Tracked tractor units drawing van semi-trailers along a mountain highway in daylight, snow-capped peaks and conifer forest behind them.
CDNS KAOS · Convoy

A Fifth Wheel on Tracks.
The Trailer Behind It Is Ordinary.

CDNS KAOS carries a fifth wheel and pulls the semi-trailer a road tractor already pulls: the same plate height, the same air and electrical connections, the same load. Behind it sit a tracked drawbar trailer and a tracked lowbed, for freight that wants tracks under it too. Nothing about the trailer changes. Everything about where it can go does.

Configurations → The machine Start a screened enquiry
The coupling

A Plate on the Deck.
An Ordinary Trailer on Top of It.

A fifth wheel is the coupling almost every road trailer already fits. Put one on a tracked carrier and that trailer goes past the end of the road.

The fifth-wheel configuration is a KAOS with a coupling plate on its deck and nothing else on it. A semi-trailer backs on, the kingpin locks, the air and electrical leads go across, and the combination is made. Each action is one a driver already performs. The trailer is not modified, not re-plumbed, not re-wired: the tractor was drawn to meet it.

Towing is a transport configuration, not an attachment. The fifth wheel is the transport axis of the five that name a KAOS, and Configurations holds all five.

A tracked tractor coupled to a long container semi-trailer, standing on a wet gravel pad under heavy cloud with spruce behind and water lying in the ruts.
The argument

A Road Tractor Is an Excellent Machine.
It Has One Condition Attached.

Freight moves beautifully until the surface runs out. What stops a load on the last stretch is almost never capacity. It is ground.

A road tractor is an excellent machine with one condition attached, and it is the network. Where the asphalt ends, a trailer that crossed a continent waits at a gate while its load is broken down, cross-loaded and carried in piecemeal. The transfer costs handling, time and damage, exactly where the job is.

The argument
Nothing about the trailer changes. Everything about where it can go does.

The same box, the same pallets, the same seals. What changes is the machine in front, and the ground it will accept.

A tracked prime mover removes the transfer. It couples at the gate and keeps going: soft and thawing ground, snow, ice, sand, a site with a coordinate and no road into it. The load arrives whole, on the trailer it started on.

The tractor

What Sits Under the Plate.
A Generator, and Two Driven Tracks.

A tractor is only as good as the machine beneath the coupling. This one is a diesel-electric tracked carrier whose assemblies bolt on and off.

The drivetrain is a series arrangement and the word series is the whole of it. The engine is not connected to the tracks. It turns a generator, the generator feeds one high-voltage bus, a battery buffers it, and separate motors drive the left and right tracks. Full effort is available from rest, and the same bus feeds the deck.

The tracked tractor from the left with nothing coupled to it: the cab forward, the power module standing above the frame line behind it, and a fifth-wheel coupling plate on a raised mount at the tail.
The carrier in side elevation with the chassis open to view: the electric driveline and its shafting running the length of the machine, the road-wheel train and track below, and the flat deck above.
The tracked carrier in churned mud, an olive container chained down along its deck, forest and peaks behind.

Underneath is one welded steel box and everything else bolts to it. Each side's running gear comes off as a complete cartridge, clamped to a machined face rather than hung on bolts, and the power pack is a bolt-in unit. Those assemblies interchange across KAOS Light, KAOS Core and KAOS Heavy, so one set of spares serves all three. The arrangements here are KAOS Core's, and so is CS-270.

The cab is offered with driving controls and without: a wheel and pedals for transit and yard work, or a seat and none, the command arriving down a fibre from a station well back. The structure is on The machine and the generator on Power and energy.

The physics

Pull Is Not Settled by the Engine.
It Is Settled by the Ground.

Towing on tracks is a traction problem before it is a power problem, and what bounds it is three separate limits rather than one.

Ask how hard a machine can pull and the answer is three answers, because three things run out, in a different order on every surface.

GRIP

A property of the surface

The most force tracks put into the ground before they slip is a fraction of the weight above them, and it belongs to what is underfoot. It collapses on wet clay.

POWER

Climbing at a speed costs it

Taking a loaded combination up a slope at a working pace draws continuous power. Past some pairing of gradient and speed the limit stops being grip.

GEOMETRY

And where the mass sits

How far a combination leans before it tips is set by track gauge and the centre of gravity. A trailer moves that centre, so cross-slope belongs to the configuration.

