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1->''The fiercest serpent may be defeated by a swarm of ants.''
2-->-- '''[[FourStarBadass Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto]]''', discussing the ''Yamato''-class battleship.
3!!Examples
4* Back to AwesomeButImpractical/RealLife
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6[[foldercontrol]]
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8[[folder:General]]
9* [[ItsRainingMen Paratroops]] in general. True, they are the cream of the crop in each and every army, provide a potentially unexpected avenue of attack, and jumping out of a perfectly good plane mid-air is just plain awesome. However, paratroops suffer from a number of downsides. First, unless the drop zone is secured, the jump planes are easy to shoot down and the descending paratroopers are similarly vulnerable to ground fire. Second, paratroops are generally unsupported by heavy weapons such as artillery and armored vehicles, which cannot be easily carried by planes and are ''very difficult'', if not downright impossible, to safely drop by parachute. Third, parachute operations are heavily dependent on the element of surprise: once deployed, the paratroop is at a disadvantage, as their opponent can call for more firepower and reinforcements. Fourth and finally, if the paratroop cannot link up with friendly forces in a timely manner, then it will eventually run out of supplies, at which point surrender is the only rational option. The experience of WWII paradrop operations was that large scale paradrops usually fail (Market Garden is an obvious example, not helped by the fact that Bernard Montgomery, the mastermind of the operation, tried to use paratroopers as regular army units to hold and defend strategic objectives, which is exactly the ''opposite'' of how paratroop regiments are supposed to function) and even successful ones (Normandy, Crete and Operation Varsity) are costly, and typically only succeeded because the regular armies were able to arrive and reinforce them within a few hours to a day at most, but small scale operations (up to company level) usually succeed (an example would be the POW rescue in Los Baños). Helicopters have more or less superseded both gliders and paratroops in most armies around the world.
10** Case in point to this is the infamous "Battle of the Bulge" in the twilight months of World War II. As a result of the above-mentioned Market Garden and related military operations, the American 101st Airborne found themselves ''far'' ahead of the Allied Army's support, and the logistical issues stemming from Market Garden meant that getting reinforced was a long way away. Unfortunately for them, the Wehrmacht were aware of this, and staged a large offensive from the Ardennes which completely overwhelmed the under-supplied and under-supported 101st, pushing them as far back as the city of Bastogne. To the 101st's credit, they [[YouShallNotPass stubbornly held Bastogne]] even as the German military leaders claimed to have completely surrounded the city, but it was not until General Patton's Third Army arrived from the south to chase off the German forces that the Screaming Eagles were finally relieved, and with heavy losses.
11** On paratroop gear, the German wartime RZ (''Rückfallschirm, Zwangablösung'') parachute. It was designed to open quickly, the rationale being the lower the drop, the less time on chute fall. Unfortunately, it opened extremely violently, resulting in bruises and broken ribs. Moreover, it had ''one single riser'' instead of the normal four, making controlling it in-flight impossible: the paratrooper hung on the parachute like a spider on the web, helplessly, and the only thing he could do was to try to pivot into the wind. The German jump position was a crucifix dive instead of the leaning rest, and instead of the safe parachute landing fall, the paratrooper landed on all fours, making wearing gauntlets and kneepads a must. The descent speed was faster than with Allied parachutes and thus landings were always hard, and many ''Fallschirmjäger'' broke their arms or ribs on landing. The rig itself took almost three minutes to undress and could not be unharnessed prone. The horribly unsafe RZ rigs were largely responsible for the horrendous ''Fallschirmjäger'' losses. Jumping with the RZ rig is prohibited today for safety reasons, and ''Fallschirmjäger'' re-enactors use normal four-riser Bundeswehr canopies attached on RZ harnesses on jumps. Even stranger is that the Luftwaffe at the time had and even ''used'' perfectly normal four-riser parachutes, but only as rescue rigs.
12** Russia took paratroops to the logical extreme by ''forgoing the parachute entirely'', running trials with soldiers jumping out of a low-and-slow flying plane, sans parachute, and aiming for ''snow drifts'' and water to break their fall. Naturally, this didn't get very far in practice, not just because a plane flying at the speed and altitude needed for such a drop would be vulnerable to anyone with a good arm and particularly heavy rock, but also because it was ''really'' difficult to judge just ''which'' snowdrifts and/or bodies of water were sufficient for a freefall, and which would turn the unfortunate trooper into a puddle of ''borscht'' soup on impact.
13*** The Russian airdrop operation at the Hostomel Airport, done during the first days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, showed the downsides of paratroopers in full. Without adequate planning and supplies, the Russian VDV lost a lot of helicopters and soldiers when Ukraine counterattacked, forcing them to retreat into a nearby forest. While the VDV eventually took over the airport with reinforcements, by then it was too badly damaged for strategic use, rendering the mission pointless and forcing the Russians to abandon their attempts to take Kyiv (near Hostomel airport).
14* The Russian "Tsar" projects. After Tsar Bell and Tsar Cannon, it has become sort of Russian joke to call "tsar-something" anything impressive-looking, but unusable.
15** The Tsar Bomba was the highest yield nuclear weapon in history at 50 megatons. That's almost 1600 times the power of [[UsefulNotes/AtomicBombingsOfHiroshimaAndNagasaki Fat Man and Little Boy]]. The test of the bomb was the most powerful single thing ever done by mankind.[[note]]And the version they tested? It was actually tuned ''down'' to 50% yield. It was designed to be a 100-megaton monster - big enough that its explosion would have amounted to more than a full quarter of ''all'' radioactive fallout caused by testing of nuclear weapons since their invention fifteen years prior. It was toned down simply because there was no way in hell any plane that could drop the thing would be able to get out of its blast radius in time at the full yield.[[/note]] In spite of that there was never a need for such a single, powerful nuke, since it is far more efficient to destroy a large area using multiple, smaller thermonuclear warheads instead of one giant one.
16* What could be more awesome than [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_elephant War Elephants]]? Unfortunately, they tend to panic in battle, trampling friend or foe with indifference. Elephants are also extremely expensive with regards to food and upkeep, and have slow gestation and growth periods, meaning they are nigh-impossible to domesticate properly. Yet another issue was simply getting them, as they weren't exactly easy to find in Europe. It's theorized that the use of war elephants outright rendered some subspecies of elephant ''extinct'' due to it placing such a heavy burden on them.
17** During UsefulNotes/TimurTheLame's invasion of India, his forces faced 120 armored Indian war elephants with (for even more awesomeness!) ''poisoned tusks''. In an act of genius, insanity, or both, he ordered all his camels lit on fire and sent the screaming animals towards the advancing elephants. The massive beasts panicked and trampled over their own forces. Timur's army then easily ran down the fleeing enemy troops. Timur then picked up the IdiotBall himself, incorporating the elephants into his own army, perhaps figuring that no one else would figure out his strategy.
18** War elephants had been made obsolete in Europe by the Roman ways (yes, ''ways'') of dealing with them, that include such things as ox-driven chariots equipped with ''huge'' spikes to wound the elephants and pots on fire to scare them (these ultimately failed, but [[PyrrhicVictory provoked many losses among Pyrrhus' war elephants]]), insane numbers of flaming arrows (scary enough to make Pyrrhus war elephants panic and stomp his own troops), extremely loud horns (that made part of Hannibal's elephants run over his own army) and simple axes. When the Romans started chopping enemy war elephants with axes, their enemies finally got the memo and stopped using them (Parthians and Sasanid still made use of war elephants, but never deployed them against the Romans).
19** [[HollywoodHistory Despite common depictions of the contrary]], only one of Hannibal's 37 elephants survived the crossing of the Alps and the first battles in northern Italy and did little more than parading Hannibal around.
20** During the decade-long [[http://wildfiregames.com/0ad/page.php?p=7050 Numantine War]] (sometimes nicknamed "Rome's [[UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar Vietnam]]") the Romans themselves got desperate enough to try war elephants and hired a company from the allied African kingdom of Numidia. As they were about to charge before the walls of Numantia, however, one of the local warriors threw ''[[RockBeatsLaser a stone]]'' with a sling that hit one of the elephants in the head (some versions say [[ImprobableAimingSkills right in one eye]]). The elephant panicked, the other elephants panicked in turn, and before they knew it the entire herd was [[HoistByHisOwnPetard stomping the Roman lines behind]]. The Romans never used elephants in Spain again.
21** King Mongkut of Siam once tried to send a herd of elephants to American President UsefulNotes/JamesBuchanan to aid in transportation and as beasts of burden. By the time the letter ended up in America, UsefulNotes/AbrahamLincoln was the president and the UsefulNotes/AmericanCivilWar had broken out, and he obviously (but politely) turned it down on the grounds that American climate is not suitable for elephants, and that steam engines would do the job better anyways.
22** The awesome but impractical nature of elephants is exemplified in the origin of the expression "white elephant". In Thai culture white elephants are perceived as very auspicious symbols, and gifting a noble with a white elephant was one of the highest honors a king could've bestowed him with. At the same time elephants were very expensive to feed and care for, and being a King's gift it was impossible to use it as a normal working elephant to earn its own support. Thus it was a constant drain on a noble's finances, so several white elephants too many can easily bankrupt less prosperous ones. But despite all this, ''turning down'' a King's gift was not only impossible but unthinkable. So, as rumor goes, the Siamese kings sometimes used them as a hint or outright punishment for the too troublesome and/or ambitious courtiers.
23* In another attempt at weaponizing animals, the Swedes once attempted to create a unit of ''moose'' cavalry (Sweden having a limited supply of good cavalry horses but plenty of moose) in the 17th century. It turned out that 1: Moose can't just subsist on hay like horses can, 2: Once the moose are in rut, they'll attack everybody, even their handlers, 3: Moose are terribly vulnerable to a wide variety of livestock diseases, and 4: Moose are smart enough to figure out that guns and pikes are bad for their health, and once they do, they refuse to go anywhere near them. The unit was dissolved without ever fighting a single battle. Course this has been disputed as a myth at best.
24* The nuclear survival bunkers constructed by the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, such as Cheyenne Mountain or Mount Weather. Theoretically they can survive a near or direct impact from a single nuclear strike and have some self-reliance for food and air, but they cost a ton to build and were built in an era when accuracy for nukes was measured in miles instead of yards. Both sides stopped building them when they realized the other side could manufacture a dozen nukes to target each bunker, something which no amount of mountain will protect you from.
25* The Spartan military. A well-bred elite warrior class trained from childhood for war is undeniably awesome. However, since every male Spartan had to go to war, in addition to the fact that they didn't intermingle with the lower classes, any major defeat would take a significant chunk out of their future population. Since having fewer soldiers would potentially lead to even more defeats, the population went into a free fall over the centuries. The Spartan army just had fewer and fewer men until they ceased to be a relevant threat altogether. For this reason, the Peloponnesian War can be considered a pyrrhic victory for Sparta; despite winning the conflict, they lost so many Spartiates that by the time of the Spartan-Theban war, they could barely fill their right flank with Spartiates, which was the most important side of an ancient Greek army. By the time of Philip and Alexander, Sparta could barely muster 1000 men, a far cry from the 10,000 that they could muster at the height of their power.
26** The Spartan training method as well, for that matter. Contrary to popular belief, the Spartan hoplite was nowhere near as effective as their hellish training and constant exercising would suggest. They were certainly better than the average Greek hoplite, but not by enough to offset their numerical disadvantage, population issue and sometimes just plain smart thinking from their enemy. There have been multiple occasions in history where the Spartan army lost to enemy forces of equal size, sometimes even smaller. Not only was their fighting effectiveness not that much better, but their morale also wasn't that much greater than the average hoplite either. During the battle of Tegyra, 300 Thebans routed over one thousand Spartans by simply breaking through the middle of their line.
27** Their TrainingFromHell of TheSpartanWay ultimately meant that enormous proportions of their male population either died or failed out of the Agoge, meaning that in spite of every boy being drafted, perhaps very few ''even made it to the actual force''. Secondly, tactical inflexibility meant that Spartan armies often were ultimately just outmaneuvered or cornered. And thirdly, records show that Sparta did not have an amazing record of {{Curb Stomp Battle}}s; they could be beaten and it was not a rare event, and it was at the hands of armies of citizen soldiers and mercenaries.
28** The training and singularly-focused martial culture required to produce a Spartiate meant that, to a far greater extent than its contemporaries, Sparta relied on large numbers of slaves – the helots, an unusually cruelly oppressed slave class. This meant that the total number of Spartiates, especially in later years after the Peloponnesian Wars had killed many of them, was actually extremely small. They were tactically effective, but Spartan institutions could not economically or culturally sustain enough individuals whose defining feature was that they did not labor, for their contingent to be reliably decisive in battles. Worse, the crippling imbalance between a minority of armed-to-the-teeth ''homoioi'' and oppressed-but-seriously-pissed-off helot slaves meant that the Spartans regularly could not field their army, or have it on campaign too long, or too far away, for fear of a slave revolt killing their families at home and crippling their shaky economic foundations. This fear was totally justified - there were a number of strategically very significant helot rebellions. It's hard to read about Spartan social institutions, especially their treatment of the helots, and come away still thinking highly of the culture (though maybe that's just what the Athenians want you to think).
29* Some military thinkers in history advocated coastal fortifications as a superior defensive investment compared to warships because their walls were much tougher than a ship's hull, and they were not limited in the size or number of their cannons. With superior defense, range, and firepower, in theory coastal forts were supposed to beat warships every time. The problem was that the guns (and in more modern times, their magazines, motors, i.e. everything except the hull) were actually the most expensive part of either a warship or a fort, so it was no less expensive to arm a fort to a certain level compared to a warship. With that in mind, a country could get more bang for their buck by putting the same guns on a ship that could take its firepower anywhere and engage any target, instead of sticking them permanently in one place and probably with a limited field of fire. Because of reluctance to divert investment from ships to forts, few coastal forts were actually made as well-armed as the enemy's big warships, and with enough naval firepower it was actually possible to destroy them. Coastal fortifications ''could'' sometimes be made superior if a country cared enough about defending a strategic location--for example, Vladivostok was so heavily fortified in the UsefulNotes/RussoJapaneseWar and UsefulNotes/WorldWarII that the Japanese navy didn't even attempt to attack it--but coastal fortifications didn't have an automatic advantage over ships and they weren't a substitute for having a proper navy.
30* Old-school mass armies, at least since the end of the Cold War. While it has a great intimidation factor and can cover much territory, armies prioritizing quantity over quality are very inefficient. Modern militaries are so equipment-intensive and have such high personnel costs that fielding millions of men is simply too expensive. Conversely, reducing equipment levels is just begging for a {{Curb Stomp Battle}} - or at least, that was the Chinese conclusion after UsefulNotes/TheGulfWar, upon which they began to furiously modernize their military along Western lines. Then there's the fact that large scale wars between great powers that would necessitate large armies were pretty much considered [[TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt suicidal]] with the proliferation of [[NukeEm nuclear weapons]].
31* The entire Axis military in World War II was the epitome of Awesome, But Impractical. The Germans had tanks with superior armor and firepower compared to any fielded by the Allied forces while also inventing wonder weapons like the ballistic missiles and fighter jets. Likewise, the Japanese had some of the biggest and most powerful capital ships that out-displaced even entire US naval task forces in some battles. Yet despite their advances, Axis military technology was notoriously expensive and unreliable, meaning that their forces couldn't replace losses or produce enough equipment to cover multiple fronts. Not helping matters is that while Axis technology was superior on paper, the lack of experienced soldiers and sloppy logistics meant that their weapons couldn't perform to their full potential in practice. By the end of the war, the heavy casualties in the early stages of the war meant that Japan lacked experienced sailors to crew the Yamato-class battleships. Likewise, Germany's disrupted supply chain lead to a shortage of fuel and spare parts, resulting in more German armored fighting vehicles being lost to mechanical failure or crew abandonment than enemy combat. Axis logistics was so abysmal that Canada, a minor Allied nation, had more trucks than all Axis forces ''combined''. Furthermore, the Axis nations never fully cooperated as an alliance, meaning that they didn't share technological advancements whereas the Allies regularly improved on each other's technology like when the British installed their Merlin engines in American P-51s for superior performance.
32* According to some veterans, the US Army's approach to infantry fighting during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII can be best described as attempting to turn standard infantry into expert marksmen, insisting that every man be a perfect shot and that every shot kill the enemy. In reality, most isolated riflemen didn't shoot to kill because they were too scared and felt that they couldn't even make a single difference in a prolonged fire-fight. Most of the effective killing done by infantrymen wielding rifle-caliber weapons actually came from machine gunners, who [[MoreDakka simply overwhelmed their enemies with the sheer number of bullets that could come out of a machine gun]]. The Germans were ahead of the Americans in this regard, with their emphasis on the machine gunner and his assistants as the key members of the squad. See the development of the M14 for why emphasizing the individual rifleman as the primary killing power of any army doesn't really work (or why one gun [[MasterOfNone cannot take over the roles of five or six different ones]], for that matter). In spite of the development of the select-fire assault rifle as the general issue infantryman's main arm and the full-power general purpose machine gun as the platoon's primary firepower, it appears that several armies (including the US Army) still insist that the rifleman lead the way with perfectly placed single shots. This, of course, leads to the machine gunners being neglected and their guns being unable to do much good away from base.
33* Sometimes a military bureaucracy will become so preoccupied with maintaining the secrecy of a classified technology or a plan for a classified operation, that they’ll go too far and make it inaccessible even to decision makers and technical specialists who will be necessary to its implementation. Hell, sometimes they’ll come up with an idea and just plain forget to tell anybody. Sure, enemy spies are less likely to find out about it if you tell almost nobody that it even exists, but look what happened to the Canal Defense Light, a tank equipped with a powerful arc lamp that could be used to blind the enemy: since few British commanders knew it was available, it ended up under-utilized. Another case is the Mark 6 Exploder, which was used in the U.S. Mark 14 Torpedo; the plans for the exploder were locked up in some obscure place where nobody could look at them, and since few people knew how the detonator of the torpedo actually worked, it took longer than it otherwise would have to discover why the torpedoes were failing to explode when used against Japanese ships. Worse, any submariner who opened the thing up and actually ''fixed'' the issues out of frustration would be cited for "improper maintenance" since they had clearly done something against the book, which they had never been allowed to read in the first place. And just to add insult to injury, these attempts at fixing the torpedo made it difficult for engineers to tell which torpedos were failing because of the primary issues, and which were failing because of other, different issues masked by the first issue.
34* Most of the weapons adopted by the UsefulNotes/RussiansWithRustingRockets in UsefulNotes/TheNewTens lean towards this trope. Nearly all of them extremely ambitious, which is helped by the hyped marketing (by various groups including Russian state media). But even if they do live up to the hype, Russia cannot afford to procure many of them quickly due to its economic state, and most of what they do have currently are prototype models hastily refurbished for combat as opposed to serial production models. While Russia could fund mass production with sales of the T-14 and SU-57, most nations opted instead to either buy non-Russian equipment or stick with their old Soviet-era wares.[[note]] Largely because of CAATSA sanctions, where the US government will sanction anyone who purchases weaponry and/or oil from countries it deems adversaries such as North Korea, Iran and Russia. Even before this law, the US government [[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34726690 can (and has) fined even nominal allies for working with countries they deem adversarial to the US]]. As a result, many countries would rather not risk major economic damage by buying Russian military equipment. [[/note]] Even if Russia could afford to build more [=Su-57s=] and [=T-14s=], they can’t domestically produce (and also can’t import, especially since additional sanctions in 2022) important manufacturing components like microchips for sensors and weapons guidance. This is why the Russian military relies more on their larger stock of (upgraded or otherwise) Soviet-era weaponry in the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War. [[note]] By contrast, their [[UsefulNotes/ChineseWithChopperSupport Chinese rivals]] have little trouble in developing and mass-producing new weapons thanks to China's larger and more stable economy.[[/note]] The existing vehicles are TooAwesomeToUse because there aren't enough of them to make a meaningful strategic difference, meaning it isn't worth the potential risk of them being destroyed (or worse, captured and analyzed) by Russia's adversaries.
35** The [=Su-57=] allegedly has maneuverability and stealth comparable to the F-22, but the F-22 is the absolute best in the stealth category ''and'' has maneuverability similar to Russian fourth-gen aircraft. The [=Su-57=] by comparison has design that only makes it LO [[note]] ''Not'' stealthy to the extent of the F-22 and F-35, which are considered VLO [[/note]], and it has to use Su-35 engines as a stopgap as it's Iz 30 engines are not ready yet. Furthermore, Russia only has a handful of [=Su-57s=] compared to the 187 [=F-22=] that the USAF has in service, and their economic state means they are unlikely to be able to procure more on short notice. The only current tangible advantage the [=Su-57=] is being an purchasable option for states that were/are adversarial to the US (since it, unlike the F-22, is being offered for export in the future, and unlike the [=F-35=] doesn't require the buyer to be on good graces with the US). Even so, most of the nations interested in it haven't confirmed export orders yet, rendering this advantage questionable (for the current time being).
36** The T-14 seems like an incredible leap forward in tank survivability, especially compared to legacy Soviet/Russian tanks such as the T-72. The turret is completely remote-controlled--allowing the remaining crew of three to be encased in a separate armored capsule inside the hull--and the tank incorporates the ''Afghanit'' hard-kill active protection system to intercept incoming projectiles. However, it is still a very risky leap as nobody else has deployed tanks with unmanned turrets, and once again it is questionable whether Russia can truly afford such an expensive vehicle. The automotive performance of [=T-14s=] on parade is also not encouraging: [[https://youtu.be/DeJzuo2TsfM the handbrake seems to be the best-made part]].
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39[[folder:Watercraft]]
40* The real-life USS ''Enterprise'' -- specifically the nuclear carrier (CVN-65), not her legendary, but conventionally-powered, UsefulNotes/WorldWarII namesake (CV-6) -- which is powered by ''eight'' nuclear reactors. Why eight? Conventional large aircraft carriers had eight boilers, so logically the "Big E" should have eight ''nuclear'' boilers, right? Also, the size of the boilers matched up nicely with the reactors that the Navy had already been building for submarines, meaning it was much simpler to adapt than to create a massive new reactor (which they later did). Fortunately, the USN realized how silly the eight nuclear reactors were after drastic cost overruns nixed the five sister ships she was supposed to have (and resulted in the next two carriers being conventionally-powered), to the point that engineers realized even a ship that big only needed two nuclear reactors (though ''Nimitz''-class reactors are much larger and more powerful).
41** The Big E was also [[LightningBruiser the fastest carrier in the fleet]]. Which turned out to not be that useful, because few escort ships (even among the handful of nuclear-powered cruisers that the Navy used to have) were fast enough to keep up.
42** USS Enterprise also had the nickname ''Mobile Chernobyl'' for obvious reasons. She is getting old, and maintaining eight aging nuclear reactors is tedious. Even after her retirement, the ''Enterprise'' couldn't even be used as a museum ship like other carriers, due to the danger posed by those aging reactors. The ship literally has to be cut into pieces in order to safely decommission them. Sadly, there just won't be enough left of her to make a museum out of, aside from maybe saving the distinctive cube-shaped island and placing it on shore and recycling some of its steel to build a ''Gerald R. Ford''-class ''Enterprise''.
43* First-rate ships of the line during the era of WoodenShipsAndIronMen were 100-120 gun monsters with 800-strong crews and which weighed in excess of two thousand tons. Whilst they were terrifyingly effective in their intended role (to stand in the line of battle and engage enemy fleets in pitched sea-battles), they were effectively useless for anything else, and could not be sent out alone, as a well-commanded frigate could easily outmaneuver them and pass up battle whenever they wished. They were also fiendishly expensive to operate. When not at war, the Royal Navy generally only maintained less than ten ships of this class, usually as flagships for the various fleets. The rest were kept "in ordinary" -- tied up at port with skeleton maintenance crews, and which would then be re-commissioned as the strategic situation demanded.
44** For comparison, the standard Ship-of-the-Line was a "3rd Rate" with 74 guns. They were 20-25% faster, half the cost, about two-thirds the manpower requirement, and much more seaworthy. After everyone figured this out (around 1700), the 1st and 2nd rates quit being built except as one-off trophy ships. Being able to field two 3rd rates vs one 1st rate was actually more combat effective, unless your navy was a) built up to the point that you already had frigates and 3rd rates coming out your ears, and b) planning on engaging in massive battles where maneuverability was worth less than raw slugging power.
45* Witness the Swedish ship ''Vasa'' launched in 1628. Armed with 64 cannons (out of 72 planned, the cannons weren't ready in time and were going to be installed later) on two decks, the ''Vasa'' was the most powerful warship in the world and in terms of naval firepower, would not be equaled for decades. She was also beautiful, covered in hundreds of brightly colored decorative carvings meant to glorify the king and the country. She was also top heavy, giving her little ability to naturally right herself (this is important in all but the calmest seas). The lower gun deck was far too close to the waterline. In fact, she was so ill-designed that she managed to sink on her maiden voyage, in full view of the citizens of Stockholm who had all turned out to watch.
46** Her design doubles with DisasterDominoes, ExecutiveMeddling, UnitConfusion and HonorBeforeReason. After the catastrophe, a thorough investigation was held, and her five half-sisters were built with broader beam, more ballast, less armament and standardized Swedish (Stockholm) measurements. One of her half-sisters, ''Äpplet'' ("The Globus Cruciger"), which had been sunk as a blockship in 1658, was discovered in 2022.
47* The Spanish ship Nuestra Señora de la Santísima Trinidad (''Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity''), a ship larger than the already massive first-rate ship of the line. For comparison, here is [[http://www.hnsa.org/ships/img/victory1.jpg HMS Victory.]] The Santísima Trinidad carried 140 guns, compared to HMS ''Victory's'' 104. It was so huge that it crawled at a snail's pace (and her original nickname of ''el Poderoso'' (The Powerful) quickly became ''el Ponderoso'' (The Ponderous) as a result). So many men were required to man it that its supplies ran out very quickly unless it was near a friendly port. The Santísima Trinidad only saw battle twice: Cape St Vincent, where it ended up surrendering without doing any damage, but the Spanish ships ''Infante Don Pelayo'' and ''Príncipe de Asturias'' managed to reach and secure her before the British, and [[CurbStompBattle Trafalgar]], where it was battered into surrender by the more maneuverable HMS ''Neptune'' and then later scuttled by the British in a storm due to its high center of gravity. It was Awesome, But Impractical incarnate.
48** The US Navy had the USS ''Pennsylvania'', a four decker of 140 guns and physically larger than the ''Santisma Trinidad''. It was authorized in 1816, laid down in 1821, and... launched and commissioned in 1837, as the US Congress cut funding for the Navy to almost nothing in the time following the War of 1812. The HMS ''Victory'', for comparison, took only six years to complete (then spent twelve years in ordinary until finally commissioned during the Revolutionary War), while the HMS ''St Lawrence'', of 112 guns and the only first rate in the Great Lakes, was laid down in April 1814 and completed and commissioned in ''September 1814''.[[note]]Despite the extravagance involved in building a first rate ship of the line to fight on a '''lake''', and the fact that ''St Lawrence'' never saw combat, she was arguably not an example of this trope. The reason she never saw combat was that no US Navy ships dared to set sail on the Great Lakes for the remainder of the War of 1812, lest they have to face such a powerful ship.[[/note]] The ''Pennsylvania's'' only voyage was in 1837-8, from Delaware Bay to Chesapeake Bay, and was finally burned in 1861 to prevent her capture by the Confederates.
49* The ''Yamato''-class super battleships of the WWII Imperial Japanese Navy. Wielding the largest guns ever placed on a warship, an incredible amount of armor, and (eventually) hundreds of anti-aircraft guns, they were meant to be the superweapons that would issue the killing blow against a belligerent (likely United States) naval force -- after the IJN's carrier, cruiser, destroyer, and submarine forces had softened it up with air and torpedo attacks in a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kantai_Kessen single, decisive battle]]. Unfortunately for the IJN:
50** The rapid advance of aircraft and aircraft carrier technology during ''Yamato'''s construction eventually made it clear to the IJN that they could not risk the ''Yamato''-class ships until US Navy airpower had been wiped out. But by the time ''Musashi'' had launched in August 1942, the USN had annihilated the core of the IJN's carrier fleet at Midway and was only a few months away from launching the first of 24 ''Essex''-class fleet carriers. By the end of the first year of the Pacific war, it was obvious that the essential prerequisite for fielding the super battleships -- that being the total destruction of the US carrier fleet -- was never going to be met.
51** Even if the "decisive battle" the IJN hoped for actually occurred, the super battleships weren't necessarily the best tools for the task. Despite their massive size and armament, the super battleships just didn't have the level of technology and survivability one would expect for a ship that required such a tremendous amount of resources to build and operate. There is evidence that the construction of these ships actually damaged the Japanese economy; the curtain woven to conceal ''Yamato''[='=]s construction from prying eyes required so much rope it crippled the Japanese fishing industry.
52*** Although the super battleships were reasonably speedy for their incredible size, they were still slower than most carriers, and consumed massive amounts of fuel.[[note]]Given that they were designed specifically with the vast Pacific Ocean in mind, the ''Yamato''s' cruising range of 7,200nm/13,300km was shockingly short, less than half that of contemporary American battleships, and slightly less than even ''pre-Treaty'' American battleships.[[/note]] As a result, in the few instances they risked leaving port, they tended to operate as a separate "Main Force" -- so distant from their carrier strike force that they may as well not have left port to begin with. One key instance of the speed problem was during the Battle of Guadalcanal where the Japanese forces on the island could have benefited from extra fire support from the battleships. Unfortunately for them, the only battleships in the Japanese Navy that could operate economically were four old ''pre-World War I'' battlecruisers; all the other battleships, including the ''Yamato'' and the ''Musashi'', either burned up too much fuel or were too slow to effectively support their ground operations. And before long, American battleships gave a reminder of what happens when battlecruisers fight battleships; had ''Yamato'' and ''Musashi'' been built as smaller but faster and more fuel-efficient ships, the outcome could have been very different. The premature withdrawal at the Battle off Samar was influenced, among other things, by concern that the Yamato was burning too much fuel in the SternChase of Taffy 3.
53*** Both sides were reluctant to commit battleships to Guadalcanal, because the constricted waters in the Solomons meant cruisers and destroyers hiding amidst the islands could easily get within torpedo range -- as proved to be the case in the first night of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. Battleships (''Hiei'' and ''Kirishima'' on the Japanese side, ''South Dakota'' and ''Washington'' on the American side) only came into play when the fierce fighting meant that both sides just straight up ''ran out of aircraft carriers''.
54*** The steel armor available to Japan wasn't of the same quality as that in the United States, so despite its incredible thickness it was still vulnerable to the USN's "super-heavy" model of 16-inch armor-piercing shells. Its own 18-inch armor-piercing shells, likewise, were only about as effective as the USN's 16-inch shells, at least at long range. Thus, its guns and armor were comparable to the USN's ''Iowa''-class, even though the ''Iowa''s were about 2/3 the displacement of the ''Yamato''s and fast enough to operate alongside carriers.
55*** Although the IJN excelled at naval gunnery at the start of the war, the accuracy of their manpower-intensive fire control systems deteriorated rapidly under actual combat conditions and had problems tracking maneuvering targets or compensating for evasive action. Since most early surface engagements were short, sharp battles that took place within short range at night, these shortcomings were neither apparent nor material for most of the war. The IJN did not develop or install new fire directors and radar as rapidly as the USN, and never developed anything close to the Mk I fire control computer that US battleships carried. So despite the massive range of the 18-inch shells, they could not match the accuracy of US guns even at the beginning of the war, let alone the radar-guided gunnery many USN ships were fielding by 1944. ''Yamato''[='=]s poor gunnery at Samar was as much due to crew exhaustion from the repeated air and submarine attacks she'd experienced in the previous 48 hours as it was to the poor visibility which forced her to constantly switch targets, making it hard to "find the range".
56*** Most problems with the IJN gunnery was because [[KlingonScientistsGetNoRespect their brass completely overlooked the radar]] as something [[ItWillNeverCatchOn that will never catch on]], despite Japanese researchers making several important contributions to the radar development, such as the Yagi-Uda antenna. The first time the naval brass has ever seriously considered the military use of radar was ''after'' they captured some British units at Singapore in 1942, two years ''[[SoLastSeason after]] Yamato'' was commissioned, and they didn't even figure that the "Yagi antenna" mentioned in the documentations referred to a Japanese person at first. They did try to compensate, and by the 1944 ''Yamato'' actually carried ''three'' radars... none of which was tied into its fire control system. All the while American ships not only started mounting radars much earlier, but had actually built their fire control systems around them. Off Samar, most American ships employed radar-guided gunnery, their cannons [[DecadeDissonance being laid automatically by the sophisticated fire-control computers]], while ''Yamato'' still used traditional visual range finding with the (severely tired and overworked at this point) humans as main decision makers and means of communications.
57*** Damage control doctrine of the IJN was lacking, which meant any damage the ships absorbed could not be repaired as rapidly, and certain types of damage had the potential to cause a [[DisasterDominoes cascade of failures]]. By using resources that could have built several capital ships to instead build one very large capital ship, the IJN compounded this issue.
58** And finally, not to put too fine a point on it, the value of the super battleships is evident in their abysmal performance during the war. The ''Yamato'' engaged US surface ships in only one engagement, the Battle off Samar, where (despite ''weighing more than the entire force she opposed'') she only contributed to the sinking of three small ships, two destroyers and one escort carrier (''Gambier Bay'')- though to be fair, she fared better than the other ships, who lacked radar and were easily foiled by smokescreens and rain squalls. The ''Musashi'', meanwhile, was sunk by aircraft[[note]]The same fate suffered by her sister ship ''Yamato'', in an attempt to draw fire away from the rest of the fleet[[/note]] in the Sibuyan Sea prior to the Battle off Samar (though taking an impressive [[MoreDakka 17 bombs and 19 torpedoes to put down]]), and never fired a single shot at an enemy surface vessel in the entire course of her career. In the end, neither ship ever came into gun range of an enemy capital ship. And those hundreds of AA guns were underpowered and obsolete even before they were installed, serving mainly to increase the number of men who went down with each ship.
59*** The Sanshikidan "Type 3" AA shells for Yamato's main guns deserve a special notice here. Weighing almost 3000 pounds, they are definitely the largest unpropelled AA munitions ever fired, and, combined with the powder charge, come only a bit shy to the largest of the modern [=SAMs=]. Unfortunately, the terrible quality of their manufacturing made them almost unusable: poorly machined leading bands damaged barrel riflings, and their detonator safeties were imperfect. Musashi may have lost a main gun in the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea because a Sanshikidan shell detonated in the barrel. Also, incendiary units in their payload were designed to the task of scaring the pilots off and disrupting their attack runs by limiting visibility, their damage potential was subpar at best, but at the distances where those shells exploded, pilots still had more than enough time to re-adjust for the attack. So these giant fireworks were not up to their task.
60** One of the biggest flaws (and the reason for the above) is that the ships were TooAwesomeToUse[[note]]In fact, ''Yamato'' and ''Musashi'' spent most of their careers either docked in naval bases or moving between them[[/note]] and the Allies knew it. This prevented the ships from being used as a threat to shipping (not helped by the fact that the different nature of the Pacific meant there was less merchant shipping for them to target in the first place) and thus the Allies didn't really put any effort into sinking them until they were forced to sortie in desperation. They ended up costing Japan a ''lot'' more money than it took for America to sink them. Contrast the careers of the German battleships ''Scharnhorst'', ''Gneisenau'', and ''Tirpitz''. These were designed for merchant raiding and even when they weren't sailing, the threats they posed required a lot of active planning from the Allies, like using capital ships as escorts. While ''Tirpitz'' had an even less successful career than ''Yamato'' on paper, she cost the Allies more than ''fifteen times'' her total build and maintenance cost to finally sink, and more if you consider the cost of escorting convoys against her. The ''Yamato''s, on the other hand, were sunk without doing much of anything - at best, ''Yamato'' temporarily disabled the USS ''White Plains'' with a near-miss, and is theorized to have contributed to sinking the USS ''Gambier Bay'' - or any real effort expended hunting them. To put it in perspective, SS ''Lawton B. Evans'' and SS ''Stephen Hopkins'', both armed merchant ships, had more successful combat careers than ''Musashi'' did.[[note]]For those curious, the former provided some rather effective shore bombardment and shot down several planes in support of amphibious operations. The latter scored a MutualKill against a German commerce raider.[[/note]]
61** Other examples of the Awesome Yet Impractical nature of the ''Yamato'' and ''Musashi'': their guns were so powerful that the ship's boats could not be left out on deck while the guns were fired. Special hangars had to be incorporated to store all the boats, which was one more added cost and also meant they carried fewer boats than would be expected for such mammoth ships. And fewer boats to load the crew into is a problem if the ship, you know, sinks. Likewise, the ship's crew could not be outside on deck either when the guns fired, because the concussive force would literally knock them unconscious. And [[TheNudifier potentially rip their clothes off their bodies]]. This proved even more problematic when it became clear that even the largest, best-armored battleship is extremely vulnerable to air attack and thus the IJN had to find a way to put lots of anti-aircraft guns on deck without them being damaged by the main guns' blast.
62** Even if they hadn't been rendered obsolete by airpower, ''Yamato'' and ''Mushashi'' defined the ragged outer edge of practicality for battleships. Manufacturing their armor pushed the limits of the Japanese steel industry. The maximum range of their guns exceeded the practical distance of naval gunfire, as the time of flight was so long that a target at extreme range could just dodge the shells by changing course when they spotted the gun flashes. The sheer size of their guns required the Japanese to invent an entirely new technology in materials handling equipment just to move the projectiles around the magazines. The extreme weight of their turrets exceeded the metallurgy available for their supporting bearings. And finally their price tags were so extreme the cost to construct them actually damaged the national economy. Finally their actual performance in operation makes a pretty convincing demonstration that the even bigger battleships planned by the Japanese and the Germans simply wouldn't have worked.
63* After their defeat at Midway, the Japanese were desperate to put more carriers to sea to compensate for their tremendous losses. One of these measures was to change their two ''Ise''-class Battleships into hybrid [[TheBattlestar battleship-carriers]]. It turned out to be a colossal failure as they didn't have any available planes and pilots to equip the two ships after their conversion process was completed. To top off how foolish this decision was, even if they did have the pilots on hand, the only planes they would've been able to launch ''and recover'' were ''floatplanes'' (slower and bulkier than a normal plane). Normal carrier-based aircraft could be ''launched'' from the converted ''Ise''-class battleships, but couldn't ''land'' on them, meaning their only use would've been for [[SuicideAttack Kamikaze attacks]] or close to friendly land bases where they could land, which would have defeated the purpose of loading on and launching from the ''Ise''s anyway. Ultimately the ''Ise'' and ''Hyuga'' had their catapults removed and the flight decks were used as a platform for anti-aircraft guns.
64** Not to mention taking out two perfectly good battleships that could have done some good in battle for extended periods of time. While something needed to be done with ''Hyuga'' (one of her rear turrets had exploded and no replacement was available), it would've surely been more practical to just remove the wrecked turret, put a steel plate over the hole and send her back into action.
65** Note also how the original plan was to convert ''all'' of their battleships except ''Yamato'' and ''Musashi'' into full-fledged carriers. Lack of both resources and time forced the IJN to drop this decision, with the two ''Fuso''-class battleships having been scheduled to be converted as the ''Ise''s, had they been successful.
