Idea: a machine that eats dirt and prints roads

I'm not sure if it's using the plasma process but it must be doing something similar because a large chunk of the mass of the vehicle is empty hanger space. So the materials to make the road must be coming from the ground itself. Either that or the 'road' is just a layer of black paint. I choose to give Gerry Anderson benefit of the doubt however.

At university my mate had to design a road maintenance vehicle that allowed traffic to drive over whilst in use, a kind of rolling mobile bridge. I was very jealous. My CS degree assignments never approached anything like designing real thunderbirds.