Tank Goodness / Real Life

• There's a good case for Truth in Television with this trope. Even though a single tank may not be a rampaging fortress of badassery in itself without combined arms support, it doesn't mean that they're not cool. The M1A2 Abrams, Leopard 2A6, Challenger 2, Leclerc, Ariete, Merkava Mk.4, T-72, T-90, Type-99, Type-10, K2, Al-Khalid and several others are all examples of Real Life tanks that are pretty damn cool and fairly badass. Plus, they don't suffer from the Crippling Overspecialization of fictional tanks (though most of them fall somewhere separate of the others in terms of speed, armour, firepower, and cost (the hidden factor!), ensuring no two nation's tanks are exactly alike). Most of them also have the neat feature of being totally modular - swapping the entire engine, suspension, armor plates, etc is easier and faster than actually repairing the components.
• The Israeli Merkava is the most versatile tank of the lot. Not only is it big, bad and extremely powerful, it has been designed first and foremost with crew survivability in mind. Also, its gun/Fire control system allow it to shoot attacking helicopters out of the sky, fire air bursting munitions and launch laser guided missiles. in addition to these features, it can also carry troops into battle,allowing the tank to double as an APC, Mobile command center and even a Medevac platform. It is basically a Swiss-Army Weapon in tank form.
  • As of 2010, the Merkavas are being outfitted with 'Trophy' Active Protection Systems - point defense mini-turrets designed to shoot down enemy rockets, missiles and shells before they hit, saving the tank's armor a lot of trouble, and to an extent countering the threat that infantry with RPGs and missiles present to modern tanks. The Americans and Germans have been working on their own versions, Quick Kill and AMAP-ADS, and the Russians already have a similar system, 'Arena' installed on their tanks.
  • To save heavily on logistics, much of Israel's modern armored vehicle platforms just use the Merkava with the tank turret swapped out for something else.
  • As a by the way the word "Merkava" means chariot. As that is in a way what a tank is, a "horseless chariot", it makes sense.
  • Unfortunately for Israel, ambulance vehicles claiming protection under the Geneva conventions aren't allowed to be armed, meaning that they have to choose between being protected by their medical status, and being protected by, well, being in a main battle tank. Also unfortunate is that the Merkava has to choose between either carrying troops or carrying reserve ammunition for it's main gun. One might think this Awesome, but Impractical, but most of the people that Israel would be likely to fight are guerrilla organizations without much of a history of respecting the protection afforded medical vehicles, so it may not make much of a difference. (Should it ever come to land war with one of the Arab states, or-somehow-Iran,^note The geography and the politics of it make such an eventuality a near impossibility, but Israel still has to prepare for such a scenario no matter how unlikely it is. the Geneva Conventions will likely be respected on both sides—as they were, by and large, in the previous wars in 1948, 1967, and 1973—but suffice it to say that such a war is presently highly unlikely.)
  • The downside of all this coolness is that Merkava IV is so freaking HUGE and heavy that it literally has difficulties moving. Even with Israel's tiny size it is usually delivered to the battlefield on trailer because running it on its own power consumes the engine and transmission's service life, and the bridges have to be specially reinforced so they withstand its 63+ tons weight- fortunately, there are very few rivers in Israel (it is a dry country after all and most of it is desert).
  • Israel is designing a new main battle tank, with possible weapon systems to replace the main gun including an EMP cannon or a laser cannon. Estimated finish date is 2020.
• The somewhat older gas-turbine-powered T-80, though in a peripheral role in service due to the fragmentation of industry with the Soviet breakup, is still famed for its nickname as the "flying tank"—capable of accelerating fast enough to jump off ramps and even fire its main gun in midair◊ at demonstrations to this day. This however, demonstrates a case of Awesome, but Impractical due to the chances of hitting anything while maneuvering like this.
  • The T-80U, the top variant of the T-80 tank, was, during its time, the Soviet Union's answer to the best the west offered. With Heavy Explosive Reactive Armor panels, or Kontakt-5, covering most of the tank's frontal armor, the T-80U was an exceptionally tough target to kill, and a fast moving one at that. Its 1G46 fire control system was not as good as those on the western tanks, but was still able to get the job done, able to fire APFSDS rounds at a range equal to M1A1s and Leopards, albeit with slightly less accuracy.
• The newer T-90, which is a major "upgrade" (if you can call the all-new engine, transmission, turret, armor, gun, and control system an "upgrade") of the T-72, could give bursts of speed around 90 kph (though seriously overloading its engine and transmission, its designed speed is about 70 kph) pretty much on every terrain, leading to quite a spectacular leaps that earned it the nickname of Flying Tank as well, and it can execute a literal Multi-Track Drifting while shooting at a target. The diesel engine is somewhat less powerful than gas turbine variants, but it has the benefit of far superior range and much lower fuel consumption.
  • The still-more upgraded T-90MS introduce an entirely new turret with integrated ammo bins in the bustle and radically improved protection (and digital FCS and new autoloader). The Army decided not to order it, as they're developing a radically new MBT, but was very pleased with the turret design and will probably use it to upgrade the existing inventory of T-90s and T-72s.
    • And then went around to order several hundreds of them due to development delays and mounting cost of the T-14 .
• The newest Russian tank, the T-14 Armata, first displayed during the traditional Victory Day parade in May 2015, has tank buffs all over the world practically salivating, and since the first announcement of its development in 2010^note Just after the cancellation of its predecessor T-95 as being too cool to afford. it probably has fueled more Flame Wars that T-34-vs.-Panther debate. Designed as a radical aversion of traditionally Russian mode of a very small, extremely mobile, extremely cramped and somewhat volatile tank, it is significantly larger, heavily armored, and while keeping with high mobility, is designed with survivability in mind.
  • The most revolutionary feature is that in addition to the now-standard composite and reactive armor, the Armata has a much more advanced "active protection system" consisting of radar panels on the sides of the turret to detect incoming projectiles and tubes to launch explosively formed penetrators to shoot them down. This is claimed to be effective against projectiles up to 1700m/s in velocity, which would include most current tank gun rounds and ATGMs. However, Russia does have a repute of inflating performance.
  • Like Leo-2, it has a high-powered diesel engine, whose nominal 1500 hp can push its 48 tons at the uncharacteristically high 70 kph, but is usually run at 1200 hp, to give it the enormous service life of 10,000 hours. With its governor removed, the engine can give out up to 2100 hp, though it virtually consumes itself at such power.
  • It is equipped with an improved 125 mm cannon (a 55-caliber 2A82, instead of 51-caliber 2A46 of T-90) with new, faster, larger sized autoloader that can handle newer, better shells that can penetrate, supposedly, 1000mm of steel, which is close to the statline for the OG Challenger 2 turret, and has provisions for installing the enormous 152-mm 2A83, developed for the T-95 Super Prototype.
  • Another major innovation is the totally unmanned turret. This was long toyed with all around the world, but it is the first time it appeared on a production tank. This feature allows the designers to isolate the potentially volatile ammo storage from the crew, a traditional weakness of previously very compact Russian tanks, that have long suffered from most penetrating hits cooking off the ammo, often together with the crew. A problem might be large blasts that damage the electronics and penetrating shots could be difficult to repair.
  • Though unlike the Merkava, it eschews the frontal-mounted engine (which, together with the heavily armored glacis, tends to overload the Israeli tank's front), it takes its cue in focusing on the crew survivability. Unlike any other tank in the world, though, it achieves this by putting the whole crew in the dedicated, heavily armored control capsule, isolated from such potentially volatile areas as the fuel tanks and ammo storage, made possible by the unmanned turret.
  • Given that the gunner and commander now lack the vantage point of the turret, it instead gives them the situational awareness through a lot of high-tech gizmos, including an all-round view through literally dozens of CCTV cameras scattered around the tank's body, a dual thermal imaging panoramic sight, and the world-first full 360-degree-coverage AESA radar, tied into the sophisticated active protection system.
• Going older, the T-54/55 may be given short shrift due to being reduced to the status of a mook tank to be destroyed by the dozens by newer NATO tanks, but it didn't become the most produced tank in the world for no reason, and has had many upgrade packages that can still make it competitive on the modern battlefield with a well-trained crew—modernized fire control systems with laser rangefinders, gun-launched missiles (each one of which costs almost as much as the tank itself), and so on. The design set the pattern for how a Soviet/Russian tank would look like for decades to come, with its low profile, heavily sloped front, and rounded turret shape.^note The autoloader would have to be left for its successors though. Its D-10 100mm cannon is arguably the best tank gun of its generation: it is the only World War 2-vintage armored vehicle main gun still in widespread active service, and the late-war SU-100 tank destroyer which was equipped with it had a deserved reputation for being able to lay waste to basically every German armored vehicle of the day. You won't be able to destroy a modern-generation MBT from the front with one, but if you could somehow get a flank shot off, it still has a good chance at taking one out.
• The aforementioned British Challenger 2 was demonstrated to be a very Cool Tank indeed on an episode of Top Gear (UK)—you'd expect Jeremy Clarkson in a Land Rover Sport to run circles around the tank. Not so. In fact, he underestimates the Challengers versatility.
  • Of course, Jeremy did make the mistake of trying to outmaneuver the Challenger 2 on broken, muddy ground and steep inclines—their home turf, in fact, in the very field that the tankers practice in. It was there he proved that tires are for speed (which his LR Sport has quite well, if on a well paved road), tracks are for rough terrain. As he puts it "Oh no, I seem to have brought Puff Daddy's car to The Somme. This is where I've had it. You can't drive a car, even as one as good as this, over this kind of surface fast. And you can with a tank." The tank crew also feels free to use some of their other abilities, such as neutralizing his speed advantage by blinding him with obscurant smoke — not a problem to a tank that can avoid large trees with infrared vision and roll over smaller obstacles, but plenty of problems to an unaided driver of a car that doesn't dare hit anything - and the fact that trying to put the pedal to the metal results in a huge dust trail that gives the tankers an easy target to chase. They catch up to him when he tries to drive in a straight line, presenting a predictable target. They're also good sports in that they never say "You know, we don't really have to use the 120mm main cannon to destroy a civilian SUV...man the machine gun."
