Base on Wheels: Difference between revisions

* Anime example: ''[[Zoids]]'' has mobile bases for the titular mechs to travel in. They are themselves giant Zoids, and therefore animal shaped. Team Liger travels in a giant snail, the bad guys use a flying sperm whale, and the standard cargo hauler is the pillbug-shaped Gustaff.

* The mobile command centers from ''[[Code Geass]]'' certainly fit the bill, until they are eventually replaced with flying equivalents. The Chinese still use the [http://codegeass.wikia.com/wiki/Longdan#Longdan Longdan bases] into the Second Season, however, along with their <s>[[Stargate SG-1|Ha'tak]] cruisers</s> Da Longdan upgrade.

* ''[[Soul Eater]]'' gives us a [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|Awesome]] versions of this. {{spoiler|Death City on Legs!}}. Best yet, it's on the side of the protagonists, and is controlled by a [[Cloudcuckoolander]], [[Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass]], [[Anthropomorphic Personification]] of [[The Grim Reaper|Death]]. Eye-Poke Attack indeed!

* The Fugaku, the mobile sea fortress of Chosakabe Motochika from ''[[Sengoku Basara]]'' is revealed in one episode to be capable of traveling on land as well as water. {{spoiler|It becomes a completely land-based base on wheels when Mori assumes control of it}}

 

== Comic Books ==

* Part of the "future" ''[[Elf Quest]]'' story "The Rebels" takes place in a large complex on a Mercury-type planet that has an incredibly hot day side and a cold dark side. The base runs on rails laid around the planet's equator in order to stay on the dark side as the planet slowly rotates. Lucky there aren't any saboteurs on board, eh?

 

 

* ''[[Live Free or Die Hard]]'' features an improbably big hacking center packed into a shipping container on the back of a tractor trailer. They do at least make it a little sensible, as the container is able to expand and contract to reasonable sizes to make it inconspicuous in city areas.

* ''[[Naruto]]'' - The Big Bad in the second movie had one of these. In addition to a number of World War 2 style warships. Needless to say they actually managed to looked out of place even in the [[Schizo-Tech]] the series runs on.

* The ''[[Speed Racer (film)|Speed Racer]]'' movie had Cruncher Block hanging out in the well-furnished (complete with piranha tank) back of a big red truck. This is possibly a [[Shout-Out]] to the Mammoth Car from the original cartoon, which blurred the line between [[Cool Car]] and ''[[Cool Train]]''.

 

* ''[[Eberron]]'' has Argonth, which patrols the border of Breland. Though it's not on wheels so much as it [[Magitek|hovers]].

** The monastery-fortresses of the Iron Hands space marines are literally (massive, massive) Bases on Wheels.

** An let's not forget the Necron's Monoliths. Which are less Bases on Wheels and more mobile floating (and teleporting) tombs of death and destruction.

** There's also the [[Canon Discontinuity|Squats]], a now [[Retcon|abandoned faction]] that specialised in this trope. Land Trains, the Colossus, the Cyclops...

** And the role-playing games in the setting give us Ambulon, the wandering city (well, that's a city-sized Base On Legs, but close enough), and the hive-ships of Zayth, which are tracked megalopoli carrying ridiculous amounts of (occasionally starship-scaled) weaponry, used to battle other hive-ships for resources

** The demon prince (and Patron of Gnolls) Yeenoghu has a palace on rollers that is endlessly dragged around his domain by hordes of slaves.

** The ''Dragon Magazine'' description of Baba Yaga's Dancing Hut fits this trope, probably more so than the original Russian myth, because the cottage on chicken legs is really a [[Pocket Dimension]] on chicken legs.

 

 

* The Eagleland and [[Dirty Communist]] 'recyclers' and factories in Battlezone are basically giant hovering... factories. They can fly around, deploy on a geyser, crap out a couple units and pack up and move along.

* The G-1 Mobile Bases from ''[[Code Geass]]'' are a fairly typical example.

** The Empire of the Rising Sun in [[Command & Conquer|Red Alert 3]] have enormous ocean fortresses that maintain and house entire armies by themselves, in addition to significant defenses. You attack or defend one of these things depending on which campaign you play.

** In C&C4, each player has a "crawler"; a giant walker, tank, or airship (depending on class) that has production facilities for units (and base defenses for the defense class), plus a ton of weapons on it. Meanwhile, base building has been mostly removed.

* ''[[Drone Tactics]]'' has one of these. It's a giant robotic snail with a cannon hidden under a hatch in its shell, which [[Rule of Cool|justifies the use of this trope all by itself.]]

** Too bad the Snail practically dies in one hit in later levels, and the cannon it uses hardly dents the enemy hp, though you can buy upgrades to mitigate this.

* ''[[Marvel Ultimate Alliance]]'' featured the Omega Base, a giant military research station on tracks operated by S.H.I.E.L.D. The only plot reason it was on tracks was to have the villains hijack it and send it towards an hydroelectric dam.

** The mission before involved the [[Airborne Aircraft Carriers|Helicarriers]] prompting Spiderman to wonder why they didn't add a tunnel to Japan to the extravagant waste two such vehicles would produce.

** Then there's also the joke unit Terra-Tron, which is quite literally a base on legs. (It's formed by combining every building in the base into a giant robot.)

* ''Supreme Commander'' has the Fatboy experimental unit. It's as large as several city blocks and can quickly produce most ground units while (not) firing away with its twelve gauss cannons, two riot guns, four railguns and torpedo launcher.

* Perhaps the ultimate Base on Wheels would have been the "Midgard-Schlange," a proposal made by German designers in the 1930s for a 60,000 ton armoured train the better part of two thousand feet long, which would run on tank treads and could drill underground or run on the bottom of the sea. It would supposedly have been used to drill under fortifications and set huge explosive charges to destroy them. The project never seems to have passed the "asking for funding" stage, though it says a lot about Nazi Germany that this was due to lack of resources and manpower rather than, say, because it was an ''utterly fucking ridiculous'' idea.

* Armoured trains were used by the Russians and Germans during the Second World War to deter vehicles and infantry from attacking vital rail lines; they had purpose-built armoured wagons and sometimes armoured locomotives, and their armament included machine guns, AA guns in armoured enclosures, artillery guns, and even surplus tank turrets. The armoured trains only got bigger, stronger and meaner as the war went on; perhaps the ultimate example was when the Allies found three Panzerjäger-Triebwagen wagons (51-53) in a German factory after the war ended, each essentially being a heavily armoured mobile bunker equipped with a pair of Panzer IV turrets.

** The earliest examples were the German prototypes for a train-launched A4 (ie V2) missile. These were extensively tested but ultimately abandoned after it became clear Allied air superiority would make them unworkable. Most V2 missiles were still moved from the factory to their launch sites by train, however.

** In the USA, the LGM-118A Peacekeeper, initially known as the "MX missile", was proposed to be deployed by a "rail garrison" system whereby 25 trains, each with two missiles (up to 10 warheads), would use the national railroad system to conceal themselves. When the [[Cold War]] ended, this was deemed too expensive and the missiles were stuck in silos.