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A lot of YouTube videos seem to insinuate that the idea of a heavy tank like the Tiger was an aberration which got quickly forgotten as the idea of a main battle tank got developed. I don’t get that. At a tank show they had a Leopard 2 opposite a working Tiger 1. Yeah, it’s a lot bigger. Better armour, bigger gun and it just happens to have a bigger engine in it. The idea behind a tiger is to get the best gun and armour you can on a tank. This is the same principal behind a modern tank. The only difference is we have really good engines that can make these monsters move. If the Germans could have put a powerful engine in the Tiger then they certainly would have.

There seems to be this bizarre narrative with the term main battle tank. It sounds more clever and introspective to say that after years of looking back at previous iterations of light, medium and heavy, we had this eureka moment where we could have one catch all thing that can do the job. A miracle of design and engineering. Not, we got mauled, but we can make our own faster now so we’ll call them something new to make ourselves sound clever and not make us look incompetent for not doing it first. I mean weren’t the Centurion and Pershing direct responses to the German heavy tanks?

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
I mean weren’t the Centurion and Pershing direct responses to the German heavy tanks?

Yes, and they had many of the same problems. A Tiger (or the allied answer) was fearsome when properly serviced and deployed on steady ground. Unfortunately it was complicated, mechanically unreliable and worst of all a gas-hungry heavy vehicle. Heavy, for real - it required special gear to get it on a train, any but the sturdiest bridges were always a potential risk and despite running on wide threads it could get stuck in soft ground. IIRC the few Pershings rushed to Europe weren't able to take part in anything impressive since the americans couldn't locate suitable bridges fast enough to get them anywhere.

Main Battle Tank doesn't mean "best" or "heaviest", it means "the one we can use in the most theaters".

Yeah, modern large main battle tanks are basically the “heavy” tanks from WW2 but with better suspension and more powerful and reliable engines, such that they have the agility of a lighter tank from WW2.

You can talk about the weight disadvantages of a tiger or tiger 2, but the Leopard 2 and Abrams are just as heavy, it’s just now we can shove well over a thousand horsepower in a tank without resorting to excessively heavy engines (or high maintenance aero engines).

During the WW2 and the post-WW2 period, there was a technical distinction between the light tank used for reconnaissance, the medium tank used for most battle purposes, and the heavy tank, an extra heavily gunned and armoured vehicle used for fighting other tanks. These are typified by the British Scorpion, Centurion and Conqueror designs.

Due to the process of history not being organised into neat divisions for the purpose of defining terminology, these designs did not overlap in service, but they demonstrate the concept.

Medium tanks got up-gunned and armoured to the level of heavy tanks. Heavy tanks couldn't get any bigger, because they were already pushing the weigh and size limit for most bridges.

Thus one vehicle was able to perform the functions of medium and heavy tanks, and it came to be called the Main Battle Tank. In the UK army, the Chieftain with a 120mm gun replaced the Centurion and the Conqueror.

The British later introduced the Scorpion tank as a reconnaissance vehicle, however this and the American Sheridan light tank have been replaced by armoured cars and helicopters.

We could ofc also build much heavier tanks, but there's little reason for it. The idea with heavy tanks was big gun, thick armor, but today a weapon capable of defeating that armor doesn't need to ride on a 60+ ton vehicle. And modern stability/sighting equipment means the first shot from 2 klicks out will hit.

A modern tank having to rely on it's armor has failed. Tankers can recite the litany better, but basically you want to be undetected, failing that unseen, failing that at least not shot at. Hoping to not get penetrated by enemy fire is the last option and not a good one.

throwing in tank destroyers and self propelled artillery also muddy the water a little bit. Look like tanks, drive like tanks, but they don’t fight like tanks. But as previously stated I think it had more to do with battlefield role than size, hull, or armament.

Its a muddy distinction to be sure. However I think the main reason MBTs aren't "Heavy Tanks with working engines" is because of the speed they are capable of. Heavy Tanks were slow by design as much as they were for "we can't do that!" reasons.