66* Battleships in general, at least eventually. There's still debate over exactly when the battleship became obsolete (The rise of air power? Modern anti-ship missiles?), but it did. And when those weren't a large concern for the US Navy (e.g., off the coast of Lebanon or the [[UsefulNotes/TheGulfWar first Gulf War]], where the 16-inch gunnery of ''Iowa''-class battleships proved very useful), they were still impractical for being extremely expensive to operate and manpower-intensive. However, on account of their awesomeness, all four completed ''Iowas'' are currently preserved as museum ships: ''Iowa'' at UsefulNotes/LosAngeles; ''New Jersey'' at Camden, UsefulNotes/NewJersey (right across the Delaware River from UsefulNotes/{{Philadelphia}}, where she was built); ''Missouri'' in Pearl Harbor, UsefulNotes/{{Hawaii}}; and ''Wisconsin'' in Norfolk, Virginia.
67** Additionally, the aging of the battleship fleet and lack of replacement meant that by the end of the 2000s, they shared literally no systems with new ships coming off the ways - steam turbines have been replaced fleetwide with diesels (most support ships), gas turbines (combat ships and some support ships) and nuclear power (aircraft carriers), the modern Tomahawk missiles are built for a different carrying system (the battleships used an armored box launcher that was phased out in the mid-90s, modern ships use a vertical launching system), their 5"/38 secondary guns used completely different shells than new destroyers' 5"/54 and 5"/62 guns; the 16" guns were completely unique. Additionally, room (and weight) would have to be found for the networking equipment required to work with other ships in the modern Navy. These old ships were struck from the Navy List in 2009, so they will likely never put to sea again.
68** The military function of battleships (killing enemy ships of all lesser capabilities without them being able to do anything about it) was taken over by the aircraft carrier pretty much as soon as it became feasible to build proper fleet carriers, presumably right at the close of WWI. It did, however, take rather a lot to convince some of the Admirals of this. A carrier can't engage a battleship under all conditions - e.g. bad weather, trapped in restricted waterways - but so long as a carrier is free to maneuver and keeping situational awareness, it can keep itself well out of range of an enemy battleship while hitting it with as many aircraft sorties as required to sink it.
69** An argument can equally be made that the battleship became obsolescent (if not necessarily ''useless''), the moment the submarine became a viable weapons platform. The essential point remains the same - the extreme construction and operational costs of a battleship can only be justified if it is essentially invulnerable to lesser ships. The moment that a vessel or collection of vessels of significantly inferior tonnage/cost can stand a reasonable chance of crippling or destroying a battleship, then the battleship becomes too great a concentration of military resources to justify. The same can be said of aircraft carrier, too - more aircraft carriers were sunk by submarines than by any other means in WWII. Carriers, however, have become more efficient at sub-hunting with the development of effective hunter-killer aircraft - something battleships were and remain incapable of doing.
70*** ANY capital ships, not just battleships, started to become obsolete as soon as the torpedo was invented. Being a powerful warhead that could damage or destroy a capital ship for a fraction of the cost made them ideal and a precursor to modern missiles and rockets. The main problem was getting a torpedo launcher within range. Battleships gained longer distance guns, recon planes, and even radar to fight long distance where torpedoes couldn't reach them. Pre-dreadnoughts began using anti-torpedo nets and many small guns to shoot any torpedo ships, while later battleships have other kinds of anti-torpedo defense but that wasn't enough. Capital ships eventually needed (and need today!) fleets to protect them from torpedoes, changing their roles to mobile artillery. When aircraft were invented that made them very effective torpedo platforms as even the longest range battleship could have attacked by torpedoes launched by squadrons of aircraft from carriers. In World War 2 most of the Italian battleships were neutralized just by a number of torpedo planes attacking in them in harbor regardless of any defenses.
71*** For that matter, anti-ship missiles took the battleship from obsolescent to full-on obsolete. Now ''any'' ship could provide torpedo-grade anti-ship firepower at a range battleship guns couldn't respond to. Vessels of inferior tonnage had moved from having a reasonable chance of crippling/destroying a battleship to a near certainty, and it also provided far better means for aircraft to destroy them than torpedoes and bombs. It's not a coincidence that the last battleships began to disappear right around when viable anti-ship missiles began to proliferate. At the same time, anti-ship missiles pose a huge threat to any ship, especially aircraft carriers, which don't even have the armor plating of battleships to give them a little more survivability. It's for this reason that [[UsefulNotes/RedsWithRockets Soviet]] tactics for facing US carrier battle groups was to attack with a combination of submarines and [[MacrossMissileMassacre a crapload of surface and air-launched missiles]], something which the Chinese were happy to adopt and improve on by utilizing their own anti-ship missiles, including ballistic anti-ship missiles.
72** One could argue with hindsight that the very concept of the battleship was inherently flawed, as it depended upon the superior range of their big guns to keep smaller ships outside of the range of their own guns and torpedoes. Unfortunately, that presumed battleships would only be employed in open water under under ideal visibility conditions, something that often didn't happen in the real world. Take for example the Battle off Samar, where poor visibility seriously hampered Japanese battleship gunnery, negating much of their range advantage, or the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, where the battleship ''Hiei'' was smothered by a saturation bombardment from the fast-firing dual purpose guns of several US destroyers and cruisers that had managed to sneak up to point blank range in the dark in restricted waters where she couldn't maneuver. Few of the hundreds of smaller projectiles (from 8 inch down to 20mm but especially lots and lots of 5 and 6 inch) actually penetrated her armor but they did set virtually her entire superstructure on fire, rendering her all but untenable for her crew.
73** What made the battleship become obsolete isn't so much their increased vulnerability but rather their decreased combat effectiveness compared to other ships. Contrary to popular belief, military technology doesn't become obsolete when it experiences new counters[[note]]As deploying that countered equipment forces the enemy to invest time, resources, and space - both in terms of storage space and space on the ship for whatever system fires the counter - to continue to manufacture, carry, and deploy the counter.[[/note]], but rather when something else can perform the same task but better. For battleships, they were viable from the 1870s to 1940s because their combination of firepower and armor was necessary for when a sizable navy needed to stand their ground (ocean?) and fight. However, by the end of [=WW2=], carriers could both attack and defend themselves at much longer ranges, cruisers could be in more places at once, and destroyers were far cheaper and could do disproportionate damage with a lucky torpedo strike, plus do any odd jobs the fleet needed. Some battleships, like the ''Iowa''s, stuck around because they had other uses (in their case, the ''Iowa''s were fast enough to operate in a single force with the carriers and made great escorts, and their 16-inch guns were excellent for shore bombardment and cheaper than missiles for that purpose), but the main purpose of the battleship ended as soon as other ships, especially the carriers, really got going. One of the major silver linings in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor was that despite all the tonnage sunk in the attack, the Japanese had focused on destroying American Battleships, and none of her Pacific-based carriers were in the harbor at the time; two were at sea (''Enterprise'' was returning from Wake Island, and ''Lexington'' was delivering planes to Midway) and the ''Saratoga'' was in San Diego.
74** Possibly the most impractical of battleships were the U.S.'s ''Montana'' class, which were designed to be the MightyGlacier to the ''Iowa'' class's FragileSpeedster. They were never built for a multitude of reasons, most of which are discussed above, but also because they were too big to fit through the Panama Canal, meaning that no matter how well they did as battleships, they were always going to be impractical for a navy that regularly needed to move ships from the Atlantic to the Pacific and vice-versa. They were built in the hope of some of the canal's locks being widened, but when that plan fell through, so did the ''Montana''s.
75* On the topic of battleships, many battleships of the Pre-Dreadnought era and the early years of the Dreadnought era had some of their guns in an off-set arrangement (for example, the ''en echelon'' arrangement used by the USS ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Texas_(1892) Texas]]'' and USS ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(ACR-1) Maine]]'' in the 1890s, or the staggered arrangement of the HMS ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Neptune_(1909) Neptune]]'' in the early 1900s). In theory, this allowed for maximum amount of firepower fore and aft, in addition to being able to fire the entire main battery in a broadside. In practice, the off-set guns couldn't be fired fore or aft without risking damage to the ship's structure due to the off-center force of the recoil, and if fired in broadside, the guns on the far side could damage the deck or superstructure of the ship due to the heat and force of the cannons firing. Which is exactly what happened to the USS ''Texas'' at [[UsefulNotes/SpanishAmericanWar the Battle of Santiago de Cuba.]]
76** Similarly, the earlier examples of super-firing main batteries (where one turret is placed to fire over the top of another turret, also seen on the HMS ''Neptune'' mentioned above) avoided the structural problems with off-set turrets, but the heat and blast (not to mention the hot gasses and such) from the upper guns firing could still damage the lower turret in some circumstances (such as the HMS ''Neptune's'' aft turrets, if the upper turret was aligned within 30 degrees of the stern of the ship.)
77** "Wing turrets" of any description proved impractical in service, as they essentially doubled the weight without doubling the firepower they provided. The extra turret was useless without separate fire control, ships almost never fired to both sides simultaneously, and being offset from the roll center along a different axis than the centerline turrets they were inherently less accurate, something easily demonstrated with simple geometry. Finally, their magazines were very difficult to armor and virtually impossible to provide with torpedo protection. The Captain of USS ''Atlanta'' reported that her wing turrets were not worth their weight and they were deleted from following classes. ''Yamato'' and ''Musashi'' had their secondary battery wing turrets removed early in their careers for similar reasons.
78** Perhaps the most impractical of all, though, was the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USS_Georgia_turret.tiff superposed turret]]. That is, one turret with another turret mounted literally on top of it. In theory, this allowed more guns to be mounted while taking up less space. In practice, the top turret served to damage the bottom turret whenever it was fired, and to weaken the bottom turret's armor simply by existing. It also complicated the ammunition supply, as a mechanism had to be included for carrying two sizes of shells (for the main guns on bottom and secondary guns on top) through the same turret.
79** The Russian Navy attempted to avoid this problem on Gangut and Imperatritsa Mariya classes simply by setting all their main gun turrets on the centerline of the ship on deck level and rejecting superfiring turrets. This arrangement had several advantages: it reduced the stress on the ends of the ship, since the turrets were not concentrated at the end of the ship; it increased stability by leaving out elevated turrets and their barbettes; it improved the survivability of the ship because the magazines were separated from each other; and it gave the ship a lower silhouette. Disadvantages were that the magazines had to be put in the middle of all the machinery--which required steam pipes to be run through or around them--and that there was a lack of blast-free deck space. Moreover, it also meant that the [[DidntThinkThisThrough arc of fire of the two middle turrets was extremely restricted]], and that any secondary armament [[DidntThinkthisThrough had to be installed on hull casemates below the main deck]]. Indeed they they were ''still'' [[DidntThinkThisThrough susceptible to main gun blast damage and were prone to getting hit by waves while sailing in rough weather]]. Combined with inverted "ram" bows, these ships were extremely wet and fared miserably in weather.
80** The Royal Navy's ''Nelson''-class battleships, the first battleships built under the restrictions of the Washington Naval Treaty, attempted to maximize armour and firepower within the tonnage limit via an unconventional armament layout in which all three of the main gun turrets were grouped together forward of the superstructure. This resulted in a shorter ship relative to its weight and armament, and thus a smaller area that needed to be armoured. The first two turrets were superfiring, as had become universal by this point, but the third had to be placed ''below'' and behind them because making it superfiring as well would've made the ship so top-heavy as to be at risk of capsizing. As a result, the third turret was of very little use due to its limited arcs of fire. It was also discovered that the third turret was placed so close to the superstructure that the blast from firing its guns would shatter the windows on the bridge. The windows were replaced with thicker tempered glass...which still shattered when the guns were fired at a high angle.
81* The dreadnaught battleship HMS ''Agincourt'' was a ship that the Royal Navy didn't particularly want, but seized it to keep it away from another country, who bought it from a third. At the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_American_dreadnought_race Chile, Argentina, and Brazil]] got into a naval arms race, each country buying battleships from foreign yards, as they couldn't build their own. Brazil, with plenty of cash from coffee and rubber plantations, ordered a ship from Armstrong Whitworth of [[UsefulNotes/NortheastEngland Newcastle]], with [[MoreDakka fourteen 12" guns]] in seven turrets (the most ever fitted to a battleship), partially in the spirit of this oneupmanship and to appear powerful to the Brazilian public. However, soon after this, the Brazilian economy took a sharp downward turn due to competition from rubber plantations in the Far East (planted by British companies, ironically enough) and Brazil sold the incomplete ship to the Ottoman Empire. The ship was actually completed and ready for delivery to her Turkish crew when UsefulNotes/WorldWarOne broke out, and the UK government seized the ship. This was actually a provision of the contract, but only if the UK was actually at war. First Lord of the Admiralty UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill didn't want to take any chances and ordered the Turks held off by gunfire, if necessary, which turned Turkish public opinion against the British and contributed to them joining the Central Powers. Now named after a famous British victory over the French[[note]]and nicknamed "Gin Palace" after the luxurious fittings the Turks requested and her name being [[{{Pun}} A Gin Court]][[/note]], she was put into the Grand Fleet, where her shortcomings became apparent. Her firepower was so impressive that a full broadside completely hid the ship in flames and smoke, but to protect all those turrets and their magazines required the armoured belt to be unusually long, and thus it was unusually thin to keep the weight down. Barbette and deck armour was also thin compared to other dreadnaughts, making her something of a GlassCannon. And for all that, she participated in only one major battle, at Jutland, where poor visibility meant she fired 144 12" shells and 111 6" shells, but never hit anything.
82* Plunging fire from battleship guns was a concept that seemed promising in the early 20th century. The main battery guns of battleships were high-velocity weapons (for the sake of range, armor penetration, and making it easier to calculate the firing solution), and tended to send shells on a relatively horizontal trajectory. Because of this, warships had their thickest armor oriented to stop hits to the side. They also had deck armor, but it couldn’t be as thick because of the larger surface area it would need to cover, and it didn’t need to be anyway because even a shell that arced enough to hit the deck would still probably do so at an angle close enough to parallel to glance off even this thinner armor. However, if you could lob shells in a high enough arc to hit the deck at a more perpendicular angle, it could theoretically go through the deck easily and cause massive damage. Some big guns were made with the capability to shoot in this way, and special super-heavy shells were created for the purpose. Unfortunately it turned out to be impractical, since firing this way made it nearly impossible to score accurate hits. In order to make high velocity guns drop shells at a steep enough ballistic arc, it was necessary to fire from an extremely long distance away. Even in general, super long range battleship gunnery was impractical because it would magnify the inherent spread of the gun, and the longer the shell spent traveling through the air the more difficult it was to lead the target. Sure, you might score a hit ''eventually'' through trial-and-error plus sheer luck, but that would give your enemy more time to try and hit you first. In practice, captains tended to try to get in closer for a better chance of hitting, which was obviously not an option for plunging fire. Add to this the fact that deliberately arcing higher further increased the travel time of the shell, and the result was for hitting a moving target at such range to be practically hopeless.
83* Battlecruisers were this when they first came out. They were designed to go hunt down and mop up enemy cruisers that might be raiding or harassing overseas bases, and as such they had high speed (so cruisers couldn't escape them) and battleship-tier firepower (to quickly deal with cruiser-grade armor), but their armor was only cruiser-grade. This was fine in their original role because they'd only face cruiser guns, but their speed and firepower made it tempting to stick them in actual battle formations- where they tended to fold like paper airplanes the instant an actual battleship landed a hit. [[LightningBruiser Fast battleships]] neatly solved the problems with both standard battleships and battlecruisers, but also came with a hefty price tag.
84** The Royal Navy took the battlecruiser concept to an extreme with the ''Courageous'' class of "large light cruisers", built early in the First World War. They had two twin 15-inch gun turrets, one each forward and aft, a few secondary guns, and very little armor. They were so lightly built that firing the main guns caused damage throughout the ship. They had little success in the war, and in the 1920s all three were converted into aircraft carriers. In that role they were useful, but Admiralty blunders resulted in the loss of ''Courageous'' and ''Glorious'' to German attackers early in the Second World War.
85* The American ''Alaska''-class "large cruisers". The idea was essentially that battlecruisers had gone wrong because they tried to match the caliber of guns battleships were carrying, which was overkill for their stated role of killing less armored ships. Thus a large cruiser fitted guns around the caliber of WWI battleships but with the catch that they could fire them more quickly due to the size reductions. The downside is these special rapid-fire turrets made them cost around the same as battleships to build despite the cost savings the smaller hull allowed. Despite costing the same as a battleship, they only really had the performance capabilities of a cruiser, due to their thinner armor and lesser number of AA guns. They were built specifically to hunt cruisers and kinda sucked at anything else. Only two of the ships were ever fully completed, arriving only in the last years of the war when fuel shortages severely limited the use of enemy heavy cruisers and most of them had already fallen prey to air attacks and submarines. Even if the ''Alaska'' class cruisers had arrived earlier, it's speculated that their higher cost would have made the USN treat them as Too Awesome To Use just like the battleships.
86* The Soviet Union's Kirov class cruisers, built in the late 1930s. The USSR, unburdened by naval restrictions that clearly defined heavy and light cruisers, decided to build cruisers with an intermediate caliber gun 180mm, which wasn't a bad idea. Unfortunately they also did not want to spend a lot of money, and made the cruisers as light as possible. This is idiotically accomplished by making the turrets incredibly tiny (thus meaning there didn't have to be as much ship supporting them) but this also make the Kirovs absolutely unsuitable for actual ship-to-ship combat. The guns were right next to each other with no spacing at all, meaning they would blow each other's shells off course. Nearly as bad, the tight spaces inside the turret made loading an extremely time consuming process (negating on the biggest theoretical advantages of the 180mm gun), with the Kirovs loading slower than many contemporary ''battleships.''
87* Super destroyer concepts generally fell into this category. Since navies began experimenting with super battleships, super cruisers, and eventually super carriers, why not make a super destroyer too? Take an incredibly powerful yet compact engine, build a super streamlined hull around that, slap as many weapons as you can on the result, and finally finish it out with all the high tech bells and whistles you can fit. The resulting ship will be able to beat the crap out of any other destroyer in the world but will probably cost five to ten times as much. Unlike a super battleship however, it still only takes one well-placed shell to send the whole thing to Davey Jones, much like a much cheaper regular destroyer. And at the end of the day, your ship simply can't be five places at once to justify costing as much as five regular destroyers.
88** To add insult to injury, the main purpose of a super destroyer is to actively hunt down and destroy enemy destroyers. However for the same cost you could build a light cruiser, (or even a heavy cruiser in extreme cases). The five normal destroyers or the cruiser are more capable for use as escorts and at the end of the day are quite capable of bagging enemy destroyers that are forced to try to engage them. And then aircraft carriers became a thing and were far better at hunting down and sinking enemy destroyer packs than destroyer hunting surface ships ever were.
89** "Super destroyers" evolved from dedicated flotilla leaders (sometimes just called leaders). These were either extra-light cruisers or enlarged destroyers designed to provide destroyer flotillas with both extra firepower and command facilities. However, these two roles turned out to be quite counterproductive to each other. Strapping on extra armaments meant that commanders tended to want to have leaders involved in the action, where [[StraightForTheCommander said commanders would be at extreme risk]]. Navies eventually phased the concept out by adding [[AceCustom custom but discrete]] command modifications to production-model destroyers.
90* The People's Republic of China's ''Kuznetsov''-class aircraft carrier ''Varyag'', purchased from Ukraine in a half-finished state and completed/commissioned as ''Liaoning'' , was this at first. It's purchase marks the beginning of China's carrier ambitions taking fruit, but whether China will able to operate an aircraft carrier as an effective weapon of war, as opposed to just a symbol of prestige, is still up in the air. Their main expected adversary, the United States Navy, has nearly a hundred years experience in carrier aviation when the Chinese bought Liaoning, something that can't easily be matched overnight. As a result, China has taken a huge gamble by trying to modernize its navy from a(n admittedly large one given its huge coastline) defensive force to one capable of power projection. Fortunately for China, they have more than enough resources at their disposal to operate her effectively, resulting in Liaoning being consistently in a "healthier" state than her still-in-service Russian half-sister; as a result, China has been able to use her consistently in learning how to operate aircraft carriers.
91** The ''Kuznetsov''-class carrier in general is a fairly impractical vessel, as it was built under the Soviet doctrine of being a cruiser first and a carrier second; in fact, the line is referred to as an "aircraft carrying cruiser" in original Russian terminology [[note]] Part of the reason for this Soviet doctrine has to do with treaty limits concerning the types of ships that can cross the Bosphorus. A pure aircraft carrier cannot cross the Bosphorus under the Montreux Convention, but [[LoopholeAbuse a cruiser that just so happens to carry aircraft]] [[http://www.mfa.gov.tr/implementation-of-the-montreux-convention.en.mfa can]][[/note]]. To put that in perspective, the ''Kuznetsov''-class has more raw firepower than traditional carriers, which allows them to function as actual attack ships instead of just floating runways, but this comes at the cost of having a smaller carrying capacity than traditional carriers as well as lacking effective means of launching them (a la catapults). In turn, the aircraft carried are normally used in fleet defense rather than frontline action, which the Russians reserve for ground based aircraft. Overall, the ''Kuznetsov'' is something of a go-between for carriers and cruisers, capable of performing either type's roles [[MasterOfNone but nowhere near as effectively as "real" carriers and cruisers dedicated to either role.]] China has realized this and removed the anti-ship missile tubes on Liaoning while completing her, thus giving her a somewhat larger hangar capacity (which is helped by them not being a signatory under the Montreux Convention and thus having no need to obey the size/type limitations).
92* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessarakonteres The Tessarakonteres]] is an [[OlderThanFeudalism ancient]] example from [[UsefulNotes/AncientGreece the Hellenistic period]]. The largest human-powered vessel ever built, it had 4,000 rowers... and roughly the maneuverability of the Parthenon. A [[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006FDZ2M2/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title 2011 study]] suggests that it was never meant to be used in ship-to-ship battles, but was intended as a siege platform against harbours. This fits the style of warfare of that time, which consisted of campaigns along the eastern Mediterranean coast and the Greek isles to conquer the coastal cities.
93* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_aircraft_carrier submarine aircraft carrier]] - such an awesome idea that the Germans, British, French, Americans, Italians and Japanese all pursued the idea. Only the Japanese ever actually built one, though. The Japanese actually built 47 submarines with the capability to carry seaplanes (between one and three, depending on the model). But the aircraft carried were limited in capabilities (with potential strike damage essentially limited to propaganda value), the process of surfacing, launching, recovery and submerging took a lot of time, and the submarine itself was vulnerable to attack while doing so. They were also very large -- the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400_class_submarine I-400 class]] boats were among the largest non-nuclear submarines ever built. It's still an awesome idea, though... and one which just might have a shot at becoming practical in the 21st century, in the form of submarine-launched [=UAVs=].
94** One of the great technical achievements of the Japanese was their secret development of the I-400 class submersible aircraft carrier, which at a displacement of 6,560 long tons was the largest submarine ever produced until the Cold War's ballistic missile submarines.
95*** Shortly after Admiral Yamamoto conducted the attack on Pearl Harbor, he conceived the idea of long-range submersible carriers which would be used to stage surprise attacks on American mainland cities. This fit in with his overall strategy against the much bigger United States, which amounted to a desperate gamble that Japan would be able to terrorize the military and population United States so much within a short period that they would decide the cost of opposing Japan was too high, and thus be forced to make concessions in exchange for peace without having had a chance to mobilize their full war-making potential. Sadly for Yamamoto's ambitions, it was an issue of starting too late, lacking resources, and the result having a limited payload. If such a weapon had been available in numbers immediately following Pearl Harbor, it might have at least been able to inflict panic on American civilians. As it was, the development process was doomed to run longer than Japan's narrow window for taking the initiative, so that by the time they came out the Americans were already outproducing the Japanese by a huge margin and defeating them in one battle after another. Any such submarines would now face a steep challenge getting in and out of coastal striking distance in the face of such enemy naval and air superiority, and their construction took up scarce resources that the rest of the Japanese fleet wanted for themselves. After Yamamoto was killed in a U.S attack on his plane in April 1943, his pet project was no longer safe against cuts: initial plans to make 18 of these vessels were reduced to nine, five, and finally to the three that were actually completed (the third was finished after conversion to a tanker submarine).
96*** The ways that they solved the various technical problems was ingenious; Each sub displaced twice as much as their American contemporaries, used a crew of 144, and had enough range to circumnavigate the globe one-and-a-half times. In order to support and balance the weight of the watertight airplane hangar on top, the pressure hull had a figure-of-eight cross section. The hangar held three specially designed Aichi [=M6A1=] ''Seiran'' floatplanes, with wings that would rotate 90 degrees and fold backward for storage, as well as floats that were detached and stored separately. For deployment, the wings were unfolded, the floats reattached, and the motor oil piped into the engine pre-heated so that a crew of four could have it ready to take off in just seven minutes. A compressed air catapult would launch each plane into the air, and after delivering their single 850 kg torpedo or bomb load they would land on the water alongside the sub to be retrieved by a collapsible crane. In theory the sub could attack and then disappear before the enemy had a chance to strike back.
97*** The problem was that there were too few of them, and despite their size they could only hold three seaplanes each: Any damage they could have dealt would have been negligible, assuming they were able to get past any sort of alert antiaircraft defenses or fighter patrols. Towards the end of the war there was a plan to deliver a ''Seiran'' force disguised with American paint and markings to attempt a ''kamikaze'' attack on the locks of the Panama Canal, with the goal of preventing more U.S. ships from entering the Pacific; this would have violated the laws and customs of war, and in any case it was called off because they realized there was already too much U.S. tonnage in the Pacific for shutting down the canal at that late stage to make a difference, and that the sub carriers might yet be needed for the defense of the Home Islands. A different proposed attack that would have used a biological weapon instead was thankfully never undertaken because Japan surrendered. The I-400 class accomplished practically nothing in World War II, but significantly affected the Cold War that came next: after studying the captured subs and then scuttling them so the Soviets couldn't learn from them, the Americans developed the ''Greyback'' class missile submarine and Regulus nuclear cruise missile. The Japanese thus created the ancestor of modern nuclear ballistic missile submarines, but without the atomic bomb that would have made it practical.
98* In 1917 Britain launched the first of what was planned to be four M-class submarines, a class of gun-armed submarine ''cruisers''. The original idea was for a coastal bombardment monitor, but what they ended up building it for was to target merchant shipping: torpedoes were then considered ineffective at hitting a moving ship at any range over 1,000 yards, so they gave the M-class a single 12-inch gun forward of the conning tower which could fire from periscope depth out to 15,000 yards. Unfortunately, the 12-inch gun could only be reloaded when the sub was surfaced and also represented a weak point in the hull. M1 did not see action during World War I; M2 and M3 were completed after the war was over, and M4 was scrapped before completion. In 1925, a Swedish ship collided with the M1 which caused her gun to be torn off and created a gaping hole that allowed seawater to gush through. After the accident and the Washington Naval Treaty restrictions on cruiser submarines, M2 was converted into an impractical Carrier Sub and M3 was converted into a Minelayer Sub, making M3 the only one to have any useful purpose.
99* During the interwar period France built its own submarine cruiser, the ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_submarine_Surcouf_%28N_N_3%29 Surcouf]]'', as a form of LoopholeAbuse to avoid the Washington naval treaty limits on the number of cruisers France could have. This provoked an ObviousRulePatch, and while ''Surcouf'' was [[GrandfatherClause grandfathered in]], nobody was allowed to make big gun submarines anymore. It was armed with a pair of 8-inch (203mm) guns in a forward turret and weighed in at over 4000 tons, making it larger than destroyers of its day and the largest submarine to date until the Japanese I-400 appeared in 1943. There was also a single small seaplane for reconnaissance and spotting for the main guns. Its more conventional armament was a dozen torpedo tubes. There were numerous problems with having big guns on the low deck of a submarine subject to more roll from waves, including that it had no point of observation high enough to see out to the gun's maximum range (hence the need for the floatplane), that it took at least 3 minutes and 35 seconds after surfacing before it could fire, that firing had to occur at the precise moment of pitch and roll when the ship was level, that training the turret to the side was limited to when the boat rolled eight degrees or less, and that it was not equipped to fire at night. ''Surcouf'' was undergoing a refit and therefore in no condition to fight when the Germans overran France, so it limped across the English Channel to Plymouth where the British seized it, and subsequently gave it to the Free French Navy. Its only notable action was participating in the Free French liberation of Saint Pierre and Miquelon. On the night of 18/19 February 1942, the submarine was lost with all hands off the coast of Panama under unclear circumstances: it could have either collided with another ship, or been sunk by friendly fire.
100* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa_class_submarine The USSR's "Alfa" class submarine]]. It set and to this day still holds the record for the fastest and deepest-diving non-prototype military submarine in the world,[[note]]second only to the preceding ''Papa'' class, itself too Awesome, But Impractical to produce beyond one prototype[[/note]] and knowledge of its production greatly alarmed the West, to the point that the US and Britain both designed torpedoes for the specific purpose of hunting down Alfas.[[note]]As for standard torpedoes, an Alfa could just turn around and outrun them. The Soviets specifically tested this by firing torpedoes at their own subs![[/note]] Unfortunately the Alfa had small and powerful but ''very'' maintenance-intensive ''lead-bismuth''-cooled nuclear reactors that ''couldn't normally be turned off'', as doing so would let the metal solidify and essentially turn the whole thing into a solid inert lump. Entire maintenance facilities had to be constructed at Alfa homeports simply to keep the reactors hot when they weren't being used - but, in typical Soviet fashion, the facilities themselves weren't properly maintained and often didn't work. As a result Alfa reactors had to be kept running at all times, which they hadn't been designed for and which resulted in several expensive failures. While the reactors could remain active for 15 years, they also could never be refueled and were intended to be replaced at the end of their life, like a battery is; despite this, the Alfa hadn't been designed with quick reactor replacement in mind, so the process would have been expensive and slow, potentially more than refueling a traditional submarine. In addition, while the Alfa reportedly had a crush depth of over 1300 meters, deep dives did permanent damage to the submarine's onboard equipment, so that impressive diving ability was largely wasted in practice. The Alfas were also ''louder'' than other nuclear attack subs of their era, which is a problem since stealth is the main weapon of a submarine. On the other hand, all this loudness was mainly during the top speed runs; at cruising speeds, Alfas weren't any louder than other Soviet subs of that generation.
101** It should be noted that the Alfa was designed and operated as a "defensive" submarine; rather than deploying in combat patrols or collecting intelligence (the Soviets had other submarine classes for this, rather than relying on the one-size-fits-all "fleet boat" approach the Americans and British used), their mission was ''solely'' to intercept and destroy enemy submarines. A higher top speed and better deep-diving capability than the submarines (and their torpedoes) it would hunt were crucial; noise and maintenance concerns were secondary, until near the end of the Alfa's life when they affected availability.
102* The ''Triton'' one-off radar picket submarine. Intended to extend the radar range of sea-based air wings; it was the largest submarine produced at the time, with two nuclear reactors and a traditional "knife" submarine hull made it stable on the surface but severely impeded speed underwater. The radar picket role would become obsolete with the rise of carrier-based AWACS aircraft (the first, the E-1 Tracer, was already flying when the Triton launched), and the Triton ended its career as a conventional attack submarine.
103* The ''Seawolf''-class submarine, which was the last Attack Submarine of the Cold War era, was designed to combat the advanced ''Akula''-class and ''Typhoon''-class submarines of the Soviet Navy. Cue the fall of the Soviet Union which led to the ''Seawolf'' becoming so unnecessary (and more importantly, ''expensive''; in today's dollars they'd cost over $5 billion apiece, comparable to the cost of a new supercarrier) that only 3 out of an intended 29 of them were built. The class was an example of a costly political boondoggle, as UsefulNotes/BillClinton's promise to keep the program afloat in 1992 enabled him to carry the state of Connecticut (Electric Boat, the USA's submarine contractor, is a huge employer in the state) over New Englander Paul Tsongas in the Democratic primaries and ultimately become President. The ''Seawolf'' was succeeded by the ''Virginia''-class attack submarine, which was a less capable blue-water sub, but less costly to build due to using commercial-off-the-shelf electronics and lower-grade material.
104* The [[UsefulNotes/NazisWithGnarlyWeapons German]] electronic industry of the 1930s was a pioneer of the radar and Kriegsmarine battleships had very advanced radar systems, more accurate than ever battleship guns when ranging a ship-sized target, yet none of them had a plotting grid or means to broadcast the radar data to the fire control directors, so each radar range had to be corrected by optics to get a firing solution. It had over 40,000 ''kilometres'' of electric wire and was very prone to shatter and vibration damage. Moreover its UnusualUserInterface - the fire control officer fired the guns by ''blowing into a mouthpiece'' fitted with a pressure switch which closed the firing circuit instead of an ordinary pistol firing key - meant it was an embodiment of this trope. Pneumatics fare badly at sea, and the British estimated the German gunnery was efficient only for the first ten minutes, after which it deteriorated sharply.
105** [[http://navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-044.htm As this article demonstrates,]] this was something of a persistent problem for the Kriegsmarine. The company that built the AA fire control system, for instance, bragged that only ''twelve employees'' (out of 20,000!) could assemble the damn thing.
106* The Italian [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vittorio_Veneto_class_battleship Littorio-class battleships]] of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII had greater firepower of anything that wasn't American or the ''Yamato'' (yes, even the famous ''Bismarck'' was badly outgunned by the Italian ships) with the longest-ranged guns of any battleship ''ever'' (and a piercing capability comparable to the much bigger 406mm-caliber guns of the American battleships and the 460mm guns of the ''Yamato''), had an awesome point defense, were 30 knots fast (enough to qualify as fast battleships, and faster than most), and were awesomely armored. Also, the guns were tremendously inaccurate at the long range they were used at (not just due a lack of radar: they remained inaccurate even after the Italians managed to develop and install it, because one of the biggest issue lies with their ammunition: the quality is extremely uneven) and had short barrel life (due to the excessive velocity) and low rate of fire, the torpedo defense used an ineffective design more expensive than the conventional (it would have been superior to normal, had the right construction techniques been available and not been compromised by speed-optimized hullforms), and the combination of high speed and thick armor made them fuel hogs, with the fuel shortage suffered by Italy during the war forcing them to stay in harbor for most of the war. Note that this is the ''less impractical'' version: the ships had been originally built with bulbous bows for higher speeds but had been modified due to excessive vibrations, and the original design was supposed to use 406mm-caliber guns, but opted for smaller 381mm guns because they would have to be designed from the ground up while 381 designs to improve were already available.
107** Italian ships from the war in general: as Italian doctrine of the time was geared to fight the French Navy, ships other than battleships were built with high reliability, ludicrous speed and thin armour in mind, so that their light cruisers would chase down and sink enemy destroyers and lure enemy light cruisers towards where heavier firepower was available, their heavy cruisers would chase down enemy light cruisers and lure enemy heavy cruisers into the guns of the battleships (that would have been able to sink enemy battleships from range and avoid counterfire at smaller ranges thanks to superior speed), and their destroyers would simply avoid enemy battleship fire and torpedo them with impunity. While arguably effective against the intended opponent, the Italians never fought the French Navy - they fought the [[UsefulNotes/BritsWithBattleships Royal Navy]], whose more aggressive combat doctrine, combined with higher initiative allowed to British commanders, the presence of carriers, the British ability to consistently break Italian and German codes, and the usage of superior radars (which Italy lacked, having [[ItWillNeverCatchOn incorrectly figured radar was a passing fad]]) ended up causing Italian ships to fight with similar-sized opponents again and again, where speed was less a factor than thick armour.
108* Similar to the above, the Italian ''Zara''-class cruisers were one of the finest cruiser designs of the second World War: A unique armor layout made them the best protected cruisers until the introduction of the ''Des Moines''-class by the USN after the war, an innovative scheme of secondary weapon placement that made their anti-aircraft defenses extremely formidable, and saved weight meant they were only 2kts slower than the preceding ''Trento''-class, whose GlassCannon tendencies they were designed to address. Indeed, there were no better ships for their intended mission - zooming up and down the Italian coast defending it from French attack. In the Battles of Calabria and Cape Spartivento, they gave the British serious difficulty. However, all that weight reduction meant cutting down the superstructure, meaning it was very difficult to mount radar, which in turn meant the ''Regia Marina'' didn't bother (which did not even matter because, as mentioned above, Italy didn't even have access to radar technology when the ships were being designed). The folly of this decision was demonstrated at the midnight Battle of Cape Matapan: three (radar-equipped) British battleships, the ''Warspite'', the ''Valiant'', and the ''Queen Elizabeth'', were able to close to within 3 kilometres of a flotilla of three ''Zara''s - point-blank range in naval terms - and opened fire, illuminating the Italian ships with their searchlights (the ''Valiant'''s searchlights were commanded by [[UsefulNotes/TheHouseOfWindsor Prince Phillip]]). Within minutes the ''Zara''s were out of action. They had not even managed to fire a single shot in reply.
109* Meanwhile, the Imperial Japanese Navy's post-Washington Treaty light cruisers showed that they were all about this trope. While they pioneered the idea of circumventing the treaty by [[LoopholeAbuse abusing its loophole]] of defining light cruisers only by gun caliber and building what were effectively heavy cruisers with light cruiser guns [[MoreDakka in huge numbers]] (the US Navy and Royal Navy promptly copied this idea, in the form of the respective ''Brooklyn''- and ''Town''-class cruisers, which were far more balanced) in the form of the ''Mogami'' class, they also insisted on using 6.1-inch (155mm) guns even though the IJN already had ships in service with 6-inch (152mm) guns of nearly identical capability to the new slightly larger guns. Why? Because they were so offended by their government agreeing to the treaty that they required that every treaty-compliant ship have the absolute maximum allowable capabilities - even when it resulted in complicating the fleet's logistics for no discernible gain.
110** The resulting Mogami class was supposed to come in under the treaty limit at 9,000 tons (treaty allowed for 10,000), but the resulting ship turned out to be badly flawed structurally (the hull buckled during the gunnery testing). The resulting fixes not only cost heaps of money, but wound up adding 4,000 extra tons to their displacements. The Japanese "solution" to the fact that their new cruisers now greatly exceeded the legal size limit was [[NotCheatingUnlessYouGetCaught to simply lie about their displacement]].
111* There are modern schools of thought that suggest the modern concept of the supercarrier (massive floating airfields with dozens or over a hundred aircraft and thousands of sailors and airmen) is, itself, awesome but impractical for the purposes of naval engagement. While they are powerful political tools and amazing resources for fighting asymmetrical wars (being essentially unreachable by "boots on the ground"), anti-ship missile technology has matured to the point where even relatively lower-tech countries can afford to just [[MacrossMissileMassacre spam effective anti-ship missiles in such numbers that getting through to such a massive target is virtually certain.]] Additionally, supercarriers and their escort fleets can be easily spotted even from space by their massive wakes and by surface radar.
112** Basically, the theory goes that they're already outdated, and there just hasn't been a symmetrical naval war large enough to make this fact apparent. Not to mention the extreme expense that goes into building and operating what is effectively an entire floating city compared to more BoringButPractical measures like simply basing aircraft out of ground-based airfields in friendly territory.
113** Much of this has always been true (and has been argued since before WWII), but the problem has been magnified by procurement decisions of the United States Navy over the last 50 years. Most specialized strike aircraft, anti-radar aircraft, anti-submarine aircraft, and everything else that isn't a COD or a helicopter have been folded into the Hornet and Super Hornet programs, sacrificing operating range in order to maintain the two aircraft as supersonic-capable air superiority fighters. The lack of long-range interdiction capability requires carriers to operate closer to land, and within anti-ship missile range. The problem will be magnified in the future, as fifth-generation stealth aircraft are expected to complete the vast majority of their missions on internal fuel, as to not compromise their stealth.