    • It also demonstrates the skill of the British tankers, in that, despite Jeremy being in a car with a lot of "viewing ports" and essentially 360 degree vision, they still managed to hide from him. You heard that right: a 63 ton MBT managed to jump a man in a vehicle designed to have high visibility.
  • The Dorchester/Chobham II armour, oft considered among the front runners for "toughest tank armour in the world." It certainly has an almost untarnished combat record to prove it. In Iraq, one CR2 returned to the British operating base with the remains of 70+ detonated RPGs all over it after 24 hours in the field. It was described as looking like an evil, 62.7 tonne hedgehog. Another, after getting stuck in a ditch, spent four hours under sustained RPG fire (14 impacts reported), and survived a hit to the top of the turret (usually a weakspot on a tank) from a modern MILAN ATGM. The damage? A few broken sight units and periscopes. REME (the British tank mechanics) repaired it 8 hours (after rescue) and had it in service the next day. Simon Dunstan also describes an incident of one taking an Iraqi tank shot at near point blank range with the crew not even realising they were hit. To sum up, this is a seriously hard tank. In fact, it had some of the best turret armor in the cold war period....This truly was a camper tank. Especially since, well, teapot.
  • Don't forget the brew-up, people. The Chally: a virtually impenetrable, go-anywhere tortoise with teeth that can calmly boil water for a decent cuppa (or, you know: heat up a meal) when you've got five or ten minutes to spare when not under direct fire. That's pretty cool. And, can find you friends in strange places willing to hog your ability to make their meal breaks more interesting. It's a British tank: not being able to make tea for a break any time, anywhere? Inconceivable! Arguably the strongest-armoured, best-armed, fastest, heaviest, maneuvrable and well-engineered kettle you'll ever meet. Until the next version rolls up, that is.
  • The electric kettle, or more specifically "Vessel Boiling Electric" or Boiling Vessel (BV) is actually a feature of British tanks that goes back to WWII. Originally, crews would either make a makeshift burner, or just simply put the kettle on top of a running engine. The U.S. has also adopted the design and is using similar devices within their own armored fighting vehicles.^note As a side note, ever since designers of the Centurion located the outlet of the boiling vessel near the loader's position, the loader has traditionally been the person responsible for preparing tea, soup, and other such niceties to ward off the cold. The modern design is such that food items could even be fried inside one if so desired—and, of course, modern boil-in-the-bag rations can be heated inside as well.
  • Another feature of the Challenger II which only a tanker might be able to appreciate is its track tensioning system. Tank track tension has to be routinely checked (usually pre- or post-mission) so the vehicle does not throw a track and lose mobility during missions, and adjusted if the tension is inadequate. In most tanks today this involves fooling around with grease-guns to pump the necessary fluid into the hydraulics controlling the system, which like most other things involving maintaining tanks, can get quite tiring and messy; in older vehicles this often involves most of the crew leaning on a large wrench to adjust a large screw connected to the idler wheel. Both of these procedures are done outside the vehicle, which means doing it in foul weather is yet another aggravation. The Challenger II has hydraulic track tensioner rams which can be adjusted by the driver using knobs at his seat, meaning he doesn't even need to leave the tank to adjust tension. This feature has been known to make British tankies the subject of mild envy by coalition armored forces deployed alongside them.
  • Around one hundred and fifty Challenger IIs are scheduled to by upgraded to the new Challenger III spec, featuring a ton of upgrades including a new turret with a smoothbore Rheinmetall 120mm cannon allowing commonality with other NATO tanks, an improved hull, upgraded weapons sights and control systems, active protection systems etc. for the next generation battlefields. Unfortunately, this also removes a useful feature from the tank: the ability to (safely) lap-load in order to unleash a rapid burst of main gun fire. Modern single-piece 120mm ammunition use combustible cellulose-based shell casings, which are relatively fragile, resulting in lap-loading being a Dangerous Forbidden Technique in the armies that use the Rheinmetall gun lest highly combustible propellant be spilled everywhere into the fighting compartment. Challenger II uses a main gun with multi-piece ammunition, and each of the component pieces are easily lugged around by one strong arm, resulting in a fire rate comparable to its contemporaries. While the charge bags shouldn't be kept outside their regular storage spaces too long for the same reasons as the 120mm ammo, the warhead certainly can be.
• The M1 Abrams is also no slouch. It's powered by a literal jet engine and can go so fast, that its treads will actually tear off if you remove the engine governor.^note Only applicable to earlier variants; the modern marques of 70+ tons weight won't be able to hit such a speed, governor or no The Abrams can also demolish most other tanks and is incredibly resilient with its composite depleted uranium/ceramic armor. In both Gulf Wars, not a single M1 Abrams was knocked out by an enemy tank. The majority of damaged/destroyed Abrams resulted from accidents, ambushes with anti-tank weaponry, friendly fire, and scuttling. They're so resilient, that even American weaponry has a hard time destroying them.
  • The Abrams is ridiculously hard to permanently put down even by the full firepower of OTHER Abrams shooting at them. At best, you get temporary knockouts; one M1A1 took a hit directly in the rear from an Iraqi T-72 in the first Gulf War. The crew survived with minor injuries, the assailing tank was quickly destroyed, and the stricken Abrams was quickly recovered and repaired. There's also a story of an Abrams that got bogged down and four T-72s decided to rush it. None of their shots penetrated. The Abrams killed two of them, shot the third as it was running away, and the fourth hid behind a sand berm. The Abrams, using the thermal imaging camera, was able to see the hot exhaust rising and shot through the sand berm, killing the final T-72. When other tanks came, it was decided to abandon and destroy the Abrams rather than have to get up specialized equipment to pull it out (the other tanks couldn't). The other tanks tried to kill the now-abandoned Abrams but couldn't. One round exploded the ammunition magazine but the blowout panels directed to force of the explosion upwards. Eventually, a tractor came and pulled it out. The turret was sent back the the US for examination and the tank got a new one and was back in action pretty soon.
  • The Abrams also is the epitome of a gas guzzler, with its range measured in gallons per mile. As in, 20 gallons per mile. No, not miles per gallon. It consumes about 20 gallons of fuel for every mile it travels. Without a steady supply of tanker trucks keeping it topped up, they quickly become very expensive, hard to kill bunkers. Jet engines are fuel hogs, after all. There's a reason everybody else uses diesel engines: you give up performance but get a massive increase in combat range. Still, almost all tanks have maximum speeds around 40-45mph: It's the Abrams which is almost unique among contemporary tanks in being able to exceed this with the governor disabled. As a bonus, though, the Abrams will consume the same amount of fuel at a dead stop as it does at full bore so high speed isn't a problem, though attempts have been made to rectify this with a small electric engine. ^note Note well that past American tanks have all been noted speed freaks; 45 mph+ was definitely possible with the M60 Patton if it had its governor removed, and the same may have been true of other American tanks—as most of these have had governors and never had recorded speed tests without them, we'll never really know.
    • That said, the one thing that the Yanks with Tanks are uncontroversially best at is logistics. No other country can ship supplies from point A to point B faster or more reliably than the US which means that the Abrams can and do meet most of its fuel requirements. After all, there are thousands of Abrams deployed all over the world, and there has only been one instance where an Abrams ran out of fuel in the field. Indeed, the main reason for adopting the turbine engine was logistics: (1) the logistics people wanted an engine that would run most efficiently on JP-8, an oily kerosene-based jet fuel closely resembling the Jet A-1 fuel used to power most commercial jet aircraft, which (it was decided) would be the sole fuel of the US military, so they used a turbine (JP-8 can be and is used as diesel fuel, but not quite as well as it can be used in a turbine, generally speaking); (2) because the US is so good at logistics, it's generally no problem for American tanks to get their fuel.
    • Additionally, the logisticians liked the turbine engine for another reason: it makes the Abrams multi-fuel capable, so it's perfectly able to run on everything from gasoline to moonshine (though not as reliably), which means it can make use of captured enemy fuel supplies. Even household kerosene for lamps and stoves can make the tank run: if it's liquid and it burns, the Abrams can probably run on it.
    • As a previous user explains here, the fuel-hog reputation of the Abrams is also somewhat overblown. Part of the reason the tank drank fuel was that earlier variants of the Abrams lacked a reliable and robust auxiliary motor, meaning that to keep the tank parked but the electronics (like radios and so on) powered up required running the main engine, even while you're settling down somewhere for the night. This is also why, as noted above, the tank consumed the same amount of fuel whether it was parked or rolling. Because the military was footing the fuel bill and could supply it reliably, the crew generally weren't too concerned about this. Eventually, a suitable auxiliary power unit mounted on the turret bustle was designed and installed, and the bustle rack was extended to mitigate the loss in space for the crew's personal gear.
  • It's also really quiet compared to the loud as hell diesels in most tanks. Iraq War veterans have made mention of insurgents waiting for a convoy to rumble past, jumping up to ambush it - and then getting ambushed in turn by the Abrams tanks silently stalking behind the convoy.
  • One downside of the gas turbine engine is that the enormous heat being dumped by it makes it impossible for infantry to sit on the tank or work as close support. Future variants of the Abrams, optimized for more of an urban combat environment, may use the same diesel engine as on the Leopard 2. (Which will only be a mild disappointment to the logisticians; remember again that JP-8 can also be used in diesel engines, especially if they're designed for it, which any Abrams diesel engine will be.)
  • While shorter than the /55 on the current Leopard 2A6, the Abrams has the advantage of Depleted Uranium Shells, which one-up the Leopard's tungsten shells in three ways. First off, it requires less alloying, (where tungsten rounds need a full 10% of their weight in alloying materials, depleted uranium only requires 1%), meaning depleted uranium APFSDS rounds weigh more and pack more of a raw punch. On top of this, where a tungsten sabot "mushrooms" out as it pushes its way through armor, blunting it and spreading the kinetic impact, depleted uranium is "self-sharpening", maintaining its slim, pointed profile as it pierces straight through the same armor. This is in part due to the third advantageous trait of depleted uranium as a shell: its pyrophoric qualities. Due to a number of complex chemical attributes, it will spontaneously combust on impact, burning/melting itself and as a result, doing the same to the armor of whatever poor bastard it hits, and this molten mass is dragged behind the uranium shell when it finally breaks through and into the target's innards, covering it in molten metal. As a result, the Abrams packs a significantly harder punch than any of its competitors.
