Allied General Workshop: Amphibious LVT for PG/AG

Be the first kid on your block to have amphibious SP artillery

Doing amphibious warfare without amphibious vehicles is like doing airborne warfare without airborne units (Crete without paratroopers?).

Below: LVT-4 at Iwo Jima. The amphibious LVT could hit the beach and keep driving inland with troops or towed guns. "Amtanks" had gun turrets. (nps.gov)

The key attribute of Landing Vehicle Tracked (LVT) and the later derivative Amtanks (LVT with light tank turrets) was the amphibious flexibility (in-out-in-out of water). Without it we may as well use Stuarts from a transport’s one-time discharge. AG does not allow you to mix mutually exclusive movement types in organic transport but we can use organic air transport movement to simulate slow-moving amphibians:

(Click any of the images for larger views)

We "average out" the LVT’s 6-8mph sea speed with the 20-25mph land speed to a slow but steady 2-hex speed through ALL terrain. This gives the LVT a fairly accurate sea, river, swamp, and forest speed in exchange for underestimating its maximum clear-terrain speed and you are on the honor system (as with many other original PG/AG quirks) not to move 2 hexes in mountains. In the image below, you see an LVT-borne infantry unit (Bren Carrier icon) and 2 Amtanks (Stuart icon) approaching the beach. As you can see below with the selected unit, despite the “air” movement, the infantry unit in or out of its LVT respects ground unit ZOC (not air ZOC) and all friendly and enemy units recognize it as a ground unit (no ranged fire from AD, etc.).

You clearly can see the LVT’s niche role by the highlighted area indicating that the unit can move 2 hexes up river (and no more 3 turns to ford a river) or 2 hexes through the swamp (it originally was a civilian swamp vehicle)—and remember that the LVT is impervious to the mud that can bar normal units from rivers and swamps entirely: ideal for Pacific atolls or a Scheldt Estuary scenario:

Make the Amtanks (above shown approaching the beach) by adding armor and the Stuart or M8 HMC firepower to the original idea—and be the first kid on your block to have amphibious SP artillery:

Remember that an M8 HMC in a transport cannot fire but a swimming LVT(A)-4 can give fire support to a landed unit while the LVT is still swimming to shore:

Especially since the Amtanks were based on the improved LVT-2 drivetrain, we can show the maximum clear-terrain speed by assigning the above data as a “transport” to a "mirror" unit that is exactly the same except for a “leg” movement factor (MF) of 4.The LVT’s paddle-wheel-track propulsion was not great on flat, hard ground but was better than most vehicles in muck so the leg designation makes it better than a 4MF tracked vehicle in mud (and allows you to buy the “transport” in purchase windows):

(Update clarification: for dual movement, the base unit should be leg and the transport should be air; class both as "tank" for the 37mm-gun version; class both as "artillery" for the 75mm-howitzer version--the LVT's ability to give fire support while swimming was a key advantage over a DD tank):