114*** However, one potential solution is the use of drones, which have over double the effective range of manned aircraft. This is why the Navy is now investing heavily in Northrop Grumman's X-47B, which has been able to autonomously land and take off from carriers.
115** Conversely, proponents of the aircraft carrier argue that a sea denial network capable of doing all of the above qualifies for this trope as well. The arguments hinge around carriers being actually very hard to find when they don't want to be; satellites have known tracks, surface radar still needs to cover enormous swathes of ocean[[note]]Even with Super Hornets, searchers are staring at searching an area of sea bigger than Texas, and air-to-ground missiles and the longer-ranged F-35C stand to make the problem worse[[/note]], and without the carrier and its escorts blaring out radio emissions there's no easy way to home in. The sheer array of assets the Soviets dedicated to the problem backs this up: hundreds of Backfire bombers, dozens of nuclear-powered guided missile submarines, surface ships, and reconnaissance aircraft, and a lot of big, sophisticated, and thus rather expensive missiles.
116*** On the note of a sea denial network, much like the coastal forts mentioned in the general section, a sea denial network is a considerable investment, due to the need for all the aforementioned assets to hunt carriers and more to make it work, and like coastal forts it cannot project power beyond the coast of the region it's in. China in particular realized this, and while they are also continuing in building up their sea denial network, they are also working on aircraft carriers to aid their power projection.
117** Also, conversely, using a system of many smaller aircraft carriers rather than fewer super carriers, though a bright spark always seems to suggest it every few years. In theory, it's less expensive and you have a lot more ships that can be in different places at once. In practice, it's actually significantly more expensive, especially over time. See, building more ships with the same capability as fewer good ones is actually more expensive thanks to the SquareCubeLaw making larger ships (to a point) just more efficient in everything from combat capability to operating costs. And in a quantity over quality model, build quality is always going to be sacrificed at some point to try to compensate the previous law. This in turn causes the ships to wear out and or become obsolete faster, and thus need replacement more often. And as for the whole "put your eggs in more baskets" argument, most modern navies haven't fought another navy since the second World War and if two that could realistically sink aircraft carriers went to war, [[NukeEm how a conventional naval war would actually turn out would be the least of everyone’s concerns.]]
118* The submarine itself was like this for many years. It was slow and often more dangerous to its operator than to an enemy ship - the first successful sinking of a surface warship (the USS ''Housatonic'') by a submarine (the ''H. L. Hunley'', armed with [[RammingAlwaysWorks a spar torpedo]]), during UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar, was followed soon after by the ''third'' sinking of that same submarine in only half a year since its completion. Germany - ironically the last Great Power to build a submarine - was able to demonstrate its capabilities once and for all when, in the opening weeks of World War I, a single U-boat sank three British cruisers in under an hour. Having a submarine with 24 men take down three cruisers and 1500 enemy sailors proved hard to resist, and the Germans quickly capitalized on their success... only to ultimately use that weapon in [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrestricted_submarine_warfare such a way]] that it ''neither'' weakened Britain in any significant extent (which, given that Britain is both an island nation and a net importer of food could have been ''devastating'' if enough transports had been disrupted) nor did them much good in the diplomatic arena, and ultimately brought the US into the war.
119* The US Navy's ''Zumwalt''-class destroyer. It was optimized to provide coastal bombardment from over the horizon – and out of range of shore-based anti-ship missiles – as part of an emphasis on building littoral capability for a US Navy that had otherwise focused on oceanic combat. To accomplish this role, it was equipped with an Advanced Gun System, which would be cheaper than missiles, and a tumblehome hull to maximize radar stealth. Unfortunately, [[CripplingOverspecialization this all came at cost to its combat capabilities in other areas]], especially compared to the ''Arleigh Burke'' destroyer. Despite its larger size, the ''Zumwalt'''s tumblehome hull means that it carries fewer missile cells than the ''Burke''. Its radar system and anti-submarine suites are optimized for littoral tasks but are less capable for blue-water operations, reducing their strategic capabilities. The stealth system was redundant since it's large profile and near-shore combat role makes it easy to track visually or by satellite imagery. Yet most crucially, its fire support role was rendered obsolete by the advent of longer-ranged coastal defenses. Even its AGS became useless as the long-range guided projectile the AGS was designed to fire got cancelled due to ballooning costs making them just as expensive as the missiles they were ''supposed'' to replace. Worse, the AGS is [[CripplingOverspecialization so specialized around those long-range guided projectiles that it can't use conventional NATO-standard 155mm artillery shells]]. Altering the guns to fire such readily available shells was deemed too expensive to be worthwhile, and thus ships hyper-specialized for gunfire support [[EpicFail no longer have guns that actually work at all]]. Seemingly the only reason, aside from the SunkCostFallacy, that the US Navy keeps these white elephants in service at all instead of cutting their losses and getting back the scrap metal value is that their engines can produce a lot more electrical power than other destroyers and cruisers. The Navy hopes that this will allow the now-useless AGS to eventually be replaced with [[MagneticWeapons large railguns]].
120* Conceived in a post-Cold War environment, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program was intended for the US Navy to produce smaller ships that would solve the Navy's deficiency in asymmetric costal combat, resulting in the ''Freedom'' and ''Independence''-class ships. Each LCS vessel has many features to provide top-tier combat for lower costs like stealth abilities, automated systems to reduce crew size and swappable modular packages that could reconfigure each ship for any role on a short-notice. However, the LCS fell victim to feature creep that resulted in cost overruns and technical problems. Many modular packages like the unmanned de-mining and anti-submarine suites were unreliable and altogether costed over $7 billion, leading to the Navy abandoning the system. Likewise, the automation system proved inadequate for long-term operations, resulting in an overworked and understaffed crew. Additional trials showed numerous design problems in each ship like the ''Freedom'' having problematic engines and the ''Independence'' having cracking hulls. The decision to pick both ship classes instead of just one created a logistic crisis as they couldn't share the same parts or crew training. In hindsight, LCS was too costly and complicated for a specialized role that could've been filled by a cheaper, more proven design like the Visby-class corvettes.
121* India's new aircraft carrier Vikrant is an impressive technical accomplishment for the Indian shipbuilding industry, particularly her deck-edge elevators, one of the most daunting naval architecture challenges around. At the same time, she is also badly limited by her design choices, particularly her small elevators. Reportedly 10 meters x 14 meters, while the elevators were the right size for the ship's [=MiG=]-29K fighters, they're too small for larger, newer planes like the French Rafale or American Super Hornet. Worse, the small elevators limit the size of future fighters, with the Indians forced to expend effort on a completely new fighter design just for their new carrier.
122* The famed Bismarck-class battleships (Bismarck and her sister Tirpitz) were powerful ships, and nominally larger than a majority of their opposition, but suffered from a wide array of severe flaws, among them exposed wires and an outdated armor scheme, as well as extremely inefficient use of displacement that made them, despite being considerably larger, only about as effective as the older 'Treaty' battleships. However, their biggest flaw was in their intended use. The Germans hoped to use them primarily as merchant raiders, not to engage the Royal Navy directly, ideally being fast enough to hunt down the merchants and large enough to fight off any escort they may have, and in that role, they would have been terribly inefficient, given their large complements and accompanying need for large amounts of supply, and long repair times should something go wrong, as well as their general vulnerability to enemy aircraft and submarines.
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125[[folder:Land Vehicles]]
126* Multi-turreted tanks, a major fad of the 1920s and early 30s which turned out to be a dead end. They were most popular with the British and the Soviets, but almost everybody was trying to get in on it at one time or another.
127** One of the problems of interwar tank development was how to arm a tank to deal with various types of opposition such as infantry, tanks, aircraft, and fortifications, and engage multiple targets in various directions. The idea of the tank was still new enough that the answer wasn't yet obvious, and what a lot of people did was look for analogy with warships. This makes sense when you consider how ironclad warships had preceded the tank by decades, and the fact that Britain's tanks had originally been developed by the Landships Committee under the auspices of the navy, hence the use of naval terminology for tank parts such as "hull", "bow", "deck", "hatch", etc. There were thinkers such as J.F.C. Fuller who believed that battles between tanks would be like battles on the seas, complete with different speed and weight classes such as "cruiser tanks" and "battleship tanks", as well as "harbors" on land to which they would return for resupply. Just as battleships required big guns to punch through heavily armored warships at long distance, smaller, quick-firing guns to hit fast-moving torpedo boats, and automatic cannons to shoot down aircraft, the thinking was that a tank needed multiple types of armament that could all be targeted independently. Needless to say, in reality the battles were nothing like that, and all these designs quickly fell out of favour and were replaced by more practical ones. The idea of a tank with guns pointing everywhere may have seemed neat and effective, but the difficulty a commander faced in coordinating all the guns, the increased crew requirement to man each gun, problems in ammunition management and supply for varying calibres of weapons, increased weight, effect on armor layout, and the complexity and cost that multiple turrets and sponsons added to production led to the idea falling out of fashion by the second half of the 1930s.
128** The Vickers [=A1E1=] Independent, a single prototype ordered in 1924 and delivered in 1926, was the design that started the multi-turreted dreadnought fad. It was very long in order to cross wide trenches, and had four machine gun turrets surrounding a main turret with a three-pounder gun. One machine gun turret could point its weapon straight upwards for anti-aircraft use. The penny-pinching government refused to pay for a production run, but various countries around the world were inspired to copy it. Both Germany and Russia obtained the plans through espionage, and a British officer named Norman Baillie-Stewart was court-martialed in 1933 for selling its plans to Germany.
129** The Soviet [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-28 T-28 tank]] was probably based on the British [=A1E1=] Independent, and also somewhat resembled the Mark III Medium: three turrets, one cannon, and up to five machine guns. It was more advanced than anything else when introduced in 1931, but it didn't age well and the Soviets kept it in service beyond its effective life. The advancement of anti-tank guns rendered it poorly armored in proportion to the large target it presented, and its tracks were so long in relation to the distance between them that maneuvering in anything other than a straight line was very difficult. Finnish troops captured seven of these beasts during the war, giving them the nickname ''Postivaunu'' (Stagecoach).
130** The Soviet T-35 heavy tank deserves special mention here, being something of an Independent on steroids and the only five-turreted tank in history to enter serial production; it weighed 45 tonnes and took 11 crew members to operate, carrying a 76.2 mm gun, two 45 mm guns, and six machine guns. It was also slow, very poorly armored for such a heavy vehicle, and incredibly expensive and complicated to produce; only 61 were built, of which 48 were on hand when the Germans invaded. The excessive length made it difficult to turn, and it was top-heavy enough to make tipping over a potential danger. It wasn’t an unreliable vehicle ''per se'', but the Soviets drove them hundreds of kilometers without maintenance in their haste to stop the Germans, causing more losses from mechanical issues than from combat. Worst of all, the T-35's turrets, when aligned a certain way, actually blocked the escape hatches. So, if the tank was hit, the poor bugger crewing it had to ''hand-crank'' his turret out the way before he could bail out - or, if the turret was damaged and unable to rotate, presumably use his sidearm to shoot himself rather than burn to death.
131** The T-100 and SMK were competing prototypes, produced in 1939 by Factory 185 and the Kirov Works, respectively. They were supposed to replace the T-35 with something simpler, more reliable, and more heavily armored; the original request was for a central 76.2 mm main turret raised on a pedestal, and two 45 mm secondary turrets fore and aft, but the aft turret was deleted from the design before construction. An apocryphal story tells of Stalin snapping the third turret off a wooden model, exclaiming, “We are designing a tank, not a department store!” The two tanks looked similar, but the SMK was marginally better at 55 tonnes instead of 58, using torsion bars instead of coil springs, and most other components differing as well. The SMK's namesake was Sergey Mironovich Kirov, an assassinated chairman of the Communist Party. The Kirov team had actually been dissatisfied with the multi tier layout to begin with, and simultaneously produced a single-turret version, the Kliment Voroshilov, which despite its own problems outperformed both of the problematic multi-turreted tanks in trials. All three prototypes were sent to be tested in battle with the 20th Heavy Tank Brigade against the fortified defenses on the Karelian Isthmus, Finland; despite the SMK bouncing at least a dozen shots of 37 mm, one jammed the overly exposed main turret ring, and while preoccupied with this problem the tank drove over an anti-tank mine, wrecking the running gear and forcing it to be abandoned. The KV with its single turret would be the only one of them to get produced.
132** In 1926, while Weimar Germany was secretly experimenting with tanks in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, they ordered several companies to produce prototypes for a heavy tank, called ''Großtraktor'' ("large tractor") to conceal its real purpose. This had the main gun turret in front, and a lower-slung machine gun turret on the rear. From 1929 these were tested at the proving grounds in Kazan, USSR which the Reichswehr was using in cooperation with the Red Army at the time. They had many mechanical problems, including the transmission, and ended up as monuments or practice targets.
133** Picking up where the Reichswehr had left off with the ''Großtraktor'', the Nazis ordered the ''Neubaufahrzeug'' ("new construction vehicle"). In 1934 they produced two prototypes in mild steel, and then three with proper armor in 1935-6. There were two machine gun turrets borrowed from the Panzer I, the first mounted front right, the other rear left. Between them was the elevated main turret, a Krupp design whose appearance would be echoed on the latter Panzer IV, with a short-barreled 75 mm main gun and a coaxial 37 mm. On one hand this was a lot of firepower on paper, and they looked pretty cool. On the other hand they were slow, complex, unreliable, short on operational range, and protected by no more than 20 mm of armor. Development of the ''Neubaufahrzeug'' was stopped in favor of the more mobile and all-around better Panzer IV. As a result they became propaganda vehicles, being shown off in the 1939 Berlin International Auto Exposition. In 1940 the three armored ones were sent to help in the invasion of Norway, mainly by trying to trick the enemy into thinking they had real heavy tanks. They had a lot of mechanical problems that kept them from seeing much action, the exception being one which was penetrated by a Boys anti tank rifle and was subsequently blown up by its crew.
134** The British A15 Crusader had a front-mounted machine gun turret which, despite having a wider field of fire than a hull-mounted machine gun, was both an uncomfortable position to man and an easy weak point for an enemy soldier with an Anti-Tank rifle. It was left empty and eventually deleted in the Mark 3 variant. The Cruiser, Mark I (A9) had two machine gun turrets on the front, which weakened the frontal protection and were unbearably hot to crew during the North Africa campaign.
135** The Vickers 6-Ton light tank, designed in 1928 and also known as the Mark E, showed the world that even light tanks could get in on the multi-turret action. The Type A had two side-by-side one-man turrets, each with a water-cooled machine gun, so they could spray the enemy in two directions at once. Of course, this made it useless against anything except infantry. The type B with a single two-man turret introduced the important innovation of a “duplex” mount combining a proper tank gun with a coaxial machine gun, meaning it had more firepower than the type A and thus became markedly more popular.
136** The American [=M2A2=] light tank accepted in 1935 looked similar to the Vickers 6-Ton type A: it had twin turrets, one with a .50 cal machine gun and one with a .30 cal. The two side-by-side turrets limited each other's field of fire, and like most countries the U.S. concluded from the Spanish Civil War that a tank armed only with machine guns was useless against other tanks. The [=M2A2=] and its slightly upgraded A3 version were superseded by the stopgap [=M2A4=] in 1940, with improvements including more armor and one turret mounting a 37 mm main gun.
137** The M3 Lee Medium Tank was developed as a stopgap so the U.S. would have a medium tank with a 75 mm gun while they waited for the M4 Sherman to arrive; this meant putting the 75 in a limited traverse sponson in the hull. Ordinance Department head Gladeon Barnes wanted it to be a turretless tank, but the Infantry arm which still held sway demanded that the 37 mm in a turret also be retained because of its ability to fire canister shot. So in addition to the hull 75 there was also a turret with the 37... and on top of the turret was a rotating commander's cupola with a .30 cal machine gun that he could fire. Basically, a mini superimposed turret. The machine gun cupola was replaced with a simple hatch in the M3 Grant variant made for the British, because by this time even they realized it was silly.
138* Overlapping somewhat with the multi-turret dead end was the idea of tanks with loads of machine guns. Since tanks were mostly controlled by the infantry arm in most countries during the interwar period, they wanted tanks that could kill a lot of enemy infantry. The United States in particular had what Harry Yeide has called the "cult of the machine gun". The M2 Medium tank had a turret with a 37 mm gun in case it had to fight an enemy tank, but primarily it was designed to be a mobile machine gun nest. It had ''nine'' .30 cal machine guns: one coaxial, two fixed-traverse machine guns in the glacis to be fired electronically by the driver, one sponson mounted MG on each of the hull's four corners, and two more stuck on the outside of the turret as spares. As the tank drove over an enemy trench, the rear sponson machine guns could aim at bullet deflectors on the rear fenders to ricochet the rounds down into the trench. The tank started production in 1939, just in time for World War 2 to begin in Europe and show that it was already obsolete. Trench warfare was gone, it was really inefficient to have four out of six crew members just be machine gunners, and a 37 mm was no longer adequate for the anti-tank role. The Army also determined from tests that a 75 mm high explosive shell was actually more effective against infantry than machine guns, so they experimented with putting a 75 in the hull of the M2 as a prelude to producing the M3 Lee. Equipping the 75 was a step in the right direction, but the M3 Lee and some very early M4 Shermans retained the glacis-mounted driver's machine guns as a last gasp of machine gun fever.
139* Throughout World War II, having a hull-mounted machine gun with its own gunner (usually doubling as an assistant driver/radio operator) in addition to the coaxial machine gun on the turret was viewed as a necessity. If an enemy foot soldier happened to pop up in the front arc of the tank with a Panzerfaust or some such, the bow gunner could react quicker. He could potentially shoot more accurately on the move--if not with pinpoint accuracy, then at least suppressively--because turret gun stabilization was either non-existent or imperfect, while the BOG could somewhat compensate for the bumps by moving the gun up and down with his body. On the other hand, the weak point created by drilling a hole in the front armor to stick a machine gun through was increasingly dangerous as tanks got more powerful guns, and by removing the machine gunner's position it would be possible to either add much-needed ammo racks for the larger shells that tanks were now using, or move the driver to a more optimal central position and give the hull front a glancing "beaked" shape. By the end of the Korean War, the improvement of turret gun stabilization and the benefits to be gained by deleting the bow gun caused it to finally disappear.
140* Electric transmission on heavy armored vehicles, which has been tried in various prototypes and production vehicles since World War I. In theory it could avoid the reliability problems of a mechanical gearbox, respond better to the fluctuating torque requirements of a tracked vehicle driving off-road, enable neutral steering in the days before that was a standard feature, allow the vehicle to drive as fast in reverse as it did forwards, and accelerate quickly. On the other hand, electric tank drive has tended to be bulkier and heavier than the mechanical equivalent because of the need for both combustion engines and generators to supply the motors with electricity, and many vehicles with this system were underpowered or had overheating problems. The quantities of copper required were also problematic during World War II. Today's vehicles could ditch the internal combustion or turbine engine and be purely battery-electric, which would also lower their noise and heat signatures, but even lithium ion batteries are still expensive, heavy, and slow to charge. An electric powertrain requires specialist electricians to repair instead of your normal AFV mechanic. And furthermore, some of the extra abilities aren’t really practical to use: driving in reverse at 60 kilometers per hour would be potentially dangerous and in almost every case quite pointless. Because they’ve been through decades of refinement, diesel engines and mechanical transmissions for tanks have reached such a level of efficiency that electric can’t get enough of a performance edge to justify the bother.
141* Military turbine-powered road vehicles have dubious practicality. The only two nations to field a fully turbine-powered vehicle were the US and USSR (notice the pattern?), and the Soviets canned their turbine-powered tank, the T-80, as soon as the end of the UsefulNotes/ColdWar happened, because [[WhyWeReBummedCommunismFell they couldn't pour money into their fuel tanks anymore]]: one T-80, including building, maintenance, and fuel expenditure, was equivalent to ''three'' T-72 or T-90. A common joke has it that the Americans are only keeping a turbine-powered tank because of their habit to solve any problem by drowning it in money. On the other hand, the turbine engine does have the benefit of being capable of consuming multiple fuel types (a boon when capturing fuel caches), and the ridiculous fuel consumption was partly addressed with a suitable auxiliary power unit to keep the communication equipment running without the turbine. Finally, due to the immense heat being dumped by the turbine, infantry can not sit on top of the tank or work as close support due to the incredible temperatures, which was the push that finally encouraged development of a multi-fuel diesel engine variant of the tank.
142* Heavily sloped side hull armor.
143** The benefits of sloped armor in general are well-established. A plate that is sloped instead of vertical presents a greater effective thickness of metal towards a round that's coming in horizontally. Furthermore, World War II era armor-piercing shells were relatively short and thick compared to the long rod penetrators of today, so they were more easily made to ricochet off of a sufficiently thick and sloped plate without penetrating. Making the front of the hull a sloped glacis was a pretty straightforward improvement. Side armor of similar slope and thickness to the front armor isn't very common, for reasons we'll go into, but the T-34 is an example of when this was done. The effect of vertically angled plates was compounded if the hull was also turned at an angle towards the enemy, making the tank more protected in a wide arc. In other AFV designs, the side armor would be thin but nevertheless sloped in order to make the front of the vehicle a smaller target.
144** Unfortunately, large sloped sides are way more inconvenient from an internal space perspective than a sloped front or even rear. To begin with, it makes sense for a variety of reasons for tanks to be longer than they are wide, thus giving more room to work with on the front or rear slope. With the front slope you can put the driver(s) in reclining seats so that they fill up the space nicely, and if it's a front sprocket drive vehicle that awkward space at the bottom of the glacis is the ideal place to put the transmission. Depending on the shape of the engine and whether or not there's a turret, sloping the engine deck or the rear plate is similarly feasible. In comparison, inward sloped sides reduce headroom along the whole length of the hull and crowd in the crew. There's less space for roof hatches, making escape more difficult, and the size of the turret ring is constrained, making it more difficult to up-gun the tank later. The French FCM-36 was a two-man tank with a one-man turret and low-velocity gun, so the sloped sides actually didn’t make it much worse than it would have been otherwise. The Soviet T-34 was more problematic because it used Christie suspension with springs that took up space in the hull, which combined with upper hull sides sloped at 40 degrees from the vertical made the driver and machine gunner feel rather cramped. The original two-man turret was similarly cramped, and the small turret ring complicated the subsequent turret upgrades it would get. The Soviets would eventually give up on side-sloping from T-55 onwards.
145* The Soviet KV-1 heavy tank, named after the Soviet defense commissar and politician Kliment Voroshilov. It was created as a single-turreted version of the SMK multi-turreted tank, and was the more successful of the two in the experimental unit's combat in Finland, leading to serial production.
146** The KV-1 was so heavily armored, with 75 mm of steel on all sides, that it was practically immune to the common Finnish and German antitank guns of 1939-1941. At the same time, its 76.2 mm L-11 gun could punch through the thin armour of early German tanks from a thousand meters away. There were some cases during Barbarossa where KV tanks managed to face off against foes several times their number: a single KV--accounts differ on whether it was a KV-1 or the KV-2 heavy artillery variant--held off ''the whole 6th Panzer Division'' for at least 24 hours during the Battle of Raseiniai. However, it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. At 45 tonnes the KV-1 was too heavy for most bridges to support, and it lacked the snorkeling equipment necessary to ford rivers. It was slow, expensive to produce, and prone to mechanical breakdown. And of course, being immune to German antitank guns is one thing. Being immune to German aerial bombardment is something else. The large, slow KV-1 and KV-2 were easy targets for Stukas.
147** The KV's reliability problems were legendary. They were flawed from the drawing board, as the Soviets attempted to build a heavy tank the size of a Panther... with the same technical components used for pre-WWII medium tanks. The engine, which gave superb performance in lighter T-34s, struggled to move a mass nearly twice as great as a T-34 Model 1940. Through a transmission which had been poorly built even for the light tracked vehicles of the 1930s and shredded itself to pieces under the weight. While steering by clutch-and-brake, a steering method which was harsh even on a tank the size of a Pz IV, let alone the KV which was twice as heavy. The joke was that KV drivers had to change gears with a sledgehammer, which was not far from the truth. Out of 600 [=KVs=] the Soviets had at the beginning of the war, 200 broke down without enemy contact at all, and another 200 were incapacitated by non-perforating hits. Other nations, when facing a similar weight problem, developed things like the complex semi-automatic transmission-steering of the [[LightningBruiser Tiger I]], or limited the tank to roughly M4 Sherman size. Later in WWII the IS-2 tank came with a planetary steering-transmission unit.
148** The KV-2 version was created in response to the Red Army's difficulties with the Finns' fortified Mannerheim line, and the problems went from bad to worse. In order to equip the huge bunker-busting 152 mm howitzer so that it would have 360 degrees of rotation, the Soviets built a very tall turret for it, increasing the tank's overall height to 4.9 m (16 ft)! Unfortunately, this turret was a giant, impossible-to-conceal target. So, to protect the poor bastards who had to lay, load, and fire the massive gun, the Soviets made the turret armor a whopping 110 mm thick on the front and 75 mm on the sides, hoping to compensate for its huge profile and lack of sloping. Now the turret alone weighed 12.9 tonnes, so that the traverse motors couldn't ''turn it against gravity''. The tank couldn't operate at even a slight angle, or the turret would seize, and on a more pronounced lateral slope the top-heavy turret put the whole tank in danger of toppling over. The extra weight added to the tank further reduced reliability, and the recoil of the gun was so powerful it could damage the turret ring, gearbox, or engine. Production was discontinued after only 203 were built. With hindsight we can say they should have never bothered with the turret at all, and instead made it an unturreted casemate SPG, which is what they subsequently did with the much more useful SU-152.
149** The KV-1S--the S stood for ''Skorostnoy'', meaning "fast"--was an attempt to correct the mobility problems of the KV-1. Armor was reduced to save weight; the old turret was replaced by a new low-profile cast turret with a commander's cupola and proper protection for the turret ring; and a new planetary transmission was used to improve reliability and replace the old clutch-and-brake steering. Production began in August 1942, then stopped in late 1943 because they realized they'd gotten the tradeoff all wrong: a slight increase in speed wasn't worth sacrificing armor--the only advantage that the KV had over the T-34, especially considering the cost--when what the Soviets really needed was a tougher and more powerfully armed heavy tank to deal with increasingly gnarly German guns and tanks. The remaining tanks were upgraded to the KV-85, which was just a KV-1S with a more powerful 85mm gun. This still wasn't sufficient, but it was merely intended as a stopgap until the more powerful IS-2 was ready.
150** In conclusion, the downfall of the KV was that it cost more to make than the T-34, yet in practice it wasn't significantly more capable. Not only did it have less mobility, but the KV-1 never received a gun that couldn't also be mounted on the T-34. The armor was good at the start of the war, but became obsolete: in 1942 the Germans fielded the 7.5 cm Pak 40 and [=KwK=] 40 guns, ending the KV's invulnerability, followed by Tigers and Panthers in 1943 which were superior to the KV in firepower, mobility, ''and'' protection. None of the various KV upgrades provided the radical change needed, so the Soviets used the KV chassis to start developing their next generation of heavy tanks, the IS series.
151* Even the famous Soviet T-34 medium tank was kind of a mess when it first saw combat in 1941, and only evolved into a great tank by getting through some severe teething troubles.
152** In 1937, responding to shortcomings of Soviet tanks in the Spanish Civil War, the Armor and Automobile Management Bureau initiated a total review of red army stocks and put out a specification for an improved "universal tank" that would replace the BT series cruiser tanks and the T-26 infantry tanks. Mikhail Koshkin, director of Design Bureau #190, rose to the occasion with the A-20 and A-32 prototypes which evolved into the T-34. The new tank had a powerful diesel engine, wide tracks and Christie suspension for cross-country mobility, 40-45 mm of sloped armor on all sides of the hull, and a 76.2 mm gun which was more powerful than any of the German tanks' at that time. German intelligence failed to discover this new model during the planning of Operation Barbarossa, and it was a nasty shock to German vanguard forces in the summer of 1941 when they started running into a surprise Soviet super tank.
153** However the original version had a very narrow and cramped two-man turret where the commander also had to serve as the gunner. He had very bad vision and situational awareness because he had no cupola, and the large front-hinged turret roof hatch was no good for commanding unbuttoned because it blocked the front view when opened and was impossible to see around; all he could see out of from inside the tank was a single traversable periscope. He was distracted from gunning by the need to command the tank (and vice versa), and if he was also a platoon commander he had yet another thing to worry about. Thanks to its problems of vision and crew ergonomics, the Germans estimated that one of their tanks could get off about three accurate shots for every one that a T-34 could; the Soviets themselves found that despite having figured on six rounds per minute, in actual practice it was a mere two rounds per minute. It didn’t help that the tank was just being phased into service amidst the chaos of Red Army organization, so when they were called upon to fight the Germans a bunch of them didn’t have their guns set up to fire, and there was a severe shortage of 76.2 mm shells.
154** Two interrelated problems were the lack of mechanical reliability and the lack of crew experience. When it was introduced the lifespan of components was so atrocious—with the engine wearing out after 100 hours on the test stand, let alone real world conditions—that the military didn’t want to let them be used for training for fear that they’d break and then not be ready in case of war. Only 50 had been operated before the war started, while hundreds of others were kept sitting in the motor pools. Therefore the crews that went against the Germans didn’t know what they were doing, and often half the tanks would break down before they made contact with the enemy. Even one of the tank’s selling points, the Christie suspension, was a double-edged sword. It enabled high speed and obstacle crossing, but ride quality as experienced by the crew was bumpy and fatiguing. The fact that the huge coil springs were contained between two layers of side plating inside the hull made the fighting compartment more cramped, and made doing maintenance on the suspension a pain in the butt.
155** The sloped armor may have been good by 1941 standards, and could usually bounce the 3.7 cm round of the German Pak 36 anti tank gun, but its invulnerability to the Germans was somewhat overblown; they were still vulnerable to 8.8 cm Flak guns or to the Pak 38 firing 5 cm armor-piercing at close range. One reason for the invulnerable reputation is that German forces had no idea which Soviet tank was which, and sometimes misidentified the heavily armored [=KVs=] as T-34s, thus attributing the NoSell capability of the KV to the T-34. Some T-34s actually had defective armor as a result of poor manufacturing. The protection was also somewhat negated by the tank’s blindness, inability to react, and frequent lack of infantry or air support. Only the platoon commanders' tanks had radios, leaving signal flags as the only way to attempt communication, so they tended to clump together "like a hen with its chicks" when they attempted any coordination at all. In other words, they often made themselves an obliging target. When you read the impressive-sounding account of a T-34 bouncing twenty-three 3.7 cm shells off the front before being disabled by a hit to the turret ring, you have to consider the FridgeLogic of how disoriented the crew must have been inside the tank to let themselves get hit that many times. The German use of artillery and air strikes helped to keep the T-34s suppressed and confused, allowing the Panzers and anti-tank guns to set up flank shots. Despite the superiority of the T-34 on paper, the Germans still destroyed them in droves.
156** The Soviets were actually already aware of the T-34's problems before the invasion; they had been planning to produce an improved T-34M--with new features such as torsion bar suspension and a three-man turret with a commander's cupola--starting in September 1941. Unfortunately the invasion killed this project, since there was no time to retool and they needed tanks ''immediately''. Therefore they had to spam production of the flawed T-34 until they gained enough of a breather to introduce incremental improvements. While the longevity of components would never be a high priority, the manufacturers corrected the most egregious problems with things such as engines and transmissions. Radios were installed as they became available; later models came with a less cramped hexagonal two-man turret, proper turret roof hatches, a commander's cupola, and eventually a cast three-man turret with the more powerful 85 mm gun. Armor and firepower were doubled over the course of the war, while the cost was cut in half. The latter was done through vast economies of scale, removing all non-essential features, accepting crude workmanship wherever it wouldn't unacceptably hurt performance, and intentionally not bothering to build any part to last much longer than the life expectancy of the entire tank before it would be destroyed in action (which during heavy combat operations could be less than two weeks). WeHaveReserves was key to its success: it was the most produced tank family of the war and the second most of all time--80,000 including all variants and postwar production--while also being the most destroyed tank of all time at 44,900 losses throughout the 20th century.
157* The [=A7V=] was the first and only German-made tank to see combat during World War I. The German military had ignored earlier proposals to build armored breakthrough vehicles, but then the British used tanks against them in September of 1916, causing them to change their tune. Joseph Vollmer, famous automobile pioneer and chief designer of the War Department's motor vehicles section, got the job of designing one and thought he could make a machine both more fearsome and mechanically sophisticated than the British ones. In a couple of ways, he succeeded. It was shaped like a huge metal box--7.34 meters (24.1 ft) long, 3 meters (9.8 ft) wide, and 3.3 meters (11 ft) tall--and weighed 33t. It could reach higher speeds than the British Mark IV--15kph/9.3mph on road or 6.4kph/4mph cross-country--thanks to a powertrain that was fancy for its time: Unlike the British tanks, which had no suspension at all, the [=A7V's=] suspension was based on the American Holt Tractor, with 24 wheels that were individually sprung to dampen the bumps. There were two Daimler 4-cylinder engines producing 101 hp each mounted in the center, and it had a remarkable three-speed gearbox that could switch to move the tank equally fast in forward or reverse; the driver sitting in the top center could just swivel his seat around to face the way he intended to move the tank, and the only real distinction between "front" or "back" was that the front had a 57mm cannon, and the rear had two of the six machine guns. The armor was 30mm in front, 20 mm on the sides, and 10 mm on top, which was thicker than on British tanks. It must have seemed to them like they'd just created an unstoppable death machine bristling with weapons, but in practice it was an overengineered flop during its brief use from March to October of 1918. Firstly they only ever managed to make 20 out of a proposed 100 chassis, a pathetic number compared to the 3,600 FT tanks made by France and the 2,500 Mark I through V tanks made by Britain during the war. Secondly, the armor wasn't hardened, reducing its effectiveness so that despite its thickness it was still little more than machinegun proof. Thirdly, the minimum crew of 18 required both to make it run and to man all the weapons was excessive compared to the minimum of 8 in a British heavy tank. But worst of all, it just sucked as a vehicle. The driver's vision was partially obscured by the hull, its low ground clearance and overhangs in both front and back caused it to get stuck on rough terrain, and its top-heavy design made it prone to toppling over on its side. In the end, it was too little, too late. It says a lot about its impracticality that Germany's small WWI tank force used up to twice as many captured British tanks as it did [=A7Vs=].
158* The German army fielded some of the most dangerous and terrifying tanks during WWII. However due to a mix of needless complicated design, poor reliability, and low production numbers, these tanks were considered to be failures. To wit:
159** The Germans had to start over from scratch after World War I ended, since the victorious Entente powers had dismantled their tank program and banned them from owning or producing any tanks whatsoever. It began in high secrecy and at a fairly rudimentary level, since the Reichswehr had to figure out the technical problems of even putting together something that wouldn’t be TheAllegedCar. The Nazi regime inherited the Weimar Republic's tank program when they came to power, and they quickly built upon it. Contrary to subsequent propaganda, Hitler during this time was mainly interested in getting state-of-the-art hardware for the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine, and did not lavish similar funding or attention on the Panzers; it wasn’t until the Panzer divisions handed him victory in France that Hitler was converted into a major tank fan, and tank development received an increasing share of resources.
160** The Panzer I, II, III, and IV were essentially boring but practical designs. They may not have been heavily armed or armored, but they had several advantages: light weight for strategic mobility and reliability; crew positions, vision devices, and ergonomic layout which allowed them to make the most of their machines; all-welded construction which made production faster, kept the weight low, and reduced spalling; and two-way radios for every tank, which allowed for superior coordination during battle. The problem was the process for producing them: the government selected the companies to produce them based on political connections and their willingness to tolerate ExecutiveMeddling in the production process, rather than who could produce tanks as fast and cheaply as possible in large volumes. The military wanted their tanks to be put together by skilled craftsmen and display a high, even superfluous level of fit and finish. They spent far too much time and resources trying to make their machines meet 100% of all design specifications, when simply meeting only ''most'' of them would have meant that they could come up with a finished product in half the time. The German style was to make a large number of successive iterations of the same vehicle with short production runs, updating the design every time any kind of little improvement became available: for example, the Panzer Mk. III started in 1937 with Ausf. A and ultimately got to the letter N in 1943 (the letter I was skipped). This increased costs and slowed production down for the sake of tweaks which, individually, didn't make much of a difference in combat effectiveness. The Americans and Soviets in contrast produced vehicles in long runs so that they didn't have to constantly retool, and would wait for a decent number of improved features (engine, suspension, hatch design, etc.) to accumulate before introducing them all at once in one improved model. What’s more, the Germans were too slow to address the problem of having too many different chassis types at once which didn’t share components or tooling, in contrast to the Soviets who switched as soon as possible to using only three chassis types as the basis for all models and variants.
161** Jon Parshall notes in his presentation on tank production that compared to the Americans and Soviets, the Germans were held back by lack of production engineering in their tank factories and under-investment in specialized hard tooling. Ever since the moving assembly line at the Highland Park Ford Plant started up in 1913, the auto industry in Detroit had set the world standard for mass production of vehicles through principles such as Time and Motion Study. Each car would be moved through the factory along a conveyor system as it was put together, with the assembly process being broken down into highly specific steps that could be performed by semi-skilled or unskilled workers who would stand in place doing the same task over and over again as the conveyor brought them car after car. A large initial investment in plant architecture and the number of machine tools meant that each machine only needed to do one thing, and would be locked into a specific setting and fitted with whatever custom jigs would make the operation easier. The increased productivity of car plants led to decreased unit cost and the ability to vastly expand the number of people who could afford to buy a car, stimulating demand and bringing in great profits. All of this infrastructure and expertise would come in handy when the U.S. entered World War II. The Soviet Union imitated these methods when they set up their tractor and tank plants during the interwar period, hiring American industrial architects such as Albert Kahn and purchasing American machine tools. The Germans, meanwhile, went into World War II still mostly working in smaller factories with a more limited pool of highly skilled workers, using a smaller number of machine tools; often they would use one machine tool to make more than one kind of part in small batches. Doing it this way meant that a skilled machinist was required to operate a machine during an operation, and a large amount of time was wasted changing over the settings on a machine for each job. Instead of a moving assembly line, the Germans tended to use a stand based system where the tank would spend long periods sitting in one spot while the parts were brought to the tank and the workers built it up. A stand system is good for producing big-ticket items such as yachts and airliners which cost a lot and require a lot of customization to fit the customer. There was a lot of end-of-the-line tinkering to correct mistakes or to spiff up the fit and finish, which could slow down the whole line. Indeed, the military would often order a vehicle that was about to leave the factory back to the production line to be retrofitted with some new feature they had just decided was now a requirement. The drawback was that they produced tanks more slowly and at a higher unit cost compared to American or Soviet factories, to a lopsided degree. In 1940 everybody was producing at a pretty low level, and the Germans didn't really need to produce that many tanks because they were simply so much better than everyone else at the operational level of warfare. Beginning in 1941, however, the non-Axis countries went balls-to-the-wall increasing production because they anticipated a long war of attrition, while the Germans were delayed in realizing how the nature of the conflict had changed. In 1942 the Germans produced 5,939 tanks, while Great Britain produced 8,454, the U.S. produced ''26,394'', and the Soviets made 24,792. At the end of 1942 the Germans finally seemed to say OhCrap and got to work on increasing and streamlining production, so that they hit peak production with 18,956 tanks produced in 1944, despite this year being one of major losses on both fronts and Allied bombing of their factories. During the whole war, the Germans produced a total of 46,937 tanks, just ahead of Britain's 36,252, and less than half of either the United States' 102,253 or the Soviets' 106,104. Meanwhile Germany's allies Italy and Japan produced 4,333 and 5,369, respectively. In other words Germany accounted for the overwhelming majority of Axis tank production, and they were ''swamped'' by the Allies almost 5 to 1. Did German tanks have some important strengths and advantages over their opponents? Sure. But were all of the German models literally five times better at everything than all of the Allied models? No way. And in some ways they were actually ''worse''.