• The French came up with the AMX-56 Leclerc, starting full-scale production in 1993. It uses a steel inner-shell overlaid with ceramics, titanium, and ERA blocks. Designed from the beginning with active protection in mind, the Leclerc is one of the fastest tanks in the world, as well as one of the lightest. It also incorporates an autoloader which, unlike Russian equivalents, is actually faster at loading shells than an extra crewman.^note Though the main reason Russians went with autoloaders was probably because they wanted more compact and lighter tanks for the same effective armor thickness, and autoloaders allowed for much smaller interior spaces Though it has yet to be tested in combat, its predecessor, the 1960-vintage AMX 30 still destroyed more advanced Iraqi tanks during the First Gulf War, and the same people make the AMX-56...
• Then there is the Leopard 2, which is a sibling of the M1 Abrams; both tanks were developed out of the original joint American-German project Kampfpanzer/Main Battle Tank 70 (which was cancelled because the Germans and Americans could not agree on what role the tank was supposed to fulfill, leading to a Master of None situation and cost overruns). For a tank it's absurdly fast (capable of driving 120 kph on road). The only drawback is, that it is nearly uncontrollable and only drives in a straight line; add the most powerful main gun of any tank to that, though, and you are ready.
  • Most Leopard 2s used the same 120mm L/44 gun as the M1A1/2^note Which is actually the other way around. All M1A1 use the Rheinmetall 120mm L/44, which is designated M256 in the U.S. armed forces., though the new Leopard 2A6's have the more longer L/55 version which is shared with the South Korean K2 Black Panther.
  • The Bundeswehr is currently testing the Leopard 2 A7+/A7 PSO. A tank build for MOUT operations. It has (again) the Rheinmetall 120mm L/44 installed. It also got a remotely controlled weapon station, a dozer blade and a 360° protection for the turret and programmable HE munitions. The tank is a supplement to the normal Leoard 2 forces of the Bundeswehr and not meant to replace the A6 and earlier variants.
  • Word of God has it that, if you get a skilled technician to tinker with the engine, you can boost the engines 1500PS to 1800PS, or exceed 2100PS at the expense of killing the engine before the fuel runs out. It was apparently tested once, where it reached the aforementioned 120kph on paved roads, and a whopping 80kph on mud.
  • It is still unclear how good the Leopard 2 would fare in a real combat with tank against tank, since it has never been in one. If the regular exercises are any indicator at all the Leopard 2 is at least on par, if not better. However it is imperative to note that comparisons are fishy at best since the Leopard 2 has a totally different modus operandi than say the Challenger II, which is also reflected it its design. From an armour standpoint it is by far the weakest armoured tank of the modern tanks, however it packs the most punch (disregarding Soviet ATGMs fired from tank cannons), beating the Challenger IIs rifled gun (as tested by the British army in the Challenger Lethality Improvement Programme (CLIP)) and being the fastest of the western tanks. The doctrine of the German army is to quickly drive up to the enemy, fire a few rounds and then get the hell out. In training, experienced Leopard 2 crews hit around 95% of the target while standing and only 3% less accurate while moving. There are even (forbidden) techniques of getting out three rounds in about five to seven seconds, which includes one round in the cannon, one in the hands of the loader and the other on the foot of the loader. After the first round is fired the loader rams the second in and pushes the third up with his foot, after that he can quickly ram down the third one. Much faster than any auto loader on the Russian T-90 series. To put is simple: This tank is fast and packs a hell of a punch.
  • It is however to note that the combat performance out of a strict tank versus tank environment has been very good so far. The Canadian army uses Leopard 2 a few years in Afghanistan and they are very pleased with it. At one time a Leopard 2 A6M drove onto an IED and the crew surviving with minor injuries, the tank was repaired and put back into action. Denmark had almost the same experience in January 2008, where a Leopard 2 drove onto an IED and lost one of its tracks. The tank could crawl back into base on its own and was repaired quickly (the crew was unharmed). the only reported combat casualty on a Leopard 2 was a IED ambush in mid 2008, where a Leopard 2 A5DK drove onto an IED and the driver was killed, this however was due to the fact that that Leopard 2 was not upgraded with a mine protection, as now almost all Leopard 2s have.
  • On the other hand, the Leopard 2 suffers from a critical flaw in it's protection scheme, thanks to the small turret ready rack and attendant larger ammo stowage in the frontal hull, which Kurdish troops took full advantage of during the Syrian war. Any attack to the forward area of the left side hull of the Leopard would invariably cause it to detonate in a Soviet-esque fireball, tearing the tank apart and killing the crew.
  • A fact that furthermore makes the Leopard highly moveable is its engine which is the engine itself and the transmission in one big block. You simply loosen the screws that hold the block, lift it out and put a new one back in. The Bergepanzer Büffel, which is equipped with the same engine and has the same chassis than the Leopard 2 can even lift out his own engine (yes you heard right, it is the only vehicle to be able to do that) and put it into the Leopard 2. The Büffel can also tow the Leopard out of harms way without the crew leaving the tank (if the towing equipment was prepared beforehand).
  • The Singaporean variant, the Leopard 2SG, has customised armor upgrades made for it that improves its armor grade beyond the stock Leopard 2.
• The MBT-70 was the prototype for the M1 Abrams, ultimately rejected as too expensive at a per unit cost of $5 million a pop in the 1970's. To put that in perspective the M1A1, is one of the most expensive tanks in the world today, and it costs $5 million now, $5 million in the 1970's would be about $26 million now.
  • To put it more into perspective the last batch of F-4 Phantoms built in the 70s cost about 3 million a piece.
  • The Expeditionary Tank that was developed in Parallel wasn't too bad either.
• More Truth in Television: In an episode of MythBusters, the cast addressed the idea that the friction between pages of two interleaved phone directories is impossible to overcome. They tested this one first with two people trying to pull it apart... then ten people... then two cars... and, instead of going with trucks or other large civilian vehicles, invoked The Rule of Cool and rented a couple of M551 Sheridan light tanks (which, yes, finally did manage to separate the books... effortlessly).
  • Point-of-fact, the pages were completely torn out of their respective bindings, but not many of them were actually separated from each other.
  • Actually, while one of the tanks used in the episode was a Sheridan, the first to start moving was not a tank at all, but an M113 armored personnel carrier fitted with a tank turret. I guess it classifies.
• Modern MBTs have large diesel or turbine engines that can give between 1000 and 1500 hp on average. The biggest Detroit Diesel truck engine (still in the prototype stage) is just 600 hp. That's more than double increase in the power, and then there's the matter of traction as well. Tanks grip the ground with the whole surface of the track, while trucks has only the points of contact — the rather smallish areas where the tire contacts with the ground, greatly increasing the possibility of slippage. And, last but not least, tanks are friggin' HEAVY — just upward of 40 tons for the modern ones, while only biggest 18- or 22-wheelers can be this heavy when fully laden. This also leads to slippage in such tests. In short, tanks make much better tugs than any wheeled vehicle.
  • Heavy tanks may be, but those tracks distribute the load well, so the M1A1 has only twice the ground pressure of a man standing still (the ground pressure goes up when walking).
• Early heavy tanks designed and built toward the end of WWI era and some years later — Real Life examples of "Games Workshop tank".
  • French FCM Char 2C◊, outclassing and outweighing any other tank of its time.
    • By the WWI standards, she was the pinnacle of heavy tank development. She was armed with a primary 75mm gun in rotating turret, four sponson mounted machine guns and one rear-mounted machinegun turret. Her frontal armor could shrug off direct hits by any German field gun (which were. basically, capable of disabling any other tank). Her terrain-crossing abilities are impressive even today; she was capable to climb 1,2 meter wall, cross the four-meters wide anti-tank moats and due to sheer mass & size could break nearly everything that came on her way. Internally, she was ergonomically thought-out well, both her engines could be serviced from inside, and her electric transmission allowed her to move (albeit very slowly) even if one of her engines break down - pretty common problem for WWI tanks!
    • Only, this tank was not produced before early 20ies (think "political meddling"), and only ten machines were ever made. All ten were considered "ships" (because the FCM company was actually a shipyard), and have individual names; they were named after provinces of France.
    • It is interesting to note, that despite being old and outdated by the times of World War II, those giant tanks weren't actually completely incapable. The most numerous German anti-tank gun in early war years, the 3.7 cm Pak 36, could penetrate their frontal armor only from relatively short distance. On the other hand, their giant size, low speed and transportation problems made them nearly completely unsuitable for highly-mobile World War II armored warfare. But whenever it appeared, its HE blast could actually rip gunbarrels.
  • Where possible, French tanks captured by the Germans were used straight as captured for training and second-echelon duties; tanks such as the Hotchkiss and the Char-B/C series were modified and used either as tank destroyers or as SP artillery. A training regiment equipped with French tanks fought in the front line in Normandy in 1944.
    • In December 1939, one tank, the "Lorraine" was experimentally up-armored. After refit, her frontal armor was 90 mm thick, side armor was 65 mm thick, and she was basically invulnerable to German anti-tank guns even at point-blank range. Her weight, though, reached the 75 ton mark, which made "Lorraine" still the heaviest tank yet commissioned.
  • The Char B1 was pretty good: in one battle, one was lured into an ambush by a bunch of Panzer IIIs and IVs, and flattened them (destroyed 13), and still managed to drive home afterwards (it was hit 140 times, but took no serious damage).
    • The 2C was equally used by the French in propaganda movies. B1-bis' advantage was that only Flak 88 used as Pak could destroy it; so was T-34 in 1941. Hence the German Blitzkrieg doctrine of not fighting tanks with tanks, but to retreat and lure enemy tanks into a trap by "Pak-Fronts" proved sensible. Only when they had to, in later war pretty much all the time, did the Germans use tanks against tanks.
  • Red Army has T-35 (built in 1933-1939) with five turrets, mounting a total of three cannons and six machine guns. With 7-11 crewmen depending on the model. Even more of a Lego-machine, since first it got its four side-turrets from BT-2, later replaced with combination of BT-5 (slightly modded) and T-37 turrets.
