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A fictional landship is a very large, and fictional, vehicle that travels on land, usually for warfare.
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Fictional 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. Landships are differentiated from normal ground vehicles by their larger sizes and complexity.
Most depictions have landships travelling over fairly flat and stable surfaces such as roads, trails and plain fields, often able to easily ford normal streams and rivers. They tend to be depicted as slow and lumbering, due to an insinuated relatively poor power-to-weight ratio. Nevertheless, they remain a popular idea due to the visual impressiveness of their great size.
Landships are mostly used for exploration, trade, transport or war. They may or may not be armed, but armed ones tend to look like actual warships of old, with multiple weapon systems and gun turrets.
Power sources used in fictional landships tend to vary, ranging from large steam engines in steampunk to things like fusion reactors in science fiction.
The type of solid physical contact maintained with the ground usually comes in the form of large continuous track or wheel arrays. More imaginative ideas in fiction include anti-gravity systems and screw propulsion.
Land mobile aircraft carrier
A land mobile aircraft carrier is a fictional terrestrial vehicle built to launch aircraft while mobile. It is not a launching sled for zero-length takeoff systems. The concept of a mobile airbase on land has been explored theoretically by many people, and deemed impractical, however this concept appears in some adventure fiction and Japanese manga and anime.
In Japanese animanga, the land carrier, as it is commonly known, is usually accompanied by analogs of other wet navy surface ships, such as landships.
Although not formally land mobile aircraft carriers, films and television series have also depicted helicopter and VTOL aircraft launches from semi-trailers and railroad cars.Concept art for the video game Command and conquer: Renegade featured an ORCA VTOL combat aircraft taking off from a converted 18-Wheeler, based on the scrapped concept from the original Command and Conquer.
Fictional appearances
Due to their large sizes, landships are considered to be impractical in real life (except for tanks and other armored fighting vehicles). However, they are featured in works of fiction, as land-based counterparts of water ships and airships.