162** German tanks were also harder to repair. In the U.S., parts were required to fit from the factory and be 100% interchangeable. G. [=McCloud=] Ross from the British tank mission to the U.S. noted that he never saw a vise on an engineer's workbench in American tank factories, because the only thing you'd need one of those for is to hold a part that you're modifying to fit. German tanks, however, were full of individual quirks and replacement parts needed to have bits shaved off or welded onto them to fit a particular tank. It didn't help that there were so many different models out at the same time, for which various parts were made differently. Lastly, these tanks were not designed for easy removal of individual parts: whereas the American M4 had the transmission and final drives contained in a bolted-on front section so you could simply take off the old module and stick on a new one, replacing the transmission on the Panzer III or Tiger I required removing the turret and everything behind the transmission--including the positions of the driver and radio operator/machine gunner--so you could lift it out through the turret ring with a crane.
163** Before going into the rest, it's worth pointing out that the broad shift of the Germans towards heavy armor and armament at the expense of mobility and numbers made sense in their situation. They could not realistically have beaten the Soviets and Americans at their own numbers game, and in any case producing more vehicles would have only exacerbated their increasing shortages of manpower and fuel. Unlike the Americans they did not have to worry about making their tanks too heavy to ship overseas, and if they really had to they could put a tank on a train back to the factory for a complete overhaul. And finally they were fighting a defensive war from 1943, in which quality was perhaps more useful than quantity. HOWEVER, their manufacturing process was still wasteful and inefficient even at producing fewer vehicles, and the lack of mechanical reliability, repair capacity and skilled crews rather defeated the idea of going for quality over quantity.
164** The ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_I Panzerkampfwagen VI]]'' [[TankGoodness heavy tank]], aka the Tiger I:
165*** This tank was infamous for its combination of firepower and protection. The Tiger could kill a T-34/76 from 1500 meters away using its great big 88 mm [=KwK=] 36 L/56 gun. With armor 100mm thick on the front and 80 mm on the sides and rear, it was practically immune to the weaker enemy guns of the time as long as it maintained a standoff distance of 1000 meters. It also drove pretty well for a tank that weighed 57 tonnes combat loaded: it was by no means slow, the wide tracks provided flotation on soft ground, and the ''Schachtellaufwerk'' suspension with interleaved and overlapping road wheels made the ride nice and smooth. Beyond the stats the Tiger's reputation took on a life of its own, such that merest mention of a Tiger would be enough to send Allied tank crews into a panic, and in their paranoia they would often misidentify the similar-looking-at-a-distance and much more common Panzer IV as TheDreaded Tiger. Ever since, it's been perhaps the most written about and most overhyped tank in history.
166*** However, the Tiger was actually something of a white elephant: it was difficult to manufacture, difficult to transport, and very difficult to maintain. Despite its vaunted reputation, the Tiger was actually something of a rush job pushed out in response to panic over the Soviets' KV-1 and T-34. The military increased the weight for its breakthrough tank specification to accommodate the desired armor and armament, and held a contest to determine whether Porsche or Henschel would get the contract. In order to have a prototype ready in time for competitive testing before Hitler on his 53rd birthday--April 20, 1942--the people at Henschel had to basically cobble a new tank together using as many parts as possible from existing tank projects. Since these components had mostly been designed for tanks that would have weighed half as much, and the Tiger was rushed into production without waiting for testing and bug fixes, it broke down frequently and required a full maintenance overhaul every few hundred miles. That often meant sending the tank by rail back to the factory that made it. This big boy was too heavy to cross most bridges, the initial ability to snorkel through rivers was left out of later models to reduce production time, and it was difficult to recover if knocked out. The intricate suspension created its own problems, as detailed in a bullet entry further below. Furthermore, Germany's deteriorating military situation later on meant that crucial supplies of nickel, molybdenum, tungsten, and manganese for armor plate were cut off; so the previously excellent German alloy steel was replaced with weakened variants to save on vital materials. This in turn meant that the Tiger's thick armour had an embarrassing habit of shattering on impact. The German tendency to overstuff their guns with propellant, thereby increasing muzzle velocity for better long-range accuracy and penetration, meant that the tank's mighty 88mm gun wore out barrels quickly and had a muzzle-flare that could be seen from miles away. It was also very expensive to manufacture because of its weight, complexity, and the inefficient process used by the Henschel factory: a Tiger cost around twice as much as a Panzer Mark IV and over four times as much as a [=StuG=] IV assault gun.
167*** Now, despite its faults, Nicholas Moran [[https://youtu.be/57oRqB_a-SA notes]] that on the whole it was actually a pretty excellent tank; the problem is that it was designed to perform a specific role, and then it was yanked out of that role by circumstance. The Tiger was an elite heavy breakthrough tank meant to punch a hole in the enemy's line at a decisive point, which exploitation forces with cheaper tanks would then flood through. This would have involved a relatively short period of intense combat in which it might take a lot of fire (hence the armor), but the Tiger's job was done as soon as the breakthrough was achieved, meaning it could be withdrawn for maintenance and repairs to await its next mission. It wouldn't have been such a problem that it took more logistics and planning to transport, or that it took more man-hours to maintain, because that kind of breakthrough task wouldn't be demanded very often and there should have been plenty of time between missions to take care of those matters. The Tiger's high cost and low numbers were also acceptable to the Wehrmacht because it was never intended to replace standard medium tanks, but rather to support the military's panzer forces in an important specialized role. Unfortunately, when the invasion of Russia turned into a fiasco, desperate German commanders who were often ignorant of the Tiger's limitations turned it into what Moran calls "The Fireman of the Eastern Front": wherever the Soviets attacked German forces the Tigers would be rushed over there to defend, and no sooner had they put out the fire in one place then they would be on their way to extinguish another somewhere else. This lack of rest meant they couldn't take the proper time for repairs or maintenance, and with ever more breakdowns the operational readiness rate of Tigers went way down, so that there often wouldn't be enough in working order when they were really needed. Maybe this tank could have been just plain awesome in the proactive role its was designed for, but it turned out impractical in the reactive role that was forced upon it.
168** Moran describes the complex ''Schachtellaufwerk'' suspension used on the Tiger I and Panther chassis as both an engineer's dream and an end user's nightmare. The Tiger had sixteen torsion bars in the hull, with eight suspension arms on each side and three road wheels on each arm. Normally you can either have big wheels for an easier time rolling over obstacles, or a lot of smaller wheels to produce more even ground pressure. The Tiger does both by arranging the large 80 cm wheels in an overlapped and interleaved pattern on wide tracks, while torsion bar suspension allows a lot of vertical travel for each set of wheels. The overlapping wheels even act as additional armor for the lower hull. The obstacle-crossing capability and smoothness of the ride are unmatched, but if you damage just one inner road wheel, you'll have to take off as many as nine other wheels in order to get at it. The Tiger's combat tracks and wheels were also too wide for rail cars: First, to get it on the rail car they had to remove the outer road wheels and put it on narrower transport tracks, and then at its destination they had put the outer wheels and combat tracks back on. As if all that wasn't enough, there's an unconfirmed but plausible-sounding anecdote about how in Russian winter conditions, mud could get between the wheels and then freeze them together overnight, so that a tank crew would wake up and find themselves stuck when they tried to start the tank. Even without that, both tanks had relatively narrow treads that lost traction quickly on icy or muddy conditions, which was a huge liability in Russia. While torsion bar suspension is universal nowadays, no country but Nazi Germany (and very briefly, postwar France) has ever made tanks with interleaved, overlapping wheels because the maintenance is more trouble than the concept is worth. The Germans tried to mitigate the problems later by replacing rubber-rimmed wheels with steel-rimmed ones, and by producing the Tiger II and some later Panthers with overlapped, but not interleaved wheels.
169** The ''Panzerkampfwagen V Panther'' tank was the Germans' next generation successor to the Mark III and IV models, having been redesigned after Operation Barbarossa to serve as Germany's answer to the Soviet T-34. Unlike the Mark III and IV it would be a heavy tank weighing 45 tonnes, but at the same time it was different in purpose from the Tiger; while the Tiger had been built following the concept of the breakthrough tank, the Panther was specifically designed as a tank-killer whose presence would reinforce the German armored forces, giving them confidence that they had something to counter even the toughest Soviet models.
170*** On paper it looks like the best fighting tank in the war: it had better mobility, frontal armor, and gun performance against tanks than the Tiger I, yet it was far cheaper and produced in quantity second only to that of the Panzer IV. On the other hand it was somewhat over-specialized for Eastern-style long-range combat on open ground, leading to some design choices that would be rather problematic in the closer quarters of the Western front: the commander didn’t have a turret traverse override to help the gunner get on target, while the gunner had no periscope or unity sight, just the magnified gunsight through the mantlet which had restricted field of view. If the tank was in a turret-down position, or if the enemy happened to not be within the sight picture already, the gunner has nothing to go on except the commander’s verbal instructions, reducing "shoot first" capability and making it more awkward at closer ranges. The turret traverse speed was also slow, putting it at a disadvantage if the enemy approached from an unexpected direction. Despite being lighter than the Tiger, the Panther still had to beware of crossing bridges or breaking the final drive by performing high-torque maneuvers such as pivot turning. There were also some weaknesses in protection: it had thin side armor because of the need to keep weight under control, and the ammo racks were in the hull sponsons where they could get hit and catch fire. Probably the worst oversight was that the curved underside of the gun mantlet on early versions could act as a shot trap by deflecting an incoming shell downwards into the thinly-armored front hull roof, one of the few frontal weaknesses that a 75 mm Sherman could exploit.
171*** The interleaved suspension was about as much of a pain in the butt to repair as the Tiger's, and there were serious engine problems early in production. Worst of all, the Panther was horribly unreliable upon introduction because it was rushed through development and production before severe mechanical issues could be fixed. The single biggest issue was that in order to mass produce the Panther despite a shortage of crucial gear-cutting machinery, the Germans had cancelled their plan to use a planetary system for the final drive and instead changed it to a double spur system. Spur gears are the simplest type because the teeth are cut straight across the face, making them much easier to produce than helical or herringbone gears, but they’re also more prone to failure since more stress is concentrated on one tooth at a time where they mesh with each other; the driver of a Panther had to be very delicate with the gears to avoid damage. Furthermore, inferior alloys were being used in final drive construction because key metals were scarce, and they broke after 150 km on average, accounting for 50% of mechanical failures. Because it was so difficult to change the transmission in a Panther or come up with a spare to do so, Potential History [[BlackComedy jokes]] that there'd probably be a German mechanic on [[DrivenToSuicide suicide watch]]. Ironically, it could be quite a pleasant vehicle to drive because of its well-designed steering system, as long as the driver was an expert who knew exactly what to do. Unfortunately, that was usually not the case; green recruits were being hurried through training to replace the losses of well-trained panzer crews, and few of these had ''ever'' had the chance to drive a motor vehicle in civilian life thanks to Germany’s economic woes. Thus, there was a mismatch between the high operator skill required to drive this vehicle without breaking it, and the low training level of available manpower.
172*** Most of the technical issues were more or less fixed eventually, but by then it was too late: fuel shortages, lack of alloys for good armor and components, lack of spare parts, and insufficiently trained crews reduced their combat effectiveness so much it hardly mattered how good the design was. The French army used Panthers after the war and managed to operate them somewhat more effectively, yet noted their inherent problems in a comprehensive report.
173** Pull up a chair and read the saga of the Tiger I that ''didn't'' get made, and instead became a candidate for Germany's worst AFV in World War II:
174*** When the Wehrmacht announced the contest to decide which company would get to produce the Tiger I, Ferdinand Porsche submitted a prototype that used a novel petrol electric generator drive: instead of the usual tank setup of having one internal combustion engine provide power through a drivetrain to a transmission connected to the drive sprockets, this design had two gasoline or diesel engines that charged two electric generators, which fed two electric motors connected to the drive sprockets. The idea was to avoid the reliability problems that come with having a mechanical gearbox, and deal more easily with the fluctuating torque requirements of a tracked vehicle going over rough terrain. This kind of petrol electric drive had already been successful in other applications such as cars and trains, and Porsche wasn't the first--nor would he be the last--to try putting it in a tank.
175*** Sadly, despite the generators and electric drive working as they were supposed to, the problem was with the internal combustion engines and how they were affected by the overall layout. Porsche was a talented engineer, famous for his racecars and the original Volkswagen Beetle, but he increasingly suffered from ComplexityAddiction and felt compelled to use only the latest cutting edge technology in his machines. In this case he wanted to design his own state-of-the-art engine rather than using an existing model, and his insistence on starting from scratch on a tight deadline was ill-advised considering that high horsepower engines in those days required years of refinement in order to make them reliable. On top of that, an inevitable problem with petrol electric was the amount of space it took up inside the vehicle compared to regular internal combustion. Having to cram so much extra machinery into a hull of the specification size didn't leave enough room for proper engine cooling, and the powerplant was inadequate for the huge 60 tonne mass of the vehicle. As a result the twin engines were prone to overheating, breaking down, and even bursting into flame.
176*** The Henschel and Porsche prototypes were tested against each other in front of Hitler on his 53rd birthday, 20 April 1942, and the people running the trials quickly realized that they'd be better off choosing the simpler Henschel model: the Porsche prototype demonstrated its unreliability with an embarrassing breakdown, and they balked at the idea of mass producing a vehicle whose electrical machinery would have required so much strategic copper.
177*** That would have been the end of Porsche's folly if not for one big problem: he'd had been so confident that his version would be selected that he'd already gone and had the Nibelungenwerk factory in Sankt Valentin, Austria produce ''100 hulls'' for his tank that didn't work, and all the money, time, and material that Germany had poured into them would go to waste if something wasn't done. Armament Minister Speer decided that the Porsche Tiger should be used as the basis for a new heavy ''Jagdpanzer'' ("hunting tank", i.e. tank destroyer) that could mount Krupp's new 8.8 cm Pak 43 L-71 antitank gun, which attained higher muzzle velocity than the L-56 used on the Tiger I by having a substantially longer barrel and using ammo with the same caliber projectile but an enlarged propellant case. This decision was influenced by the fact that the 100 turrets originally ordered from Krupp to put on the Tiger(p) hulls had instead been installed on the first 100 Henschel Tigers, and Krupp was now set up to produce hydraulic instead of electrically operated turrets. German engineers welded a large superstructure onto the rear half of the Porsche Tiger hull to accommodate the larger gun and a second loader, increased the frontal armor to 200 mm, and moved the engines--now a pair of the same reliable Maybach [=HL120=] model engines used in the Panzer III and IV--up to the middle of the hull since there was no longer room in the rear. The now 65-ton vehicle was named the ''Ferdinand'' after its inventor: 91 ''Ferdinand'' tank destroyers were hurriedly put together from March to May 1943, and they were sent in two groups to the Eastern Front.
178*** Despite the reconfigured design, the ''Ferdinand'' continued to be plagued with problems related to lack of space for proper cooling and access to the engines, as well as its longitudinal torsion bar suspension (another of Porsche's bright ideas) which helped save much-needed space in the hull but was more failure-prone and complicated to maintain than regular horizontal torsion bar suspension. These machines broke down with alarming frequency: one crewman recounts an incident during Operation Citadel where the engines of multiple ''Ferdinands'' caught fire one after another from the strain of climbing a hill, which initially made the crews think they were being hit by artillery! The drive sprockets also had to be changed every 500 km. In the Battle of Kursk in July and August of 1943, the Ferdinands were effective at sniping Soviet tanks from ranges of up to 2 km, where their heavy armor and long-range firepower gave them a strong advantage. However, once they advanced further into the deep defenses the Soviets had set and got isolated from their infantry, their lack of a turret, peripheral vision periscopes, [[PointDefenseless or even machine guns]] meant that Soviet troops could hide in trenches until the tank destroyer passed, and then swarm it with Molotov cocktails and demolition charges. Perhaps too much has been made of the lack of machine guns, since Kursk was a weird kind of chaotic situation and they would have normally been shooting from a safe distance away, but the more serious problems for them were mines, artillery, and mechanical failures: any damage to the suspension made the armor moot by forcing the crew to get out in the open to perform repairs. The super-heavy vehicles were also horribly difficult to tow, requiring ''five'' of the standard armored recovery vehicles based on the Panzer IV chassis to drag one off the battlefield if disabled.
179*** Between January and April of 1944, 48 of the 50 surviving ''Ferdinands'' were called back to the factory and given a modification package based on the lessons of Kursk. This included a ball-mounted MG 34 on the hull front, redesigned armored engine grates, a commander's cupola with seven periscopes, ''Zimmerit'' anti-magnetic mine coating, and additional armor in some places, which brought up the weight of the vehicle--now renamed ''Elefant''--to 70 tonnes. ''Again'', with no increase in engine power. ''Elefants'' were then deployed to try and hold back the Allied landings at Anzio, Italy, where the mountainous terrain both negated their advantage in long range combat and exacerbated their deficits in mobility and reliability.
180*** Despite an impressive kill/loss ratio--crews reported about 10:1, though claimed kill numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt--far too much precious time and resources had to be spent trying to recover and repair immobilized vehicles, and many of them had to be abandoned or destroyed by their crews. In his analysis of the ''Ferdinand''/''Elefant'', [[https://youtu.be/Qx2-jLNHdzY Potential History]] judges that this whole project was an example of the SunkCostFallacy, and that the Germans should have cut their losses by letting the misbegotten things die early on.
181** The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_II Tiger II]] was the bigger, badder sequel to the already big and bad Tiger I, intended to replace the previous stopgap with something designed from the ground up for heavy tank supremacy. Improvements included simplified suspension, thicker, sloped armor, and the long-barreled 8.8 cm [=KwK=] 43 L/71 cannon, which was derived from the Pak 43 used in the ''Ferdinand'' and thus became the most powerful gun ever mounted in a revolving turret on an operational World War II tank. It could perforate Allied tanks from up to 3km away, and there is no record of a Tiger II ever having been perforated through the front during the war. However, the Tiger II had some serious performance issues. Because of production limitations due to the Allied bombing campaign targeting German industry, the Tiger II's initial drivetrain was from a tank twenty tons lighter, resulting in broken transmissions and destroyed engines. It required 300,000 man-hours to build, cost as much as two Tiger I tanks or nine M4 Shermans, and guzzled large amounts of fuel which the Third Reich was dangerously short on. The biggest liability however was the Tiger II's sheer mass. Try to imagine just how much of a panic attack a logistics officer had when trying to figure out how to pull a 70-tonne tank out of a crater in a bog in the middle of a battle, or out of a stream after the bridge beneath it collapsed. More Tiger II's were rendered unrecoverable due to mechanical failure and getting stuck in terrain than those that were destroyed. When they were destroyed, it was usually due to being in terrain "lesser tanks" had an easier time negotiating and liberal use of the air superiority that the Allies so enjoyed at that point of the war.
182** Also awesome but impractical was the colossal 71.7 tonne ''Jagdtiger'', the heaviest enclosed armored vehicle ever put into production, which was essentially a Tiger II with a gigantic 128mm Pak 80 Krupp gun mounted in a fixed casemate instead of a turret. On one hand, its frontal armor was nigh impenetrable at up to 250 mm thick, while its naval caliber gun could be accurate out to about 3.5 km away and was guaranteed to destroy any kind of Allied tank it hit. On the other hand...everything else about it. This thing was clearly designed without any concern for Germany's logistical limitations. It was slow, fuel-guzzling, and unreliable since it was so overweight and underpowered, making it necessary to depend heavily on the rail transport system which by this time was increasingly disabled by Allied air attacks. As a result, it could hardly ever be gotten to the battlefield in time to be of use. The gun was so powerful as to be overkill in almost any situation, and the ammo was so massive that the projectile and propellant charge had to be loaded separately, hence a lousy rate of fire. Indeed, the Jagdtiger with its run of eighty-odd vehicles was the only production model that used this shell type, which unnecessarily complicated logistics. The gun could only be moved 10° to the left and the right each on account of the casemate, so it was usually necessary to turn the whole TD to aim at a target. Turning the war's heaviest operational armored vehicle on the spot did put quite a lot of stress of the drive system, which therefore often broke down when it was needed most. It really didn’t help that the transmission couldn’t be pulled out the roof for repairs without first removing the big-ass main gun and then stripping out the driver and co-driver’s positions. Without the ability to turn the TD, it could not defend itself against anything outside the 20° sector; its [=MG34=] machine gun was also front-facing with limited traverse. By the time it was employed it was easy prey to air attacks, and since all the good tank crews had been killed earlier in the war, the green soldiers who operated this monster vehicle just weren't skilled enough to use it properly. German tank commander Otto Carius wrote about a Jagdtiger whose inexperienced German commander panicked under fire and made his crew attempt a U-turn instead of reversing backwards; this exposed the thinner side armor, which was easily penetrated and resulted in all six crew members dying. On a similar note, some surrendering crews abandoned their Jagdtigers with their ears bleeding and their nerves frayed beyond repair despite the fact that ''not a single shot had penetrated the vehicle''; it turns out that the cacophonous noise inside from all the shells bouncing off [[DeathOfAThousandCuts had battered and disoriented the inexperienced crewmembers into submission]]. Only about 20% of the ''Jagdtiger'' vehicles were lost in combat, and most were destroyed by their own crews when abandoned due to breakdown or lack of fuel.
183** The Germans also built the ''Sturmmörser Tiger'' or ''Sturmtiger'', consisting of a heavily armored casemate installed on a Tiger I surplus hull and armed with a colossal 38cm rocket mortar for destroying buildings. Oddly enough, this rocket mortar had originally been developed by the Kriegsmarine as a coastal antisubmarine weapon. First a normal charge would lob the round out of the barrel, and then once it was clear of the vehicle the round's rocket propulsion would fire. The huge 350 kg/770 lbs. projectile was capable of crashing through about eight feet of concrete and blasting most hardened defenses to rubble. There is also an unconfirmed report of a single one of these shells taking out three M4 Shermans near Duren and Euskirchen during the Battle of Remagen. Alkett produced 19 vehicles--each one slightly different from the others in minor construction details--and they were distributed to three armored assault mortar companies.
184*** Mortar Company 1000 saw action in the Warsaw Uprising: the unit commander reported that the 38cm rocketgun was extremely effective. [[GoneHorriblyRight So effective]], in fact, that the ''Sturmtiger'' risked damaging friendly forces or even ''itself'' if either got too close to the projectile's roughly 500 meter blast. The circumstances of urban combat were forcing them to use one Assault Mortar at a time in the direct fire role, using a naval antitank sight to aim down city streets. Apart from the risk of collateral damage, there was also the problem that the massive blast of the mortar shell usually had the effect of replacing an impassable enemy fortification with an equally impassable chaos of rubble and craters, which sucked for the troops who actually had to follow through.
185*** The February 1945 manual, written by the Artillery after they took over control of the assault mortars from the Panzer arm, stated that such use was to be an exception, and that otherwise they should always operate in batteries of four, laying indirect fire on targets up to 5500 meters away. Having four of them all firing at the same target compensated for the large dispersion of hits at long range, as well as each crew only being able to load and fire about four rounds per hour. Still, the target would have to be something really big like a building or a huge concentration of troops and supplies in order to have a chance of hitting it and make using the high-value weapon worthwhile. Each vehicle could carry 12 to 14 rounds, and only 317 rounds were ever issued to all vehicles in total, leaving an average of 17.6 shots per mortar. Despite being heavily armored and hopefully very far away from return fire, the assault mortars were advised to seek concealment because the enemy would try to take them out. The large amount of gas that they vented out the holes in the barrel to reduce recoil tended to give their position away, and they had to be protected by the company's organic antiaircraft assets. Finally, they were at the end of the day ''Tigers'' with the expected maintenance and fuel requirements, more so because they were eight tonnes heavier.
186*** The other two ''Sturmtiger'' companies saw action on the Western front at the Ardennes offensive and at Remagen, with disappointing results. Most of the ''Sturmtiger''s ended up abandoned by their crews after they could no longer obtain ammunition or fuel. Much like the Ferdinand, it looks like a case of thinking they'd found a good use for valuable hardware that would otherwise go to waste, except that the resulting white elephant required a lot of maintenance and protection and had to take out really high value targets in order to be worth it, something which didn't reliably happen. It was weapon suited to the purely offensive role of attacking enemy cities, yet it was coming out after the failure of Operation Citadel permanently changed the German position from invading to being invaded. Perhaps some kind of tank destroyer would have been a better strategic use of those chassis.
187** Most of the problems the Germans had with the above designs could have been averted if Hitler had diverted as much resources to logistics as he did to the sharp end. One critical failure in this regard was the Nazis neglect of armored recovery vehicles. Most modern armies base their [=ARVs=] on the principle that "1 pulls 1": ie, 1 ARV is sufficient to recover 1 main battle tank. The Germans, due to a failure to update their designs, maintained recovery vehicles based on the Panzer IV chassis even as the ''Heer'' switched to Panthers, Tigers, and then on to Tiger [=IIs=]. It took ''five'' Bergepanzer [=IVs=] or three halftracks to pull a Tiger or ''Elefant'' out of action, even more for a Tiger II. In some senses, Hitler's neglect of logistics made ''the entire Wehrmacht'' Awesome, But Impractical.
188** Dr. Roman Töppel says that Germany did not lose the war because they didn't have enough tanks; they lost because they didn't produce enough spare parts to keep them running! Because German tank production was fairly inefficient at the outset of the war and could barely meet demand to begin with, they weren't willing to slow production down in order to produce generous numbers of spare parts. This didn't turn out to be such a big deal in their invasions of Poland and France, which involved relatively short distances and which they accomplished in such a short time that mechanical wear was minimal. However the distances in Russia were a lot greater and the roads were rougher, consisting of dirt that tended to billow up in huge clouds when the panzers drove over them. This dust got sucked into the engine intakes and wore out the engines so that they needed to be replaced after a certain distance, but there simply weren't enough spares to go around and many otherwise perfectly good tanks were disabled. Also, because Germany alone didn't have enough fighting vehicles or trucks for Operation Barbarossa, they had commandeered basically everything with either tracks or wheels throughout all their captured territory, going into Russia with a chaotic menagerie of models from different countries with as few parts in common as you can imagine. The further they pressed into the USSR, and the longer the campaign dragged on, the worse it got. When Albert Speer became Germany's armaments minister, he made a big show of increasing all kinds of war production, including tanks. However, because he was so focused on achieving big vehicle production numbers in order to please Hitler and make himself look good, he pursued this at the expense of spare parts production. For example, despite the frequent breakdowns of Tiger I tanks, the factories would make just one extra engine and transmission for every ten Tigers they produced. Therefore, unlike the Americans who sent large numbers of spare parts to Europe so their tanks could be maintained, German tank crews had to wait for months to get a requisition filled. When spares came in on the trains, crewmen from different tanks would literally fight over them using their fists. Since it was forbidden to cannibalize any of their tanks for parts, the units would do things like falsely report a damaged but recoverable tank as a total loss so they could get away with stripping it. So however many tigers and panthers Germany had on paper at any given time, in reality a large portion of them were broken down waiting for parts.
189** For context, loss-rates for armoured vehicles during offensive operations in WWII average 50-300%, but irrecoverable losses were typically only 20-50% (no new vehicles being added). It is extremely easy to put a vehicle out of action (usually by a 'mobility kill' i.e. damaging the track and road wheels with mines, grenades, or shells fired at the flank), and thus immeasurably important to have an effective vehicle-repair institution in place. Not losing the ground you fight on is also extremely important, as it means you don't have to destroy your immobilized vehicles to prevent the enemy from capturing them.
190** Finally, one of the biggest flaws in the Tiger I/Panther/Tiger II was their own status as TheDreaded: Their unique profiles, massive sizes (moreso for the Tigers than the Panther) and fearsome reputation meant that while yes, they struck fear into the Allies, it also means those tanks were instantly recognizable at practically any distance and higher on the Allies' kill lists than the more mundane Panzer III's and IV's, and they often faced the prospect of being destroyed by prowling Allied pilots before they even ''made it to the front line.'' This is also why most Allies never [[VehicularTurnabout made use of]] the German machines in the first place: even if you dressed it up with Allied markings, you were liable to get bombed on sight from the air. Those Allied ground-support pilots had ''very'' itchy trigger fingers.
191* The famous German half-tracks for used for supply and as infantry armored cars all used the same ''Schachtellaufwerk'' type of chassis and track, only scaled up or down to their respective size. Unlike tank tracks, which were classic links held together by pins, in ''Schachtellaufwerk'' tracks designed to allow high road speeds all track links were fitted on needle bearings with individual sealing and lubrication. That makes ''a few hundred'' lubricated bearings for each vehicle, with expected costs and hardship of maintainence. And all for no useful purpose, since there were strict orders to drive them at lesser speeds than possible anyway. The interleaving and overlapping wheels were also a big maintenance issue, namely that mechanics would have to disassemble the running gear assembly just to replace ONE wheel.
192* The whole German approach to half-tracks was a tad over-engineered, even if you allow for the fact that the Sd.Kfz. 250 and 251 were supposed to be more like Armored Personnel Carriers or Infantry Fighting Vehicles than just utility trucks with improved cross-country mobility. While the Americans, inspired by French designs, basically took the existing M3 Scout Car and replaced the rear wheels with sprockets to drive a short bogie suspension track unit, the Germans came at it from the opposite direction by making an almost fully-tracked caterpillar chassis with a wheeled steering axle added to the front. American developers sometimes called what the Germans made a "three-quarter track". Unlike the American M2 and M3 half-tracks which relied entirely on the front wheels for steering and only used the tracks for propulsion, the German Sd.Kfz. 250 and 251 had a more complicated steering system where the wheels would take care of slight turns to preserve momentum, and when the steering wheel was turned more sharply the differential steering of the tracks would kick in to assist with the turn. This did meet the criterion of the vehicle handling more like a truck and being easier to drive than a tank, but the expense of producing it and the complexity of maintenance were equal to or greater than that of a fully tracked vehicle. The manager of the factory that made the Sd.Kfz. 8 said that for every three of them he produced, he could have made ''five'' Panthers. At the same time, while it had better cross-country mobility than American half-tracks and wasn't as crippled if the front axle got taken out, the front wheels reduced its obstacle-climbing ability compared to a fully tracked vehicle.
193* The Einheits-PKW concept of the Wehrmacht preceded the development of the Volkswagen Type 81 Kubelwagen. Standardized passenger cars in three classes (light, medium, and heavy) were designed for versatility and good off-road handling. The problem with this was that the cars made in this program were horribly complex and overweight for their engine-power, making them fuel-inefficient and occupant unfriendly (especially off-road). Many design details like 4-wheel steering on the light and heavy cars and mid-chassis spare tires as rough-ground buffering gave mechanics a nightmare.
194* The early Cold War saw the final development of the heavy tank concept. The Soviets, who had started the ''Iosif Stalin'' heavy tank series to counter the German Tigers and Panthers, continued making new IS models to keep ahead of its postwar Western rivals. Meanwhile, the US and allies such as Britain and France created their own heavy tank programs to counter the IS-3. Gigantic guns meant to kill enemy tanks at extremely long range were combined with thick steel armor, so they could perform over-watch support for the lighter tanks and take out the opponent's heavies. There were several problems with them: weight was increasing to the point where the powertrain technology of the time couldn't keep up, causing low speed, fuel economy, and reliability; the size of the shells they fired reduced the number of rounds they could carry and required two-piece loading, hence a slow rate of fire; and their size made them slow and difficult to transport to the combat zone, or to recover if knocked out. By the 1960s they were obsolete in the face of improved High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) rounds and Anti-Tank Guided Missiles ([=ATGMs=]) which no practical thickness of homogeneous steel armor could protect against, and against which they were sitting ducks with their low speeds and large profiles. Indeed, there was little need for a heavy tank’s oversized gun when an ATGM could kill any enemy tank at long range just as well, and at a lower cost. The heavies were rare and extensive, yet still just as likely to be taken out by mines, tank destroyers, artillery, and aircraft. Therefore they were abandoned while all focus went to developing balanced and increasingly capable Main Battle Tanks such as the Chieftain, M60, and T-64.
195** The IS-3 used the same giant 122 mm D-25 gun as the IS-2, which had terrorized the Germans in the Great Patriotic War. It also incorporated a new "pike" nose with compound sloping which made the upper glacis almost impenetrable, and a turret shaped like an upside-down soup bowl which was more protective and presented a lower profile. Although it didn't get into action before the Germans surrendered, it was shown off to the world in the post-war Berlin Victory Parade on September 7, 1945, crewed by the 71st Guards Heavy Tank Regiment of the 2nd Guards Tank Army. The sight of 52 of these heavy tanks rumbling in formation caused the Western officials at the parade to metaphorically crap their pants, and when they got home their countries spent huge effort coming up with their own tanks to counter it. However, the IS-3 wasn't as great as it looked. The low turret may have been protective but it also reduced gun depression and headroom for the crew, especially the loader. Neither the gun nor its fire control were precise at long range. Its two-piece ammunition was unwieldly, meaning that just 2-3 shots per minute were possible and only 28 rounds could be stored. Furthermore, wartime production was shoddy and there was a tendency for hull welds and turret castings to crack, which is why production was ended in 1946 at 2,311 units. Engine, transmission, and running gear breakdowns were also frequent. IS-3s were being constantly rebuilt afterwards to correct these issues, costing a huge amount of money and reducing the number that were ready for action at any given time.
196** The IS-4 was also derived from the IS-2, but at 53 tonnes it was more massive than both IS-2 and IS-3. It had a turret similar to the IS-2, but lengthened the hull and had heavier armor with a sloped glacis. By the time it entered production in 1946 it was overweight and less advanced than the IS-3, so less than 250 were made.
197** The IS-7 was a magnificent beast, the heaviest of the IS tanks at 68 tonnes and a technological marvel of its time. It had very heavy and well-angled armor, proof even against its own gun and the German 128 mm, yet also a 1050 HP diesel engine and 8-speed planetary gearbox that enabled a fantastic road speed of 60 km/hr (33mph). Besides an even bigger 130 mm gun it had infrared scopes and an automatic loading assistance device which enabled up to 6-8 rounds per minute. However, the gun had to be return to a neutral position for this device to work, and that rate of fire didn't account for the fact that the device itself had to be reloaded. The tank also had a silly armament of ''eight'' machine guns. This included two KVT heavy machine guns--one coaxial and one pintle mounted on the roof that could be remote controlled--and six 7.62 mm SGS-43 machine guns: two coaxial, two fixed forward-firing ones on the hull, and two fixed backwards-firing ones on the turret. Nick Moran reckons it could have stood to lose five of them. Alas, it was expensive and difficult to produce, and the weight made it impractical to transport by rail. It would have been an incredible breakthrough tank but good for nothing else; larger numbers of medium tanks and the less massive T-10 were considered more appropriate for doctrine. Only 7 prototypes were made and it was rejected for production.
198** The T-10 was produced beginning in 1953; it was originally going to be called the IS-10, but got renamed after the death of Stalin. It was essentially an improved IS-3 with a new, longer 122 mm gun with fume extractor, larger turret, improved engine, and tougher armor. However the T-54/55 and T-62 tanks already had comparable firepower and armor while being more flexible. As the T-64 tank became available, T-10 production was stopped in 1966 and all further heavy tank projects were cancelled.
199** The last Western heavy tanks, the American M103 and British Conqueror, both used the tremendously powerful 120mm M58 rifled gun. This was supposed to allow them to out-range the gun of the IS-3, and defeat its armor at a distance where the IS-3 couldn't hit or perforate them in return. Both were impressive in their own way, but there were problems.
200*** The development of a heavy gun tank was jointly supported by the United States Army, which wanted to counter the IS-3, and the United States Marine Corps, which wanted a heavy to help drive an amphibious invasion inland after medium tanks had secured the beachhead. Unfortunately there were numerous difficulties throughout development, and after the initial IS-3 panic the Army started to lose interest. The Korean War served as a second wake-up call which led to the conception of a new prototype called the T43, and in January 1951 the army gave Chrysler a contract to produce it. Chrysler manufactured a series of 300 [=T43E1=] tanks in 1953-54, but these were determined after testing to be unsatisfactory and they ended up missing the war altogether. The Army basically gave up on the T43 after this debacle, and it was only the Marine Corps demanding that the tank be salvaged which led to it entering service as the M103 in 1957 after receiving 98 separate modifications. The 59 tonne M103 suffered from initially using the same powertrain as the much lighter M48 tank, leading to a sluggish 21 mph top speed, an operational range of only 80 miles, and serious maintenance issues. It also carried only 34 rounds and lacked proper NBC protection. The Marines received 220 M103 tanks, while the Army received the remaining 80; it operated a single battalion of [=M103s=] in Europe from 1958 to 1963, when they replaced them with 105 mm-armed M60s and gave their 80 to the Marines as well. The final [=M103A2=] upgrade actually turned out to be a really cool tank and well-liked by its Marine Corps crews, especially with the M60's new diesel engine which provided improved power and fuel economy. However, by this time it was basically an anachronism and was never used in combat. All of them were withdrawn from service by 1974.
201*** The Conqueror was ridiculously huge at 64 tonnes and used a Meteor engine, giving it a 35 km/h (22 mph) top speed and 161 km (100 mi) operational range. This was a little bit better than the M103, and it did have Churchill-like cross-country mobility, but still not ideal. The M103 dealt with the heavy two-piece 120 mm ammo by having two loaders in the turret, but the Conqueror only had one; special fitness courses had to be offered to help Conqueror loaders develop the necessary strength. Two devices to help him were evaluated: a ramming assist to push the shell into the breech, and a system to eject spent propellant casings from the tank. The ram worked but the ejector was unreliable, so in their [[SarcasmMode infinite wisdom]] the bosses rejected the ram and accepted the ejector. The British kept their Conquerors parked in West Germany from 1955 until 1966, when they dumped them in favor of the new Chieftain MBT which was smaller and more mobile, yet had as powerful a gun and equal or better armor. As some final trivia, there was also a Conqueror variant with a ''183mm'' gun that never got off the drawing board.[[note]]The 183mm gun itself and a less-armored alternative vehicle to carry it both did have 2 prototypes built. When test-fired against a Conqueror, still among the best-armored tanks in existence at the time, the 183mm shell literally split the heavily armored gun mantlet in half. And when tested on a lighter Centurion medium tank, the entire turret was blown clean off as if the ammo rack had detonated...except that range targets don't have ammo stored in them. But guided missiles proved to be an even more efficient way of killing tanks with a single shot, so the QF 183mm L4 gun was also deemed too impractical to enter service.[[/note]]
202* The [=FV4005=] tank destroyer was a modified Centurion tank armed with ''183'' mm gun capable of destroying any tank at ranges of up to 1.8 km (2,000 yards). Most notably, firing test showed that [=FV4005=]'s gun could blow entire Centurion turret was blown clean off as if the ammo rack had detonated...except that range targets don't have ammo stored in them. However, [=FV4005=]'s gun was encased in a large turret protected by only 14 mm of steel, making it highly conspicuous and fragile. Even with a mechanical loading mechanism and two loaders, the rate of fire was abysmal. Furthermore, the [=FV4005=]'s intended target of Soviet heavy tanks were never produced in quantities that would justify the [=FV4005=]'s enormous firepower. Yet most importantly, technological advances allowed smaller tank guns and guided missiles to pack as much firepower for less space and weight. Fundamentally, the [=FV4005=]'s firepower was overkill and didn't have any additional benefits to offset its GlassCannon design.