    • And proved, like its predecessor, the Vickers A1E1, to be a flop. If you look on the list of how they were lost, most were to various malfunctions due to the combination of complicated machine and USSR tech/craftsmanship. Combining with her great size and relatively thin armor (and VERY cramped internal conditions), this tank wasn't well-suited to World War II standards. Literally anything that we mounted on a tank would shred it.
    • For the early 1930s, the T-35 was fine, though. Her armor gave her adequate protection against light anti-tank guns, AT rifles and heavy machineguns (which were considered the main threat to tanks in early 1930s), and her multiple turrets made her really good in trench warfare, providing the suppression fire on several target at once.
    • On one tank, though, the fire control problem was partially solved in 1936 by installing the centralized fire control system - like on naval warship. The tank commander could use stereoscopic rangefinder to follow targets and retranslate orders to gunnery crews in turrets. Surprisingly, with that system T-35 actually worked pretty well, but all reliability problems were solved only by the late 1938, when the tank itself was considered obsolete, and planned refit was cancelled.
  • In late 1930s, the USSR started to seek the new heavy tank to replace the aging T-35. The initial design was still multi-turreted - albeit the number of turrets was only three, and even that was lately reduced to two (to improve armor protection). Two different designs, SMK tank and T-100 tank were developed by competing tank factories and prototypes were tested under field conditions of Winter War. Eventually, SMK won the competition and was recommended for mass production... which doesn't started, because single-turret KV-1 tank prototype demonstrated MUCH better characteristics.
• KV-2, which mounted a 152mm howitzer (largest caliber weapon ever fitted on a production tank), but was virtually immobile and couldn't traverse its turret unless it was on perfectly level ground. Its intended role was an assault gun, i.e. self-propelled bunker-buster, better compared with the German StuGs. As such neither did it need much mobility, nor lack of ease of use would be all that detrimental for it. Of course, these lumbering behemoths performed well enough slowly chewing through Mannerheim's concrete, in highly mobile warfare of the summer campaign of 41 they acted more as mobile fortifications — unable to hit anything that doesn't stand and wait for it, but armored heavier than KV-1 that were able to survive over a hundred cannon hits and beat lighter tanks by ramming. One well-placed KV-2 was enough to stop a division: tanks and anti-tank cannons failed to penetrate its armour, so Germans stuck until they brought in 88-mm anti-air guns. 105-mm howitzers were able to only to blow off tracks off these monsters, but not destroy them. KV's worst enemy were the Stukas (bombs were more practical against heavy armored but slow tanks) and Red Army's own logistical troubles. Still, the scheme was good enough to reuse production lines, upgrading both assault gun and tank branches, and later turn KV series into IS series.
  • The KV2's biggest flaw was that it could only be used on the flat. The top-heavy turret not only made it problematical on slopes, if tipped too far from the horizontal, its sheer weight displaced in one direction caused it to jam solid in its bearings, making it impossible to traverse.
  • Talking about IS tanks ( Iossif Stalin, by the way), don't forget the IS-2, a heavy, breakthrough tank developed to counter the German Panthers & Tigers. The IS-2 main armament was a 122mm gun that could kill a Tiger or Panther from much greater range than they could kill it or bust open fortifications with the best of them AND it could match a Panther on mobility. Only flaw was a very low fire rate from handling the huge ammunition in a quite compact fighting compartment.
  • Although the Soviets won the war by mass-producing the awesome-in-its-own-way T-34 and KVs, they were also prone to some bizarre experiments, such as the unmanned, remote-controlled Teletank and the Antonov A-40 flying tank or strapping a pair of 245-mm rocket rails on top of BT-5 light tank (reappeared in more sane variant as side rockets on KV-1, but cancelled due to low accuracy).
  • One battle in 1941 involved 5 KV-2's ambushing a German tank column. The Soviet tank commander made sure to utilize the KV-2's strengths by trapping the entire column on a narrow road going through a swamp by blowing up the leading and trailing German tanks. Any Panzer that tried to go off-road found itself bogged down and just as trapped. The camouflaged KV-2's rolled out one at a time, fired, and rolled back into cover, making sure the Germans had no idea where they were. By the end of the shooting gallery, sorry, battle, the Germans lost 43 tanks with no casualties on the Soviet side. The Soviet commander's crew counted the hits on their tank - there were over 200 with no penetrations.
  • The Finnish army captured two intact KV-I tanks during World War II, which were quickly put into action against their former owners. They stood the battle quite well - they were always employed as the "spearhead" tanks. They both still exist in driveable condition and were used in making the film Tali-Ihantala 1944. This must be a unique situation in war movies where not only actual vehicles are used in the movie, but also the actual individual tanks which have taken part in the Real Life actions the film depict.
• Even more Truth in Television, as far as the coolness aspect is concerned. Any Superheavy tank would count even if most of them don't work. They make the list based on sheer principle.
  • During World War II Those Wacky Nazis developed the Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus, a 188 ton superheavy tank (it means 'mouse' — who says the Germans don't have a sense of humor) with a 128mm and a 75mm coaxial gun. These two prototypes – one with, one without turret – underwent trials in late 1944. The second was pressed into combat against the Soviets in the last days of the war and was scuttled by its crew to prevent the Soviets from capturing in, when it was destroyed by placing charges in the engine and fighting compartments. Unfortunately for them, the Soviet Commander of Armored and Mechanized troops ordered the hull of the first to be mated with the turret of second and it was put it in the Kubinka Tank Museum. The Maus holds the record as heaviest land combat vehicle ever built, and given the Awesome, but Impractical nature of building land combat machines of that size, it's quite likely that that record will never be broken.
  • The Maus had a competitor, the Panzerkampfwagen E-100. Lighter than the Maus at a "mere" 140 tons, it was to have been armed with with both a 75mm gun and a 150mm gun while being lighter and more maneuverable than the Maus. The prototype never reached a functional stage, and it was eventually captured and sent to Britain for evaluation (result: "too mechanically unreliable, not useful at all") before being scrapped in the 50s.
    • Incidentally, on the drawing board was the Landkreuzer P-1000 Ratte , theoretically 1000 metric tons (in practice it would have been twice that) with two 280mm naval guns (the same type used by the ''Scharnhorst''-class battleships), a 128mm antitank gun, eight 20mm anti-aircraft guns and two 15mm heavy machine guns! And topping it all was the P-1500 Monster, which would have the 800mm Dora artillery piece with its railroad running gear replaced with about eight sets of tracks. With two 150mm howitzers and multiple machine guns for backup. Its nominal weight of 1500 metric tons is even less realistic than the idea of the Ratte weighing only 1000 tons; the Dora gun alone weighed 1350 tons, after all. Both these tanks are in fact even larger than the Baneblade from Warhammer 40,000, which is comparably tiny (at only 250 tons). If the Maus was impractical, such behemoths would be virtually useless; they would've likewise been easy targets for allied bombers mistaking them to be buildings, unless for the the flak guns did their jobs. Hitler was a badass for curbstomping fiction before it even came up with its own, wasn't he?
    • It is interesting to note, that the main designer of P-1000 - engineer Edward Grotte - in early 1930s tried to persuade Soviet Government to build quite similar 1000-ton tank with 12-inch cannons. This may be the reason, why USSR decided to terminate the contract with Edward Grotte...
    • As ludicrously impractical as these concepts were (Hitler's own top tank general, Heinz Guderian, dismissed the notion as a ridiculous fantasy), they were in fact technically possible; certain civil vehicles were in fact as big (or even bigger), such as the NASA Crawler-Transporters and the insanely huge Bagger 288 coal excavator (roughly the same size as the RMS Titanic). This proves that tank sizes could certainly be increased to this extent, but would be militarily worthless.
  • Americans meanwhile tried T28 Super Heavy Tank / Gun Motor Carriage T95, redesignated back and forth due to lack of turret. Essentially, when the Americans decided they needed a new Tank to take down the Siegfried Line, they decided to fight bunkers with bunkers. A 95-ton rolling bunker with a literal foot of armor, a 105mm gun chosen specifically for it's excellent performance against concrete, and a blistering top speed of 8 miles per hour. But at least it managed to move under its own power and not sink into the dirt, in no small part thanks to it's mounting 4 tracks, 2 on each side. Of the two prototypes built, one was recovered in 1974 when a farmer stumbled upon it, abandoned in a field. It currently sits in Fort Benning, Georgia. The other one sadly, was damaged in an engine fire while being used as a testbed for heavy vehicle components and had to be scrapped.
  • The British counterpart to the T28 above, is the Tortoise Heavy Assault Tank, likewise built to break through the Siegfried Line. Weighing in at only 78 tons, and mounting both a smaller gun and less armor than the T28, the Tortoise was capable of being marginally more mobile, albeit still being comically slow by any standard.
  • The author of the book My Tank Is Fight!, which specifically looks into the various super projects of World War II and puts forth hypothetical scenarios involving their deployments, mentioned that were the Rattes or Monsters to be built they would likely have to be built in naval shipyards (and be subject to the same allied bombing raids as the other ships). They would be devastating, sure... for the first encounter, after which they would likely be bombed out of existence from the air. Even as heavily-armored as they were planned to be, a single 500 pound bomb was all it would take to pierce that armor. That's not counting even narrower list of accessible terrains and inability to cross most contemporary bridges. Awesome, but Impractical.
  • After the war, USSR build a really impressive IS-7 heavy tank. Reaching 68 tons, this tank was the heaviest in her line and heaviest of post-war tanks actually considered for deployment. She was armed with long-barreled 130-mm cannon (not counting two REALLY heavy 14.5-mm machineguns and six light 7.62-mm machineguns, all on remote controlled mounts), and protected with six-inch armor in " pike nose" configuration, which basically made her frontal armor impenetrable to any existing AT weaponry... Unless it didn't face you head-on. Despite being as heavy as "Tiger-II", IS-7 was much more mobile, capable of reaching 60 km/h on good road and with much less gound pressure. Eventually, though, this impressive tank was considered too heavy for frontal deployment, too costly for mass production, and much cheaper T-10 heavy tank was produced in limited numbers instead.