A fourth limit belongs to the tractor itself, and it is set out with the others on The machine: a tracked vehicle has no steered wheel, so it turns by dragging its tracks sideways. In a combination that cost arrives at the coupling. A turn on soft going skids two tracks and swings a loaded trailer through the same ground, so a route is planned with its turns in it and not only its straights.

Tracked tractors drawing tracked semi-trailers across wind-packed snow and ice at low sun, a glacier front and jagged peaks behind.
Flotation

Weight Spread Over Square Metres,
Not Over a Handful of Patches.

Flotation decides where a combination may go at all, and it is a footprint question long before it is a power question.

Ground pressure is weight over the area the tracks lay down, and a platform is sized against the pressure the ground will take. Coupling changes the question. There is now a second footprint behind the first, and a route is open only where both of them float.

Two consequences follow, and a combination sharpens both. A coupled trailer shifts the balance fore and aft, so the pressure under the tractor is not what it was standing alone. And the figure that decides a route is never an average: weight reaches a track through a finite number of rollers, and what stops a combination is the highest pressure under any part of it.

The shoe family is chosen against that figure, and widening one is a trade: lower ground pressure, more energy to turn, a wider machine. The families and what each is for are on The machine.

The trailers

One Coupling, Three Trailers.
Each Answers a Different Ground.

The configuration is a fifth wheel pulling standard road semi-trailers, a tracked drawbar trailer, and a tracked lowbed. One tractor stands in front of all three.

What follows the tractor is chosen by the ground and the load, and these three are not variations on one trailer.

The trailerWhat it is forWhat it asks of the tractor
Road semi-trailerThe freight the network already moves: vans, flatbeds, tanks and containers, coupled at the plate and untouched.A fifth wheel at the height the trailer expects, an air supply and an electrical connector.
Tracked drawbar trailerA load that must follow onto ground where a wheel digs in. The trailer carries its own running gear and footprint.A drawbar and pin, brake and lighting connections, and a pull taken into primary structure.
Tracked lowbedA low, strong deck for plant and heavy single loads, driven or craned aboard and chained down.The same connections, and a footprint continuous from tractor to tail.

The three trailers of the fifth-wheel configuration, and what each asks of the machine in front of it.

Mixing them on one route is ordinary. The road trailer takes the distance, the tracked trailer the part with no surface, and the lowbed what has to be carried rather than driven.

Tracked trailers

The Tractor Was Never the Limit.
The Wheels Behind It Were.

A tractor that floats behind a trailer that does not is a stuck combination. Running gear under the load keeps the whole of it on the surface.

Wheels concentrate. A loaded trailer axle puts its share of the weight through contact patches the size of a coat, and on ground a tracked tractor crosses without marking, it sinks. The trailer stops being a load and becomes a plough, and the pull goes into dragging it rather than moving freight. The limit was never the machine in front.

A tracked trailer spreads its share the way the tractor spreads its own. The combination then has one footprint from nose to tail, rolling resistance stops climbing as the ground softens, and the pull goes where it was meant to. On thaw, on snow over unknown depth and on wet organic soil, that is the difference between a route and a recovery.

The structure is drawn for being moved as much as for moving: lifting and tie-down points engineered in rather than welded on, restraint loads reaching primary structure, battery retention designed for transport and rollover.

The drop-deck trailer in profile on a plain ground, running on its own track bogie with a plain container chained down along the deck and the gooseneck reaching forward onto the tractor's deck.
A tracked tractor coupled to a low drop-deck trailer running on its own track bogie, an olive module chained along the deck, wet ground and snow-covered peaks behind.
Mass and braking

Two Systems Slow It Down.
Only One of Them Is a Brake.

The mass a prime mover carries is what its grip is made of. The mass behind it is what its brakes are answerable to.

Grip is a fraction of the weight pressing the tracks into the ground, so a prime mover's mass is not dead weight in a towing configuration. It is what becomes pull. The trade is symmetrical: what a heavier tractor gains in traction it also has to stop, and then hold, with a loaded trailer pushing at its back.

So braking is two systems that do not depend on each other. Normal slowing is done by the traction motors running backwards as generators, pushing energy into the battery. It saves friction material, and it is not a brake, because it works only while the electronics are alive and the battery can take charge. The brake is a spring-applied unit at each final drive, held open by power and closing on its own spring the moment power goes.