"Heavy" is also a relative term. Today's MBTs would have been called Heavy Tanks by the designers of WW2 by virtue of their size and armament, but in the same vein we would call a Sherman a light tank if it were designed today when at the time it was a Medium. A modern day Bradley would not have been out of place as a WW2 medium tank, and its not even actually a tank! Terms are relative to what else exists at the time.

The Main Battle Tank concept was developed post WW2 with the idea of using Medium Tank chassis(Which at the time were the most reliable) and putting a heavy tank sized gun on it. As technology progressed through the 20th century, the tanks slowly got bigger. They needed to mount more armor to deal with the big guns, thus they needed bigger engines, and the technology allowed them to mount said engines.

And as mentioned, its as much a doctrinal definition as a physical one. A heavy tank isn't fast because it doesn't need to be. It's supposed to sit there and shoot the enemy with a huge cannon and thick armor from beyond the effective ranges of other tanks. A medium tank is the main battle line. It has a "good enough" gun on a decently fast chassis that can be produced for a cost effective amount allowing mass production. It engages the enemy medium tanks and overwhelms the heavy tanks with numbers. Light tanks are mostly scouting vehicles, meant to give your scouts some extra punch and armored units.

Those roles have been supplanted by Main Battle Tanks. They have the armor and range to act as heavy tanks and the speed of medium tanks. Meanwhile, APCs have also gotten more teeth. Infantry Fighting Vehicles have taken over the role of Light Tank and to an extent Medium Tanks as well.


The reason the Heavy Tank concept didn't pan out so well was because technology wasn't advanced enough and doctrine left it behind. It was almost simultaneously both ahead of its time and behind the times. By the time technology had caught up to allow for a good heavy tank to be made, doctrine and other technology had made it obsolete. Particularly airpower which can easily prey on a slow easy target.

When we see a technological advancement which largely negates airpower, like cheap easily deployed Anti-Air/missile Lasers, then we will probably see more diversity in tanks reemerge(as well as direct combat naval ships) as aircraft and missiles will become impractical. And heck, even in the event of a long term conventional war right now everybody would run out of all these hideously expensive precision weapons very quickly and we'd be reduced to using more conventional stuff.

This has more to do with the role in the battlefield a specific tank was designated to

A heavy tank had a different role than a tank destroyer or a medium
That hat nothing to do with the effective wight of a tank as tank destroyer with a turret could be heavier than their heavy tank counter part

German medium tanks in WW2 were heavier than other nations heavy tanks and so on

Also the weapon is not really different between those types per default and was more a development thing (Russian and German heavy, medium and destroyer tanks of the same development stage carried the same weapon) especially as soon as not size but type of a grenade made the difference (APCR, HEAT, HE, HESH)

That the heavy tank concept did not turn out too well was for the simply reason that the role on the battlefield those tanks should fulfil was outdated by the time


The concept of the Main Battle Tank came up as one type of tank should cover the roles of all 3 types up to a point. Some nations still produced dedicated tank destroyer next to their MBT but those were light tanks with big guns, easier to hide and faster than an MBT.

Going back the first MBT were the German Panther and Russian IS-2 (and T-44).
Those were used as such and later development of the post WW2 MBT were based on the experience with them (the US just came late to the party)

An MBT is not a heavy tank with a better engine, but a medium tank with a good gun

So we could probably make a working Mouse today and that means technology wise something like the Leopard is still a “medium tank” because it hasn’t compromised its speed to maximise firepower and armour. So a theoretical heavy tank today would be relatively bigger by an order of magnitude than a WW2 tank.

I mean I had heard that the Tiger was meant to a breakthrough tank so I assumed that they had wanted it to be faster?

I think it’s more because there seems to be a lot of hipster “tiger was bad” videos out at the minute which insinuate that it didn’t influence later tank design. Despite the allies slapping progressively bigger guns on their tanks and things like the development of various types of super armour in the 20th century. You wouldn’t be doing that if you weren’t influenced by the idea of making a technologically superior tank that outclassed it’s opponent in armour and firepower. The “it’s good enough and let the men show character” attitude of the Sherman pretty rapidly fell by the wayside. The US could probably have made a much cheaper MBT than the Abrams for example.