  • Somewhere in between is Obyekt 279 ("Object 279"), a Soviet prototype heavy tank with a maximum armor of 305mm and a 130mm cannon. It is designed to withstand a nuclear attack, and it seems that it doesn't fail its purpose. Two pairs of tracks and 1000 horsepower to move 60 tons allowed it to be a tank and not a self-propelled bunker — velocity on a road is claimed to be 55 km/h and you can see how it plows through snow and swamp. Canceled, like most projects of its time not related to either nuclear missiles, space race or overdue upgrade of production capabilities.
    • Speaking of the heavy Objects, there's some more that should be noted. The 279 would probably have been a logistic & maintenance nightmare with its overly complex chassis, but another project of that time - the 277 - is also notable. The main drawback of Heavy Tanks (low mobility) would not have really applied to it; it wasn't too heavy (a lot of modern MBTs have more weight than its 55 tons); its power-to-weight ratio would have actually been better than most medium/MB tanks of its time (about 18 HP/ton), and its ground pressure was on par with the MBTs. It would have had a 130mm rifled gun with mechanized loading (same as the 279) and its armor, while less than that of the 279, would have been thicker than that of the medium/MB tanks. The project (as part of the whole heavy tank development program) was killed by Khrushchev himself, who believed that dedicated missile tanks were the future. They were not.
    • For reference, Khrushchev was a firm believer in missile superiority over armor. He fought any proposal for large armored ships, calling them floating targets for missiles.
• Speaking of the failed German superheavy tanks from World War II, there's also what was perhaps Nazi Germany's scariest war machine — although not its most reliable — the PzKpfw VI, otherwise known as the Tiger. Sure, it was slow, over-engineered, and expensive to produce, but with its heavy armour (up to 200mm thick) and anti-air derived 8.8 cm gun it proved a formidable opponent when fielded, having inspired the legend that it required five Shermans to defeat a single Tiger ^note  British doctrine of deploying tanks in groups of five may have given rise to this misconception. Developed alongside the Panther as a response to the Soviet T-34, it outclassed medium tanks such as the Lee and early Shermans when first deployed in Tunisia, and remained competitive against the later Sherman and Cromwell. However, it was produced in (relatively) smaller numbers ^note specifically, output of Shermans alone was approximately equal to Nazi tank production during the war , without air superiority it was always vulnerable to ground attack, and by the end of the war it was outclassed by Allied tanks such as the Comet and tank destroyers such as the M36 and Firefly.
  • However awesome, the Tiger proved logistically troublesome. Although — by German standards — relatively safe and reliable, when it did break down its road wheels inhibited field maintenance and it required specialised facilities for even basic repairs. That said, as if to underscore the American understanding of the importance of logistics, reports from one of the first American ordnance officers to be able to review a captured Tiger I, after making positive mention of its armor and gun, made sure to also mention that its outer set of roadwheels could be dismounted for rail transport.
  • Or the Tiger II (aka King Tiger), a Tiger tank on several jars of steroids with an even more powerful gun and sloped armor. However, as with many German WW2 tanks, mechanical problems were quite common and few were built as they appeared in the last year of the war.
  • Awesome as the King Tiger was, the Jagdtiger tank destroyer had even more armour (a freakish quarter of a metre thick in places - ten inches, all but a hairsbreadth) and an even bigger 128mm gun that could trash any enemy tank from two miles away. Fortunately, few were built and mechanical problems were common (along with fuel and equipment shortages). And mobility issues, since a lot of bridges couldn't actually take its 70+ ton weight.^note  The Jagdtiger, in fact, remains among the heaviest armored fighting vehicle to be put into mass production. Larger vehicles like the Maus and T95 only ever reached the prototype state.
    • They usually were simply driven in ambush to wait oncoming enemies, picking them one by one. And then reversing away, shooting all the time should things get too hot.
  • Tiger? See also the Panzer V Panthers. The US Army Armor Officers Basic course used to (might still) require an essay on the Panther vs the T-34/85, which was quite comparable. They were close enough that picking either one was acceptable, as long as you gave good reasons and covered the pros and cons of each. A battle between a Panther and a T-34/85 would most likely be decided by the quality of the crews — terrain and surprise being equal.
    • Shermans upgunned with 76mm (American) and Ordnance QF 17-pounder (British) guns didn't do too badly either, and in fact Sherman Fireflies (armed with 17-pounder guns) could penetrate Panther turrets at a decent range and were almost a match for Tiger 1s (if they could hit; first-generation 17-pdr high-velocity discarding sabot ammunition had a tendency to be not able to hit the broad side of a barn beyond close range, though the standard armor-piercing ballistic cap ammunition was passably accurate if a little less capable of hole-punching). ^note  In fact, the Sherman Firefly is The Dreaded to Tiger I crews, who made Fireflies a first-priority target if encountered. It was also a Sherman Firefly that ultimately did in famed German tank ace Michael Wittmann's Tiger I
  • Panthers actually were tanks in the blitzkrieg tradition. That is, they were made to be heavy cavalry without horses. Tigers were anti-air guns on tracks- developed because they needed a way to give mobility to the cumbersome but powerful FlaK 88 gun- and Tigers were the result.
    • In the hands of skilled drivers, Tigers did actually have good mobility on rough terrain on par with the Panzer IV, contrary to popular belief.
  • The Panther, however, had huge flaws, like its secondary gear shift and complicated intersected wheels for example. It was poorly constructed and held together for a whopping 150km, before needing a maintenance overhaul. The turret had a weak motorisation that left the crew with hand cranking it while tilted, and the intersected wheels made changing the inner row a pain, since you had to remove 3 wheels to change one. The motor and tracks also didn't hold together that much, needing to be swapped every 1000 and 500km respectively. That said, the good did outweigh the bad by a huge degree, and in combat the design's merits were proved beyond a doubt. Despite this, the Panzer IV remained the workhorse of the German Army until the end.
    • Some of these problems were corrected in later variants, but more than half of the Panthers lost in Normandy were due to the weak final drive that caused the Panther to break down after just 150km of use (or less than half of its gas tank). The Germans simply made the mistake of making the tank too heavy (45 tons, or the same weight as the original specifications for the Tiger heavy tank) for the technology of the time.
    • Panthers represent an interesting case. In terms of size and design parameters, Panthers belong with immediate post-war medium/main battle tanks such as Centurion, M-46, or T-54, all of which were designed with the recognition that the relatively small World War II mediums could not be satisfactorily equipped with sufficiently heavy armor, armament, and other equipment. They were all physically bigger and much heavier than World War 2 mediums such as Shermans or T-34s (40-50 tons rather than 25-30 tons), but were designed to operate as medium tanks rather than as specialist vehicles that the heavies were. While Panthers were armed and armored to be superior to the contemporary mediums, it was not enough to stand up to tanks in their own class—which, to be fair, didn't exist just yet. Consequently, they were better (but not dramatically) than most of their adversaries, but quite inferior to the more appropriate counterparts that showed up just a few years later (US M-26, the tank that M-46 would be developed from, was starting to show up on the battlefield by early 1945. The Centurion was about to enter mass production when the war in Europe ended. The Soviets were starting to field T-44, from which T-54 would be developed from, by the end of the war as well. Each one of these outclassed the Panther, by considerable margin in some respects.). Speaking of which....
  • Ironically, but debuts of both Tigers (in 1942), Panthers (in 1943) and Tiger II's (in 1944) on Eastern Front turns into embarrassing blunders due to poor planning on German side and well-prepared Soviet defenses.
• The British Centurion deserves some votes as the best tank of its era. It was designed on the same premise as the Panther, the recognition that the World War II era medium tank was too small to accommodate the kinds of armor, weapons, and other equipment needed for a future war. Originally designated as a 45-ton "heavy cruiser" tank, it was better armed (originally with the 17 pounder (basically, the equivalent of the long 75mm of the Panther), than the 20-pounder (equivalent to the long 88mm of the Tiger II), and eventually the revolutionary 105mm L7), better armored, fairly fast, and utterly reliable. It was good enough to be remain in service as a frontline tank for 30 plus years and in supporting roles (modified as engineer vehicles or heavy armored personnel carriers) for 30 years or more and counting. Not bad for what is essentially a late World War II tank.^note To paraphrase an overview of the tank by a researcher, all other British tank designs used in World War II was a stopgap in one way or another; the Centurion was the first time the designers felt that they had the time to sit down and not half-arse the job while incorporating all the lessons learned so far from the war. The longevity of the resulting design speaks for itself.
• Statistically, the best "tank" of the German army was actually the Panzer III, which then transitioned to become the StuG III assault gun. All types of Tigers are claimed (but not verified) to have killed 10,000 Allied tanks. The StuGs alone claim to have killed twice that number by 1944.
• On the other side of the scale, you have the French Leclerc, one of the fastest main battle tanks in the world. And the fastest one when firing; while other tanks have to slow down to shoot, it can pummel you with twelve 120mm rounds a minute (it has the fastest autoloader of any main battle tank too) while running at 50km/h.
  • The Leclerc also deals with the poor fuel efficiency of jet engines by using a hybrid diesel/gas turbine setup. The main engine is a mostly conventional diesel, but instead of the usual supercharger it's got a small gas turbine.
• The British Churchill AVRE mounted a 290mm spigot mortar, designed for breaching fortifications. The projectile weighed 40lbs, and was known as a "flying dustbin." That wasn't the only modification it received either.
• Sturmtiger, anyone? The thing was build on the Tiger's chassis. Although smaller, stockier, more armored and armed with a repurposed and modified large naval rocket launcher, the 380 mm Raketen-Werfer RW61 L/5.4. It had a crane at the back to help loading the enormous shells. Unfortunately, it was Awesome, but Impractical in practice—the shells had a ~500m blast radius that could easily disable the firing vehicle itself, unless you sat back so far away that the armor of the Sturmtiger basically served no useful purpose whatsoever. Furthermore, the blast effects were so intense that no vehicle of any kind could hope to traverse through an area where such a shell exploded, rendering the thing effectively useless for close support of assaults.
• What happens when you take an already crawler-tracked bulldozer, weld a few tons of steel to it, seal it up and go nuts? The Killdozer.
