I've had an idea that I swear I can't have come up with one my own - I need confirmation before I go off and try to develop it.

Battle Wagons. Big (and I mean BIG) wooden and/or metal plated seige vehicles, kinda like sawed off seige towers. Moved by men in hamster-wheels that are inside the protective outer wooden walls (or harnesed horses/oxen). Essentially mobile keeps that could dominate a battlefield or be used to seige towns and castles. Carry maybe 50-75 men, archers, etc, maybe catapaults on top.

I know there were smaller versions of something similar in real life, but I'm thinking REALLY big-ass verisons thereof.

Now, have you heard of them before, in a game or book or something similar? Or is my "remembering" them just remembering their smaller cousins that really existed?

You're thinking of Jan Hus and the Wagenburg.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_%C5%BDi%C5%BEka

Hmmm... interesting, but no. I like it though. That's more like an entire mobile fortress. I'm stealing the hell out of that.

I like this guy, I'm going to read more on him. Damn, history is interesting.

I'm thinking of this as one solid structure, a tower on wheels if you will, but only about 30' tall maybe.

General Qi Jiguang (16th century Ming China, picture here) designed a "battle wagon" for his troops, using it to great success in several campaigns:

Quote from: Samuel Hawley's "The Imjin War""... a huge, two-wheeled cart, protected on all sides by wooden screens, which operated in some ways like a crude tank. Each was manned by twenty soldiers. Ten formed an assault party, four armed with muskets and the rest with swords, spears, and shields. As they advanced, the ten men remaining in the wagon would push it along, so that the assault team was never more than ten meters from safety. When the enemy attacked, all the men would fall back inside the wagon, where they would fight with their personal weapons and their fo-lang-chi guns, a crude, small-bore cannon so named because it had been introduced into China by the farangi, the Portuguese, a century before. For large-scale engagements, these wagons could be drawn into an impenetrable fighting square, with cavalry units sheltered within."

Sadly, Qi Jiguang fell out of grace when his political protector died. Qi's military innovations were forgotten by Ming China, though a certain naval officer from neighboring Korean studied them to great effect... :cool: