Trope Finder

I did some searching and couldn't find anything that obviously fit. If we want to be cynical, it could be Critical Research Failure or similar, that whoever wrote the specs didn't use the right tank as a basis, and didn't consider that in 500 years we might have developed some better materials. Many sci-fi games have military hardware with invented names (like "Ferro-Fibrous" armor).

But if we want to be generous, there may be plausible explanations. Perhaps the M808B is not quite so bad as it looks. Maybe its weapons are effective for the cost. Maybe it needed to trade a few things for that extra 18mph. Maybe it's a main battle tank merely in context, that this is the heaviest tank used in a specific location. Any military must compromise between material availability and desired effectiveness. If there is a crewman shortage, a reasonably effective tank that only needs a crew of one is quite valuable.

Not really a trope.

Military design is a dance between pros and cons more than an escalating arc- take the tanks of World War II. The Maus had a friggen period battleship gun as its main weapon, the Tortoise was a bunker on tracks, the Hellcat did highway speeds over any vaguely flat terrain...and the most effective tank of the war was the T-34, the USSR's tin can with treads and a gun- all ~84,000 of them.

My takeaway here is that the Halo tank is faster, constructed using more abundant lighter-weight materials with minimal compromise on armor, has roughly comparable firepower, and I can field 4 times as many of them with the same number of soldiers. Seems pretty viable.

There's Modern Stasis for when the far future doesn't look that different from what we currently have, and Artistic License – Engineering for when something that looks cool would have serious problems in real life.

That said, the latter is not really built for speculating what future tech *should* look like, for which there's no artistic license to be had.

Thanks everyone. I can see the points raised though I still think the form factor is oversized for the role - I can only speculate that the neural interface is so bulky that it needs to be that size to fit it in - and that the speed advantage isn't worth the additional complexity of having four separate tracks and any advantage in manoeuvrability would be negated by the fact it's over twice as wide as modern MB Ts.

EDIT - I've shoved this onto Halo in any event.

Thinking about it from another perspective, there might be a TLP here - My initial thought is Form Follows Function Failure - this is where creators get carried away by Rule of Cool and fail to understand why things are designed and constructed the way they are in Real Life - a form of Artistic License – Physics. For example you get things like:

• Fantasy weapons that are oversized, ridiculously heavy and have so many spikes, cutouts and squiggly bits that they'd be ludicrously impractical in actual combat and magic/superstrength etc. will only take you so far. Or armour covered in spikes and protrusions that actually weaken it's structure and serve only to guide incoming weapon hits into weak points.
• Oversized vehicles that simply couldn't be moved at any reasonable speed without risking a catastrophic crash or would simply break apart under the stresses of even normal operation, much less combat conditions.
• Creators failing to remember the conservation of energy / thermodynamics laws - you can't create or destroy energy, it has to come from and go to somewhere - heat dissipation is a real problem in even fairly mundane technology such as the internal combustion engine for example.

Possibly a combination of Writers Cannot Do Math and Most Writers Are Writers. I remember seeing that apparently Warhammer 40 K's ginormous tanks have stats that look impressive to laymen but are actually underpowered compared to modern tanks.