  • Done over right by the IDF's 'Doobi' armored Caterpillar D9 bulldozer.
• Leonardo da Vinci actually designed a tank. It was built out of wood, was powered by hand cranks, and had multiple cannons pointing all around the tank. One TV show was even able to build a functioning replica.
  • They had to modify the design; as originally drawn, the wheels would counter-rotate and result in it going nowhere, as well as cannons having to stick through the wheels themselves. It was mentioned on the show that Leonardo would occasionally do this sort of boobytrapping in case someone picked up his notes.
  • This design is used in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood as one actually built by Leonardo for Cesare Borgia. It was actually pretty fast, although only firing one cannon at a time. The mission involves destroying all prototypes and the original plans. It can be assumed that Leonardo then made a second set of plans deliberately flawed.
• The T-34, the tank that broke the Nazi armies. It was built in 1940, and its appearance completely shocked the Third Reich, who did not think the Russians could design good tanks. The T-34 was cheap, fast, reliable, tough and very powerful. Its 76mm gun outclassed the 37mm and 50mm guns of early Panzers, whose shots would simply bounce off the T-34's sloped armor. The 1943 upgrade of an 85-millimeter gun allowed them to deal with upgunned Panzer IV variants, Panthers and Tigers. Although not the first tank ever to have sloping armor, it was the first to use it so well in its design that it became an obvious factor to its battlefield survivability, thus prompting the Germans to come up with what eventually was the Panther. Consequently, sloped armor became a standard feature on pretty much every tank post-WW2.
  • While the Russians have had a reputation for poor build quality, the T-34's armor quality was consistently excellent and the much-vaunted German armor had highly inconsistent quality (verified by both Soviet and American tests on Panther tanks as well as by a prewar Russian test on a Panzer III tank). The consistently good armor quality on the T-34 was a factor in keeping the sloped frontal plate and allowing it to bounce shots - the Germans, with their hard but often brittle armor, decided against copying the T-34's armor until they devised the Panther with its less sloped but far thicker frontal armor.
  • Unlike most other tanks, the T-34 was also built to operate well in winter conditions - its diesel engine could start easily and keep running in such freezing conditions (diesel fuel has a lower freezing point than petrol/gasoline which the German tanks ran on) and cold even nullified defects in radiators that earlier tanks suffered from in summer, and its wider tracks were like snowshoes, allowing it to race across ground that German tanks couldn't hope to cross (the German tanks had narrower tracks meaning they bogged down in mud and snow, and outfitting them with "snowshoes" just didn't work).
  • Being cheap also goes well with the fact that it was relatively easy to manufacture them by the numbers. Crew compartments were crude, sure, but all that time saved furnishing for comfort could result in more tanks being made and sent straight away to push back the Germans at Leningrad and towards Berlin. The Russians learnt that a tank that could not be pushed out and sent to the front lines was as good as no tank at all, especially when the front lines were less than a dozen miles from the factory where the vehicles were being built.
    • All wasn't rosy for the T-34, though. Initial T-34 designs came with a turret that was too small to allow for more than two people to operate(a common failure of many early-war tank designs, with French tanks having only one horribly overworked man in the turret), and were often built without radio equipment (another drawback of many early war designs). Both of these factors severely hindered the combat effectiveness of T-34 units and made them difficult to command. Hard-pressed factory workers also often pushed out half-finished T-34s with no gunsights and shoddily-built machinery that would literally fall apart after running for a few dozen miles. This understandably happened in factories that were at the verge of being run over by the Germans or which had to be shifted thousands of miles in a matter of days, although according to reports the best T-34s by far were from Factory No.183 (based in Kharkov pre-invasion, and the factory that first developed the T-34) and the worst were from Factory No.112.
    • Early T-34s could barely accommodate two men in its turret, leaving them cramped internally. The T-34M, which was under testing when Operation Barbarossa began, would have rectified this, but these new developments were hurriedly abandoned due to the necessity of cranking out as many tanks as possible before factories were overrun. The late T-34s armed with modified 85mm anti-aircraft gun managed to enlarge the turret but the turret design, like the Panther's, had shot traps that could make it vulnerable against guns that would otherwise fail to penetrate it. Armor protection, high for 1941, was inadequate against the guns of Panthers and Tigers, although it was still effective against smaller weapons at long ranges.
    • Early T-34s were also borderline blind, a combination of not having a cupola, and terrible optics for both the Driver and Gunner, effectively blinding it, and further escalating a problem of only being able to engage German tanks in close distances. Later models rectified some, but not all of the problems involving the T-34's visibility, with one tank commander straight-up referring to his T-34 with it's hatches sealed up as "deaf and blind".
    • While simple to manufacture, T-34 was not exactly "cheap." Its engine was largely made of aluminum (the design began as a project to fit lightweight diesels to long-range bombers), which USSR was very short of until the later stages of World War II. The heavy use of aluminum is one of the factors caused the Germans to decide that T-34 cannot be economically copied.
    • While sloped armor is a very good idea, the T-34 was generally agreed to have been an overly enthusiastic adopter, with sloped armor on all sides, leaving the tank a with relatively little usable space and limiting the ability to install larger turret rings. Successor tanks like the T-44 and T-54 kept the sloped front armor, but not the side/back slopes, similarly to the American Sherman and German Panther.
    • Another problem with the crampness is the Christie Suspension, which, while good, eat up a lot of space, further exacerbating the above issue, and is hard to service. While the T-34M (which would replace the Christie suspension with torsion bar, amongst other improvements including turret for 3 people) never got into production due to outbreak of the war, post-war Soviet tanks pretty much abandon Christie suspension due to that reason.
  • To quote creator of this tank, M.I. Koshkin: "Even a fool can invent something complicated". And this tank was simple.
  • The Military Channel show Top Tens episode on tanks ranked the T-34 as number one, ahead of M1 Abrams. One of the main ranking categories were production numbers and historical impact. The M1 Abrams, while arguably the best modern tank, has not yet made significant historical impact. Also, they're very high-tech and expensive, meaning there aren't very many of them made ^note Although this is a relative term; there are over 8.000 Abrams in service all over the world, but this is a drop in the bucket compared to the 85.000 T-34s of all modifications that rolled off the assembly lines. The T-34 is the second most produced tank in history(after the T-54/55) and was crucial in turning the tide of a world war. It is, basically, the AK-47 of tanks.
• While often forgotten in shadow of T-34 and IS tanks, the Soviet light tanks - T-60, T-70 and T-80 (the first one, not the modern one) actually were the machines, which stopped the German Blitzkrieg on its tracks. Up until 1943, they were the most numerous tanks of Soviet Army. While not as impressive as their bigger brothers, those light tanks were cheaper, could be build on automobile factories (which were more numerous than heavy industrial plants required for T-34), and due to well-refined design, descending from pre-war series of amphibious tanks (T-37 and T-40) were quite reliable.
• The Kubinka Tank Museum near Moscow has got tanks of just about all degrees of awesome in one place. Including the five-turret T-35, including Obyekt 279, and including a 188-ton Maus formed from the hull from the turretless first prototype mated to the turret from the second prototype.
• The humble M4 Sherman has a poor reputation nowadays due to its performance during the Second World War, when it was forced to fight Panthers and Tigers with an inferior gun and Zerg Rush tactics. However, that all changed when the Israelis got their hands on some Shermans and gave it the love it deserved. Their first major kitbash, the M50 Sherman, ironically replaced the original 75mm gun with a more powerful French 75mm gun derived from the German Panther's Kwk 42. Another kitbash, the M51, did away with the 75mm altogether and opted for a 105mm gun. Both types saw extensive action during the many Arab-Israeli Wars, facing tanks that were far superior to any Tiger or Panther. The Israeli Shermans, along with other more modern Western contemporary designs, consistently beat the crap out of these newer tanks.
  • Just like when inferior German tanks faced superior Soviet ones, or were far outnumbered; one suspects that crew and general army quality has something to do with this. The fact that Soviet export models were greatly inferior to the original models used by the Soviet military is also a factor.
  • And as an extra dose of irony, Syria fielded, amongst other things, surplus Panzer IVs.
  • The Sherman, despite being outgunned and out-armored by the Panther and Tiger, did have some real advantages. It was the very first tank to have a (vertically) stabilized main gun, which helped make firing after moving easier since the elevation didn't have to be adjusted after stopping. It also was quite agile for a medium tank of its era and relatively compact (at least in length and width; it was a bit tall for its size), allowing it to go places a Panther or especially a Tiger could never dream of. In an era where most tanks made use of a hand crank that would allow for a full 360 degree turret rotation in one minute, the Sherman had an electrical system that could do the same in as little as fifteen seconds. And finally, it was probably the most reliable tank of World War II, with some Shermans managing to make it through the entire Western Europe campaign with no more than a single major overhaul. This reliability was intended for the tank from the very beginning, as the US had to ship all of its fighting forces afar for combat and a maintenance-heavy tank would have caused unneeded delays on campaign.
  • There's also the fact that Tigers and Panthers were exceedingly rare, with around 1,500 Tiger Is, 500 Tiger II's and 7,500 Panther tanks being made. The US built almost fifty thousand Shermans. Shermans did quite well against the more common Panzer III and IVs since they were closer to its weight class than the heavier Tiger and Panther. Plus, much of the Sherman's more powerful upgrades were delayed either due to reliability issues or crew ergonomics issues, or looked over by the troops on the ground as unnecessary at the time. However, once the upgrades had their kinks worked out and were implemented Shermans became far more effective against German armor.
  • The Sherman also had an excellent service history with the US Army, contrary to modern history films that often exaggerated its failures largely due to only very basic research (for example, the oft-quoted "it takes 5 Shermans to take out one Tiger" was redundant. The Tiger was a heavy tank, and the entire point of heavy tanks was summed up nicely in the concept: take down more than 1 vehicle from a lesser weight class; furthermore, as noted below, the "5 Shermans for a Cat" thing is mostly myth). During the battle of Arracourt in 1944, the US Army lost only 30 Shermans while destroying over 90 German tanks - mostly the vaunted Panthers. While lacking air support^note Besides one madman who mounted bazookas on the wings of a scout plane; it was way too cloudy for any kind of combat air missions beyond that. This was also somewhat helped that the US Armored Corps had adequate support of mechanized infantry and artillery, something their German counterparts were severely lacking in, if they were lucky enough to receive it at all.