203* British tank doctrine and production for most of the Second World War. Either they'd make the right tanks for the wrong doctrine, or they'd have a great design that got let down by the limitations of their military industries, or the tank would have practically everything going for it except for maybe ''one'' important part of the design that wasn't quite right and dragged it down from fantastic to just mediocre.
204** When the Second World War began, Britain--like most countries--still considered the infantry/cruiser concept to be basically sound. The well-armored but slow-moving infantry tanks such as the Matilda II and Churchill were supposed help the infantry create a breakthrough at some point in the enemy line, and then the lightly armored cruiser tanks such as the Cruiser Mk. I and Crusader would use their greater speed and operational range to rush through the gap and wreak havoc deep inside enemy lines. While many of the tanks they made were well-suited for their intended use, the problem was that the British planners had based their machines on what turned out to be a mistaken prediction about how the next war would be fought. Instead of the slowly moving front of World War I, where flexible deployment wasn't as much of an issue, the more dynamic and maneuver-based operational picture of World War II tended to favor JackOfAllStats medium tanks such as the U.S. M4 Sherman and the Soviet T-34, which could be produced in large numbers and perform adequately in whatever role the circumstances required. After all, if the tanks were too specialized, one could not always ensure that the right tank would be in the right place at the right time. The Britons' assumption had been that infantry tanks wouldn't have to move very fast because they'd be supporting riflemen on foot, and great speed would be counterproductive anyway since the tanks would also be vulnerable if they left behind their infantry. And since the Infantry tanks would take care of the breakthrough role, the cruisers would help themselves to soft targets while avoiding anything they couldn't handle. However the infantry tanks lost a certain amount of tactical and operational flexibility because of their low speed, and the thinly-armored early cruisers inevitably had bad encounters with German [=AFVs=] which weren't quite as fast but had more firepower and protection. In general the infantry tanks were more effective, although the cruisers also had their moments.
205** Having said all this, Tom Schwallie of Tank and AFV News points out that the mediocrity of British tanks wasn't so much caused by their designs' adherence to the infantry/cruiser doctrine per se, as it was that military bureaucracy and industrial problems slowed the development process to the point they'd be obsolete by the time they came out. For example, the development of what would lead to the Cromwell began in 1940. If something like the Cromwell could have been in North Africa by 1942 it would have been fantastic because of its more powerful and reliable engine, high mobility, 75 mm gun, and improved armor; instead it took until 1944, by which time the Cromwell's firepower and armor were far from impressive. British tanks tended to lag behind other countries in firepower and engine development through most of the war. Furthermore, the production rate was hampered by lack of efficiency and standardization, which is odd considering the high standardization of parts and production for the Royal Air Force. Thus, both for combat effectiveness and for sheer numbers the British had to rely heavily on American Lend-Lease tanks such as the Sherman.
206** The need for a "universal tank" was recognized early in the war, with UsefulNotes/BernardLawMontgomery its biggest advocate, but the idea didn't get very far until the Rolls-Royce Meteor engine became available as the basis for a LightningBruiser; they were then able to up-armor and up-gun the next generation of cruisers to the point where infantry tanks became unnecessary. Britain made a workable late-war stopgap in the form of the Comet, a derivative of the Cromwell that was not only low and fast, but also had a powerful gun and a well-armored turret. That allowed them to take the time to develop a new model from scratch to be the best possible modern tank. Centurion just barely missed the war, but it was a huge success during the Cold War and marked Britain's comeback in the sphere of tank design.
207* French tanks in the Battle of France, 1940.
208** France's military policy was shaped by its perception of what had worked in World War I, as well as the limitations imposed by the war's lasting damage to population and economy: The fighting of the Western Front had largely taken place on her soil, with over a million men killed or missing in action, and more than four million wounded. The Great Depression hit in the 30s, reducing the amount of money for defense, and all the men who didn't come home from the war to start families led to a significant dearth of young men for the army 20 years down the road. French politics was unstable, with Prime Ministers changing frequently, and the left wing government was suspicious of letting the traditionally right wing professional military grow too large and powerful for fear of a reactionary coup. With all of this in mind, the French came up with the defensive strategy they would use in case of invasion by Germany: a [[EliteArmy small but elite]] professional military would be used in peacetime to train reservists, who would be summoned for refresher training from time to time, and in wartime the professionals would [[YouShallNotPass hold back]] the Germans to prevent France's industrial areas on the border from falling, thus buying time for the [[TheCavalry massive reserves]] to be brought up. Since the professional military's reservist teaching duties didn't leave them with much time for new courses or exercises, and reservists coming for refresher training would have a hard enough time shaking the rust off of what they'd learned before, most tactics including those for tanks would have to stay simple and relatively unchanging. The UsefulNotes/MaginotLine along the southern border with Germany could be held with fewer men, allowing the bulk of the army to be concentrated in the north where they could move into Belgium and establish a defensive line as soon as the Germans violated Belgian neutrality. If the Germans tried to come through the Ardennes forest, they would presumably be slowed down enough by the rough terrain that the French could detect their movement, and send reserves to intercept the invaders while they were still caught up in a bottleneck.
209** Towards the end of World War I the French had come up with their first truly successful tank design, the little two-man, 6.5 tonne Renault FT. The FT was the TropeMaker of the modern tank layout: tracks that extended the whole length of the vehicle, the driver in front, the fighting compartment in the middle with a 360 degree revolving gun turret, and the engine in back. The French decided on a strategy of using a "swarm" of light tanks to overwhelm the Germans, ordering 3,530. This seemed to work well with their overall strategy in 1918, and after the war there was a strong school of thought emphasizing relatively small two-man infantry support tanks. After all, if they wanted to swarm the Germans with a huge number of tanks despite lack of money and recruits, they'd need tanks that were cheaper to produce and required fewer men to operate. At the same time there were some people who championed the need for "fortress tanks" and "battle tanks" for the breakthrough role, leading to the creation of some heavies such as the Char 2C and the Char B1 bis.
210** The French were second only to the Soviets in terms of how much they invested in tank production during the interwar period, and their designs had some good points. Their factories became skilled at casting, with the SOMUA S35 being the first tank with a hull made entirely from castings, and the FCM 36 was one of the earliest tanks to be made with welded armor. The tanks the French made in the lead-up to World War II had substantial, often rounded or sloped armor which the standard German 37 mm antitank gun would often fail to penetrate. French tanks in general were more numerous, better armed, and better armored than the German ones, especially when you remember that more than half of the Germans' tanks in 1940 were small, barely-armored Panzer Mark I and [=IIs=] armed with machine guns and a 20 mm cannon, respectively. On paper the SOMUA was superior to 1940 German models in every way except for the one-man turret, and hardly anything short of airstrikes could stop a B1 bis once it got into battle.
211** However, the R35 and H35 which were the most numerous models had painfully low horsepower, and were armed with weak, short-barreled 37 mm SA 18 cannons that had been taken straight off of old World War I [=FTs=] to save money, and which could penetrate only about 20 mm of armor. These models had been designed as infantry tanks that would replace the FT, hence the lack of concern about speed or anti-tank capability. The R35 showed the teething problems of early hull casting technology, as the steel came out much weaker than its thickness would imply. Tests proved it was vulnerable not only to 25 mm antitank rounds, but even in some places to 8 mm armor piercing bullets.
212** The FCM 36 two-man infantry tank was welded and angular in construction, because ''Forges & Chantiers de la Méditerrannée'' was a shipbuilding company. However, at this time welding was only done by skilled workers who required higher pay, and while the tank's welded construction was quicker than the alternatives of casting or riveting it also cost more. The welding technique was also imperfect, as the welds could burst if the tank was hit by a shell. When they tried to replace the underpowered SA 18 cannon with the more powerful SA 38, the turret welds couldn't handle the recoil. A new, strengthened turret for the SA 38 was not available in time for the German invasion. Of 400 orders for the FCM 36, only 100 were early enough to be built in time for the German invasion. They may have been the best of France's two man tanks on the whole, since they had sloped armor, a reliable diesel powertrain, and a turret less cramped than the APX (which is what the next bullet is about), but with too many of the same vision and crew comfort problems as the others it just wasn't better ''enough'' to be considered good.
213** In addition to relying on primitive vision slits that were hard to see out of and didn't protect against bullet splatter, the French lineup also demonstrated why a one-man turret can be a major disadvantage. When France was rearming between the world wars, it was a lot cheaper for the cash-strapped French to make just one standard model of turret that would fit all of their tanks, so they decided to make a cast, one-man turret. Compared to a two- or three-man turret, a one-man turret would make a smaller target, use less metal and add less weight, be more thickly armored for the same weight, and fit the small turret rings of old models such as the FT and D1 that they might want to retrofit. However, the drawbacks were so horrible that in hindsight it seems unbelievably boneheaded. The ideal, codified by the German Panzer III, is to have a three man turret in which the gunner aims and fires the main gun, the loader loads the shells and perhaps shoots the coaxial machine gun, and the commander looks out the roof hatch with his binoculars, guiding the gunner onto the target and feeding him range adjustments. In contrast, the commander in a French tank had to do all the work of loading and operating the gun himself, in addition to having to actually command the tank or--god forbid--several tanks if he was the platoon leader. Rate of targeting and fire was rock bottom, and try as he might to juggle his different tasks, he could only do everything poorly. As for situational awareness, the standard APX turret didn't even have a commander's hatch in the roof above him, just a dome-shaped rotating cupola which on early versions had only one vision slit, making it a sort of poor man's periscope. The only way for the commander to stick his head out was a door on the back of the turret, and in order to see forward over the turret he'd have to leave the gun unmanned, crank open the turret door, and sit on it so he could see over the top of the turret with his head. This was allegedly to ensure he'd be protected by the turret armor while he was looking out, and it worked well enough on road march, but it was ridiculous to think they would do this in battle. As you could imagine, there wasn't much room in the turret for ammunition and most of it was down in the hull. The SOMUA and the B1 bis were only slightly better for the commander in that regard because they had a version of the APX with a bigger turret ring, so that the radio man--who usually ''had'' no radio and thus had nothing better to do--could pass 47 mm shells from the ammo racks up into the turret. German commanders noted that the French tanks would usually roll into battle and then stop in one place as soon as they began firing, not moving at all because the poor commander couldn't handle the demands of scoot-and-shoot all by himself. When the Germans captured large numbers of French tanks in the Fall of France, they did the best they could by installing turret roof hatches in place of the dome cupola.
214** In most tank units only the platoon leaders had radios, forcing the others to signal to each other using flags. Good luck noticing or reading those flag signals while buttoned up, since the vision from inside these tanks was so poor! The radios that were issued weren't very good--they tended to be short-ranged or of the Morse-code-only type which was impractical to use in the heat of combat--and furthermore the tankers were often ordered not to ''use'' them because the generals were worried that the Germans might eavesdrop or attempt to confuse the tanks by transmitting fake orders. That fear was the reason for the whole French army's ill-fated reliance on telephone lines and message couriers for communication instead of radio.
215** On top of all this, the crews weren't adequately trained on even the basics of operating their tanks, owing to the shortening of reservist training periods and the fact that many of these tank models--which had been stuck in DevelopmentHell and held back by inefficient manufacturing--were just beginning to be produced and delivered to the units by this time. A lot of tanks weren't even finished when they were sent from the factory almost directly into combat, such as some B1-bis tanks that were delivered with no turret installed. The crews had little or no time to train on their vehicles before going into action: one famous issue was the complaint that the SOMUA had a ridiculously short range. This actually happened because it had two fuel tanks, both equipped with overfill valves for safety: a small one holding 110 liters which the engine drew fuel from, and a large 410 liter tank which replenished the small one. Crews who didn't understand how the overfill valves worked would pour fuel in until it looked like everything was full, and then afterwards they'd wonder why the tank ran out of gas so quickly, not realizing that they had actually filled up only the small tank. Another issue was that the hydraulic transmission of the B1-bis used large amounts of castor oil as lubricant, but not the type available in pharmacies because that stops working above about 80 degrees Celsius. Crews didn't understand the difference and assumed any kind of castor oil would do, which led to breakdowns and gave them the idea that the system was a piece of crap.
216** Despite their flaws, there were a few places where the French tank forces gave the Germans a black eye, and it's possible that they could have stopped the Germans' very risky and vulnerable lightning offensives if not for the fact that Gamelin had depleted his strategic reserve for the sake of his so-called Breda Variant, that when he heard the Germans were coming through the Ardennes he at first assumed it was merely a diversion from the real thrust in Belgium (it was the other way around), and that the French army had made the disastrous decision not to use radio for command and control, making it impossible to coordinate and react at the speed the Germans were maneuvering. As it was, though, the Germans ran rings around and defeated what was supposed to be the strongest army in the world.
217* The Tank Destroyer doctrine of the U.S. Army, and the related choices of what kinds of vehicles got produced during world War II.
218** Up to 1940, the conventional anti-tank policy of most countries was to have towed anti-tank guns distributed among the front line infantry, ready to take out any enemy tanks that attacked so they could hold the line. Then the U.S. saw how the Belgians and the French couldn’t stop the German panzer divisions from repeatedly breaking through the lines and encircling their forces. Based on their interpretation of what had happened, the U.S. Army thought the traditional method was no longer enough; as long as the Germans concentrated their tanks to attack a narrow front, and used terrain to keep out of the flanking anti-tank guns' fields of fire, U.S. infantry would never have a high enough concentration of anti-tank firepower to counter them and would get broken through. Deciding that it was practically impossible to keep the initial German breakthrough from happening, U.S. thinking turned to creating concentrated units of towed or self-propelled guns that could act as mobile reserves. While U.S. tanks could be effective at fighting other tanks, and were fully expected to do so when they ran into enemy tanks during offensive actions, the U.S. Army believed it would be a waste to use tanks in a reserve or defensive capacity when their greatest use was on the offense. Besides, tanks were expensive to manufacture and it would be better if cheaper weapons could do the job instead. Therefore, a tank destroyer force was formed whose mission was purely defensive; they would wait in reserve until a German armored spearhead broke through the U.S. line somewhere, and then it would be their job to go intercept and neutralize the enemy armor before the Germans could fully exploit their breakthrough. The Germans actually developed a similar antitank doctrine using self-propelled, open-topped antitank guns, but while they used platoon and company units, the US tank destroyers weren’t supposed to act at anything less than the battalion level for fear of diluting their counteroffensive mass.
219** Andrew Davis Bruce, head of the TD force, favored self-propelled guns over towed guns. From humble beginnings where they were just sticking antitank guns onto half-tracks and trucks, the Tank Destroyer program progressed to using fully tracked vehicles (M10, M18, M36) with relatively light armor and a powerful gun mounted in an open-topped, revolving turret. It's important to understand that these vehicles were not ''automatically'' considered Tank Destroyers in US terminology; unless a particular vehicle was actually assigned to Tank Destroyer force, it was merely a self-propelled antitank gun. Since the vehicles were designed to rush to where they were needed and then ambush the enemy from an advantageous position--using their superior vision to see first and shoot first--speed and firepower were prioritized over armored protection.
220** As it turned out, there would be only a handful of times when the Germans made the kind of massed armor attack the TD force was designed to counter, and US forces were mostly on the attack, fighting against infantry much more often than tanks. Meanwhile, tank support wasn't available to all infantry units at all times, and they desperately wanted help from anything that had tracks and a gun on it. Almost as soon as the US began ground combat in the European Theatre of Operations, the TD doctrine was basically thrown out the window: the battalions were split up into companies or platoons and sent to support the infantry on the attack. Thus, contrary to what the doctrine prescribed, they were now being used as pillbox destroyers, indirect fire artillery (in which role they fired the majority of their rounds), and sometimes even as substitutes for tanks in close infantry support (which was a bad idea, as the tank destroyer was intended to be long range artillery against tanks, not a close-quarters combatant). The infantry support role didn't play to their strengths: their armor was relatively thin, and their open tops made their crews vulnerable to enemy infantry swarming and grenade shrapnel. They also lacked hull or coaxial machine guns for defense against enemy infantry--which ironically had been a deliberate design decision to ''discourage'' the crews from going outside their role--and instead the crews had to use the pintle-mounted .50 caliber anti-aircraft machine gun or their personal small arms.
221** Thus, these self-propelled antitank guns weren't as versatile as tanks and weren't appropriately designed for a lot of what they actually ended up being used for; in North Africa, General Patton went so far as to opine that the M10 should stop being produced, and that the existing ones should be turned into tanks by welding on more front armor and a turret roof. The Tank Destroyers were a success in the sense that they got superior kill ratios against enemy tanks, but this can partly be attributed to the fact that unlike tank crews, which were trained as generalists, these guys were specifically trained to destroy tanks. In other words, it wasn't so much the hardware as it was the training. The idea that the [=TDs=] would have enough punch to take out anything the tanks couldn't handle also contributed to the Army's general lack of urgency about up-gunning the medium M4 Sherman and introducing the heavier M26 Pershing, which were not recognized as necessary until the Normandy campaign starkly highlighted the inadequacy of US guns and armor ''vis a vis'' the Germans. There was also an increasing duplication of capacity once the Sherman got the same gun as the Hellcat, and the Pershing the same one as the Jackson.
222** After the war's end it was no longer as difficult to produce tank turrets which could mount guns as big as any tank destroyer's, and it became accepted policy that the best counter to a tank was another tank. While the development of smaller, usually missile-armed tank-killing vehicles continued, the existence of a separate, independent Tank Destroyer branch was abolished.
223* The United States M6 heavy tank:
224** This thing began development in May 1940 with a recommendation from the Chief of Infantry to the US Army Ordinance Corps. Originally conceived as a 1930s-style multi-turreted monster with cannons and machine guns sticking out of everywhere, it was revised to a one-turret design. It had a combat loaded mass of 57.4 tonnes, with armor up to 100 mm on parts of the front. The three-man turret housed a commander, gunner, and loader; toys included a big three inch gun M7 and a coaxial 37 mm gun M6. In the hull were a driver, assistant driver, and an assistant loader whose job was to get ammo from the hull racks and pass them up to the turret. Also, the tank had loads of machine guns: a twin .50 caliber hull mount for the assistant driver, two .30 cals in the front plate fired electronically by the driver, a .30 on the commanders cupola, and a .50 antiaircraft mount to be used by the loader. The US didn't have any high-horsepower tank engines at this point, so they put in the G200 variant of the large Wright R-1820 Cyclone radial aircraft engine. This produced too much torque for any existing transmission, so variants using torque converter and electric transmission were both produced. The tall engine gave the tank an excessively high silhouette, while the transmission type contributed to the large volume and length.
225** By the time it was finished the Army said they didn't want it: they had no doctrinal use for a heavy tank; the crew layout was inefficient; it was too big for standard bridges, flatcars, and ship cranes[[labelnote:*]]Which their nemeses the Germans would ''also'' encounter when developing the King Tiger and Maus tanks later in the war.[[/labelnote]]; there were various mechanical problems; and they preferred not to ship a 60 ton tank to Europe when they could ship two 30 ton tanks instead. The 3 inch gun was more powerful than the Sherman's 75 mm but still not powerful enough to justify such a heavy vehicle (the same gun was mounted on the much lighter and cheaper gun motor carriage M10) while the 37 mm and its ammunition were a waste of space. It presented a tall, bulky target to enemies, and the amount of internal volume that had to be surrounded by armor meant it wasn't much more well-armored than a medium tank. In 1943, production was stopped at forty tanks and the project was essentially cancelled.
226** Despite these setbacks, Ordinance Department tried repeatedly to revive the M6. First they modified it by installing a T7 90 mm gun, but the turret layout was still bad and its fundamental faults were still there. In early 1944 they offered the M6 again in response to US Army Europe HQ's request for 250 heavy tanks for D-day, but unsurprisingly that was declined in favor of an up-armored Sherman, the [=M4A3E2=] "Jumbo". In August 1944, for the purpose of assaulting the heavily fortified German Siegfried line, they recommended a modification called [=M6A2E1=] with 190 mm frontal armor and the turret of the T29 prototype heavy tank with a [=T5E1=] 105 mm gun. It would weigh ''77 tons'', with no increase in engine power. Their proposal to make fifteen of these and send them to Europe was rejected as well. In any case, with the M26 Pershing on the horizon, M6 was recognized as obsolete.
227** All M6 tanks stayed in the US and never saw any use except for testing and propaganda. Ultimately, the Army saved one as a museum piece and broke down the rest for scrap.
228* Tankettes during World War II. The idea of miniature tanks sounds awesome: you can make a bunch of your infantry more mobile and give them more firepower against other infantry at a relatively low cost. Italy was particularly keen on tankettes because they were small enough to navigate narrow mountain paths that were all but impassable to full size tanks and that Italy expected to use them on,[[note]]The main battlefields Italy expected to fight on were the Western Alps against France, the North-Eastern Alps against Germany (with whom the alliance wasn't really certain until Italy entered the war), and the Ethiopian Highlands against Ethiopia and bands of rebels. Furthermore, almost 80% of Italy is occupied by hilly terrain and mountain ranges, making the tankettes more practical than full-sized tanks even in their own homeland[[/note]] and for a country without much heavy industry they were a lot cheaper to buy or produce than real tanks were. Similarly, Japan liked its tankettes, all of which had great mobility in non-ideal terrain (such as supposedly "impassible" jungles) and could easily cross improvised bridges. While they performed well during the early days of armored warfare and against poorly-equipped infantry, they quickly became outclassed due to the fast pace of armored vehicle development. Their disadvantages were their very thin armour (vulnerable to most heavy weapons and even small arms fire), light armament (most couldn't mount any weapon larger than a machine gun or autocannon, meaning they were useless against most heavy armoured vehicles), their cramped interiors, and a general lack of versatility and mobility in rough terrain depending on the design of the tracks with respect to ditch crossing and ground clearance. Most tankettes were phased out of frontline service, or relegated to non-combat or low-intensity duties. Miniature armored vehicles have come back thanks to better alloys and weapon technology, but only in very niche roles where proper tanks and infantry fighting vehicles would be impractical. For example, the Wiesel is light enough to be airdropped from a helicopter, is protected against rifle fire, and can use an autocannon or TOW antitank missiles.
229* Main battle tanks in urban combat are something of an imperfect solution. On one hand, putting a platoon of four 60-ton M1 Abrams tanks in the streets is one hell of a way to deter resistance by awing the population, or if necessary to blast out stubborn enemies who are fortified inside buildings. On the other hand, such monsters are too wide to navigate any streets narrower than two lanes, too heavy to cross bridges built only to withstand cars, and largely blind unless a commander opens a hatch to get a good look, which would expose him to sniper fire. Even with the TUSK modifications and infantry support, American tank commanders are ''very'' leery of entering close quarters where they can easily by ambushed and disabled by any yahoo with an RPG. It's for this reason that the US Army is interested in looking into [=IFVs=] and light support vehicles for urban combat, which, while not nearly as impressive as tanks, are lighter and more maneuverable, allowing them to move with infantry to support them, instead of having to rely on support ''from'' infantry themselves.
230** The worst part is not knowing if the enemy has hidden tanks within the city as well, as was the case in the Normandy Campaign after D-Day. German Panzers tended to hide within towns, knowing that the Allies wouldn't dare bombard any French town that still had civilians in it. As a result, Panzers were hunted down one at a time by tanks, tank-destroyers, and infantry armed with anti-tank weapons. The fight usually resembled a chaotic wild-west shootout, but with tanks and supporting units in place of the usual gun-fighters. And sometimes the tanks would smash through houses just to get at each other's weak spots!
231* Turretless casemate tank destroyers have fallen out of the wayside since the end of World War 2. During the war, many nations created such vehicles by installing big guns into tank hulls instead of mounting them into turrets. These casemate vehicles have the advantage of mounting big guns that would be too large to fit inside the limited space of existing turrets. They would be much smaller in profile and quicker to manufacture than conventional tanks, as they did not require turrets. However, the lack of a turret meant that a tank destroyer couldn't react to flanking maneuvers or infantry ambushes, limiting their roles to defensive positions. The turretless design also meant that a tank destroyer would have to constantly turn its entire body to aim, leading to a strained and degraded drive system. The mass production of main battle tanks, which excel in nearly every given role, limited the cost-effectiveness of casemate tank destroyers. Yet most importantly, the absence of large conventional wars between superpowers meant that manufacturers could spend more time and money developing tanks whose turrets could mount as big a gun as any tank destroyer. Even armies needing a cheap stopgap tank killer could just mount lighter yet equally lethal anti-tank missiles on recon vehicles and [=IFVs=].
232* The chariot, a staple of bronze age warfare, quickly became obsolete once horse breeds that could carry a warrior in full gear into battle came to be.
233** On a strategic, economical and logistical level, chariots require competent artisans capable of building the chariot itself, its axle and its wheels, and keeping it maintained in the field. This means a commander needed to find sources of quality wood and keep fed the entire team of chariot artisans in the field. EasyLogistics is very much not a thing in real life.
234** Chariots required a full team of horses, usually 2 or 4, which was expensive to maintain, especially when you take them out of the stable and into battle. Losing one horse could cripple the chariot.
235** The charioteer needed his hands to control the team, and while it was possible to do it one-handed and wield a spear in the other hand, it was clumsy and awkward. Generally, chariots would carry two soldiers, one to drive and the other to use a bow or spear to kill people. [[RunningGag This means even more people to keep fed while on campaign]].
236** Chariots have much less agility than a single rider and their horse, and require relatively flat terrains free of obstructions (trees, rocks, water, etc...) to be effective. This wasn't too much of a problem in ancient Egypt or the near East, but the chariots were very limited in use outside of these flat plains and deserts.
237** Chariots fared a little better when not directly in combat, such as a battle taxi to bring a warrior into battle (and take him out of there quickly if things go south), but even gimmicks such as SpikedWheels couldn't stop their obsolescence. By the time of the [[UsefulNotes/TheGloryThatWasRome Romans]] they were about as useful on the battlefield as a musket would be in the 21st century.
238[[/folder]]
239
240[[folder:Aircraft]]
241* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_fighter heavy fighter]] concept. Compared to smaller fighters, the usually twin-engine heavy fighters packed much more firepower, and had much longer range, designed to escort heavier bombers and escape using their high speed. In practice, however, the concept failed; they couldn't maintain their top speed for very long, and they just couldn't match lighter fighters in terms of maneuverability. That, and the proliferation of drop-tank equipped light fighters removed their range advantage. Many were converted to night fighters (where they were more successful, since maneuverability wasn't as much of a concern in darkness) or bomber destroyers (where they were initially successful against unescorted bombers, but ultimately fell victim to the aforementioned lighter fighters).
242* Rocket powered aircraft in general, and The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_163 Messerschmitt Me-163 Komet]] particularly. Designed by Alexander Lippisch and introduced in 1944, it is the only rocket-powered fighter aircraft to have ever seen operational use. Its role was to be an interceptor which could rapidly engage enemy bombers by climbing to 12,000 meters (39,000 ft) in an then-unheard-of three minutes, and it could reach more than 1000 km/h (621 mph) in level flight, the first piloted aircraft to ever do so. However, there were a bunch of problems. First, the sheer speed and altitude. It flew so high without a pressurized cabin that pilots had to train for the brutal conditions in altitude chambers, and were required to eat a special low-fiber diet to reduce painful intestinal gas. It also flew so fast that they couldn't accurately hit slow-moving bombers with their low-velocity, short-ranged cannons: no pilot ever scored more than one victory with it. A promising solution to the high-speed targeting problem was a bank of ten single-shot, upwards-pointing cannons that would fire automatically when a photocell detected the silhouette of the bomber above it, but this came too late and was seemingly only used in combat once, on 10 April, 1945. Secondly, it burned up all its fuel in just seven and a half minutes, turning into an unpowered glider to get back to its airfield. This meant it could only be used for point defense, and rendered it helpless if the enemy decided to pick it off while it was gliding home. Thirdly, it was extremely unsafe for both pilots and ground crews. The rocket engine used two highly-corrosive chemicals called C-Stoff and T-Stoff, and created thrust by virtue of the fact that these substances were hypergolic, meaning they violently combusted upon mixing. Since these were both clear liquids that could be easily confused with one another, and were absolutely never supposed to come in contact with each other outside the engine, there were separate refueling teams for each fuel who were never allowed to be near the aircraft at the same time, and used different fueling ports on the plane. The fuel tanks and other systems would be regularly flushed out with water to prevent accidental explosions. However, even these measures didn't prevent occasional detonations on the tarmac. Moreover, the Komet had a habit of spontaneously exploding if jarred too much by, say, a rough landing, and the T-Stoff in particular was so toxic that a leak could kill the pilot even if there wasn’t an explosion. The plane was made of wood to keep the weight and cost down, and while it had wheels when it was going up, they broke away from the aircraft as it took off. What did you land with? ''A single skid''. The "best" part was that at this stage of the war, even flat runways were in short supply, so the pilots had to land them in bumpy, rocky fields. The whole idea was so poorly worked out that there were multiple incidents of these aircraft destroying themselves on takeoff '''with their own launch wheels'''. Because of the poor fields they were taking off from, it was entirely possible for the rubber-tired take-off wheel assembly to bounce higher than the altitude it was dropped from...and smash into the plane, often resulting in a catastrophic explosion. More pilots died trying to fly/land these things than in combat. Oh, and the engines were considered more valuable than the pilots. What does ''that'' tell you?
243** The French came with the idea of SNCASO Trident after the WWII in 1949, hosting two jet engines and a rocket. While it hads impressive performance, it was so dangerous to fly that it was shelved 1958. One prototype survives in Le Bourget air museum, Paris.
244* Around the end of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII many rather impressive prototypes of fighter and bomber aircraft had been designed by various American and Russian manufacturers. Innovative uses of old technology (for instance, contra-rotating propellers) made them fast and powerful; sadly, the innovative use of ''new'' technology - namely the jet engine - resulted in aircraft that were even faster and more powerful, but also more efficient and less maintenance intensive. Needless to say, this doomed all the new piston-engine planes into never leaving the prototype stage.
245** Related to the above is the turbo-compound engine. It was a late development that used a turbine placed at the end of the exhaust that would recycle power wasted by the piston engine and add it directly to the driveshaft. The engines thus obtained were very powerful and efficient, but were both maintenance-intensive and impractical: the bigger the turbine was the more efficient the engine became, until someone eventually figured out that you might as well leave the piston engine out altogether and simply use the turbine as a turboshaft.
246*** The turbo-compound could make a comeback. The problem was it put a lot of stress on exhaust valves which would fail and their shards would take out the turbine. A lot of the power that could potentially go to the turbine was also absorbed by those valves. However, if used on a Wankel rotary engine, which has no exhaust valves, turbo-compounding could potentially make a Wankel engine that runs on automotive unleaded gasoline provide fuel economy and horsepower competitive with turboshaft engines, but without the turbo-lag.
247* In terms of airstrikes specifically, [[AirstrikeImpossible high risk, highly planned operations]] which use a large amount of aircraft tend not to produce worthwhile results due to the sheer fact that, as advanced and complicated as military aircraft are, the room for errors are ''incredibly'' small; as opposed to ground operations, where at least there is a ''chance'' to pull back and reconsider your options if something unexpected happens, in an air battle there is quite literally nothing between you and the enemy, with nowhere to hide. So, if something goes wrong, such as a premature loss of vital aircraft, unexpectedly heavy defenses, or unforseen changes in the weather the only option you have is to press the attack, follow the plan as best as you can, and ''hope'' things turn out okay. Such was the case of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tidal_Wave Operation Tidal Wave]], where the precise, low-level multi-squadron airstrike on the Ploiești oil refineries went to all hell due to a combination of mechanical failures, breakdowns in communication, and unexpected defenses that rendered the high-stakes operation AllForNothing with heavy casualties and no lasting effect on the refineries themselves. Of course if you want something of a more modern area, refer to the abortive [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_Q_Strike Package Q]] operation, which, like Tidal Wave, saw several separate failures pike up to ultimately render the entire mission useless, and which was later ''successfully'' completed by a smaller strike. When it comes to massed aircraft attacks, the simpler the operation, the better--for an Airstrike Impossible that ''did'' succeed, look at [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Catechism Operation Catechism,]] one of many operations to sink the German battleship ''Tirpitz''; the entire mission essentially boiled down to "get a shit-ton of [[BigBulkyBomb Tallboy Bombs]], load them onto a squadron of Avro Lancasters, and ''[[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill bomb that fucking ship to kingdom come]]''." And hey, it worked! Granted, it took ''three'' operations to finish her off (the failed operations ''Paravane'' and ''Obviate'', followed by the successful ''Catechism'' - and those are just the ones specifically carried out by the RAF's No. 5 Group, which only accounted for about ''half'' the individual operations to sink the ''Tirpitz'') and succeeded mainly because ''Tirpitz'' was unable to move on her own power due to her destroyed engines, but it was the first operation ''Paravane'' which left ''Tirpitz'' stranded at Tromsø with damage too heavy to allow her to sail - the Norwegians said "''Tirpitz'' lived a life of a loner and died a death of a cripple" - and the losses compared to the disastrous ''Operation Tidal Wave'' mentioned above were much lower, with a(n eventually) successful outcome.
248** Overall, massed bomber raids saw a downward trend in popularity after World War II--sure, it's one hell of a display of aerial might, with the potential to deliver tons of ordinance to a single strategic target and wreak absolutely demoralizing destruction, but the risks of sending so many planes and people into hostile territory almost guarantees crippling losses. With the advent of jet-powered aircraft that could fly higher and faster and carry more ordinance, along with unmanned delivery systems such as cruise missiles and drones, the need for strategic bombing soon petered out. Compounding this was the development of guided missiles, both of the ground and air-launched varieties, which would make target practice of a massed formation of big, ungainly aircraft. The most egregious, and arguably most modern examples would be [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder Operation Rolling Thunder]], which essentially was Awesome, But Impractical brought to life--mass bombing reminiscent of those seen in World War II, but with modern jet aircraft, SAM systems, supersonic dogfights, and more than ''1 million tons'' of bombs dropped--which is almost ''half'' of the total amount of ordinance dropped during the '''''entire European Theatre of World War II.''''' Despite this, losses continued to mount as the China-supplied North Vietnamese stubbornly resisted the bombing raids, to the point that the operation was cancelled in 1968.
249* It's 1949, and the US Navy high command is ''pissed''. For nearly two centuries, the Navy has been the lynchpin of US strategic defense, but now everyone is talking about the Air Force, nuclear bombing, and Strategic Air Command. The USS ''United States'', supposed to be the largest and finest (and most expensive) American warship ever launched, has been cancelled only 5 days after being laid down. So what do you do? Well, if we can't launch strategic nuclear aircraft from ships, we'll just launch them straight off the damn sea! And so was the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_P6M_SeaMaster Martin P6M SeaMaster]] born. A ''transonic flying boat'' to be used as a strategic nuclear bomber. This was in many respects a cutting-edge, extremely advanced aircraft, designed to float on open water, supported by seaplane tenders or special submarines, hopping from place to place and making it hard for the Soviets to find and destroy them. Trouble is, all this brilliant innovation was dedicated to solving a problem that could more easily be circumvented entirely, and it was, with the fleet ballistic missile submarine and the aircraft carrier - suddenly back on the agenda following the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Admirals Revolt of the Admirals]] - eventually beating out the [=SeaMaster=] for funding. The program was cancelled as Navy pilots began conversion training to use the new bomber.
250** The [=SeaMaster=] as originally designed was even more impractical: it was supposed to be ''ramjet-powered''.
251* Some awesome Atomic Age aircraft were rendered impractical not so much by inherent design problems as by advances in missile technologies:
252** The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XB-70 XB-70 Valkyrie]] was a six-engined high-altitude strategic bomber designed to travel at Mach 3 (which would allow it to outrun Soviet interceptors). All very impressive -- before the development of surface-to-air missiles that could effectively target and destroy high-altitude supersonic bombers. Furthermore, bomber designs like the XB-70 were made obsolescent by advances in intercontinental ballistic missile technology. An [=ICBM=] that could accurately hit a target half way around the world in 45 minutes increasingly marginalized the role of strategic bombers. There was also the huge per-unit costs. To get those impressive Mach 3 speeds, the airframes had to be made of titanium and other expensive metal alloys, making it economically unattractive to mass produce them.
253** The [=MiG=]-25 Foxbat was a blisteringly-fast high-altitude interceptor designed to intercept bombers like the XB-70. Despite its short range and primitive but rugged avionics, it might have been effective in that role. But it also had terrible maneuverability and a limited payload (four missiles, no cannon) which made it [[CripplingOverspecialization rather useless when its intended mission disappeared]]. While useful in a reconnaissance role, its combat record (in the service of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq) is poor. And since its engines were recycled from a long-range cruise missile design that wasn't meant for re-use, they would melt if it pushed to around Mach 3 (what it was ''designed to do in the first place''),[[note]]But that was okay, [[FalseReassurance because]] the steel leading wing edges made the plane so heavy that it usually ran out of fuel before it burned out the engines anyway[[/note]] eliminating its cost effectiveness as well.
254*** The Foxbat did get a limited, short-term use as a propaganda item as it was by far the fastest and highest flying jet fighter at the time - one incident had a Soviet Foxbat in Syrian colors saunter up to an Israeli F-4 running flat out at operational ceiling altitude, let the F-4 crew get a good look, and then accelerate and climb away - but even this backfired when the US developed jet fighters designed to defeat the plane that they ''thought'' the Foxbat was, namely the ''uber''-successful F-15 Eagle. Then, the US got hold of one through Viktor Belenko's defection in 1976, and discovered all the shortcomings.
255*** Its successor, the [=MiG=]-31 Foxhound, is also a pure interceptor, and at first glance looks like a two-seat Foxbat. In reality, it's only loosely based on the [=MiG=]-25, and has a stronger fuselage that allows it to go supersonic even at low altitude. The top speed was dialed back to Mach 2.8 (still very fast, and what turned out to be the top ''safe'' speed of the [=MiG=]-25). The [=MiG=]-31 turned out, despite its limited role, to be far more practical, due to its far superior radar and missiles making it effective against terrain-hugging cruise missiles, not just high-flying bombers.
256*** The Foxhound is also seeing a new use in Russian weapons testing, apparently - with their speed, they're perfect chase planes for the Russian military's new planes.
257*** Its incredible speed gets another good use when armed with a new ''Kinzhal'' SRBM/IRBM[[note]]No one is sure about the range of the blasted thing.[[/note]], an air-launched version of the already pretty impressive ''Iskander'' land-based one. Launching it during the top speed dash adds as much as 2 points to the Mach-8 terminal velocity of the baseline missile, making it about as difficult to intercept as a full-on ICBM -- however, during Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2023, there were ''several'' accounts of US-made Patriot missiles systems intercepting Kinzhal missiles, calling into into question its actual capabilities.
