb bay to carry an obscene amount air-to-air missiles, this concept just might become Truth In Television as well.
- Navy pinnaces in the Honorverse are the bastard children of the space shuttle and the B-1R mentioned above, scaled up to the size of a 747. They are interplanetary space craft, Space Marine assault ships and fighter-bombers rolled into one.
- From the E.E. Doc Smith Space Opera First Lensman
The vehicle, while slow, could go—literally—anywhere. It had a cigar-shaped body of magnalloy; it had big, soft, tough tires; it had cleated tracks; it had air- and water- propellers; it had folding wings; it had driving, braking, and steering jets. It could traverse the deserts of Mars, the oceans and swamps of Venus, the crevassed glaciers of Earth, the jagged, frigid surface of an iron asteroid, and the cratered, fluffy topography of the moon; if not with equal speed, at least with equal safety.
- Similar to the Lensman example above, the Perry Rhodan universe gives us the so-called 'Shift' — an amphibious, flight-capable, yet still tracked tank usually equipped with Deflector Shields and energy weapons that can operate and fight in pretty much any environment, including some of the more extreme alien ones.
Live Action TV
- Federation ships in Star Trek tend to be science-vessel/warship hybrids. The sole exception is the Defiant, which despite officially being classified as a "heavy escort vessel", is unofficially admitted to be a warship (though the Prometheus, briefly seen in Voyager, may have been another step in this direction).
- The Andromeda Ascendant takes large parts of The Battlestar, and adds troop transport, science vessel, mobile factory, diplomatic vessel, planet killer and star destroyer to boot. All such Glorious Heritage-class heavy cruisers have such capabilities.
Western Animation
- Some Transformers have multiple forms, resulting in things like this. Perhaps most well-known is the Decepticon Triple-Changer Blitzwing, whose alternate modes are a MiG-25 and a Type-74 tank. The most over-the-top, though, would have to be Sixshot, a Decepticon with six alternate modes who can take on entire teams of enemies single-handedly.
Video Games
- In the Homeworld games, your mothership is a space factory/carrier, able to manufacture everything else in your fleet and house all of its smaller craft, while also able to maneuver(or even make hyperspace jumps) to any part of the battle area like any other ship. However in the original game, on its own, it's still fairly vulnerable.
- The Carrier-class ships from the first game also functioned as factory/carriers, but weren't able to build the larger ships (like Carriers) and were much faster and more maneuverable than the Mothership.
- In the Cataclysm expansion, it's possible to add "battleship" to the number of roles it fills. While still fairly vulnerable, it was much more capable of fending off fighters and small capital ships on its own. With a particular upgrade, they could even wipe out enemy fleets.
- In Homeworld 2, though, the Mothership went back to being vulnerable to pretty much anything, and another factory/carrier ship, the Shipyard, was added. It could build the largest ships in the game, which the regular Mothership couldn't, but was even slower and less maneuverable.
- Final Fantasy VIII features the main protagonists and antagonists using a mash-up of guns and swords. The user would load a cartridge into the "gun" part and "fire," which would cause the blade to vibrate and magnify damage.
- Real Life: There were real examples of Sword-Guns, though they weren't very popular. Commonly, they involved a knife/revolver combination.
- Of course, the rifle bayonet is a somewhat more successful example of a gun/edged weapon hybrid.
- While not edged, the powerhead (aka "shark stick" or "bang stick") uses a similar principle in a "jab with a stick" fashion.
- Parisian hoodlums who called themselves the "Apaches" had weapons that could be used as a dagger, a revolver, or a set of brass knuckles.
- Some upstanding gentlemen in the seventeenth century created cutlery pistols - as in a knife-pistol and a fork pistol.
- The 'gunblade' of Final Fantasy VIII is actually more akin to the vibroblade concept, which is quite popular.
- Starcraft's Terran siege tank, which switches from main battle tank to artillery platform.
- Command And Conquer Red Alert 3 is pretty much in love with this trope, especially the gadget-heavy Empire. Between the examples listed and others, there are very few units that don't qualify. Even most buildings can be planted in the water, so long as the unit they produce can exist on water. The Empire don't even have an air factory, since every single flier they field transforms from a vehicle, ship, or infantry.
- To a lesser extent, the Sonic the Hedgehog titles. The easiest example being the Egg Carrier, having a runway on the front of it, robot construction rooms in the interior (complete with "training" areas), as well as a couple entire stages within it.
- Chrome Hounds. Yes, the titular Hounds are supposedly Humongous Mecha, they're more like tanks. And by that I mean, a hound is probably a wall of Artillery cannons, Battleship guns, hulking armor, machine guns that turn M1-Abrams into swiss cheese, on anything from humanoid bipeds to tanks. (Oh, and tanks/wheels tend to be a bit faster.) and the cockpits range from bridges of ships to jet-fighter cockpits.
- Metal Gear Solid 3's Shagohod was a tank/hovercraft/ICBM launcher hybrid. With legs. They were just forelimbs, meaning it couldn't walk upright like the titular Metal Gear, so it compensated with a pair of Archimedes' screws. Have we mentioned it was rocket-boosted?
Real Life
- The Russian Topol and Topol M nuclear missiles are Mobile Missile Silos, at least in functionality.
- Nah, it's just mobile launcher — nothing really mashup here.
- Arguably, the original aircraft carrier was a working real-life example of this, attempting to combine an airbase with a ship.
- ...and while we're at it: the Airborne Aircraft Carrier in all its many incarnations.
- British carriers of World War One, many of which were conversions of warships already in service, tended towards a different hybrid status. HMS Vindictive, converted from a cruiser, carried five 7.5in guns; the former battleship HMS Furious, meanwhile, witnessed the first successful landing of an aircraft on a moving ship while still mounting a single 18in gun aft. The concept was revived (albeit briefly) in 1940, when lack of carriers and need for airborne protection led to suggestions that battleships under construction should be redesigned to carry ten fighters.
- Also worthy of mention are the M-class submarines, which began as a project to fit a 12in battleship gun on a submarine, and which ended up in one case as a submarine aircraft carrier.
- Partly to get round the Second London Naval Treaty and partly because they just did things differently, the Soviet Union built four "aviation cruisers", essentially VTOL aircraft carriers with anti-shipping missiles built in. The VTOL aircraft, the Yak-38 "Forger" was spectacularly poor. The current sole Russian carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov is also an example, albeit a full-length one with Su-33 fighters on.
- Most of these belong in the Battlestar category.
- An Amphibious Assault Ship is probably as close as practical towards several mash-ups into a single ship, taking on the functions of aircraft carrier, troop transport/beach assault ship, command ship, and - when some earlier designs still had decent-sized guns - bombardment ship.
- Probably no more of a mash-up than the LSTs ('Landing Ship Tank's) of WWII, which had to be good in both deep and shallow water.
- Many battleships carried seaplanes; today, many destroyers and cruisers carry helicopters, as did the Iowa class battleships when they were brought back into service in The Eighties.
- Many battleships were built before radar was around, so the seaplanes served the scouting function. Now that we have radar, the seaplanes have been replaced by helicopters to serve in the ASW role.
- Let's not forget the unlucky French submarine ''Surcouf''. Touted as an "underwater cruiser" is was capable of launching a small seaplane, which was housed in a hangar below decks, and was armed with two 203mm guns in a forward turret. It was also armed with a significant number of AA canons and machine guns. However it never saw action: it was accidentally rammed by a US freighter off the coast of Cuba and sank with all hands.
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