    • Better tactics and training can make up for a lot of deficiencies in tanks—and the Sherman was not too far behind the tanks of 1940s or even 50s, with appropriate upgrades. During conflicts in Middle East and in South Asia, Israeli and Indian Shermans made mincemeat of Jordanian and Pakistani M48s on several occasions.
    • The 5 Shermans for one Tiger is actually just an Urban Legend, which stems from the fact that the smallest combat unit of tanks (a platoon) was 5 tanks. So you would need 5 Shermans for a Tiger because you wouldn't usually send less than 5 Shermans for a job, whether it was for taking out a machine gun nest or an isolated tank.
  • Well before the Israelis created their Super Shermans, the British upgraded the Sherman to carry the enormous and powerful 17-pounder anti-tank gun, this being their best AT weapon. The resulting tank, the Sherman Firefly, was rightly feared by German tank crews and Fireflies became priority targets to the extent that the Firefly's main gun was often camouflaged to resemble the Sherman's original 75mm gun.◊ Famously, it was likely a Firefly that did in German tank ace Michael Wittmann's Tiger, as noted above.
    • The Firefly was not without its own disadvantages however. The oversized 17-pounder gun barely fit inside the M4's turret, making it difficult to aim and load the gun,^note The stabilizer and powered elevation/traverse systems of the base M4 had to be removed to make room, the gun had to be shoved in sideways, and then a the turret had to have it's back cut and the radio made to stick out said back, and even then, the gunner had to get into a hilariously contorted position to aim and fire the gun and a decent high-explosive round wasn't available until very late in the war. To give a point of comparison: the original 76mm-armed, small turret Sherman was rejected by the US Army because it was too cramped inside for maximum crew effectiveness. The 17-pdr gun was even bigger than the US 76mm gun, and had to be significantly modified to fit inside a Sherman turret, and generally comparable or slower in loading speeds to a 90mm gun, such as used by the Jackson (which, itself was a returreted Sherman)^note Part of this was due to issues with British tank/cannon procurement during the war—artillery branch had the say on what kind of cannons were made, and little attention was given to how adaptable these designs were for tanks.
  • The 75mm gun-armed Sherman, although not as powerful as the 76mm variant, was able to penetrate Tigers from flank and frontal shots during Soviet testing. Also, it fired a superior high explosive shell than the 76mm variant (due to the 76mm needing extra casing material to withstand higher velocity, and thus less HE filling. This makes the 75mm much more effective against enemy infantry). The "Sherman Jumbo" assault variant had additional armor but usually retained the 75mm gun (about 100 had the 76mm gun). In fact, the very first time Shermans got into a confrontation with a Tiger, seeing that their AP rounds were having no effect, the US tank platoon fighting the Tiger loaded HE rounds and fired at the Tiger until it stopped fighting back; the Tiger crew were killed by the concussive force of the HE rounds.
  • The US also eventually got their own Sherman variants that performed better against German armor, such as the Sherman Jumbo and Easy Eight, which had significantly more armor and were commonly fitted with the more powerful 76mm cannon. To put it in perspective, Jumbos had almost as much frontal armor as a Tiger I.
  • The main problem with the Sherman was that since it was so simple and successful at the start of its career, the powers that be saw no reason to do any serious planning to replace it. Shermans at El Alamein in late 1942 were regarded with mild fear by the Axis due to the massive increase in firepower and armour compared to what they were used to facing. By Normandy in 1944, when faced by what was effectively the same tank, the Germans had moved ahead with equipment and now refered to Shermans as Tommy Cookers (more due to lousy ammunition storage practices^note Generally attributed more to the Brits, who had a habit of stuffing extra ammo absolutely everywhere inside a tank, which improved endurance but made every penetrating hit more likely to cause ammo fires than any fault of the tank itself, and remedied with "wet" storage; furthermore, despite the name, crew casualty rates were astonishingly low given how easy it is to get out of an M4 quickly in an emergency, aided by the fact that American ammo tended to burn more slowly, which generally gave the crew enough time to escape before the inevitable cook-off and fireworks show).
  • The M4 Sherman was deployed after the T-34 so had less of a shock value to the German forces who had prepared anti-tank guns like the pak 75mm and Flak 88mm. It was a highly reliable vehicle that had small but important upgrades in only a few years' time to improve its mobility, armor, and most importantly its gun. The tank units were generally happy with what the 75mm could do, and didn't initially adopt the 76mm gun armed Shermans due to concerns over logistical complications; this attitude changed rapidly once the Normandy invasion was underway and the "Tiger Scare" set in among Allied tankers.
  • While the Sherman was produced in smaller numbers than the T-34, this was more a result of the United States simply not being as focused on a single land war as the Soviet Union. A good portion of American production was put towards the naval war with Japan, as well as an air war and bombing campaign in Europe, not to mention supplying trucks, food, and countless other supplies for the entirety of the allied military. If the U.S. had singlemindedly produced M4 models like the Soviets did with the T-34, it's likely that the Sherman production would have vastly outpaced that of the T-34.
  • Sherman tanks, send in USSR, were well-received by Russian tankers, who loved their reliability, good ergonomic, effective radio equipment and powerful weaponry (albeit they criticized their height, which made Sherman's more obvious targets than T-34, and low-quality armor on some production series). The USSR imported more than 3600 Sherman tanks, of diesel-powered variety. Initially, due to concerns about the ammunition supply, some Soviet Shermans were re-armed to use Soviet-made guns, but after the logistical problems were solved, this practice was abolished. Russian crews gave the machine a passionate nickname "Emcha", which was abbreviation of "M - chetyre" (translation of M4 number).
    • The high profile of the M4 design was partly so it could accept a wide variety of engines, including aircraft radial engines as necessary (indeed, some early marques were equipped with such a radial engine). Thanks to a minor economic hiccup years prior, only aircraft engines were still being developed at any significant pace, so the tank designers took that into account. This design choice left enough room under the main compartment to store main gun rounds vertically, which was helpful since in "wet storage" ammo racks this was the only way to store main gun rounds.
  • While unsurprisingly inferior to the Panther and Tiger, the Sherman was in fact superior to the most common German tanks, the Panzer III and IV, as well as its Soviet counterpart, the T-34, thanks to its stabilized gun and impressive reliability, as proved against the former in WWII, and the latter in the Korean war.
• The M26 Pershing, the ancestor of M47, M48, and M60 was only introduced in the last year of world war 2, but is well remembered. Like the Tiger it used a repurposed anti-aircraft gun but improvements made its gun closer to the Tiger 2 gun. It did have reliability issues, however, partly due to the engine essentially being M4's engine being used on a tank 10 ton heavier, which first resulted in the US Army rejecting it for service outright (before heavy advocacy resulted in a small quantity being shipped to Europe over objections), and eventually led to its service in the Korean War being cut short and replaced by M4 and M46 instead. The heavier weight also proved a logistical problem, as most if not all WW2 US pre-made bridging equipment was designed to take the weight of a Sherman-sized vehicle but not a Pershing-sized one. Like the Panther, the Pershing was designed, not as a heavy tank, but as an outright replacement for the Sherman, essentially being the "Missing link" between WW2-era mediums and the modern MBT.
• Some credit has to be given to the Medium Tank M3, built by the Americans but primarily fielded by the British, who chose to dub the tanks "General Lee" (with the original American-designed turrets) and "General Grant" (with a newer British-designed turret, which was enlarged to fit a radio set). In addition to starting the American tradition of naming armored vehicles for generals (Sherman, Stuart, Pershing, Patton, Sheridan, Bradley, Abrams, etc.), the M3 also carried an unusual armament mix of a light high velocity gun in the turret paired with a heavy low velocity gun in the main body of the tank. This was done because there were no current turrets that were large enough for the 75mm gun, and the US needed a medium tank with such armament right now (at least as a stop-gap) rather than waiting for the proper turret to be designed (which would come within a year in the form of the M4 Sherman). Pulled from service with the arrival of the Sherman, many Grants and Lees were retooled into various unusual vehicles, including one version that used a high-intensity turret-mounted spotlight to blind German defensive positions during night battles.
  • The M3 Lee was also sent to the Red Army. While the Russians were not happy with the high profile, the poor hull shape, inadequate armor and the need for gasoline fuel (as opposed to Diesel), they liked the high explosive capacity of the weapon, and the spacious crew compartment allowed them to function as heavy Armored Personnel Carriers in summer, carrying ten troops armed with SMGs.
  • Obsolete in Europe in mid-1943, the Lee and Grant tanks were shipped on down the line to British 14th Army in Burma, where the high silhouette was not an issue in jungle combat and the secondary weapons proved effective against Japanese infantry. The high-mounted turret machine guns were especially effective against Japanese snipers hiding in trees.
  • A word on gasoline engines: One of the (many) myths that gets passed around regarding the inferiority of American tanks mentions that they burned gasoline rather than diesel fuel, making them far more likely to catch fire in combat. While it is true that many American tanks (including the Lees and Shermans) burned gasoline, it is also true that most German and British tanks did as well. For various reasons, including the state of the art of engine design at the time, only the Soviets (and the Japanese, but the Japanese tanks weren't exactly anything to write home about) were big into diesel-engined tanks. Gasoline-engined Lend-Lease tanks probably presented more of a logistics problem than a safety problem for them.^note Which was a non-issue for tanks like the Sherman, which were built with diesel engines if they were intended to be sent to the Sovs.
• The M10 Tank Destroyer. Designed as a stopgap "heavy interceptor" vehicle to blunt German armored spearheads after they broke through the frontlines, the M10 used a slightly modified M4 chassis with an open-topped turret on top mounting a 3-inch high velocity gun for defeating armor. It did quite well at what it was designed for in the few instances where it performed its intended role—one of these being the Battle of El Guettar, where it made a impressive debut and helped stop a German attack that included Tigers. In the majority of instances where it could not be employed for this role (due to there being no German armored thrusts to turn away—or, later in the war, much of any German armor at all), it didn't do too badly at indirect fire support and bunker-busting either (though at cost to the barrel life of their guns). The Brits also made use of the vehicle, either with the original 3-inch gun or refitted with a 17-pounder gun (both variants became known as Achilles, though this name is now only commonly used to refer to the 17-pdr equipped variant; the base model with the 3-inch gun is commonly called Wolverine, but this name is poorly attested in archival records and is of uncertain origin).