258** The [=B-47=] Stratojet had been a CoolPlane, but the features that made it cool also blew the efficiency to hell: the graceful almost Sci-Fi airframe barely had space for a crew of 3 and the wings were thin enough to be flexible in flight, the aerodynamics [[GoneHorriblyRight were so efficient]] that the plane would float over the runway instead of touching down, the superior maneuverability mandated the nuclear bomb had to be tossed in a wide looping like a fighter would do in a ground attack flight (less fun when the [=B-47=] weighed almost 100 tonnes at takeoff with full load and maybe 60 tonnes at the point where the ordnance would be released) and the combat range was too short, only 2000 miles or so, shorter than a regular commercial airliner.
259** The [=B-58=] [[EmbarrassingNickname Hustler]] was an awesome aircraft for [[TheFifties the mid-1950s]] (it could climb like a rocket and cruise at Mach 2.2 for hours years before the ''parents'' of most Tropers were born), yet it was ''breathtakingly'' expensive to build and maintain (just changing a fuselage panel in the field required the specialized jig from the factory to be brought to the airbase) and had an ''extremely'' idiosyncratic design that made ground crews pull their hair out in outrage (the fuselage was too small and the wings too thin to carry fuel, so instead they just had the fuel in a massive belly tank slung under the fuselage; the problem this presented was that now there was nowhere to store a payload, so they ''built the bomb bay into the belly tank.''). So complicated and frustrating to perform basic maintenance on that it was dropped after 10 years in service to be replaced by [=ICBMs=].\
260There were people daring enough at Convair back into TheSixties [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_Model_58-9 to propose]] a supersonic [[http://www.up-ship.com/eAPR/images/v2n2ad2.jpg transport]] [[http://www.up-ship.com/eAPR/images/v2n2ad3.jpg version]], either for paying passengers or as a VIP transport for the military. It proved so madly expensive there was no funding even for a prototype.
261*** That tank also was the only place to put the single atomic bomb it could carry, which had to be literally built into it. As it then, naturally, had to be jettisoned at the target together with the bomb, the plane had to rely just on the internal fuel reserves to get back. It also constantly leaked fuel into the bomb compartment, requiring the eventual replacement with the two-piece pod, where the tank and the bomb could be jettisoned separately.
262* The Messerschmitt Me 321. It began its life as a glider, the biggest glider ever made. The mission for this glider was to rapidly transport large amounts of troops and medium or light tanks into the battlefield. The first problem was how to make something that big glide. Thus, it was made largely of hollow steel tubing, doped fabric and wooden spars. Then came actually getting it up into the sky. Normally, a tow aircraft would be used to drag it up into the air, but two towing aircraft would have to do the job, which would be impossible to synchronize safely. The solution? [[http://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/detail.asp?aircraft_id=528 They just stuck two Heinkel He-111's together with a fifth engine between]]. Originally it was intended to be used for the scrapped invasion of Britain, but then was used for Operation Barbarossa. After that, feedback from the people who "flew" them led to a big design change. Sticking six powerful engines on it, they turned it from a glider into the Me 323 transport plane, and it ''still'' needed the damn Franken-Heinkel to take off (or RATO or three airplanes working in sync) if it was fully loaded. It arrived just in time to support Rommel in his collapsing North African campaign. Where they were shot down in droves, because they were slow, ungainly and massive targets loaded with fuel, ammo and other things that went boom. In one famous incident, [[CurbStompBattle 22 were shot down in just one flight]]. It saw service for little under a year before being retired.
263** An escort gunship version of the Me 323 was prototyped, with 20mm gun turrets and additional gun positions, intended to escort loaded Me 323s. However, with only two prototypes produced, it was determined that single-engine fighters would provide better cover than the Me 323 E-2 WT, and the design was cancelled.
264* The Convair B-36 "Peacemaker" long-range atomic bomber, which kept the balance of power during the cold war and looked positively badass. When everyone was switching to jets Convair used six huge radial engines[[note]]There was actually solid reasoning behind this. The B-36 was intended to make a nonstop flight to the Soviet Union, carrying the very bulky atomic bombs of the time, and get back to the US. The jet engines of the time were such gas-guzzlers that an all-jet plane of that size would have a significantly-reduced payload to carry all the extra fuel, or would require in-flight refueling.[[/note]] - which turned out to be maintenance nightmares, both for their inherent complexity (the ground crews hated having to replace all fifty-six spark plugs in ''each engine'') and because they were never meant to be mounted in a pusher configuration, resulting in many failures (when your plane losing an engine is considered so routine that ''the mission is allowed to continue as if nothing happened'', you know you have a problem). And for all that the plane was still underpowered, so they eventually fitted four additional jet engines to compensate, though they were normally only used for takeoff and shut down while cruising to conserve fuel. The B-36 also featured an innovative control-by-wire system for the engines... but no mechanical backups, so if the electronics failed you were screwed. And the electronics were mounted in delicate housings that would shake themselves apart under the vibrations caused by the turret guns. Even after the design was tweaked and bludgeoned into some kind of functionality, it still had a tendency to spring oil and fuel leaks all over the place or abruptly catch fire. Then again, it could carry ''ten times'' the payload of the famous B-17 Flying Fortress, and its morale and propaganda value was enormous.
265** Then again, engine failures were less of a problem for the B-36 because its wings were so enormous that the aircrew could actually crawl around inside them and fix the engines in flight if necessary.
266** The B-36 was so ''very'' prone to engine fires (mostly caused by excess fuel from air intake icing) and failures that the aircrew soon turned the typical phrase "six turning and four burning", indicating all engines were running properly, into "two turning, two burning, two smoking, two joking and two unaccounted for".
267* During World War II, the US Military subscribed to the "Bomber beats Fighter" philosophy by arming their bombers with [[MoreDakka multiple gun turrets]] for defense against enemy fighters. Many of bombers like the B-17, B-24 and B-29 bombers sported anywhere from from 8 to 13 machine guns. In theory, long-ranged bombers could only rely on themselves for protection as then-existing fighters lacked the range necessary for escort missions. In practice, the defensive armaments turned out to disappointment despite initial successes following advancements in air combat. Although the guns were initially useful against the BF-109 used by the German Luftwaffe, these proved inadequate against newer tactics and lightning-fast jet and rocket fighters that could evade the gunfire, while also being useless against ground-based anti-air. Improvements in fighter speed and range gave bombers adequate long-range fighter escorts that proved to be much more effective at reducing losses. Yet what ultimately [[{{Pun}} shot down]] this doctrine was the development of beyond-visual-range missiles that gave fighters the ability to safely shoot down bombers from beyond the guns' maximum firing range. Subsequently, most post-WWII bomber models have had few if any defensive weapons, which would be little more than deadweight at the cost of plane mobility and payload.
268** The concept was briefly resurrected with the YB-40 project, which took the basic B-17E design and removed the bombload, replacing it with a second upper turret, doubling the waist guns, and adding a chin turret, with increased ammunition supply, as a means of augmenting the ability of B-17 formations to defend themselves when carrying out missions beyond the range of fighter escort. However, the additional weight of the armor and weapons meant that it could not keep up with the returning bombers that no longer had the weight of their bomb load to slow them down, and the introduction of the long-range P-51 Mustang that could escort the bombers through the entire missions eliminated the need for gunships. The chin turret from the YB-40 program was, however, added to late B-17F aircraft and all B-17G aircraft, so the resources put into the program were not entirely wasted.
269* In World War 2, Japan actually deployed balloons to drop bombs. They tied bombs to high altitude balloons that would ride the natural air currents across the Pacific, at which point a built-in timer would release the payload and bomb whatever happened to be below. In a sense, they were successful, being the only attempt by an Axis power in WWII to directly bomb the Continental US that actually ''hit''[[note]]Besides [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lookout_Air_Raids an attack]] by a submarine-based plane with incendiary bombs, that caused minimal damage[[/note]]. On the other hand, the carried bombs were too small and too widely-dispersed to reliably hit anything of strategic value, making them useless as anything other than a terror weapon, although the Japanese did also develop incendiary bomb balloons, with the aim to start forest fires. A family of six in Oregon killed by one of the bomb balloons was the only known civilian death case in the US during the war directly caused by enemy action.
270** The notorious Unit 731 of the Japanese Army perfected a system to drop plague-carrying fleas via the same balloons, but the US managed to locate and bomb the launch facilities before it was ready. It wouldn't have really done much damage in the scale of the carnage occurring at the time, but would have been awkward and messy to contain had a plague outbreak started in a major west-coast city.
271** Also, thanks to gag orders and censorship, the US government was able to keep any news of the balloon bombs out of the press. The Japanese then believed the project was a total failure and scrapped it.
272* The Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit heavy strategic bomber was the culmination of decades of research into stealth and precision bombing: It's a flying wing with no tail or fuselage, the engines and armament are hidden inside the wing/body, and every angle and curve was designed with the help of computers to deflect radio waves away from radar receivers below the bomber. The skin is made of materials that absorb radio waves and convert them into heat, and the engines have a low thermal signature. The intended capability was to slip through dense anti-aircraft defenses to deliver nuclear weapons. Then it suddenly lost much of its value as a strategic stealth bomber when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It has since been relegated to rear echelon status and has seen action as a conventional bomber in only four conflicts: Kosovo, Afghanistan, the 2nd Gulf War, and the Libyan Civil War. On the plus side it performs conventional bombing very well, with an absolutely absurd bomb capacity, a varied arsenal of smart munitions that it can pick out of a revolver-like bomb bay carousel, and fantastic range thanks to its flying wing design. In particular, its ability to get very close before it shows up on radar helps it to slip through gaps in ground-based anti-air radar networks and bomb them, in order to clear the way for non-stealthy aircraft to come in and wreak havoc. However, there's still the problem that it's incredibly expensive to manufacture and maintain with each plane costing over ''$1 billion'', requiring their own specialized climate-controlled hangars to maintain its stealth coating and needing 50 hours of maintenance for every hour spent flying. It also requires a computer-controlled fly-by-wire system to safely operate the complex system of split-brake rudders, differential engine thrust, and "elevons" that control the inherently unstable flying wing aircraft, and if those computers fail the damn thing ''will'' crash.
273* The Messerschmitt Me-262 Schwalbe, the world's first operational jet fighter. While fast enough to leave any Allied plane in its contrails and an excellent bomber interceptor, its engines were prone to mechanical problems and required high temperature alloys that Germany didn't have enough of. It also required more fuel than the Germans could afford to ration to it. Many armchair historians have cited UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler's decision to make the 262 a fighter-bomber as a boneheaded move that delayed the introduction of a potentially war-winning weapon, but this view is mistaken and unrealistic: Hitler was right in believing that the 262 would be the only aircraft capable of penetrating the air umbrella over an Allied invasion fleet, though it wasn't ready in time, and the fighter-bomber issues only delayed production by about a month. And by that point in the war ''all'' fighters were effectively fighter bombers, as the Allies realized that fighters made effective ground attack aircraft and used them to replace dead-end types like dive bombers. The fact of the matter is that the Germans rushed the 262 into service about as fast as they could have, and its premature birth was part of the reason for its problems. Finally, even if it had gone straight to fighter units, their primary opponents - the P-51 Mustang and the Supermarine Spitfire - still would have outnumbered them 60 to 1; this was what eventually led to the Allies' primary method of disposing of the 262, via ambushing the fighters as they were landing, since they had ''more'' than the aircraft and pilots required to track their jets to their bases and spring the trap. Even as Germany wised up and began posting their own fighters to cover their jets as they landed, this ended up being a moot point, since such exercises meant those escort fighters, and the fuel they burned, were tied up covering for the Me-262's when they could have been deployed on frontline duty.
274* The jetpack, sadly, turned out to be this. Starting with [[StupidJetpackHitler the Germans in the later years of WWII]], several nations attempted to build a practical jetpack for military purposes (though contrary to popular belief, the earliest designs were intended for short jumps rather than sustained flight - just enough to bounce over a minefield or quickly cross a river). And sure enough, many of the designs ''did'' work, they were just too impractical. The engines were incredibly loud, they could only fly for a short time (20-30 seconds), and the pilot could get a nasty burn on his legs if he wasn't careful (not to mention he could ''break'' his legs if he wasn't careful coming down). Ultimately all the military applications jetpacks might have had could be done using easier, cheaper, and safer (though sometimes slower) methods. So while working jetpacks do exist, barring a revolutionary new discovery in small-scale rocket propulsion they are doomed to an eternity as scientific curiosities.
275** Perhaps, however the worst part of this all is, towards the end of its testing life, improvements were starting to be made that ''could'' have made it practical enough to regain the Army's interest. Unfortunately, the mind behind it all, Wendell Moore, died due to complications from a heart attack, and the concept died with him.
276** The '50s and '60s also saw the US military experiment with one-man helicopter-like flying platforms, which likewise proved possible but not ''practical''. They could stay aloft longer than a jetpack, but only introduced a new problem: soldiers floating above a battlefield are little more than horribly exposed targets begging for someone to shoot them. Old-fashioned ground based infantry at least have the luxury of taking cover behind something. There was also the rather glaring issue that placing the pilot ''above'' the spinning rotors meant that if for any reason they fell off (such as if, say, they ''got shot'') means the unfortunate pilot would fall straight into the rotors, which was...[[HelicopterBlender not a pleasant way to go,]] and making even a non-fatal injury and fall into a [[ChunkySalsaRule very fatal one]] indeed.
277* This was the US Army's evaluation of the Sopwith Camel during UsefulNotes/WorldWarI. While very agile, the Camel was unforgiving to inexperienced pilots, and the Gnome Monosoupape rotary engine had a variety of quirks and shortcomings of its own (which the Americans were very aware of from operating the Gnome-engined Nieuport 28). If not properly handled, the Gnome could burst into flames. Instead, the US Army Air Service opted to adopt the SPAD S.XIII, a less agile but faster French fighter plane, for most of their front-line units.
278* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_CR.42 FIAT CR.42]]. The best biplane fighter ever built, it was very maneuverable (even for a biplane), and was remarkably fast and tough, for a biplane. It entered service in 1939, when monoplane fighters had got much faster, tougher and better armed, and once their RAF opponents adapted to them all they could was to fight on as a ''monoplane'' replacement was put into production.
279** The experimental [=CR.42DB=] variant, fitted with a Daimler-Benz DB [=601A=] 1,200 HP engine, could reach the speed of 525 km/hr, making it the fastest biplane ever flown to this day. It was still an open-cockpit biplane, and ''still'' slower, frailer, and less armed than its monoplane opponents, resulting in it remaining a one-shot prototype.
280* The Yokosuka MXY-7 [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokosuka_MXY-7_Ohka Ohka]], whose name means "Cherry Blossom", was a rocket-powered suicide aircraft developed by the Imperial Japanese Navy later in World War II. On paper, it could carry three times the bomb load of a conventional [[SuicideAttack kamikaze]] or conventional light bomber aircraft, and could very well sink a US aircraft carrier or destroyer in one hit,[[note]]One such example of the latter was the ''Allen M. Sumner'' class destroyer, USS ''Manert L. Abele'', when an Ohka split the ship in half.[[/note]] as well as evade American AntiAir fire and enemy fighters once its rockets had been switched on. However, because its solid fuel rockets burned up so quickly, it had to be carried within 37 km (23 mi) of its target by a [=G4M=] "Betty" bomber specifically modified to carry it. This bomber, already lacking in armor and protection for its crew, was vulnerable to American fighters patrolling the skies, and these bombers were usually shot down miles from the US fleet as a result, usually with the Ohkas still in the bomb bay. Only seven ships were successfully sunk or damaged by Ohkas.
281* The [[CoolPlane F-14 Tomcat]]. Though undeniably an incredible interceptor and quite solid in the air superiority role, the early-model Tomcats were plagued by [[TheAllegedCar the craptastic TF30 engines]] salvaged from the failed F-111B project, which flamed out for any reason at all, and were also big and expensive. The vaunted Phoenix missiles also had weight issues, and were not of much use against maneuvering targets. Worse, as the years went on, the effort of keeping them running rose to unreasonable levels; according to former Navy veterans, Tomcats would frequently fly without a functioning radar, just because it was such a pain to keep running. Add in a lack of upgrades (the best it got were better engines and then new avionics), and the Navy was probably not sorry to see it go in 2006. In addition, the Tomcat has the dubious honor of being the last major warplane deployed before digital fly-by-wire controls revolutionized the entire fighter concept; new planes such as the F-16 and F/A-18 blew away the Tomcat in the maneuverability department. Also, the AEGIS radar present on all new American destroyers and cruisers has rendered the "fleet defense interceptor" concept obsolete.
282* The Mi-24 "Hind" is one of the most iconic military helicopters of all-time. It was designed to have the weaponry of a gunship, the armor of a tank, and on top of all of that [[AwesomePersonnelCarrier the ability to transport a squad into battle]]. In practice, the latter feature isn't as versatile as it sounds. Carrying infantry means having a large amount of extra weight, which limits its maneuverability, along with adding an extra distraction when maneuvering or taking fire, while its capacity of eight soldiers is on the low end of transport helicopters. It isn't too surprising that its successor, [[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/VVS_100th_IMG_0063_%287727429476%29.jpg the Mi-28 "Havoc"]], drops the troop transport ability entirely in favor of a streamlined attack helicopter design.
283* The concept of a "torpedo bomber" became this by mid-to-late World War II for most if not all sides. Sure, hand-delivering a self-propelled OneHitKO to all but the toughest and most armored ships from on high might sound fun, but to get the things on target, you have to fly very low (so the torpedo won't just plunge straight down and go under the target on release) and very slow (so the torpedo doesn't break apart or accidentally detonate upon impact with the water), and at that point you're essentially a sitting target for any AA gunner with more than two brain cells to rub together. Compounding this is that torpedoes...aren't exactly the most reliable and robust things to drop from airplanes, so there's a chance they'll miss the target or prematurely detonate anyways, even if you ''do'' manage to survive long enough to drop the ordnance; the Americans learned this the hard way during the Battle of Midway, where ''not a single torpedo'' managed to score effective damage to the Japanese fleet[[note]]Admittedly, some of this was due to severe issues with the Mark 13 torpedo itself[[/note]], and the losses among torpedo bomber pilots were ''astronomical'', a fact not helped that most were flying incredibly outdated Devastators (though even the one squadron flying the new Avengers suffered heavy losses as well, and also failed to score any strategic hits.) The Japanese had better luck, since their torpedoes were more reliable, but even then casualties among "Kate" crews pulling torpedo runs were still very heavy. It is also very easy for smaller and more maneuverable ships (like destroyers) to dodge the torpedoes if the bombers dropped them very far from their intended victims. Aerial torpedoes are still used to this day from helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft as anti-submarine weapons, but they are nowhere near as ubiquitous as before, having been supplanted by anti-ship missile-carrying aircraft.
284** Dive bombers also saw themselves falling into the ABI category by the end of the war as well; Diving straight down on your target allowed for better accuracy and precision, and even helped with "boosting" the bombs a little to help them punch through armored plating, and it made for one hell of an impression on your hapless enemies, especially if your plane happened to have [[StukaScream sirens (or very loud airbrakes, on the part of the American Dauntless)]] attached. But every second you spent with the enemy in your sights is a second spent with ''you'' in the enemy's sights, and being the pilot of a plane designed to plunge ''towards'' the things shooting at you was a good way to get killed fast. While the Americans had the prescience of mind to make their Dauntless bomber maneuverable and robust (to the point that it could fight toe-to-toe with enemy fighters if need be) the Germans' Stuka unfortunately fell prey to this trope; besides the siren and the ability to carry heavy ordinance up to and including [[{{BFG}} anti-tank cannons]], it was a slow, ungainly plane vulnerable to AntiAir or enemy fighters, and took increasingly severe losses as the war went on and anti-aircraft technology progressed. What ultimately ensured the obsolescence of the dive bomber was the development of [[JackOfAllTrades multirole aircraft]] as well as guided munitions (guided bombs or air-to-ground missiles), and they would replace the type entirely.
285** Hilariously enough, it was probably the Japanese that started the whole multirole warplane thing with the Aichi [=B7A=] "Ryuusei." The Imperial Japanese Navy noted that torpedo bombers were too vulnerable to getting shot down and that dive-bombers sacrificed good performance when flying with a lot of ordnance. So, in a strangely logical turn of events, Aichi's engineers had created the very concept of a multirole fighter, as the Ryuusei outperformed the Zero during flight testing. The answer to the issue of performance was adding a lot more horsepower, so that the plane was not as burdened while carrying bombs or torpedoes.
286* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_AM_Mauler AM Mauler]] was a massive single-engined carrier-capable attack plane of the US Navy built by Martin, capable of hauling more ordnance than the already hefty Skyraider, including the ability to carry '''three''' torpedoes (for context, most other planes that can carry torpedoes, like the competing AD Skyraider, could only carry one). Unfortunately, it was a temperamental plane with a nasty tendency of bouncing when landing on deck (putting plane and pilot at risk of missing the arresting cables and going straight into the drink) among other issues, and it was powered by an equally temperamental engine (the Pratt&Whitney Wasp Major, the same engine that powered the B-36 mentioned earlier) that made it unpopular among service crews and pilots alike, earning the "Awful Monster" nickname as a result. Because anti-ship missiles made its signature advantage over the Skyraider irrelevant, and because the Skyraider was a lot less temperamental and easier to fly (in addition to its smaller size being an advantage in cramped carriers), the AM Mauler was only in service for a short time and never saw action.
287** A naval plane in Awesome But Impractical was the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_XTB2D_Skypirate Skypirate]], which was ''even bigger and heavier'' than the Mauler, capable of carrying ''four'' torpedoes. It also still uses the same temperamental Wasp Major engine, and it proved too big to operate from the then-ubetiquous ''Essex''-class aircraft carriers, needing the then-delayed ''Midway''-class. As a result of this and the collapse of the Japanese in the Pacific, the project was cancelled.
288* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-47 Sukhoi Su-47 Berkut]]. The plane looks like it flew straight out of a [[Anime/{{Macross}} Macross]] anime, so no doubt it's awesome. However, the much touted forward-swept wing is where the "impractical" comes in: the composite material suffered tremendous stress which caused the plane's top speed to be lowered to a measly 1.6 Mach (to compare, the Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker, it's forerunner, achieves ''2.4 Mach'') and the superb manoueverability at low speeds just didn't warrant the losses the Su-47 suffered in return for the forward-swept wing's implementation. It got cancelled in the late 2000's and replaced with the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-57 Sukhoi Su-57]] whose much-less awesome trapeze wing offers almost all the advantages the Berkut had at none of the downfalls.
289* Increasingly, the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunderbolt_II A-10 Thunderbolt II]] is being viewed this way.
290** On one hand, it's a famous ground attack aircraft with a 30mm Gatling gun designed to rip through armored vehicles with a burst of depleted uranium shells, and carry various bombs and missiles. The fact that it swoops dramatically low with engines roaring and a gun that goes "brrrt!" can elicit cheers from friendlies on the ground, while its combination of loiter capability and old-fashioned firepower are thought to suppress and terrify enemy ground troops more effectively than a high-flying fighter that just drops an explosive payload and leaves. The A-10 also includes an armored bathtub around the pilot, and redundant mechanisms which can enable it to keep flying after damage that would wreck a less durable plane. Supporters in both the military and the media have objected to the idea of retiring it and relying only on multirole fighters to perform close air support, arguing that these are not a substitute for a specialized ground attack aircraft like the A-10.
291** On the other hand, as time goes on it becomes harder to deny the flaws of the A-10. Its primitive avionics have led to at least one [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/190th_Fighter_Squadron,_Blues_and_Royals_friendly_fire_incident friendly fire incident]], the iconic [[GatlingGood Gau-8 Avenger]] [[https://medium.com/war-is-boring/cold-war-coloring-book-taught-a-10-pilots-to-kill-soviet-tanks-a26385113bf0 would struggle against any modern MBT]], [[https://web.archive.org/web/20160304062736/http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a522397.pdf even Patton tanks made into ideal targets give it trouble]], while being overkill against almost any vehicle lighter, and its slow speed makes it vulnerable to modern surface-to-air missile systems, most of which are now easily carried on vehicles as opposed to the older surface-to-air missile systems that relied on ground-mounted static launchers and bulky radar sets[[note]]Its most effective role which it is used for today is that of Counter Insurgency (COIN) strikes, where the enemy force isn't ''expected'' to have anything more advanced than technical and possibly [=MANPADs=], both of which the A-10's armor and sturdy airframe can shrug off with little trouble. That sturdy airframe, however, is also a weakness, as it means the turbofan-powered aircraft is a relatively slow, plodding thing as it flies through the air, and for all its fuel efficiency and stability it still chugs fuel like a fratboy on Homecoming Night just to get airborne. Add onto this the maintenance costs for those robust features, and the expenses of getting an A-10 into the air for COIN ops are prohibitively high compared to dedicated COIN aircraft that can perform the same role for significantly less cost, which the U.S. military is currently looking for.[[/note]], and no matter how tough the airframe and well-protected the cockpit, it simply can't withstand heavy AA, no plane can. Its best weapons are almost all missiles and smart bombs, which can be carried by faster multirole jets, large bombers and even longer-loitering turboprops. Even ignoring all this, there is still the problem that the manufacturer went under decades ago, so the only way to get spare parts is to custom make them or cannibalize existing airframes, and eventually the airframes will just be too worn to keep flying. As it is, while the USAF continues to upgrade the Thunderbolt with more modern systems and avionics, most upgrade packages are notably focused towards allowing for greater long-range strike and loitering capability, essentially turning the ground-attack aircraft into a stand-off missile deployment system instead of a dedicated CAS "gun run" plane.[[note]] While many people *think* Close Air Support is about how close the plane is to the target, it's not. [[https://irp.fas.org/doddir/dod/jp3_09_3.pdf The 'close' refers to the target being in close proximity to friendly forces by the US definition]]. This makes the problems with using the A-10 as a gun plane obvious. Under ideal conditions, the dispersion of rounds has approximately [[https://web.archive.org/web/20090714150222/http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/equip/gau-8.htm 80% land in a 12-meter radius at approximately 1220 meters from the target]]. That's a circle a bit bigger than a basketball court filled with DU rounds that will turn a human to paste. With that in mind, if friendlies or civilians are close by, a single twitch on the stick is the difference between a medal, a court martial, and a trial at The Hague. To ensure things go well, the pilot must have the best situational awareness possible and the most precise weapons possible. While back in WWII the way this was achieved was flying close to the target at a slow speed, with modern electronics it's possible to get a better picture of the ground from further away at higher speeds. Knowing all this, it can be seen that minimizing use of the gun when friendlies are near, upgrading the avionics as much as possible, and using precision-guided munitions as much as possible are needed to maximize CAS effectiveness and minimize risk to US soldiers and local civilians.[[/note]]
292* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-25 Su-25 Frogfoot]], the Soviet/Russian answer to the A-10 Thunderbolt II, is also afflicted with this later on. Like its American counterpart, this dedicated ground attack aircraft packs a powerful cannon, heavy armor and enough munitions to wipe out entire tank columns. However, the Su-25 suffers from the same problems as the A-10, such as vulnerabilities to modern anti-air and antiquated avionics, while lacking the A-10's legendary survivability. The Su-25's vulnerabilities came to the forefront during conflicts in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Caucuses where the plane suffered heavy losses to both heavy anti-air systems and [=MANPADs=] with half of the Su-25s deployed in the Soviet-Afghan war being lost to enemy fire. Furthermore, avionic advancements allowed multirole fighters like the [=MiG=]-29 and F-16 to take on ground attack roles previously dominated by the Su-25.
293[[/folder]]
294
295[[folder:Artillery, Missiles, and Small Arms]]
296* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_mortar The hand mortar]]. A combination between a small artillery piece and a blunderbuss- basically 16th century frag GrenadeLauncher. The awesome speaks for itself, particularly considering it showed up in an era where the average soldier was still armed with a spear and/or sword. The impractical part? If it malfunctioned, the grenade could detonate in the barrel, ruining the weapon and injuring (or even killing) the user. Given how often early firearms misfired, you can see why not many soldiers wanted to use one. On top of that, it didn't actually extend grenade range that much over simply throwing it (arguably not enough to make up for its huge reload time) and was limited to fist-sized grenades that were surprisingly weak (the projectile design being primitive and the only explosives available being black powder, with 1/3 the energy to weight ratio of modern hand grenade fillers).
297* Ladies and gentlemen I present to you [[http://firearmshistory.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-enouy-revolver.html the Enouy revolver.]] A revolver with eight cylinders that could fire 48 shots. As a surprise to no one the gun is unwieldy, unbalanced and heavy.
298* Rifles as mass battlefield weapons before the Industrial Revolution. Rifling, or spiral grooves inside the bore of a gun barrel, have been around since the 15th century. The grooves impart a stabilizing spin to the projectile, and even back then rifling was known to increase the range and accuracy of a firearm. However, not only was rifling expensive to implement prior to modern machine tools (as in everything had to be done by hand), the fact that nearly every firearm was muzzle-loading meant that burnt gunpowder residue would foul up the barrel. In addition to the grooves themselves collecting fouling, a rifle needed to use ammunition that was tightly fitted to the bore in order for the rifling to be effective. Compared to a smoothbore musket which could use a sub-caliber ball wrapped in a fabric patch, it was harder to ram a bullet down a rifle barrel to begin with, and it would soon get fouled enough from shooting that you’d need to be hitting the ramrod with a hammer to force the next bullet in. The net result was that a rifleman could get off maybe 1 shot in a minute, while a musketeer with a smoothbore flintlock could do 3 or 4. For centuries the rifle was confined to civilian hunting or specialized sharpshooter units. Muzzle-loading rifles finally became practical for mass army adoption with the invention of the Minie ball and similar ammunition, which could be loose-fitting enough to be easily pushed down the bore, yet also had a "skirt" that expanded upon firing to engage the rifling and form a tight gas seal. A few decades later, the mass production of breech-loaders rendered the whole issue moot because you no longer needed to manually ram a bullet all the way down the barrel.
299* [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volley_gun Volley guns and organ guns]]. Basically a bunch of small cannons bound together and fired off in quick succession for MoreDakka. While it looked spectacular when it fired, gunsmiths quickly realized that all they really did was add unnecessary mechanical complexity to the old standby of a conventional muzzle-loading cannon firing grapeshot, thus they were rarely used past the 15th century. It helps that the usual cannon only had one barrel to load rather than several, so in net the volley gun's rate of fire might actually be slower than the regular cannons'.
300* The 15th and 16th centuries saw the construction of utterly enormous cannons, such as the [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dardanelles_Gun Dardanelles Gun]] and [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Cannon Tsar Cannon]]. Unfortunately their awesome size and power also made them an absolute chore to roll into place, thus inferior to the smaller culverin and falconets for shooting anything more mobile than a massive wall... which the Europeans mostly stopped building at the time anyway in favor of bastion forts.
301* [[FirebreathingWeapon The Flamethrower]]. It was an ideal weapon for WWI and WWII that could quickly torch infantry, bunkers, and vehicles while also having the psychological effect of producing the hellish images of burning people screaming in pain. However, the weapon was eventually phased out since the Vietnam War for several reasons. First, it was a heavy weapon that weighed down the user and turned them into a highly visible target. Second, while its range isn't as [[VideoGameFlamethrowersSuck atrociously short as depicted in the media]], it still wasn't effective for long range engagements. Third, the weapon couldn't be safely stored in such a way that it would not explode if hit by an explosive or incendiary projectile. Finally, even its psychological advantage has its own downside; since flamethrowers were so terrifying, their users were always the first to get targeted or routinely executed if captured. Incendiary rockets and grenades have since been tried as more practical alternatives, although some of these have their own problems.
302** While largely obsolete as military weapons, flamethrowers are more useful for agriculture. Flamethrowers are not classified as firearms, and in America, 48 out of 50 states do not forbid unlicensed possession of a flamethrower, meaning that is far easier for civilians to own one. Furthermore, the limitations of flamethrowers like short range and bulky weight actually means they are less likely to be regulated compared to guns. Farmers in particular like using flamethrowers to exterminate nasty pests (like venomous snakes) and clear overgrown poison ivy as, unlike most pesticides and herbicides, they don't leave behind nasty residues or accidentally create resistant pests.
303* During the First World War, when trench warfare dominated the battlefields of Europe, one invention that was popular among soldiers was the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periscope_rifle Periscope Rifle]] . This kind of weapon, [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin as its name states]], is a rifle attached to a periscope (and a large wooden stock), which enables any soldier using it to fire while still being concealed below cover. In the static trenches of [=WWI=], it makes perfect sense at face value. However, shooting (relatively) safely from cover was about the only real advantage such rifles had. Their large, wooden stocks made them very cumbersome to use, carry, and reload, since the entire assembly has to be pulled down to access the bolt. They were also fairly difficult to aim and rather inaccurate to shoot; and their frames did not handle the actual rifle's recoil very well, with the wooden frames flying upward for every shot and requiring a tedious readjustment for the shooter. Unsurprisingly, most sharpshooters & snipers in the various militaries of the war simply opted for the standard scoped rifle when actually trying to hit enemies.
304* Machine pistols in general. A machine pistol is a small submachine gun using a small-size pistol cartridge and capable of being fired using only one hand. Unfortunately, ''those are the reasons why they're impractical'': They are usually horribly inaccurate and their rate of fire is so great that they easily spray the ''whole magazine'' empty with just one squeeze of trigger. One of the most famous failures is [[https://warisboring.com/the-mac-10-was-an-over-hyped-hunk-of-junk/ Ingram MAC-10]], whose immense rate of fire (1200 rounds per minute) and flimsy stock made the weapon so inaccurate it was nicknamed as "bullet sprayer". But, hey, they can be ''fun!'' Just look at the Trejo machine pistol, a Mexican Colt 1911 look-alike with a 7-shot magazine of 22lr. Just good enough for [[WebVideo/ForgottenWeapons giggle-factor]]...
305* The Nock Volley Gun, a smoothbore flintlock small arm with ''seven barrels'', designed to be fired from the rigging of Royal Navy warships during UsefulNotes/TheNapoleonicWars. Unfortunately, it turned out most men weren't big or strong enough to fire it without a) being thrown violently backwards by the recoil, b) falling off whatever high place they were firing it from, c) having their shoulder shattered, or d) all of the above. It also took freaking ages to reload, even by the standards of the period. Moreover, because of its enormous muzzle blast, it also had a tendency to set nearby ropes and sails aflame.
306* The Imperial Japanese Type 97 20mm automatic anti-tank cannon, despite its name, was actually a semi-automatic anti-tank rifle. Relatively powerful for a weapon of its class and possessing a high rate of fire to boot, it was also one of the heaviest anti-tank rifles ever made, weighing an unwieldy 50 kilograms unloaded, requiring at least two people to carry it around. This went up to as much as 68 kilos when fully loaded and equipped with accessories. Eventually the gun was upgraded with a wheeled carriage, so it could be moved around more easily.
307* The Gatling Gun was viewed as being this when it was first developed, although it has since been VindicatedByHistory. With the UsefulNotes/AmericanCivilWar underway, military quartermasters already had their hands full trying to develop logistical standards for weapons and ordinance. They simply did not want to deal with ''another'' weapon with its own unique set of ammunition and upkeep needs.
308** One of the more notable people to hold this viewpoint of Gatling Guns was General Custer. Custer in general, valued mobility highly, and when given the option to have them present at what would become known as his last stand, he rejected not just Gatling Guns, but artillery in general as they could not fight on the move. It's debated on how much of a difference they would've made in the Battle of Little Bighorn (AKA Custer's Last Stand), with one side saying that they would've saved the day, while the other side saying that they wouldn't have made a difference fighting Indians. That the Gatling Gun in Custer's unit was really heavy and required a minimum of two people to operate it didn't help him, as it would have become a stationary target for Sitting Bull's men.
309** The Gatling's contemporaries, most of which were multiple-barrel volley guns on carriages, turned out to be more impractical. The guns with barrels arranged horizontally, sometimes called bridge guns, used a single percussion cap located at one end of the row of barrels in order to let off a salvo of shots. While these barrels were breach-loaded, powder, percussion caps, and bullets were still separate components to be loaded up by the assistant gunners. Imagine having to reload the bridge gun after letting off a salvo. That's what restricted the bridge guns to sentry duty at, well, bridges, of course. 7 salvoes a minute do not mean much without some form of support from other soldiers.
310* The Gyrojet gun fired tiny rocket-propelled bullets and was cool enough to showcase in the Bond film ''Film/YouOnlyLiveTwice'', but rocket propulsion caused problems. Rather than starting fast and slowing down, it started slowly and accelerated. This meant that within a certain range, the bullet would not be moving fast enough to do any significant damage to anyone with body armor. They were also both more difficult to manufacture and much more expensive than conventional bullets, costing several dollars per round. Finally, air turbulence resulting from the transition from subsonic to supersonic speed effectively destroyed its accuracy. So, lack of power at short range, and lack of accuracy at long range. While later designs have ameliorated some of these problems, they remain more curiosities than practical weapons.
311* [=WMDs=] fall victim to this. If you use chemical weapons on the battlefield, you automatically allow counter use... and there are a LOT of countries with covert or open stocks of chemical weapons. The standing policy of the United States (which no longer has chemical weapons in its arsenal) is that any WMD attack will be responded to in kind - i.e., with ''nuclear'' weapons, the only [=WMDs=] America still has.
312** Of course, that doesn't mean the US isn't willing to allow their allies to use chemical weapons themselves. During the Iraq-Iran war, the US supplied Iraq with the technology to make chemical weapons.
313** Hitler specifically forbade the use of chemical weapons in WWII (despite having a very large stockpile of the chemicals) because he himself was the survivor of chlorine and mustard gas attacks, and if the Germans used them then the enemy would be used in kind, and Hitler didn't want that kind of horror to be inflicted upon a human being. Didn't stop him from using it on the Holocaust victims, as he didn't see them as human.
314** Sure, it's possible that Hitler's reluctance to use chemical weapons was a rare, self-centered mercy based on his own war experience. It's more likely, however, that Germany avoided combat use of chemicals because their logistical transportation was still heavily reliant on horses, compared to other belligerent nations with much greater production and/or imports of trucks. German supply lines would have been terribly vulnerable to any kind of chemical retaliation.
315* The third type of [=WMD=] that has been developed, biological weapons. All sides had operational weapons before the end of WWII (anthrax for the US weapon, and Plague-bearing fleas that could be dropped from a bomb casing for the Japanese one). These ''theoretically'' might have been more devastating, and certainly anthrax could have been more persistent, than the nukes actually used. However, in practice they proved to be absolutely unreliable, as the stresses and conditions of ''deploying'' them tended to kill both the vectors (such as infected fleas) and the disease microbes themselves. And even in the cases when the weapons were successfully deployed (like Unit 731 did in China), they usually managed to devastate a couple of villages at most. And the strict wartime quarantine measures, available under martial law, were later shown to be very effective in successfully stopping the epidemic, negating the very reason of the weapon's existence. US learned this from captured Unit 731 members after the war, and quickly abandoned the concept. The Soviet Union toyed with the idea much longer, up to the very end of the UsefulNotes/ColdWar and tried to overcome these shortcomings, but without much success.
316** Also, unlike conventional weapons, there's often going to be a chance that the disease will spread to your own soldiers or some neighboring allied country[[note]]then there's the political issues that make the use of biological weapons even less practical[[/note]].
317** Developing and testing these weapons can also be an own goal. Even into the 2000s, one remote island in the Western Hebrides of Scotland was still too dangerous for humans to even briefly visit, because of its use in WWII as a test-site for biological weapons such as anthrax. The issue of cleaning it up still persists nearly eighty years on.
