Technically a Transport

Transports. We all know them. Slow. Weaponless. Altogether, quite vulnerable. But what if you could fix that little issue? In comes this thing: a humble battlefield bus turned into a substitute front-line tank. Or gunship. And it can still drop off its passengers and cargo most of the time. But who'd want to?

Examples of Technically a Transport include:

Film

  • Star Wars. The Millennium Falcon. Originally a stock light freighter, but has since been upgraded with souped up drives, heavy-duty quad laser cannons, concussion missiles, and a sensor suite that's like seeing the future. And, insanely enough, Mandalorian Kom'rk ("Gauntlet starfighter") is both a Space Fighter and troop transport.
    • AT-AT ("All Terrain Armored Transport") is APC / heavy self-propelled artillery hybrid.
  • The Batmobiles seen in The Dark Knight Saga.
  • In the Dawn of the Dead remake, the survivors turn a tour bus into an armoured zombie killing death machine (complete with slots that let them use chainsaws to get rid of undead hitchers) in order to make a break towards the pier.
  • The A-Team with their modified vehicles.
  • The movie The Pentagon Wars is about a Real Life development project that went this way: the Bradley Fighting Vehicle started out as a pure troop transport vehicle, but as development continued it acquired more and more features of a tank.

Tabletop Games

  • Car Wars. Big rig trucks are often armed with extensive weaponry in case they're attacked by bandits or have to engage in autodueling.
  • Star Fleet Battles. Many interstellar civilizations used armed transports and Q-ships to defend convoys from Orion pirates and other raiders.
  • Warhammer 40,000 has Valkyrie Airborne Assault Carrier - troop transport helicopter aircraft/hovercraft (12 + crew including two door gunners) that is also gunship. And its variant Vendetta is a minor transport (for 6) / heavy gunship (tank-killer), vehicle/container transport variant Sky Talon is still a gunship, if more modestly armed[1]; though more versatile gunship variant Vulture is not a transport.

Video Games

  • Battlefield 2142: With the Air Transports filled with various members of a squad. Most commonly being Engineers, a Medic/Soldier, and Supports.
  • Supreme Commander: A T1 or T2 Dropship loaded with T1 Light Assault Bots. The Cybrans can stick a T2 Mobile Stealth Field Generator with the LAB's to make it impossible to shoot down early without Omni-Sensors. In Forged Alliance,the UEF gets a T3 Dropship with a self-projected shield to jack survivability. The in-house term is "Ghetto Gunship"
  • Twisted Metal: Just look at half the vehicles, you'll see it.

Real Life

  • The AC-130 gunship. It's simply a Hercules cargo plane with guns and ammo rolled on board,pointing out the port side. The AC-47 and AC-119 having a similar history.
  • Maybe not "a near unstoppable force of destruction", but a technical is a pickup truck fitted with guns (also seen in Command & Conquer Generals/Zero Hour, they upgrade increasing their strength through wreckage).
  • During the American Civil War the Confederacy salvaged the USS Merrimack and outfitted it with iron plating, renaming it the CSS Virginia.
  1. this can be metagame motivated: seeing how Sky Talon is small and delivers only a pair of Sentinels (which can be simply dropped with a grav chute without risk of interception en route), or a Tauros (which is a fast vehicle anyway), and tabletop already starts at a battlefield, it's mostly useless as a transport and mostly is just a discount gunship thrown in with those vehicles; while In-Universe it should be good as a transport for scouts (who use either of those vehicles) and (as a fast, vertically landing, armoured flying transport) immeasurably more valuable for resupply of units that cannot be easily reached by ground transport; at least in Dawn of War 2 it drops turrets.