 Jjohnso11 wrote:
throwing in tank destroyers and self propelled artillery also muddy the water a little bit. Look like tanks, drive like tanks, but they don’t fight like tanks. But as previously stated I think it had more to do with battlefield role than size, hull, or armament.

Tank destroyers and self-propelled artillery generally lack turrets though. It does get a lot more muddy when you look at modern IFVs though. Those are usually (light) tanks in all but name.

But the reason why an MBT is not a heavy tank is simply because the light-medium-heavy tank classification has been abandoned in favour of other nomenclature. This happened because advances in tank development during WW2 led to the creation of tanks that incorporated characteristics of both heavy, medium and light tanks. And so we got the MBT which had the firepower and armour of a heavy tank combined with the mobility of a light tank all with the weight of a medium tank. Of course, then tanks started becoming heavier and heavier over time again so now we have monstrosities like the latest version of the M1A2 Abrams or Leopard 2 which weigh almost 70 tons (that is as heavy as the heaviest WW2-era heavy tanks such as the Tiger II). Of course, they are a lot heavier than average, most modern MBTs range in weight from 40-60 tons.

Breakthrough tanks in WWII concepts are basically big heavily armoured things that can trundle into fire from emplaced guns, and other tanks without worry, speed wasn't a real worry as they'd be deployed alongside infantry that they didn't want to outpace

once the breakthrough tank had made a hole in the enemies defences the faster medium tanks would have zoomed through and exploited it

this gave the turretless heavy tanks from the US (T28) and UK (tortoise) although both should probably have been called assault guns rather than tanks

The reason why the Maus would be a bad kind of tank is two-fold:

Firstly, it's too large and heavy for nearly all roads, railways and bridges, so it would have to drive everywhere across country under its own steam, having special bridges constructed to cross rivers.

Secondly, something that big and powerful becomes a target like a battleship -- too large and vulnerable to air attack to ignore. You would have to put extra mobile AA around it, which then increases the target footprint for enemy tanks. You have to make it into a kind of Deathstar.

This leads to the third point, which is even the Maus's guns aren't tremendously more effective than a normal tank of the time. They would be one hit-one kill, but they wouldn't be one shot-one hit, and wouldn't often have the clear field of direct fire you get from a battleship. The Maus could potentially get swarmed by much larger numbers of much lighter vehicles.

OTOH if you put the resources needed for one Maus into building IDK, say 12 Tigers, you 've now got three tank platoons which can attack three separate targets, and take 12 hits to disable and so on.

The Tiger 1 was a bit of an old-fashioned design when you look at its vertical armour plating compared to the T34 which influenced the Panther.

However when introduced it did have very good armour and gun which made it a powerful weapon for the time it was in service. From that angle it should be considered a successful design, although of course it was fairly rapidly superceded by newer designs..

But, you know, once people start to criticise individual weapons, they tend to lose sight of other reasons why wars are won and lost. If Germany could have built 30,000 Tiger tanks, they would have been able to win the war easily, but they only built about 1,300.

While modern MBTs evolved to be simar in size and weight, I would argue both the US and USSR effectively developed MBTs right out the gate with M4s and T 34s. Both were designed to be the do everything tank. Infantry support and breakthrough.

The KVs were a holdover from earlier. SUs were effectively mobile artillery or tank killers to react to heavier German. Armor when they had nothing else.

Americans just had the M4 for every theater. The TDs were a Philosophy side show.

You're right in the sense that the M4 and the T34 did prove capable of tackling the MBT role effectively. However, they did actually fit into a tactical/design concept of light/medium/heavy. The US had its Stuart and its Pershing, while the SU had various light tanks and the JS series.