  • Another word, this time on US Tank Destroyer doctrine as used in WWII. A very common misconception is that the US did not intend to use its tanks (like the M4) to fight enemy tanks and wanted to leave this to the tank destroyers—commonly paraphrased as "tank destroyers kill tanks, tanks kill everything else." In reality, the intention was for tanks to be used as general support vehicles and tools for breakthrough and exploitation, and this included taking out enemy tanks as necessary. Indeed, even the M4's 75mm gun was chosen for all-around utility including armor-busting, and it only started to become out-classed in this regard once Panthers and Tigers took the field. Tank destroyers were intended for purely defensive applications—move quickly to a point of ambush after a German armor breakthrough, and intercept this armored thrust. (In practice, the tank destroyers were used for other jobs most of the time.) Tank destroyers like the M10 were no longer produced after the war because most commanders thought that specialized tracked vehicles were redundant for this role because a good tank should be able to do this job just fine. On the modern battlefield, other vehicles have stepped in to fill the same role, such as attack helicopters equipped with anti-tank guided missiles.
  • As mentioned, the Brits received and made use of American tank destroyers as well. The only difference was that since they didn't use American tank destroyer doctrine, instead of calling them tank destroyers and creating a dedicated ground forces branch to crew these vehicles, they designated them as self-propelled guns and crewed them (mostly)^note the driver tended to be a tanker with artillerymen.
• The Slovaks have a Version of the T-72 that has a pair of 20MM Anti-air guns attached to the side of the turret.
• The very first tank battle took place at Villers-Bretonneaux in 1918. It involved a battle between 10 tanks on the British side (1 male Mark IV, 2 female Mark IVs, 7 Whippets)^note :In World War I British parlance, a "female" tank was one armed solely with machine guns, while a "male" tank had cannons as its main armament and 3 German A7V Sturmpanzerwagens. None of them were very good tanks, yet the battle looked awesome, with both sides acquitting themselves quite well: the Germans lost their lead tank, Nixie (whose crew later stole her back), but knocked out 4 Whippets and forced the female Mark IVs to retreat, while the British and their Australian allies ultimately won the battle.
  • The very first British tanks however, were pretty noticeably not of this trope in practice, and their German counterparts weren't much different. They moved at a speed slower than an adult walking, even impacts that failed to pierce the armor was likely to cause shrapnel to fly off inside the hull (forcing crews to be equipped with protective equipment made of thick leather or leather and mail), ventilation was poor and the engine being housed in the same space as the crew caused the interior to be so hot that numerous tank attacks ended prematurely from its crew being too sick to continue or even unconscious, the fuel tanks were inside and so them being ignited somehow would likely doom the entire crew in short order, their combination of slow speed, huge size and thin armor also made them fantastically vulnerable to artillery and even light German mortars and to top it off, the things were mechanically unreliable and many of them broke down or were bogged down just trying to arrive to their first battle...but that being said, their first battle had the few of them that were there catching their enemies entirely by surprise and caused the Germans to flee before them, if far too slow to actually chase after them and achieve much more than making them run away.^note After the Germans got their wits together, they brought some of their light field artillery pieces to the front for use in the direct fire role as the world's first anti-tank artillery. As the tank's armor was only thick enough to stop small arms rounds, the unfortunate British crews were quickly blown to smithereens. Well, tanks had to start somewhere...
• British Infantry Tank II Matilda. Before late 1941 it completely outclassed anything the Germans and Italians could throw in, and the only weapon which had chances to destroy it was the 88 mm anti-aircraft gun. It gained the nickname Queen of the Desert during the Operation Compass in 1940. Obsolete at West by 1942, the surviving Matildas were shipped to Far East - where it proved superior against anything the Japanese had. The Australians dubbed Matilda as Queen of the Jungle. One of the more whimsical modifications was to equip Matilda with Hedgehog depth charge launcher.(The Hedgehog is actually a Cluster mortar system, and uses impact-fused rounds, and no, it was not used against submarines, but Japanese bunkers.]
  • The Matilda II has this distinction: it is the only British tank of WW2 that was in continual front-line service from September 1939 to August 1945.
• The Matilda's replacement and stablemate, the Valentine, was no slouch. Although not nearly as heavily armored as the Matilda, it was still a small, well-protected and versatile tank that could fit a variety of roles. The diesel versions of the Valentine were very reliable, had superb fording and terrain-crossing capabilities, far better off-road speed than one would expect, and excellent fuel economy. The Soviets also received it under the Lend-Lease program, and while they weren't happy with the slow speed and weak firepower, they liked its extreme reliability and still-impressive armor. It is one of two tanks in WW2 that saw service in all fronts—the other being the M4 Sherman.
• The nomenclature of British tanks was a double-edged sword when psychological warfare was involved. It's a lot easier to be frightened by a "Tiger" or "Panther" ^note  These two were Names to Run Away from Really Fast after all. than a "Matilda" or a "Valentine". But it's a lot easier to deceive your enemy when you have the Fluffy the Terrible trope on your side too.
• The Polish PL-01 concept tank. Stealthy like the Armata, but also equipped with an unmanned turret to maximize crew survivability. Poland cannot go into space, but it can certainly make its war machines absolutely badass. Sadly, it went nowhere, and remains just a plywood and plastic shell over an old BMP chassis.
• The Indian Army used quite a few tanks post-independence, such as the French AMX-13, the British Centurion and the M4 Sherman. They also bought several Russian pieces, mostly T-72s and T-90s (both of which received considerable modifications and upgrades, often with a mixture of kit from practically everywhere). They also developed some tanks of their own, such as the Vijayanta ("Victorious" in Sanskrit) - which was a version of the British Vickers Mk I, and the Arjun (named after a famous hero in the Sanskrit epic poem known as The Mahabharata). The Arjun is supposed to be the equal of the T-90 and the Challenger tanks, and was infamous for a prolonged Development Hell. The current version, the Arjun-3, is now under production. With a 120mm Gun, an Israeli guided-missile system (to be replaced with an indigenous one once it gets out of Development Hell, at any rate), a German engine made by MTU and a computerised fire-control developed jointly by the Indians and the Israelis, it's shaping up to be quite a formidable machine.
  • …except, frankly speaking, all domestic-built Indian tanks are mediocre machines fraught with reliability problems, and the Army won't touch them with a ten-foot pole. While a good machine on paper, all iterations of the Arjun tank suffered from the "design by committee" problem, and those that enter limited production are passionately disliked by the soldiers, remaining in production largely to appease the nationalist politicians. The Indian Army, on the other hand, has just ordered another 500 of the newest T-90MS model to serve as its armored backbone.
• The Pakistani Al-Khalid tank is roughly equivalent to the Russian T-80 (same size, same gun, similar armor and mobility), and backs that up with the power of a cool name: it translates to "The Immortal Tank".
  • Unfortunately for them, it's basically a Ukrainian-built diesel version of the Soviet T-80, and there won't be any more of them: the Morozov factory in Kharkiv that built them went into decline and cannot currently produce any new armored hulls, and for the guns they use the Ukrainians (who cannot produce them either) basically cheated Russians, when their relationship was still passable, stating that they'll use them for their own tanks. Nowadays, Pakistan has switched to Chinese, China being their traditional ally and arms supplier.
• The ISU-152, a 152mm howitzer mounted on the IS tank chassis, was a heavy assault gun that -was also used as a heavy tank destroyer. And a fearsome one, at that- like the British Sherman Firefly, the ISU-152 was The Dreaded to German heavy tank commanders. This was mainly because its massive 152mm gun created enough blast force to blow the turret clean off a Tiger tank, while its 90mm front armor was enough to protect it against return fire. Even if the round itself couldn't penetrate armor, these heavy HE shells could easily stun or kill enemy crews by spalling effects or pure concussive force. Due to its capability to destroy the Panther, Tiger and King Tiger tanks and even the rarely-fielded Ferdinand/Elefant and Jagdtiger tank destroyers, it received a nickname- zveroboi- which translates to "Beast Killer" in Russian. In fact, prior to the introduction of the SU-100, this was the only thing capable of reliably knocking these German vehicles out—and even after that it remained a major reason why King Tigers weren't very inconvenient to Soviets, despite being absolute nightmares in the Western front.
• The 1K17 Szhatie, the only laser-armed tank in existence. It was designed to blind enemy optics and shoot down missiles.
• The title of largest military machine even suggested, seems to be awarded to the "Oboy" - the "fortress-destroying machine", suggested by (very patriotic, but not exactly very practical) Russian engineer Smishin during First World War. The "Oboy" was essentially an enormous metal egg, about 650 meters (2000 ft) in height, and almost a kilometer wide, made of thick armor plates and driven by internal eccentric flywheel, rotated by equally enormous steam engines. The whole contraption was supposed to crush the enemy troops and fortresses by just running them over. The project was dismissed by military as being completely fantastical.
• While Italian tanks are usually nothing to write home about, the Ariete is a respectable design, comparable to most post-Cold War MBTs in most respects but with a little exclusive improvement: the very accurate gun and gun control/target acquisition system allow to shoot down any helicopter daring to come close enough to try and lob a missile at it.
• The M50 Ontos was a tank that gets honorable mention because of the sheer amount of destructive force it could unleash. The Ontos carried six M40A1C recoilless rifles, and each weapon had a M2 Browning mounted on top for ranging and aiming purposes, as well as a M1919 Browning machinegun for close protection. The US Army passed on the vehicle because of the amount of collateral damage it did around it when all of its weapons were fired in rapid succession, with the surrounding windows at the test site were shattered and walls were damaged from the noise of the rifles firing. The US Marine Corps, on the other hand, bought three hundred of them and used them to great effect in Vietnam and the Dominican Civil War. There were reports that just seeing the Ontos made the enemy break and flee. It ultimately went out of service in 1969 because of a lack of spare parts.

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