When I personally think of military vehicles, I go one of two ways: fast and nimble for rapid response or big and lumbering with armor and armed to the teeth. Those are really the options you want to have, as they each provide you with the right tool for a given situation.
And you’ll see those ideals baked into most military vehicles, and even most of the improvised technicals strewn about the globe in wartorn locales.
What I don’t think of is slow, lumbering, and unstable, and without the aid of armor. Because that just seems like a recipe for disaster and the easiest way of getting your soldiers killed. Yet, the Belarusian military-industrial complex didn’t either think or care about those tenets when coming up with this fat-tire Konung trike motorcycle that they strapped what looks to be a PKM machine gun to and handed it over to the Libyan military.
And what’s truly funny about this trike being in the hands of the Libyans is I bet this thing tips over if it even sees sand.
According to my buddy Jared Keller writing for the site Task & Purpose at the time, the Konung trike was designed to “[be] used by scouts to perform special operations in the rear of the enemy, bring equipment and ammunition, and evacuate the wounded.” Nowhere in that description does it say, “used as a mobile machine gun platform,” but the old adage of “everything is a technical if you believe hard enough” absolutely still applies.
Not much is known about the Konung trike, as horsepower, torque, or even what powers its massive rear wheels isn’t out there. This is just a trike that exists, though I’d love to know how slow this beast of burden is given those massive wheels. I mean, you’d likely need some sort of turbodiesel just to spin them to 30 mph, though that’d be terrifying given trikes are the most unstable platform you could have and those wheels aren’t doing it any favors in that regard.
The Reddit sub where I found this was equally distrustful of the Konung’s stability, with commenters lamenting that no one remembered the Honda ATCs and other trikes of the day and their instability and subsequent ban after killing people.
One commenter had an especially good point about the Konung’s tires, stating, “Would love to zip a 7.62 through one of those tyres and watch the whole thing collapse like a bouncy castle.” Truly, that would be catastrophic and given they’re such a large target compared to the rider and rest of the machine, it’d be so easy to put one of these down with a bullet to the tires.
But to all of this I ask, what’s so wrong about a four-wheeled ATV?
