Thank you for your detailed response! That's great to learn and much appreciated!
First of all, I would like to clarify that I certainly do not think that the RT should be the new standard fire truck that everyone has to use.
The cost of the vehicle alone, which is currently more than twice that of a standard vehicle, justifies if then only the use in fire departments that go to well over 1000 calls a year.
One can certainly say and recognize that the RT was first designed for the European market and has now been adapted as RTX for the North American market. But as you write, you do many things significantly different than we do. (Putting the wet stuff on the red stuff is also our mantra).
In addition, the gap between urban cities and the vast unsettled countryside in the U.S. and Canada is much wider than in Europe, especially this aspect should always be kept in mind when talking about the design of fire trucks.
Speaking for Germany, we have a standards committee, in some respects certainly similar to the NFPA, which makes a lot of specifications about what a fire truck has to look like and what it has to bring to the scene. We have standardized nine different engine types alone, with water tenders/tankers being an additional group of their own. These are always the minimum requirements, but also with hard limits, especially for weights, which play a major role here. In addition, there are a large number of regional guidelines from the various federal states.
The range goes from vehicles without a water tank, but with a small portable pump, without rescue equipment and a crew of six at 3,5t GVW (7700lbs.) to large rescue engines with a build in pump, water tank of 2000l (530gal), a crew of 9 and a lot of heavy rescue equipment at 16t GVW (35270lbs.).
The RT only comes into play here for the two upper fire truck models, as it is too large for everything else and the costs justify only this, if anything. As you can imagine, the majority of the vehicles is not at the end of the line.
Fire trucks in Germany have in most cases a water tank between 1000 and 2000 liters of water (about 265 to 530 gallons) and a pump capacity of 2000l/min (530gal/min). Of course, the performance requirements are quite different when I quadruple the pump capacity.
Because of the much smaller pump, our supply hose is also much narrower. Here, the standard for all vehicles calls for 14 lengths of 3 inch at 65 feet. (roughly 950 feet of 3 inches) In most cases, these are then distributed on a mobile reel at the rear or carried as roll hose.
At the end of the day we all have the same goal to get the fire out and to help people, but on the way to the goal there are some major differences.
You guys have the advantage that your fire truck suppliers can build customized chassis, there as we in Europe currently only use commercial chassis. This will be a big disadvantage in the not to far future, as we already start to struggle to build fire trucks on modern truck chassis with modern exhaust systems and which will be an even bigger problem with the change to electric truck chassis. As they don't fit the criteria for fire trucks and it will be impossible to build fire trucks in weight limits.