318* Among nuclear weapons, atomic bazookas are the least useful and most hazardous. During the 1950s the US Army invented with the Davy Crockett recoilless rifle to fire low-yield nukes (think the Fat Man launcher from ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'' and you get the picture). As cool as the idea of a man-portable nuke may seem, it just happened to have a nuclear fallout radius that was greater than its optimum firing range. So, it essentially it becomes a suicide weapon as the user would die from radiation poisoning after using it.
319* If any select-fire infantry rifle has a burst-fire mechanism, it is certainly this. Mechanically induced burst-fire tries to find a good compromise between full auto suppression and semi-auto accuracy. This ends up not giving enough rounds to properly suppress foes and ruins the accuracy of a single shot at the same time. Training soldiers to fire their weapons in short bursts is cheaper and more useful than a building a burst-fire setting into the rifles.
320* Project Thor, aka "Rods From God". A platform in orbit firing kinetic-energy projectiles at targets on Earth. Sounds awesome, right? Well, not so much:
321** It takes about 15 minutes from firing to impact, but about 50 minutes (on average) to target.
322** Everyone with any amount of skill in orbital mechanics (read: almost every space program on the planet) would be able to calculate exactly where a launch platform is at any instant, what it could possibly hit, when it fires, and once it fires determine very quickly what it's firing at.
323** Due to the plasma sheath that forms around a projectile entering the atmosphere, the projectile can't use sensors to retarget itself.
324** Finally, the deal-killer: the amount it would cost in money, energy and resources to put enough weapons platforms and projectiles in orbit[[note]]at the very least, the mass of a projectile needed to even make it ''worth'' using over a more conventional strike method would have to be in the ''tens of thousands'' of kilograms, at the very ''least'', and you would have to fight the SquareCubeLaw to get ''just'' the massive, dense projectiles all the way into orbit; not to mention that such an effort would not go unnoticed by others.[[/note]] to make Project Thor effective as a weapon system would buy more than enough existing and conventional weapon systems and launch platforms (which have more flexibility) to make project Thor utterly pointless to have, except when conventional weapons can be easily shot down or fooled by countermeasures.
325* The AN-94 assault rifle, originally intended to replace the AK-74 as Russia's general issue rifle. It is extremely accurate even in burst-fire mode thanks to a system that fires them at 1,800 rounds per minute, putting out both bullets before the recoil from the first even affects the shooter's aim. However, it is prohibitively expensive, and its internals are much more sophisticated than the AK-74 (including what is effectively [[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment a second receiver within the receiver]] and a ''pulley'' to make it work), relegating it to Special Forces use. The complexity also meant that it'll jam whenever it feels like, and certain jams are extremely difficult to clear - not something you want in combat, especially when you're used to the legendary simplicity and reliability of the AK-74. A great example of such a jam can be seen [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATpeX3XBuuw here]].
326* The German [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_gun Schwerer Gustav and Dora Guns]] were railway siege guns, and the two biggest artillery weapons ever. Each weighed 1,350 tonnes fully assembled, and fired 800 mm shells that weighed seven tonnes. Designed specifically to destroy France's Maginot Line forts, the guns weren't ready at the time of the Battle of France, which at any rate ended up completely bypassing the fortifications altogether, thus eliminating the need for the guns in that campaign. The Schwerer Gustav was used to some effect in the siege of Sevastopol, destroying some forts and landing a lucky hit that spectacularly blew up the otherwise invulnerable White Cliff ammunition magazine underneath Severnaya Bay, but it only fired 48 rounds before wearing out its barrel (having previously fired 250 rounds in testing and exercises). The Dora was only deployed briefly against Stalingrad, but quickly withdrawn when Soviet encirclement threatened. Their disappointing performance reflects the fact that they were highly limited in what kinds of targets they could be used against. Because the shells were so heavy, the maximum range was only 48 km HE or 38 km AP, less than the 64 km range of 283 mm shells from the smaller 218 tonne Krupp K5 railway gun. And since they were significantly affected by barrel warpage and inconsistent powder combustion from variations in the local air temperature and humidity, the dispersion of the shells was too wide to hit precision targets. The guns basically relied on luck to hit what they were aiming at, so they were only useful for area bombardment of a fortified city. They were also awesomely impractical when it came to manpower and transportation. It took the equivalent of an entire regiment just to man, move, fire and maintain one single gun. The railway guns were also so large they couldn't use existing rail lines when emplaced, unlike normal railway artillery which could either pivot on its carriage or would simply use an area where the rails curved and move forward or backwards to adjust the aim horizontally. Custom rails had to be built wherever the guns had to be set up, using dual sets of tracks in a curve. When broken down for transport, the gun was moved in a train of 25 cars length on conventional tracks. Their inappropriateness for defensive warfare left them with little to do after 1942, and being so conspicuous they were increasingly vulnerable to attack from the air as the Allies gained air superiority; after being basically sidelined for the remainder of the war, the Germans blew them up in April of 1945 to prevent them from being captured by the Allies.
327* The V-2 rocket, a single-use weapon that cost a fantastic amount of resources per shot, and, thanks to the brutal treatment of the slave laborers making them, still the only weapon that killed more people on its own side than enemies. [[FridgeHorror But since the slave laborers were also considered enemies, it still sorta worked from the Nazis' perspective]].
328** The main problem was the guidance system, which often failed to hit any of the British Isles, if it didn't crash into a German town first.
329*** Later it turned out that the guidance system ''design'' was basically pretty sound — the missiles' lack of accuracy was largely the result of [[HeroicSacrifice the deliberate sabotage of the concentration camp prisoners]] that built them. Boris Chertok, a Soviet rocket scientist and influential chronicler of UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace, who worked at their Mittelwerke production site shortly after the war, noted that the workers learned to make unreliable solder joints and similarly cripple other parts so that they looked and worked fine on the initial inspection, but basically shook themselves apart due to stresses and vibrations during the flight. Another issue was that the German spy network in Britain used to report the missiles' accuracy had ''all'' been converted to double agents by the British, so when V-2s would land accurately, they would send back false reports to Germany that the missiles weren't aimed far enough, causing the Germans to "correct" the problem and end up overshooting.
330*** Another problem was the decision to steer the missile by the "gas rudders" — graphite vanes placed into the nozzle that directed the exhaust flow. These were fragile and unreliable all by themselves, and were quickly replaced by Vernier engines of pivoting (gimballing in the engineering parlance) the whole combustion chamber and nozzle assembly together both on the Soviet and the American designs.
331*** As if all this wasn't enough, the V-2 was intended as "Vengeance" for Allied bombing, and so it was fired primarily at London, rather than at the Western Allied beachheads in France, which were often chock-full of vulnerable supplies.
332** The V-2's big brother, the A9 - which, fortunately, never left the planning stage, though it did come worryingly close to actually being prototyped - was '''much''' bigger, and intended to strike the US after an intercontinental flight. It would have been so expensive as to make the V-2 look like a bottle rocket in comparison, especially as it would have required an even more massive booster stage to get the required range. Such a booster, the A10, would have used six V-2 engines. The engineers realized that if they couldn't get precise targeting from V-2s there was no way it could be achieved over such long distances, so it was decided that the second stage would be manned. The pilot, had he managed to eject, wouldn't have had much of a chance, as he'd be parachuting into enemy territory. The Nazis even built test sites for this behemoth, but none were ever produced.
333** And then there was the A11, which was intended as yet another stage for the A9/A10 combo, and would have used ''thirty-six'' V-2 engines. This three-stage monster was intended to target Japan, but the technology of the time would have limited the payload to... 300 Kg. For comparison, WWII-era general-purpose aircraft bombs - certainly capable of causing serious damage, but of little threat singularly - commonly had a weight of 500Kg, and often more. So Germany would have expended huge amounts of fuel, metal and manpower to deliver a payload that would have, possibly, destroyed one or two buildings. Nor did Germany, which was at the time ''allied'' with Japan, have any actual desire to attack them. Not surprisingly, this one didn't even leave the drawing stage.
334* The V-3 artillery cannon, which was a massive 130-meter-long cannon originally designed to bombard London from across the English Channel. While the gun could actually be fired, it was horribly unreliable since it used a series of controlled explosions to propel the projectile instead of a single explosion. This also made the gun prone to exploding, which is what destroyed the prototype. The guns also could not be turned or moved in any way, though given that they were intended to fire at cities (which by definition also cannot be moved) this was considered unimportant, but it meant that the V-3 guns were incredibly vulnerable to air attack. The intention was that the V-3s would fire 24/7, each one landing a 140kg shell in London every 12 seconds. While each individual shell wouldn't do much damage, an actual sustained bombardment would have completely shut the city down since it would never be safe to leave the bomb shelters. In practice, they never achieved such a sustained bombardment and the V-3 guns aimed at London were destroyed by Allied bombers before they could even be fired. A second set of two V-3 guns managed to shell Luxembourg during the Battle of the Bulge, but failed to do any significant damage and amply demonstrated why the original plan never would've worked even without the Allied bombers destroying the guns. Over five and a half weeks, they managed only 183 rounds fired (a far cry from the intended rate of fire) and only 44 of them were confirmed to actually hit the city, killing only 10 people and injuring 35. In addition to the inherent technical problems with the design, the Luxembourg bombardment was impaired by severe ammunition shortages due to the German railways being under constant air attack. This resulted in the gun crews improvising a much smaller 95kg sabot round containing only 9kg of explosives.
335** The third ''Vergeltungswaffe'' (Vengeance Weapon), the humble V-1 flying bomb, proved to be BoringButPractical. It became the grand-daddy of all cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles.
336* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Gerat Karl Device]], a 124 tonne self-propelled siege mortar designed and built by Rheinmetall for the German Wehrmacht. The second-largest weapon by caliber ever fired in war (600 mm, compared to the Schwerer Gustav's 800mm), each heavy concrete-piercing shell weighed 2,170 kg and contained 289 kg of explosive filler. The SPG could only be effectively moved by rail, and was almost useless as tactical weapon. But it sure blew the hell out of whatever it hit: Here is what it looked like when it hit the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Warsaw_Uprising_-_Prudential_Hit_-_frame_2a.jpg old offices of the Prudential Insurance Company]] in Warsaw. Here is a picture of a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Warsaw_Uprising_by_Joachimczyk_-_Dud_in_Adria_-_459.jpg dud]] shell. One was also used during the Siege of Brest Fortress, where the shockwaves from the impact could travel through metres of concrete and still be lethal.
337* One of the weapons the Ottomans brought with them during their siege (and eventual conquest) of Constantinople was Basilica, a 27-foot-long cannon that could launch cannonballs as heavy as 600 pounds up to a mile away. It probably didn't see much action due to a lack of effective ammo to get the desired results and required 60 oxen to drag it from place to place. It also took three hours on average to reload, giving the Byzantines a chance to repair the damage between each shot.
338** There was also the somewhat-smaller ("only" 17-foot) [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dardanelles_Gun#History Dardenelles Gun]]), which came in handy [[BreakOutTheMuseumPiece when repelling a British invasion in 1807]] - roughly 300 years after its initial construction - during which the Ottomans fired it with grapeshot and caused 28 British casualties in the process.
339* The [=XM29=] OICW. It was a standard 5.56mm assault rifle with a 20mm grenade launcher that had programmable airburst grenades. Issues came about due to weight,[[note]]the target weight was 15 pounds, three heavier than the existing [=M16A2=] with M203 combination; the actual weight ended up being 18[[/note]] cost,[[note]]Whereas the [=M16A2=] and M203 cost $1,000 together, the projected cost for the full [=XM29=] was $10,000 per unit, and the actual cost was likely to be $35,000 at minimum, to say nothing that each 20mm grenade for the launcher cost $150, versus a regular 40mm grenade only costing $8; the only reason the regular bullets didn't cost more was that those were the same as with the M16[[/note]] and the ineffectiveness of both the 20mm grenade[[note]]it was too small for proper [[NonFatalExplosions lethal]] air-bursting or fragmentation[[/note]] and the rifle itself compared to the [=M16A2=][[note]]thanks to a barrel just barely longer than nine inches, which wasn't enough to generate an effective muzzle velocity for bullets to go where they were actually aimed or particularly damage what they did hit. The [=M16A2=]'s 20-inch barrel is generally considered to be ideal for maximizing the 5.56x45mm cartridge's lethality; anything shorter than the M4 carbine's 14.5-inch barrel - and for the record, only ''one'' military AR-15 derivative has gone below ten and a half inches - is intended for a role similar to submachine guns rather than a normal rifle.[[/note]].
340** The grenade launcher part did manage to spawn the [=XM25=], using a larger and more effective 25mm grenade, which saw continued testing and some actual service. Unfortunately, the [=XM25=] would also fall victim to this trope. Despite its original design as something that would later be recombined with the concurrent [=XM8=] rifle to give another shot at the full OICW package, the [=XM25=] and its ammunition were rather heavy, forcing the user to forego a rifle. This reduced their combat effectiveness, since it limited their close-range combat capabilities, along with its lower overall ammunition capacity. The air-bursting grenades were quite expensive, even moreso than the [=XM29=]'s at $1000 per round. Eventually, [=40mm=] grenades were developed with air-bursting capability, which were much cheaper and more standardized than the [=XM25=]'s specialized [=25mm=] rounds, and following lawsuits between the people who were supposed to produce the weapon, the project was finally canned in 2018.
341** The South Koreans tried to salvage the design in the form of the Daewoo K11, a combination of a 5.56mm assault rifle and a 20mm bolt action grenade launcher, with such features as a ballistic computer, thermal viewing capabilities and an effective engagement range of 300 meters, all while weighing 6.2 kilograms (13 and a half pounds) while unloaded. It was apparently tested in Afghanistan and while initially showing some serious defects (most notable defects with the striking mechanism and the barrel moving during firing) DAPA managed to repair these and the weapon is now fully functional, even getting export requests from several other countries, most notably the UAE and Saudi Arabia. However, even the improved model was demonstrated to have absolutely abysmal accuracy, with testing at 500 meters showing only three shots out of fifty hitting, alongside the high costs despite the lower equip rate (even with the South Koreans realizing the concept would only work as a specialist's weapon, issued to a couple grenadiers per squad, rather than entirely replacing the standard rifle, the project has cost the equivalent of $100 million USD) which ultimately saw the project suspended in late 2019.
342* Arguably, a lot of the weapons in the US Army's Advanced Combat Rifle program could fall into this by the sound of it. Varieties include stuffing two bullets in a single cartridge[[note]]For example, the Metal Storm system, which used multiple barrels, each loaded with multiple rounds, to produce a storm of metal. However, the personal version of the weapon was ludicrously heavy (and the "artillery" version had serious design flaws), reloading was time-consuming, and accuracy was not a priority in the design, ultimately scrapping it[[/note]], making cartridges shorter by packing the gunpowder on the side, flechette rifles[[note]]While flechette cartridges are available for shotguns, the fin-stabilized flechette design (think of it as the fletching on an arrow) was designed to increase range and didn't do a very good job of it. In addition, the fins would frequently break or fail to deploy when the round was fired, making the bullet a lighter, ''less'' accurate round that frequently failed to reach the ranges they were supposed to, or even the ranges of standard slugs[[/note]], and caseless ammunition weapons[[note]]Caseless ammunition was designed to increase fire rate, by removing the mechanical necessity of ejecting a spent cartridge from the weapon after the slug was fired. While it worked, one thing the designers neglected to consider was that the ejected case also took with it a lot of the heat and fouling from the explosion of gunpowder. As a result, the barrels of caseless weapons would quickly get dirty, overheat, and warp from a ''single'' magazine of ammunition, rendering the weapon useless[[/note]]. Unfortunately, none of these weapons produced results that were significantly better than what was available at the time. It didn't help that this program was obsessed with smaller ammunition that didn't perform any better all for the sake of MoreDakka (though many rounds, such as the 4.7mm round, were also designed with armor penetration in mind, and the thinking was that even if the bullets were individually less lethal the sheer number would make up for that). Oh, did we mention that the failed programs wasted billions of dollars in the process of proving that the US Army Ordnance Corps couldn't properly design a rifle?
343** Then again, the program did produce several rifles that were ''as good as'' the M16 and slightly better in some ways (especially in the weight department)... just not better ''enough'' to justify the Army replacing all their existing stocks of BoringButPractical M16s with the new gun (which would likely have been the fantastically expensive H&K G11). The new types of ammunition developed for the project also came with their own teething problems independent of their ballistic properties; for example, the G11's caseless rounds were so fragile that just dropping them could potentially ruin them. Though many of the problems exhibited by the program's entrants could probably have been solved with a little more R&D, the program was already too short on time and money to sit through another development cycle. It's unlikely that the US armed forces will be replacing the M16/M4 family any time soon. It is also known that retooling lots of munition factories to make any rifle to replace the M16 and the M4 would require lots of time and money. Even if a replacement rifle had better performance, the retooling process would make logistics units miserable!
344** The Russian equivalent of the ACR program, ''Project Abakan'', similarly failed to bear much fruit. The engineers toyed around with some neat ideas like "balanced recoil" systems to eliminate muzzle climb, and even welding two AK-74 rifles together to increase the total rate of fire, but none of the prototypes would be particularly successful. Tellingly, the rifle that actually ended up adopted at the end of the program was the above-mentioned AN-94, and its adoption may have been more down to Russian politics than to any actual superiority of the design itself.
345* The [=XM214=] Microgun. Intended to be a man-portable version of the M134 Minigun, it was scrapped when someone figured out two simple facts: 1) the combined weight of the gun, battery and ammo pack were still too much for any soldier to carry, and 2) such a huge amount of firepower is rarely actually needed - normal machine guns provide more than enough for the vast majority of purposes.
346* In the great Soviet tradition of '''moar''' firepower, the Soviet army designed their rotary cannons (the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gryazev-Shipunov_GSh-6-23 GSh-6-23]] and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gryazev-Shipunov_GSh-6-30 GSh-6-30]]) differently than the US: instead of being powered by electric motors, they ran on the gas they themselves generated, which made them very fast to spool up and ''ridiculously'' [[MoreDakka dakka-capable]]. It did, however, come with a few slight issues: because they were adapted from the naval CIWS guns, the massive recoil and vibration, while quite acceptable for the much more massive ship installations, were putting so much stress on airframes that stress fractures and breakage of minor systems was practically a given (they had to install powerful lights near the landing strips, because the aircraft's own landing lights would almost invariably break upon firing of the gun), and not-so-minor ones like ''the landing gear'' or, in one case, '''the ''entire control panel''''' would sometimes break as well. Oh, and a full magazine would be exhausted in less than two seconds of fire. And shells would occasionally rupture prematurely and damage the firing aircraft. And the cannon could be fired no more than ten times, because it was ignited by pyrotechnic charges. As a result, the final generation of Soviet fighters (and the post-Soviet Russian designs to date) have reverted to a single-barrel cannon (and repurposing the pyrotechnic charges of their rotary cannon to give the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gryazev-Shipunov_GSh-301 GSh-301]] the unique ability to unjam itself in the event of a dud round).
347* In general, fully automatic combat shotguns. Weapons like the H&K CAWS, USAS-12 and the AA-12 are typically designed for close-quarters engagements in built-up urban or thick jungle/forest areas. However, where they have raw firepower, they lack versatility. With the military, shotguns are largely relegated to the role of door breaching and lack the versatility to quickly adapt from a close-range to medium-range threat like a rifle or carbine (requiring unloading and reloading with a different shell type for the new purpose - the CAWS program was actually brought to a halt partly because someone asked what exactly a soldier armed with one was supposed to do if they encountered an enemy further away than the 100-meter maximum range intended for the weapon). For the police, that much firepower is simply overkill, and private citizens who want to own one have to go through a mountain of expensive paperwork.
348** The [=Mk3=] Jackhammer never even got as far as most of the others (which are available for purchase): designed as one of the very first automatic shotguns, the Jackhammer was weighty, inaccurate (which is saying something when you're talking about a ''shotgun'', which with normal buckshot is supposed to use less-than-perfect accuracy as an advantage), and most damning of all, could not be actually be fired in full-auto. The weapon was very quickly scrapped, and only a dozen or so prototype versions were ever made, maybe two of which were actually capable of full-auto fire (and even then they'd immediately jam after one or two shells). There were also plans to make the magazines work as an anti-personnel mine with the addition of a detonator, but that too never got further than a mock-up of a slightly-modified magazine. But that being said, the Jackhammer had a devastating rate of fire and a surprising range when it ''did'' work.
349* The Heckler and Koch Mk 23 pistol. It's a match-grade-accurate, very reliable and durable handgun developed for Special Forces use. It is capable of making a 2-inch group at 27 yards and has exceptional durability in harsh environments, being waterproof and corrosion-resistant as well as being capable of firing tens of thousands of rounds without a barrel change. The .45 ACP round has considerable stopping power and yet is subsonic, making it suitable for use with a suppressor. However, since the design priority was using the pistol [[PunchPackingPistol as a primary weapon]] instead of as a secondary or fallback weapon, the thing is five pounds and sixteen inches long when loaded and outfitted with all the trimmings (specially designed suppressor and laser aiming module). To compare, the Desert Eagle, the king of Awesome, But Impractical handguns, is almost four and a half pounds loaded, and almost eleven inches long. No operator wants to carry a sidearm that weighs as much loaded as an unloaded [=MP5=], and so H&K quickly designed and released the USP series of handguns[[note]]the prototypes of which were actually used to make the Mk 23, in fact[[/note]] which retain most of the good qualities of the Mk 23, but with less weight and bulk; the USP Tactical in particular does pretty much everything the Mk 23 does at two-thirds of the weight or cost and in three different calibers, thus leaving the Mk 23's civilian version to end production.
350* The M16, when first used in Vietnam, was supposed to represent the pinnacle of the modern assault rifle. It was made of lightweight polymers which reduced the rifle's weight tremendously while still giving the user the option of automatic or single shot fire, decent penetration for its weight, and a number of other features which are now standard design elements. However, cost-cutting measures[[note]]Particularly the removal of chrome-plating in the bore. However, considering the fact that the versions without the chrome-plating were also the ones with the fairly pointless forward-assist added, which the Air Force, Colt, and Stoner all felt was a needless expense but the Army insisted on adding, this may or may not have been outright sabotage by members of the Army brass still bitter over having to replace the M14[[/note]] and a supply issue with the powder used with the ammunition it was tested with and designed for led to a switch late in the game that led to corrosion and jamming issues in the field. To make matters worse, the M16 had been issued without a cleaning kit[[note]]Or instructions on how to clean it, because apparently someone assumed that Colt saying it required very little maintenance and that the gas system was self-cleaning meant that it required ''no'' maintenance and the ''entire weapon'' was self-cleaning. Again, this may have been deliberate sabotage[[/note]]. While quickly fixed (as in by 1968) by the improved [=M16A1=], evolving into a top-class assault rifle in the [=M16A4=] and finally gaining success in its even more successful cousin, the [=M4A1=] that became the standard US service rifle, [[NeverLiveItDown the reputation lingers]], particularly among those that have [[ArmchairMilitary never used one]].
351* The immediate predecessor and the rifle the M16 replaced, the M14, was also an example of this. The M14 was a far more traditional rifle than the M16, with a body made of wood, mechanisms based on the M1 Garand rifle and firing a full-sized rifle round (the NATO-standard 7.62x51mm round, which matched the ballistics of the prior .30-06 Springfield round in a slightly smaller and lighter package). Unlike the Garand, it was selective-fire and could fire on full auto as well as semi-auto. The idea of the rifle was to replace several semi- and fully automatic weapons systems with a single do-all weapon that could reliably engage a target at any possible range. The fact that it was a more "traditional" rifle compared to the M16 also meant it was more widely accepted by the old guard of the U.S Military in its approach of emphasizing the role of individual riflemen over everything else. However, it proved to be very flawed as a general infantry weapon. For starters, the M14 is two pounds heavier than an M16. Its ammunition was also heavier than an M16's, with the same amount of ammo becoming a much greater burden for a soldier trudging through Southeast Asia. The heavier round also resulted in heavier recoil, which made the M14 extremely inaccurate in sustained automatic fire (this trend had been discovered earlier by the Russians when they tested the AVS-36, one of Simonov's first automatic rifles, way back in the 1930s - the problem turned out to be that the ergonomics of semi-pistol-grip weapons like these simply aren't designed to keep on target at 700 rounds per minute). Finally, [[JackOfAllTrades in attempting to be a do-all weapon system]], it had [[MasterOfNone failed to surpass any of them]]. It was too light to be a squad automatic weapon, too heavy to be comparable to a submachine gun and one Department of Defense report went so far as to call it "completely inferior" to the M1 Garand. The only real improvement was that it used a detachable 20-round magazine instead of feeding from 8-round clips like the M1... and John Garand, who would later go on to call the M14's gas system 'junk', had already designed a modified M1 using BAR magazines of that capacity before anybody thought of the M14. Most damning, Springfield Armory could neither produce it in the numbers needed for mass adoption (breaking one of the promises that had effectively sold the weapon over the FN FAL and thus gave the Pentagon the excuse it needed to not buy a foreign rifle; it took seven years before the change to the M14 was completed) nor use the existing production tooling for the M1 (the other promise that sold it over the FAL), since, even if that had been possible (the design turned out to be just different enough that it couldn't be made on existing Garand tooling), it had all either been broken beyond repair or sold off to Italy. To add insult to injury, the Italian firm Beretta actually designed [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beretta_BM_59 a comparable battle rifle]] that ''could'' be manufactured with the original M1's tooling. Eventually, the M14 was completely replaced as a frontline general-issue infantry weapon. It was however later modified into several designated marksman's rifles like the M21, a role it has proved to be much more capable in.
352* In general, [[MoreDakka drum magazines]] tend to be this when compared to either traditional rifle magazines or a belt feed system. While they hold more rounds than a standard rifle or submachine gun magazine, and load faster than a belt feed system, they are also heavier than the former and a lot more finicky than the later. Because of the weight, a soldier could only potentially carry one or two. They can be reloaded by hand, but as you can imagine, reloading a 50-, 70- or 100-round drum magazine by hand takes a pretty long time. Finally, they have a tendency to jam. That's why almost every firearm originally made with a drum magazine either had a traditional magazine made for it later or was adapted for a belt-feeding system, and why the G.I. issue version of the Thompson submachine gun cannot load drum magazines at all.
353** In a subversion, there is one place where drum magazines were better than either detachable box magazines or belt-fed ammunition systems. That would be the magazines for the single barrel 20mm+ wing-mounted cannons of WWII fighter and ground attack aircraft. Box magazines couldn't carry enough ammunition and belt-fed ammunition systems often required a complete wing redesign that would have taken several years.
354* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urumi Urumi]] is an extremely flexible Indian sword, more like a whip that has a sharp edge to it. In the hands of a master, almost no one can get near the user and no parry would be able to successfully block it. In the hands of ''anyone'' else, they are as likely to slice their own leg off as kill the enemy. Another downside is that it requires a lot of stamina as swinging it around, even with two hands, is very tiring. There is a reason it considered one of the most difficult weapons in the world to master.
355* ''Every military weapon'' made by Italian gun designer Abiel Bethel Revelli di Beaumont, due to different reasons every time. Here's a quick breakdown:
356** [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glisenti_Model_1910 Glisenti Modello 1910]]: the first semiautomatic handgun of Italian make produced first by Glisenti and then by Metallurgica Bresciana già Tempini, it was a cheap and reliable handgun (compared to the Luger P08, which required lots of hand-fitting before leaving the factory) firing an adequate proprietary 7.65mm round. When it came the time for the Royal Italian Army to adopt a semiauto, this was the chosen weapon, but at one condition: it would have to fire a 9mm round. Thus MBT redesigned the weapon to fire the proprietary 9mm Glisenti... And that's when the gun becomes impractical: the 9mm Glisenti is a 9mm Parabellum weakened enough to be fired in the more fragile Italian pistol, but aside for that the two rounds were almost identical, save for the more conical shape of the Glisenti's bullet, and during UsefulNotes/WorldWarI Italian troops would occasionally capture Parabellum rounds and, unable to notice any difference, load their handguns with those, with [[StuffBlowingUp explosive results]].
357** [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat-Revelli_Modello_1914 Fiat-Revelli Modello 1914]]: a machine gun, it was a sound design, had an indexing multiple-column magazine that was more reliable than a belt (even if hellishly complex and slow to load without special tools), and, most important, was Italian, thus freeing the Royal Italian Army from foreign supplies that would come either from Britain (at the time an enemy), Austria-Hungary (technically an ally, but a very disliked one that the Italian government planned to betray at the first chance) or Germany (an ally. This one Italy liked, but also knew they'd stay loyal to Austria-Hungary). Less awesome were the ''many'' troubles that earned this weapon a place in the ReliablyUnreliableGuns page on Website/ThisVeryWiki and the fact it was adopted over a better Italian design only due the Fiat company political power and [[ObstructiveBureaucrat bureaucrats screwing up hard while buying Maxims]]. Its successor, the Modello 1935, was even worse as it frequently overheated and jammed if not oiled.
358** [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villar-Perosa_aircraft_submachine_gun Fiat Modello 1915]]: AKA the Villar Perosa or, to the soldiers, the Raspberry, TropeCodifier of the [[MoreDakka submachine gun]] (and the TropeMaker alongside the German [=MP18=]). It was awesome also for other reasons: it was a combination of ''two'' independent submachineguns, each gun had an awesome rate of fire of ''[[MoreDakka 1,500 rounds per minute]]'', and, firing the slightly underpowered 9mm Glisenti, the recoil was easily manageable. On the impractical side, the magazine for each gun contained a measly 25 rounds (AKA ''less than one second of fire''. That's why the soldiers called it Raspberry), the weak round made it ineffective at longer ranges, and the ergonomics were so bad that you have to wonder ''how'' the soldiers managed to fire it while moving (Italian soldiers were very good at improvising).
359** Cannoncino Semiautomatic Fiat Modello 1916: a portable automatic cannon for infantry and aircraft use, firing 25.4mm-caliber high-explosive or AP rounds, with a higher rate of fire than its counterparts from Austria-Hungary and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=37mm_M1916 France]]. As an aircraft gun it failed due excessive weight and the rounds being too slow to hit late war airplanes, and production ended up being cut short when the British (by now allies) noticed it was suspiciously similar to their [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QF_1-pounder_pom-pom Pom-pom]] and threatened to sue.
360** [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beretta_OVP Villar Perosa Modello 1918]]: AKA the OVP and the Half Raspberry, it's a derivate of the Villar Perosa, taking one of the Villar Perosa's two guns, modifying it to fire slower (900 rpm, still fast but on the high end of current service submachine guns), and mounting it on a spare rifle buttstock. It was a good weapon, apparently pure awesome... Except the young military officer Tullio Marengoni came up with a less expensive way to do the same thing ''and'' attach a bayonet to the gun, resulting in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beretta_M1918 Moschetto Automatico Beretta Modello 1918]].
361* Yet another example of the Soviet love of MoreDakka, the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShKAS_machine_gun ShKAS aircraft machine gun]]. Quite unusually for a 7.62mm machine gun, it functions like much larger revolver cannons to ensure smooth feeding. It also has an unusually light recoiling section, allowing for an incredible rate of fire of 1,800 to 2,000 rounds per minute in the standard model and up to ''3,000'' RPM in the rare "Ultra-[=ShKAS=]" version. That's at the lowest level the M134 Minigun can reach, and with a single barrel. While (like any rifle-caliber machine gun) the [=ShKAS=] was shorter-ranged than a .50-caliber one, the ability to put up a veritable wall of lead greatly increased hit probability once the target did pass within its range. The problem was, the [=ShKAS=] was described as having [[ReliablyUnreliableGuns 48 ways of jamming]], some of which were difficult to clear even on the ground, and the Ultra-[=ShKAS=] was even less reliable. It was also very manpower-intensive to manufacture, a flaw that carried over to the otherwise much superior 20mm [=ShVAK=] autocannon that was developed from it.
362** Much of its reliability problems stemmed from the very rate of fire it was designed for. Just as an example, the rimmed Russian round required two-phase feeding, first pulling it out of the belt to the back of a weapon, and then pushing it forward into the action. Because of the insane rate of fire, the round was jerked out of the belt with such a force that the bullet would often fall out of it. They had to design a special kind of ammunition with much heavier crimping to fight this problem, but this increased the barrel pressure, leading to a whole new host of reliability issues. On top of this, these special rounds would often [[EasyLogistics mix with the normal ones in the supply chain]], causing issues for ''other'' guns if they accidentally loaded the [=ShKAS=] bullets - but [[FalseReassurance this wasn't so much of an issue]] because the [=ShKAS=]-specific bullets were quite rare, tempting the armorers to load the guns with the normal ones when they weren't available.
363* The Luger P08 is absolutely gorgeous for a handgun and is superbly machined and precisely fitted. That's why it was a ''terrible'' combat pistol for anyone not well drilled on its usage. The toggle action is notoriously finicky if not racked properly (and will injure a person who attempts a rack on the draw), prone to corrosion at sea if not well-maintained, fails to cycle if fed low-pressure ammunition, and the degree of hand-fitting meant that interchanging parts was practically impossible without the expertise of a proper gunsmith. Additionally, while the Luger was extremely reliable and mud-resistant in the trenches, it was very expensive to produce in large numbers. In both World Wars, the Luger worked fine as an officer's sidearm for shooting prisoners and deserters or as the weapon for specialized soldiers who raided enemy trenches, but it didn't take long for the German army to notice how poorly suited the gun was as a backup sidearm for regular infantrymen, and it was eventually replaced as standard issue by the boxier-looking and less costly Walther [=P38=], which was also quickly adopted by officers as a replacement for the Luger, as the [=P38=] could interchange parts more easily.
364* The Canet 12.6" naval cannon, as mounted on the Japanese Itsukushima-class protected cruisers. Intended to give the ships a gun that could actually tackle battleship armor, it proved not only far too large for the ships, but also ''abominably'' slow at reloading, even for the era. In their only battle, it took an hour to reload the gun. Unsurprisingly, the Japanese bit the bullet and bought proper battleships shortly thereafter.
365* The 46cm/45 Type 94, the gun mounted on the Yamato-class battleships, is the largest gun ever put to sea, and the problems mounting it caused the ships is documented above. The gun itself, though, had two major flaws that made them even less practical. Their armor-piercing shells were designed to dive underwater and strike below the armor belt, with the result they had less penetration under normal conditions, which is one reason the American Mk. 7 16"/50 matches it at longer ranges. Further, the Japanese could only reline the guns at such colossal expense that they simply planned to replace the guns entirely when they wore out.
366* Most high-velocity naval guns fall into this category. High muzzle velocity has its benefits - increased range, greater belt penetration, and against lighter ships greater accuracy - but the drawbacks made them very situational based on the navy in question's operational doctrine. That high velocity wore out the guns at alarming speeds, often suffered from decreased accuracy due to the incredible firing pressures, stressed breech mechanisms, and early in the 20th century the guns themselves were too long to hold up, structurally. But above all, high-velocity guns traded in reduced deck penetration at long ranges due to their flatter trajectories. Most of the navies that opted for high-velocity guns expected to fight close to their bases, while Japan, the US, and Britain went for more modest ballistics and sought other ways to improve their guns. See the Italian 15" gun mounted on the Vittorio Veneto classes and mentioned below for a good example.
367* The big Cold War-era Soviet anti-ship missiles. You know, the ones that are mounted in massive canisters that seem to take up half the ship they're on. Often supersonic and long-ranged with big warheads, they were a constant headache for the US Navy and drove their development of ever-better air defense systems, but... well, look at that description again. These missiles were ''enormous'', and required either equally enormous ships to carry them, or serious compromises in numbers and stability — which, of course, didn't stop the USSR from putting half a dozen of these on a tiny missile boat, but such boats were practical in closed theatres only, and couldn't be used to shadow American battlegroups, as the Soviet navy was wont to do. Now that technology has made smaller missiles with similar capabilities viable, the Russians are replacing these big old missiles as fast as they can. It also helps that you can put about ''twice'' as many of the new, smaller missiles on a similarly-sized boat.
368* The American RIM-8 Talos Surface-to-Air missile, one of the "Three Ts" that equipped early American missile ships. The Talos had, by an enormous margin, the greatest range of any missile of its era, with equally excellent altitude performance, an 80% accuracy rate, and the ability to carry a [[NukeEm nuclear warhead]]. Unfortunately, they came with a laundry list of issues that drastically reduced system effectiveness. The 7800-lb, 32-foot missiles had to be carried horizontally in massive magazines that ate up so much space that only a handful of cruisers could carry it. The beam-riding guidance system required two massive guidance radars high up in the ship per launcher and meant only two targets could be engaged at once. And finally, they had a battery that required monthly replacement, and the missiles themselves needed to be tested every two months. And as the final nail in the coffin, unlike the smaller Terrier and Tartar systems, the launchers were incompatible with the later Standard missiles, which meant the ships were obsolete as soon as the Talos was.
369* In World War II, the British and the Germans tried out {{sticky bomb}}s on the field as anti-tank weapons. They suffered from a variety of drawbacks. Both versions were infantry weapons that required the troops to get within throwing distance of a tank. Whereas the German magnetic version was unable to reliably stick to its target, the British glue version was actually ''too'' sticky and could easily [[HoistByHisOwnPetard attach to the user instead of the tank]].
370* The Walther WA-2000. On one hand, it was engineered to a high standard, very accurate for a semi-automatic sniper rifle (it was built from the ground up as a target rifle, after all), and a gorgeous piece of machinery. On the other hand, it was ludicrously expensive (a single rifle went for anywhere between $9,000 and $12,500 in the '80s. Today, it's valued between $40,000 and $75,000) and, rather damningly, not robust enough for military use (despite what ''VideoGame/CallOfDuty'' and ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolidPeaceWalker'' would have you believe). Production ended in 1988, with only 176 rifles made.
371* So far as military logistics is concerned, the idea of a universal service cartridge sounds awesome, but has proven to be troublesome. The idea is to give every serviceman the exact same primary weapon ammunition for vastly different roles. The problem is that there are roles with vastly different requirements, so making a universal cartridge doesn't work out too well in the long run (you could change powder loads and projectile properties, but that undoes the whole "universal" idea).
372* Laser weapons struggle to find use outside of point defense systems on naval ships and stationary bases. Compared to conventional projectile weapons, lasers have a lower cost per shot, don't require carrying warheads or propellant charges that can cause catastrophic explosions if hit, and can instantaneously hit fast-moving targets because they travel at the speed of light. However, a power plant to supply the necessary amount of electric current is too large and heavy to be carried by a single person or installed in most aircraft or ground vehicles. As a result, such weapons can only be found on either a ship (which are large enough to have the internal volume to justify said large powerplant) or a land base (which doesn't have to worry about powerplant size or weight given their stationary nature). Furthermore, while lasers can easily melt fragile equipment (such as drones, missiles and planes), a laser needs to shoot at one spot continuously for a long time to burn through hardier targets like bunkers and tanks. That requires the user to spend a longer time exposed to attack, and exacerbates the already-high energy consumption. Even worse is that aerial debris like dust, sand and smoke can block laser beams. So while laser weapons may have advantages in point defense against airborne threats, they're not yet powerful or adaptable enough to serve as a primary offensive armament against surface targets.