Losing control power is therefore a braked state, not a coasting one. The stop and the order of authority sit on Command and safety.

Tracked tractors under container semi-trailers on a dry graded track through desert ground, dust drawn out behind them, red rock ridges beyond.
The ground

Mud, Snow, Ice and Sand.
Then the Site With No Road at All.

The configuration exists for four kinds of going. Each of them takes something from a wheeled combination that the combination has no way of giving back.

Ground fails under a wheel in more than one way, and the four below are the ones this configuration was drawn for. A combination has to answer all of them on the footprint it started the route with.

SOFT AND WET

Mud, thaw, organic soil

Bearing strength falls away and a wheel finds the bottom of it. Footprint is the answer, on the tractor and on what follows it.

SNOW AND ICE

Depth you cannot see

Snow hides what lies under it and ice gives little to push against. A wide shoe keeps the combination on top of the drift.

SAND AND DUST

Loose, hot, abrasive

Dry sand shears under a wheel and takes the drive with it. Spreading the load lowers the shear demand.

NO ROAD AT ALL

A coordinate and a cut line

A site with a grid reference and no surface into it is what this was drawn for. Nothing is transferred at a gate.

None of that is a claim about a climate. It is a claim about ground, and ground is what a footprint answers. The shoe family, the trailer and the route are recorded with the configuration.

On the road

It Runs on the Surface as Well.
That Is Half of the Point.

A machine that only worked in the mud would need a lift to reach it. This one drives to the job and then leaves the road.

The interesting property of this configuration is not that it goes where a road tractor stops. It is that it does the road part as well, so there is no handover in the middle. The combination stages on pavement, crosses a city street in winter, runs a highway, then turns off onto ground with no surface and keeps the same load behind it.

Tracked tractors with van semi-trailers on a two-lane highway in bright daylight, conifer forest and a snow-capped range beyond.
Tracked tractors on a wet city street in falling snow, mixed loads aboard, towers and cranes behind.
A tracked tractor coupled to a long van semi-trailer on a paved apron, a snow-covered range behind.

Surface work is where the road-pad shoe family earns its place, and where the commercial half of the argument lives. The load never leaves the trailer, the seals stay closed, and nothing is handled twice.

Who it is for

Who Couples One of These.
And What This Configuration Is Not.

A coupling defines both sides of the boundary it sits on, so both halves below are specific: who orders a transport configuration, and what it is not there to do.

WHO IT IS FOR

The people who order the transport axis

  • An operator whose freight moves on semi-trailers, whose last stretch has no surface.
  • A works manager who would rather bring a container to the job than break it up.
  • A hauler reaching a site through thaw, drifted snow or sand.
  • An engineer moving plant on a lowbed onto ground a wheeled rig cannot cross.
  • A planner who wants one route from depot to work, no transfer in the middle.
  • An operation wanting the machine in front to be the architecture already on site.
WHAT IT IS NOT

Read this before the enquiry

  • Not a replacement for a road tractor where the route is paved end to end.
  • Not a bespoke trailer build. The road trailer is the one you already run.
  • Not a personnel carrier. The trailers take freight and plant, and the machine goes in so a person does not have to.
  • Not a fixed model with options after it. Transport is one axis of five.
  • Not a set of published performance figures. What a combination does is settled with the ground in front.
  • Not an offer. Enquiries are screened, and supply is subject to Canadian export permits per shipment.
The conversation

Start With the Trailer You Already Run.
The Last Stretch Is the Question.

It starts with the trailer you already run, the load on it, and the part of the route that stops everything else.

Bring the trailer and its coupling, the load and how it is restrained, and the ground on the last stretch. The answer names a transport configuration and the trailer to put behind it. Every enquiry is screened, and supply is subject to Canadian export permits issued per shipment.

The line as a whole is on the CDNS KAOS page. The five axes and the mission deck are on Configurations, the structure and the running gear on The machine, and the generator behind all of it on Power and energy. The buyer's door is Who it is for.

Start a screened enquiry → Contact Canadian Shield Configurations

Nothing on this page is an offer or a commitment. Patent pending. Designations are current as issued and subject to change. International transfer is subject to Canadian government permits taken per shipment; export posture is counsel-first.