373* So far hypersonic missiles seem this way. While their extreme speed and unpredictable flight path makes them near impossible for any existing defense system to shoot down and gives them superb range, once they hit their higher speed, they're unable to follow sensor input to precisely hit a target. As a platform for short-range ballistic missiles it certainly works well, but against any kind of maneuvering target where the exact location is uncertain, their effectiveness is less certain. Furthermore, a single hypersonic missile costs $50-100 million, more than 10 times that of a conventional cruise missile.
374[[/folder]]
375
376[[folder:Experimental Weapons]]
377* The book ''[[http://www.amazon.com/My-Tank-Fight-Zack-Parsons/dp/0806527587/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205083504&sr=8-1 My Tank is Fight!]]'' is all about impractical inventions of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII.
378* During World War I, before the first [=A7V=] tanks were even completed, Imperial Germany decided it needed to go bigger and ordered the super-heavy K-Wagen, also designed by Joseph Vollmer. This was going to be a true landship: 13 m (42 ft. 8 in.) long and 120 t in weight, with four 77 mm cannons, 7 machine guns, 30 mm of armor, and a crew of 27! It was so gigantic that it was designed to be shipped by rail in six modules and assembled at its destination. The commander would have to give orders to the crew by means of electric light signals, including two drivers who would have to steer blindly based on the signals they got from the commander. Even assuming that it would have been able to crawl along at 7.5 km/h without getting stuck or breaking down (in which case they probably wouldn't have been able to tow it away in one piece), it would have been a huge target for artillery and cost so much that they wouldn't be able to afford the loss of one. Two prototypes begun under Hindenberg's orders were almost compete at the war's end, and were destroyed under the terms of the Armistice.
379* UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler ''loved'' this trope. Here are just a few of the awesome and extremely impractical weapons that never quite made it:
380** If the Tiger and Panther could have been considered Awesome but Impractical, what can one say about the superheavy tank [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer_VIII_Maus Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus]]? It's the most massive fully enclosed AFV to ever be actually built, with the surviving example measuring 188 tonnes in mass, 10.2 meters (33 ft. 6 in.) in length, 3.71 meters (12 ft. 2 in) in width, and 3.63 meters (11.9 ft.) in height.
381*** The project was a collaboration, employing Dr. Ferdinand Porsche and his company to design the hull, Krupp to both design the turret and manufacture most of the tank’s components, and Alkett to perform final assembly. The requirements from Hitler and the military were extremely difficult to meet: armor that would be immune to basically anything the Soviets could shoot at it; a turret big enough to mount a 150 or 128 mm gun, as well as a coaxial 75 mm gun; a powertrain powerful enough to move the heaviest tank ever while still being compact enough to fit inside it; tracks and suspension that could handle all this weight and prevent it from sinking into the ground; and finally the whole tank could be no more than 3.7 meters in width because that was the maximum that could be transported on German rail gauge without blocking train traffic going in the opposite direction.
382*** First, the layout. In order to keep within the width limit, the hull had to be quite long and also fairly tall, causing it to resemble a huge metal brick. The 1.1 meter wide tracks with volute spring suspension were tucked underneath the hull and contained within the side armor, leaving only a relatively narrow "tub" between them for the lower hull. The driver and radio man sat in a front compartment behind the sloped glacis. Behind them on the other side of a bulkhead was the engine compartment, containing a Daimler-Benz V 12 petrol or diesel engine producing over 1000 horsepower. The engine ran an electric generator system behind it under the turret, which in turn fed electricity to the two electric motors that turned the drive sprockets in the rear. The sponsons over the tracks contained--from front to back--the fuel tanks, radiators, and ammo stowage. The turret was mounted on the rear and constituted another large brick shape more than half as long as the hull and weighed over 50 tonnes by itself. It was armed with a 128 mm [=Kwk=] 44 main gun, a coaxial 75 mm gun, and a coaxial MG 34 machine gun; inside were the commander, gunner, and two loaders.
383*** The 128 mm gun, which saw combat as a field gun and in the ''Jagdtiger'', could destroy any kind of tank at long range and do a lot of damage to fortifications with its giant shells. However, its rate of fire was slow. The coaxial 75 mm gun was supposed to be a more quick-firing secondary armament which would also save the 128 mm gun from having to waste ammo on weaker targets, but it merely served to make the turret cramped and reduce the main gun's ammo stowage to just 32 rounds. A 20 mm antiaircraft cannon and flamethrowers were also proposed but rejected because they’d take up too much space and add too much weight.
384*** The non-removable side skirts made most kinds of track maintenance impossible in the field, and while it could be put up on three large hydraulic jacks to replace a road wheel, Moran suggests it might have been easier to just dig a hole under part of the track instead. Mechanically speaking, the powertrain and running gear worked surprisingly well. Steering was good, and ground pressure was acceptable. However, because it was so damn heavy the power-to-weight ratio was a lousy 6.4 hp/tonne: they couldn't get it to go any faster than 14 miles per hour on a hard surface, and the operational range was less than 100 miles despite carrying over 1000 gallons of fuel. A giant 14-axle rail transport car was specially designed for it. Since bridges were out of the question, the planned method for crossing deep rivers was for one Maus to drive submerged in water up to 7.9 meters deep, with the crew breathing through a snorkel and a second Maus remaining on shore to run its generator and supply the submerged tank with electricity through cables. This was one of the main benefits of using electric drive. Once the first one got to the other side it would provide electricity for the second one to cross submerged.
385*** The Maus was nigh invulnerable to antitank guns because of slab-like armor--including a 200 mm sloped glacis, 240 mm gun mantlet, side armor 180 mm thick, and side skirts 150 mm thick--but this couldn't change the fact that it would have been a big, slow-moving target for Allied fighter-bombers. The biggest problem, however, was the extreme difficulty of constructing it and the fact that it was wasting huge amounts of industrial capacity and resources that Germany couldn't afford. Those resources included enough steel in each Maus to make roughly four Panther tanks, and also large amounts of hard-to-get copper for the electric components. The one factory that was capable of producing the Maus got blown up, making it the only tank in the war to have its production completely stopped by Allied bombing. After the war, Allied soldiers would discover several hollow, unused Maus hulls and turrets which testified to all that wasted effort. Had the Maus served it would have met the same fate as other heavy German vehicles, getting abandoned and blown up by her crew after taking a disabling hit or running out of ammo and fuel.
386*** The government had ordered six prototypes and 135 production vehicles by June 1943. Later that year, though, the companies were ordered to stop all work so that they only completed two chassis in December 1943 and March 1944, respectively. The V1 prototype was a petrol-electric chassis, which was given a dummy turret for driving tests; it was supposed to get the second turret to be finished, which didn't happen. V2 was a diesel-electric chassis, which received the first and only complete turret. At the end of the war, the Soviets captured the prototypes after the Germans had succeeded in destroying the hull of V2, but not its turret. Therefore, they put hull number 1 and turret number 1 together to make a complete Maus for testing; it's now displayed in the Kublinka tank museum, albeit with most of its internals missing.
387** The ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1000_Ratte Landkreuzer P.1000 Ratte]]'' was the super-heavy tank taken to its ridiculous conclusion. A literal landship dwarfing even the enormous Maus in size and powered by U-boat diesel engines, not only would bridge crossings have been completely impossible for the 1000 tonne vehicle (the plan was that it would simply drive ''though'' rivers), but it would also have destroyed any road it attempted to travel on! For long trips it probably would have had to be shipped in pieces by rail, then put together at the front. This tank (if you could even call it that) would have carried two ''naval guns'' as its main armament, the same 280mm guns used by the ''Scharnhorst''-class battleships. Its secondary armament was a 128mm gun of the same type used by Maus, the intended location of which is uncertain (variously depicted as mounted in the font hull, in between the main guns in the turret, or on an independent rear turret), and numerous anti-aircraft turrets would've rounded out the armament. It would have had armor up to 250 mm thick. Nevertheless, it would have been a juicy target for Allied bombers and artillery which could have killed it outright, or at least disabled it by destroying the constant train of supply vehicles that would have been required to keep it going. There would have had to be German planes constantly in the air protecting the space above it, and large ground forces assigned to its defense. Hitler's interest in the 1000 tonne tank concept notwithstanding, the ''Ratte'' seems to have been at a very back-of-the-napkin stage of design before it got cancelled by Albert Speer in early 1943: if it's true that they were going to use spare turrets from the disabled battleship ''Gneisenau'' for ''Ratte'' construction, then the tank was definitely going to weigh a ''lot'' more than 1000 tonnes since those turrets weighed some 750 tonnes each. It's so nonsensical that some historians believe the ''Ratte'' to be a hoax, or perhaps a fanciful sketch that some engineer made for his own amusement. Wehrmacht General Heinz Guderian summed up the absurdity nicely, saying "Hitler's fantasies sometimes shift into the gigantic."
388** The proposed [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1500_Monster Landkreuzer P.1500 Monster]] took the idea from ridiculous to downright insane. A tracked, super-heavy self-propelled artillery piece specified at ''1500 tonnes'', the aptly-named ''Monster'' was supposed to have a crew of over 100 and use the ''Schwerer Gustav''-type 800 mm gun as its main armament! In reality the idea that it would weigh only 1500 tonnes was sheer deluded optimism, since the railway gun it was based on already weighed 1350 tonnes. If you look at the "Artillery" folder on this page, you'll see that the ''Schwerer Gustav'' was impractical as an artillery piece to begin with. What's more, even though the ''Monster'' would have been heavily armored, the giant and slow-moving machine with its large train of supply vehicles would be an unmissable target for Allied bombers and heavy artillery. Albert Speer cancelled the project in 1943 before it had a chance to leave the drawing board and waste Germany's resources.
389** The designs of ''Ratte'' and ''Monster'' have both been attributed to Edvard Grotte, an engineer and the director of Krupp who was [[MadScientist well known for his bouts of gigantism and reliance on the awesomeness]] to the detriment of practicality. During the times of the UsefulNotes/WeimarRepublic, when Germany and the Soviet Union entertained a brief alliance, both being something of the pariahs to the West, he did some work in Russia, producing several designs for his Russian employers. While the first of them, the unimaginatively named Grotte Tank, AKA TG-1, [[BoringButPractical was a fairly conventional medium that advanced to the prototype stage, generally pleased everyone]], and wasn't adopted largely due to the sorry state of the early-'30s Soviet industry, his subsequent designs were a clear indication of what would then follow. The TG-5 dwarfed even the aforementioned T-35 in its sheer insanity, and was essentially an early version of ''Ratte'', weighing the same 1000 tonnes and boasting 12-inch naval guns. It was to be driven by four marine diesels and to have 1000 mm frontal armor.
390** The Japanese, whose dynamics with their allies could be sometimes described as "everything that the Jerries can screw up we can screw up better", and their armor department [[TheAllegedCar being the proverbial redheaded stepchild]] of their military industry, produced the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-I O-I]], a superheavy tank that might be best described as [[MilitaryMashupMachine the lovechild of a T-35 and the Maus]]. Equipped with five turrets with [[{{BFG}} 100-to-150 mm guns]], and driven with two naval diesels, it was to weigh from 100 to 120 tons in its various incarnations, and used for coastal defence and invasion protection. There's very little information on this tank, but at least one prototype was reportedly built in 1944, and sent to Manchuria for trials, where it was reportedly blown up by the retreating Japanese forces during the Russian offensive the next year. The only material remains of this tank are several huge track links in some Japanese armor museums.
391** The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachem_Ba_349 Bachem Ba 349 Natter]], whose name means "Grass Snake", was a vertically launched rocket-engined interceptor that carried its offensive armament of rockets directly in front of the pilot. Endurance was even shorter than the Komet, and the plane was semi-disposable: missions ended with the aircraft breaking apart and the pilot being thrown free. So impractical it was never used operationally - and the only manned test killed the test pilot.
392*** Because it wasn't already insane enough, the original project (later scrapped) had the pilot expend his rockets on the enemy aircraft, then steer the Natter on a collision course with one of the surviving bombers and only ''then'' eject. With any luck.
393** [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blohm_%26_Voss_BV_40 Blohm & Voss BV 40]] Glider fighter was proposed to spare fuel and strategic materials for resource-strapped Germany late in the war. By getting rid of the engine and having the pilot lying prone on his belly instead of sitting, they could make the fuselage really narrow to improve aerodynamics and make it a smaller target. The fuselage was made almost entirely of wood. A Bf 109 fighter would tow two BV 40 gliders at once to operational altitude, and the gliders would dive at high speed to attack the enemy bombers with their two 30 mm cannons. The wheeled dolly was discarded upon takeoff, so after its brief attack it would have to land on a single skid. Pretty impressive for an unpowered aircraft, but the prone position was uncomfortable, and the plane was dangerous to fly. Seven were produced before the project was cancelled.
394** Related, the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blohm_%26_Voss_BV_246 Blohm & Voss BV 246]] guided glide bomb, which was also designed to be built from non-strategic materials. It never went into series production, but tests showed that it could indeed fly. The awesome part? The use of non-strategic materials...specifically, the wings made of concrete.
395** The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbervogel Silbervogel]] bomber, a semi-orbital intercontinental bomber. Too impractical to build at the time, and in any case, it would have had two problems: that it wouldn't have been able to carry a large enough bomb load to justify the cost, and that it would have burned up upon atmospheric reentry. The inventor figured out that the thing would never be able to work halfway through designing it, but continued to work on it anyway for the insane amount of money the Nazis were giving him.
396** The ''ne plus ultra'' of impractical Nazi inventions was the [[http://www.damninteresting.com/the-third-reichs-diabolical-orbiting-superweapon Sun Gun]], an idea for an orbiting space station with a giant parabolic mirror made from metallic sodium and at least three square kilometers in area. By concentrating the sun's rays into a focused beam it could function as a KillSat, with the ability to deliver scorching death from space to all enemies of the Third Reich. Food and oxygen were to be supplied by on-board pumpkin farms. Fortunately, Nazi Germany didn't yet have the technology, industry, or resources to manufacture manned rockets to construct objects in space, much less a space station consisting of hundreds of tons of equipment and millions of tons of sodium. Building this Sun Gun would probably be impossible even today, with all the countries of the world working together! What’s more, a single mirror might not have been able to concentrate that much energy on such a distant focal point, though perhaps numerous smaller ones could have. Oddly enough, the designers also recognized its MundaneUtility: in addition to establishing Nazi world domination, they thought it could be used as a weather satellite and communications platform.
397* In 1918, Italy completed two prototypes of the Fiat 2000, a heavy tank weighing 40 t. It had full length tracks, a 240 HP engine, 20 mm of front armor, several machine guns, and a hemispherical rotating turret on top equipped with a 65 mm howitzer. In some ways it was more promising than the comparable [=A7V=], with much better obstacle-crossing ability and an innovative layout, but at an average of 4 km/h it was just too slow, particularly when they tried to use it in Libya. It never entered serial production.
398* When Japan began work on copying the Me 163 (based on blueprints and samples provided by the Nazis), they apparently felt that the tendency of the rocket fuel to explode wasn't a bug, it was a feature. The intended use was for each pilot to take a pass or two shooting at B-29s, then [[RammingAlwaysWorks ram the next one they saw]]. [[SuicideAttack The pilot wasn't expected to bail out.]] Fortunately the war ended before any of these got into service.
399* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_XP-79 The Northrop XP-79]] was intended to be a rocket-powered flying wing fighter that would destroy incoming bombers by '''[[RammingAlwaysWorks ramming them]]'''. (No, they thought of that, it was designed to take the impact without significant damage.) Three prototypes were built, two were abandoned after the rocket engine failed to perform adequately, and the project was entirely cancelled when the remaining prototype, fitted with conventional jet engines (and with the ramming concept abandoned), was lost (and the pilot killed) after an unexplained loss of control during test maneuvering.
400* The Soviet Union/Russia, like the Nazis mentioned above, came up with some impractical gems for battle. In fact, it sometimes seems that the only reason they would design and build these weapons was just to prove that ''they could'':
401** Cast in 1586, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Cannon the Tsar Pushka/Tsar Cannon]] is recognized as the largest cannon by calibre, with a barrel nearly ''18ft'' in length and a bore of nearly three feet. However, it wasn't actually designed as a bombard (the mount and shot displayed nearby are decoration made in 1835): its intended purpose was to be the largest shotgun ever made. Mounted on a fortress wall, it was to be loaded with 1,600 pounds of grapeshot and used against attackers. But by the time it was finally completed, the Tatar threat to Moscow greatly diminished and it never had a chance to be used in a battle.[[note]]Although gunpowder residue was discovered during restoration in 2008, meaning it ''was'' fired at least once, though nobody can say at who or for what purpose.[[/note]] Still made a neat showpiece, though. In fact, showing off the prowess Russian bronzeworkers was a major purpose from the start.
402** [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_A-40 The Antonov A-40 "Krylya Tanka"]] is... a ''Flying. Tank.'' It's [[NinjaPirateZombieRobot a tank with wings]]. If anyone remembers making paper airplanes as a child, you can understand where the problem comes in. Tanks weren't/aren't designed to fly for good reason: they're heavy and aerodynamically unsound. To actually make it possible for it to fly this stinkin' thing, it was stripped of most of its ''ammunition, armament, armor'', and [[ArsonMurderandJaywalking headlights]]. This made it less a tank and more of a very heavy and cumbersome armored car that would have had very limited survival once on the ground, let alone still in the air. Only one was made, and in its solitary test, it did in fact fly... but was still far too heavy and overtaxed the tow-plane's engines to the point it risked a fire. The project, not surprisingly, was scrapped afterwards.
403** After limited success with an experiment to create a flying jeep - basically a modified jeep with helicopter rotors allowing it to be towed into the air and for it then to fly under its own power for limited distances - there was serious work done on extending the "flying jeep" idea to a ''Cromwell tank''. This was scrapped on saner reflection when it was realized the rotor blades necessary to support a tank would need to have a two-hundred-foot span, and at least two heavy bombers would be required, plus a one-shot wheeled undercarriage, to get nearly thirty tons of tank into the air.
404* The Western Allies got in on this, too. Due to the German blockades, the British had a huge shortage of steel during the early part of the war, which was needed to create new carriers and the like. One genius came up with an idea: "Pykrete", a mixture of ice and wood pulp, such as sawdust or even old newspaper. The resulting material was not only stronger than regular ice, but still light enough to float and also resistant to melting. The idea was to make a huge unsinkable ''aircraft carrier'' out of the stuff. It never got past a theoretical stage, because the giant refrigeration units that would be needed to produce ice on a scale to build a capital ship would consume just as much steel as one built the conventional way.
405* [[http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html Project Pluto]] and the Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile (SLAM). Imagine a cruise missile. Now, imagine that cruise missiles with a ramjet engine powered by a ''nuclear reactor'' the size of a locomotive, flying at low altitude to avoid radar at three times the speed of sound, lobbing nuclear bombs at things. In addition to the nuclear bombs, the shockwaves and radioactive exhaust from the engine would destroy, kill and irradiate whatever it flew over. Project Pluto involved the development of a nuclear reactor and engine that could withstand such air pressure and temperatures, a feat achieved through huge experimental efforts and at great expense. Unfortunately, the problem with building a weapon that spews nuclear waste everywhere is that nobody will give you permission to ''test-fly'' the damn thing, and your allies might disapprove of it flying over their countries to get to the USSR. Nuclear-tipped [=ICBMs=] turned out to be a lot cheaper, a lot safer, and a lot faster. On the other hand, the guidance system developed for it was used in later cruise missiles.
406* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_X-6 The Convair X-6]], a ''nuclear powered'' bomber. The X-6 had potential if it was practical, such as being able to stay aloft in the air for ''weeks'' at a time without refueling. But to shield the crew at a minimal safety level required ''12 tons'' of lead and rubber. There were also concerns about the fact that peacetime crashes carried the possibility of contaminating large swaths of civilian land, both yours and your allies, not to mention the fact that even the best shielding scheme wouldn't guarantee against the constant emission of hot radioactive byproducts directly into the open atmosphere above everyone's heads. While test flights with an operational nuclear reactor on board were conducted on a similar aircraft as a testbed, the all-nuclear X-6 never got off the drawing board.
407* The Soviets had their own nuclear powered bomber, the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-95LAL Tu-95LAL]], which did partly solve the weight problem of the Corvair X-6 by mainly shielding ''the crew'' instead of the reactor itself[[note]]while the reactor did have the shield, it was relatively light, and mainly served to protect the mechanics working on the plane from the inactive reactor, with full shielding only in the cockpit direction[[/note]], but while it was more practical (it even flew a couple of times with the reactor on), it still was too large, unwieldy and expensive, not to mention an absolute nightmare to maintain (fix a tire? Step 1: don full radiation gear...) and hugely dangerous in a crash. When the first practical [=ICBMs=] arrived, the project was canceled.
408* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion nuclear pulse propulsion rocket]] concept made even the SLAM and Corvair X-6 look sedate and practical by comparison. This design used the periodic ''detonation of nuclear bombs'' for launch and forward propulsion. Surprisingly, it might have been quite [[OrionDrive practical for space travel]] from an engineering perspective, but it was hideously impractical politically (the nuclear detonations would violate the Partial Test Ban treaty, and that's before even considering public opinion).
409* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-46_Mauler Mauler]] was ahead of its time. Aircraft speed increased and helicopters became a viable threat to armor, so the US Army decided to make a mobile SAM system for Forward Area Air Defense (FAAD). The M113 based Mauler would have a radar to track any aircraft so that the fire control would shine a radar beam on the target. The missile would follow the beam and then use IR to finish the job. The operator just had to press a button so the system would do the rest, which piqued the interest of the US Navy and the British Army. The problem? This was ''[[TheSixties 1960]]'' - [[TechnologyMarchesOn computers filled entire rooms back then]]. The radar barely worked, and the missile would fly off course. There were issues with the missiles falling apart or bad rocket casings. The missiles (mounted in a 3 x 3 box launcher) would shake their launcher apart. In the end, the both the Navy and the British Army bailed, and the US Army canceled the project.
410** The concept eventually became successful twenty years later with the Bradley Linebacker, which was the same idea, only scaled down. It had the 25mm gun in addition to four Stinger missiles. With it, the Army finally had a FAAD system that could keep up with the M2 Bradley and the M1 Abrams. It even cost the same as a regular Bradley. Problem was, with the Soviet Air Force no longer a threat necessitating its use, it was easier just to use it as a regular Bradley. All were converted by 2004.
411* Around the same time as the Mauler, the Navy was working on its new Typhon Combat System to replace its early [=SAMs=]. Attention was paid in particular to avoid the guidance channel limitations of early [=SAMs=], as the early missiles required guidance throughout flight and so each guidance radar could only guide a single missile at once. The heart of the system was the AN/SPG-59 electronically-scanned phased-array radar, which doubled as both a search and guidance radar. Unfortunately, it was also the downfall of the system: the Navy never got the broadcast elements to be suitably reliable, and the radar was such a power hog it was only practical to mount it in expensive nuclear ships. Unsurprising, since the Navy was essentially trying to build the AEGIS combat system fifteen or twenty years before they actually managed it. Faced with the rising costs and mounting technical failures, the Navy cancelled the system in favor of iterating existing missiles.
412* During the Cold War, some armies dabbled in designing tanks with twin cannons mounted in a single turret. This arrangement would theoretically provide more firepower by letting the tank to fire two consecutive shots in quick succession. However, the double-barreled tank ran into many of the same problems experienced by the multi-turreted tanks from World War II. Not only would the arrangement add additional weight to the tank, but it would also take up too much crew space, making fighting conditions too cramped and exhausting. Also, the additional firepower would be overkill especially since nowadays a single tank round is accurate and powerful enough to destroy most armored targets. Even if a tank needed an increased rate of fire, there are always autoloader that provides the necessary firepower but with less weight and space. Currently, all armies mount twin cannons only on lighter anti-air vehicles and even then, their cannons have calibers no greater than 57 mm compared to the 90-125 mm guns used on tanks.
413* The amphibious [[AwesomePersonnelCarrier Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle]] ([=EFV=]) was an infantry fighting vehicle was conceived for long ranged amphibious assaults performed by the [[SemperFi U.S Marine Corps]]. In many regards, it surpasses its peers as the [=EFV=] can carry 17 troops and has a whopping 2700 hp engine whereas its contemporaries like the Puma can carry only 6 troops and have a 1000 hp engine. However, the [=EFV=]'s amphibious specialization meant that it cannot mount proper protection like a V-Shaped hull or slat armor that have become standard on most [=IFV=]s. Furthermore, the increased range of anti-ship missiles have made direct amphibious assaults too dangerous as it would be much safer to land after clearing out defenses or land on less defended beachheads. The [=EFV=]'s fragility, along with cost overruns, lead to its cancellation by the Pentagon in 2012.
414* So far, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun railguns]] are much more Awesome than they are Practical. Despite current tests showing that a railgun can fire a 3.2 kilogram/7 pound projectile at Mach 7 speeds, there are still crippling issues with powering the gun as well as the heat from firing wearing it out quickly,[[note]]Though that has been steadily improving. FY 2015 report indicate that they now have around a 400-shot barrel life, but the Navy wants 1000.[[/note]] limiting how useful it would be as an actual weapon. However, the project cost for developing the railgun is a lot lower compared to some of the other examples on this page (along with the finished version expected to a little more damage than a Tomahawk missile at a fraction of the cost), which has seen it survive several rounds of budget cuts.
415** More feasible than railguns are '''coil'''guns. Some already exist, as seen [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coilgun here]]. Coilguns circumvent the projectile-on-barrel friction that is the cause of a railgun's severe firing wear, by hurling a maglev bullet.
416** It's worth noting that the Naval railgun project has been cut, this is mostly due to shift resources to a hypersonic missile project, and the Navy has the full intention of reviving the project later down the line.
417* Not really a ''weapon'' per-se, but in UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, the British experimented with a "Parachute-less Air Drop". Basically, the idea was to use small rocket thrusters to negate the speed at which a supply crate fell from the air, allowing it to safely lower to the ground. Unfortunately, the rockets were very finicky. In tests, they would either activate too soon and thus spend their fuel before they hit the ground, or slam into the ground at near-terminal velocity ''then'' fly up into the air, flinging whatever was inside and large splintered timbers about the landing zone. This idea was so impractical, it never got past the 'drop twenty feet from a crane' stage.
418** There was a reason for this: very poor supply of silk in Britain to make traditional parachutes. Other fibers are either too heavy, or too weak, and the three major producers of silk were China, Japan and Northern Italy - all in Axis hands during the war. The large (millions-strong) number of parachutes made for the D-Day airborne ops were made with nylon.
419** Other nations continued the development, though, and similar technology (in addition to conventional chutes, mind you) was introduced by the Soviet Union to cushion the final landing impact of heavy airdropped loads, such as [[AwesomePersonnelCarrier APCs]] and supply containers. Both the USSR/Russia and the US used it as a last-second landing engine for their space capsules/interplanetary probes, and as recently as August 2012 the US used a pure rocket-engined sky crane to land its latest Mars rover. The newest Russian capsule is also planned to eschew parachutes and land on aerobraking and rockets only, and Elon Musk has declared that if [=SpaceX=]'s Dragon capsules cannot make a soft landing on Earth using only rockets and aerobraking, the project will have been a failure in his eyes.
420* Project Babylon was Iraq's attempt to build a supergun that would have rivaled the Nazis' V-3 project. The project would have called for the construction of two 1000mm cannons and a 350mm prototype, each 156 meters long. The full-size cannons would have been capable of firing conventional shells over 1000 kilometers, or firing rocket assisted shells straight ''into orbit''. The guns' intended uses were to either deliver nuclear, biological, or chemical tipped warheads or to disable enemy satellites. However, like the V-3, the Babylon guns suffered from the drawback of being locked into facing a single direction, as well as being gigantic and impossible to hide. The gun was so impractical the Israelis never considered it a serious threat; after a few shots, the [[UsefulNotes/IsraelisWithInfraredMissiles Israeli Air Force]] would quickly put a laser-guided bomb right down the muzzle. The project ground to a halt after its lead designer was assassinated (whether by Israel or Iran remains uncertain; both were more concerned with his simultaneous work on improving the accuracy of Iraq's ballistic missiles), and the guns were dismantled and destroyed by the UN after the First Iraq War.
421* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1 Boeing YAL-1 Airborne Laser]]. Essentially a Boeing 747 with a WaveMotionGun, designed to shoot down [=ICBMs=] with a laser beam during the missile's launch stage. Unfortunately, the laser itself proved too expensive and required too much power, plus the massive aircraft would be a sitting duck against enemy fighters (problematic since the laser would need a line of sight to the ICBM immediately after launch, requiring flight very close to the launch site), and the project was cancelled.
422* The so-called [[https://www.military-history.org/articles/the-tumbleweed-tank-back-to-the-drawing-board.htm Tumbleweed Tank]], proposed by Texan inventor A. J. Richardson in 1936, would work like a giant hamster ball with the crew contained in a stationary internal sphere, while hemispherical outer shells on either side would rotate to roll it along. It would turn left or right by rolling the hemispheres on either side at different speeds, and fire on the enemy using machine guns sticking out of the center and from turrets on the left and right hubs. The inventor claimed that it would be gas-proof, and that anything but a direct hit would glance off of its curved surfaces. However, it appears from the picture that the only way to see out would be tiny slits above the machine guns, and since there's no periscope, cupola, or hatches on the roof or front the crew would have been driving and shooting almost blind. It's not even clear how they were supposed to get in and out of the ball! If you think about it, the problems are numerous: The big ball wouldn't have nearly as much flotation or obstacle-climbing ability as continuous tracks; it has nothing more powerful than machine guns; there's no fully traversing turret where a proper tank gun could be mounted; it looks as if the driver is also expected to manually fire a machine gun; and the most vulnerable part of the armor is the ''dead center'' of the vehicle. Richardson's version was not built, but in 1945 the Soviets captured a strange German-made "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelpanzer Kugelpanzer]]" (spherical tank) in Manchuria that uses the same principle. The mysterious object has a single-stroke engine, a crew of one man, a little vision slit, no weapons, and armor just 5 mm thick. No German record has been found of what it supposed to be used for. It might have been made for scouting, but in any case, it now resides in the Kublinka Tank Museum.
423* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panjandrum Panjandrum]] was one of the few Allied experimental weapons in WWII that was too crazy to work. It consisted of two wooden wheels ten feet in diameter with rockets strapped to them, connected by a central drum that would be filled with 4,000 pounds of explosives. It was designed to be released off a landing craft so that it could run over everything in its path and then blow up the fortifications on the beach. Unfortunately, the thing was literally impossible to control, and had the nasty habit of veering off course and going into unpredictable directions. Not to mention the fact that the rockets would sometimes separate from the wheel, firing off in random directions as well. Suffice to say, the project was scrapped after one demonstration went horribly awry when the panjandrum veered off course and nearly collided with the gathered panel of high-ranking spectators.
424** More recent speculation is that the Panjandrum was a deliberate hoax created solely to confuse the Germans and to support the false suggestion that the invasion of France would be via an assault on the Pas-de-Calais.
425* The Mark 90 Nuclear Bomb (aka 'Betty') used as a depth charge. It entered service in 1955, and left it in 1960. The Betty had a 5 kiloton warhead. Just for reference, the Hiroshima bomb had a 15 kiloton warhead. Tests showed that the nuclear depth charge was in of itself a feasible weapon, as the immense shockwave generated by the explosion would almost guarantee the destruction of a submarine. Problem was that the detonation of a nuclear depth charge at a shallow depth produced radioactive rain and steam that is ''much'' more concentrated than the dust produced by an aerial explosion over ground, which could badly affect the crew that launched the thing. Pairing it with the ASROC (Anti-Submarine Rocket) system solved this problem, but by then there was a comprehensive ban on underwater nuclear explosions, and the development of guided anti-submarine torpedoes provided a weapon that was nearly as effective at destroying submarines, without the potential complications posed by a nuclear weapon.
426* The TOG II, a British interwar tank prototype whose name was an abbreviation for "The Old Gang", referring to its designers who had been responsible for tank design in World War I. It was based around the idea that WWII would be just like WWI; thus, the TOG was to be a "breakthrough tank". Slow, lumbering, but heavily armed and armored, designed to dismantle enemy trench lines and allow smaller tanks to pour into the gap and exploit the hole the [=TOGs=] had made. It was ''33 feet long'', propelled by petrol-electric drive, and weighed eighty tonnes; despite this, it reportedly trialed successfully, reporting no reliability or mechanical issues. Sadly, WWII was not like WWI, and this feat of engineering - though not common sense - was not put into mass-production and never saw action.
427* Towards the end of [=WWII=], Allied planners had to find ways of breaching the German Siegfried line of defenses on the River Rhine. One school of thought held that very heavy armored vehicles - purpose built for the task - would be sufficient to knock a large enough hole in the German defenses that the Allies could then exploit with faster armor. Both the United States and Britain designed and built ''vast'' super-heavy tanks designed for the sole purpose of breaching the lines:
428** The US offering was the T28 Super-Heavy Tank. To confuse matters, they later changed the name to 105mm Gun Motor Carriage T95, and finally changed it back to T28. Weighing in at 95 tons, 36 feet long, with a high-velocity 105mm main gun and ''300mm'' of frontal armor (for those reading at home, that's a full ''foot'' of steel), this lumbering monster had a top speed of only 8 miles per hour on roads[[labelnote:*]]Some witty ''VideoGame/WorldOfTanks'' players have suggested that it didn't move, it just turned the planet beneath it.[[/labelnote]]. It was low and very wide, with a double set of tracks on each side to distribute the ground pressure; in order to make it narrow enough to get on a flatcar or LST, the outer track modules were designed to unbolt from the main body and attach to each other, so the main vehicle could tow them behind it. Getting a T28 to the front would have been a huge logistical problem, and the whole assumption that super-heavy armor was required turned out to be erroneous when unarmored heavy artillery in theatre managed to creep up to the German bunkers under cover of smokescreens or blind spots and then blast them apart. One of the two T28 prototypes was destroyed by a fire. The other was supposed to be destroyed, but the Army somehow managed to misplace the heaviest armored vehicle it has ever built, so it sat forgotten in a field in Fort Belvoir, Virginia for 27 years, until a hunter found it "hidden" behind a much smaller bush and decided to tell the army about it. When he told them what it looked like, at first they didn't believe him! It is now on display in Fort Benning, Georgia, and supposedly in running condition.
429** The British came up with the Tortoise, which was (''slightly'') more practical than its American cousin. Weighing 87 tons, and 33 feet long, it was slightly less well armed and armored than its American counterpart with a 94mm gun and 228mm of frontal armor, it was however designed as though it might actually, y'know, drive somewhere, with a more powerful engine. In trials it was found to be a decent gun platform and also fairly reliable... unfortunately, the military need for it had completely dried up. Six prototypes were built; one - in ''running condition'' - is displayed in Bovington Tank Museum, whilst another is used as a target at Kirkcudbright Military Training Area.
430* UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill was so convinced trench warfare was coming back in 1939, he came up with the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultivator_No._6 Cultivator No. 6]], a trench-cutting device. It would operate at night, digging a trench to intersect with enemy trenches, so the following infantry would be protected from most enemy fire. A larger version would accommodate tanks. Because Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, he got the Department of Naval Land Equipment to create and build it. The French were prevailed upon to provide soil samples from the front. A scale model performed as advertised, and a full prototype was completed in 1941. By this time, even Churchill had to concede that it was not needed. As its use could not possibly be stealthy, one must assume the enemy would not simply sit and wait for it to break through. Churchill was very proud of his concept: "I am responsible but impenitent." Even weirder: ''there was a competing design'', independent of Churchill's.
431* Humanoid vehicles with two arms, two legs, and a cockpit for a human pilot--HumongousMecha, in a manner of speaking--have been produced by private individuals and companies. For example, Masaaki Nagumo and farm machinery manufacturer Sakakibara Kikai have produced a Gundam-style robot called [[https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/japanese-engineer-builds-giant-robot-to-realise-gundam-dream LW-Mononofu]], which is equipped with an ArmCannon that shoots sponge balls. In theory a military mecha could do things that tracked vehicles couldn't, such as navigate through anti-tank obstacles, switch quickly between different hand-held weapons, or remove debris to clear the way for other vehicles. Unfortunately, we aren't remotely close to making them work like they do in fiction. For example, bipedal walking is actually quite dangerous for a sluggish, heavy machine that can't replicate the complex, fluid movements of human gait, since it would be likely to lose its balance and damage itself by falling. Nagumo's robots don't actually walk by lifting their feet off the ground but have to shift their legs around to simulate walking while actually scooting on wheels concealed under the feet. Promisingly, a South Korean mecha called Method-2 is able to actually walk on two legs, but it can only take small steps at a time and is "only" 13 ft tall. Merely having legs is a weakness: if a robot only has two legs, having just one shot out from under it will make it collapse in a wreck. The SquareCubeLaw makes it unlikely that a humanoid mecha would be fast-moving or structurally sound under stress; their large surface area to volume ratio would make them more difficult to armor adequately; and their tall posture would make them easier targets for the enemy than wheeled or tracked vehicles. A solution to some of these problems is to make the robot tracked or wheeled on the bottom, such as Suidobashi Heavy Industry's [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuratas Kuratas]] which has wheels on the end of each of its tripod "legs", or [=MegaBots=], Inc.'s [[https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/12/16464150/megabots-giant-robot-duel-live-stream-watch-twitch Eagle Prime]] which stands on caterpillar treads. However, even a mecha with a humanoid upper body sitting on a tracked base would have the same problem of an unnecessarily high silhouette. As of TheNewTwenties, the money to be made is in using them for amusement, either selling mecha rides or making entertainment out of robot fights and contests. Meanwhile, militaries are focusing their development on more practical [=UAVs=], bomb disposal robots, etc. Even the legged robots in military testing such as [=BigDog=] are small, unpiloted, and have four or more legs. Admittedly, a robot with human-like arms might be useful in the future, but probably for behind-the-lines construction and loading/unloading of cargo rather than front line combat.
432* Speaking of robots, the Boston Dynamics "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigDog BigDog]]" was meant to serve as a robotic "pack mule" that could keep up with soldiers in the field across a variety of terrains, essentially becoming a WalkingArsenal so the soldiers wouldn't have to carry heavy or dangerous equipment like mortars or demolition charges. Unfortunately, the government lost interest in the project because it was [[https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/news/a18768/ls3-marines-boston-dynamics-shut-down/ reported]] that robot was just too ''loud''. In order to have the power to keep up, it used a small 2-stroke engine that made an ''ungodly'' amount of noise, even with a muffler; it essentially would have made it painfully easy to track a squad's location and would have interfered with communication — while installing a four-stroke engine was out of question because their mass efficiency is significantly worse, and a sufficiently powerful engine would've been just too heavy, defeating the whole purpose of having a "pack mule".
433* Col. James Burton's Blitzfighter concept is basically an A-10, but stripped down to the bare minimum until it was basically just a GAU-8 Avenger, a titanium bathtub cockpit with a radio and basic navigational instruments, and the engines and airframe itself. While a cheap, easily produced ''flying gun'' sounds cool in theory, the truth of the matter was this "Blitzfighter" was what amounted to a highly-expensive COIN aircraft-analogue which had about as much versatility as, well, a flying gun, and one which unfortunately would be utterly useless against modern main battle tanks at the time, the armors of which had already surpassed the GAU-8's piercing capabilites at about the same time the original A-10 rolled off the assembly line in the first place. When his superiors told him it would at least need a radar or thermals, [[HopelessWithTech he claimed that you couldn't tell anything about a ground target on radar]] so mounting radar on attack aircraft was a good way to get refugees killed.
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