That said, one of the reasons that the Pershing was delayed was that Production worked out they could build and ship something like four Shermans in place of one Pershing, The Sherman was more than good enough for the Pacific Theatre given the light weight of tanks the Japanese deployed.

From that angle the Sherman was consciously produced and deployed as an MBT.

Heavy tanks also could work on totally separate criteria. The Churchill was the only heavy tank in large scale production by the western allies, and from a gamers perspective it was a mediocre vehicle, decent enough armour but limited speed and firepower. However few rulesets include what the Churchill was actually good at. Going places no other tracked vehicle could go. Traversing extreme elevations etc.

Varied mobility, as opposed to raw speed, is a common characteristic of the modern MBT not present most in heavy tanks.

The simple reason we don't call MBTs heavy tanks is because they're really the only tanks. Calling something "heavy" implies that it's compared to something else.

The same thing happened with infantry, when line tactics disappeared in the late 19th century, and all infantry essentially became "light infantry."

There's a reason we don't call all modern Jet Fighters "Night fighters" even though they can fight at night.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
You're right in the sense that the M4 and the T34 did prove capable of tackling the MBT role effectively. However, they did actually fit into a tactical/design concept of light/medium/heavy. The US had its Stuart and its Pershing, while the SU had various light tanks and the JS series.

That said, one of the reasons that the Pershing was delayed was that Production worked out they could build and ship something like four Shermans in place of one Pershing, The Sherman was more than good enough for the Pacific Theatre given the light weight of tanks the Japanese deployed.

From that angle the Sherman was consciously produced and deployed as an MBT.

We should remember Pershings were only produced to counter German big cats. The US had no doctrinal reason for a heavy tank, or unlike everyone else in The ETO, an assault tank(they used a 105 variant of the M4 plus artillery and air for that).

"Light", "Medium", "Heavy" (and to a lesser extent "Super-heavy") are more properly descriptors of battlefield doctrine and tactical/operational/strategic employment than they are weight (although its important to note that battlefield doctrine dictated/corresponded with a certain weight class due to the technical requirements associated with a tank design being able to fulfill its doctrinal role). The Panther, a "medium" tank, weighed more than most allied "heavy" tanks, the actual difference was that the Panther, as a medium tank, served a different purpose and fulfilled a different role from the heavy tanks of other nations.

Light tanks were designed as support vehicles, they had to be maneuverable (but not necessarily fast) in order to keep up with infantry and armored advances and cross fairly rough terrain (or be light enough to be carried over unsuitable terrain on trucks, etc.) which might otherwise be unsuitable for larger tanks to cross, they were also used as recce vehicles for larger tank formations. Armament wise they generally carried only a couple machine guns or a smaller cannon. Basically, if they were supporting infantry, they carried heavier firepower than what the infantry themselves were able to carry and fire on the move and would employ it using "shoot and scoot" type maneuvers or get themselves hull-down in cover to supply localized support fire, and then move forward to occupy a new position and rinse/repeat as the infantry advanced. When supporting armored formations they would basically do the same, except instead of providing infantry with heavy firepower they would provide armor with lighter more reactionary fires against targets that larger tank struggled to engage effectively. Light tanks are still in use today, but are mostly used for strategic mobility reasons (i.e. air transportable) and occasionally as recce vehicles. They have been supplanted in some ways by armored cars and in others by modern IFV (infantry fighting vehicles).

Medium tanks were designed to operate as the main thrust of an armored advance, as well as to exploit openings in enemy lines. They were generally fast (often faster than light tanks, with the exception of specialized light tank designs that prioritized speed), had decent all around protection and carried an armament suitable for engaging a wide variety of targets. In other words they were "jack of a ll trades" type designs that balanced speed, protection, and firepower. Note that the British and French messed around with this a bit and developed the concepts of Infantry and Cruiser(Calvary in French use) tanks as subset of the Medium tank design, but those also went obsolete and were supplanted by Centurion as a "Universal Tank"/MBT. Infantry tanks were slower and more heavily armored to assist infantry in breaking through defensive positions, while cruiser/cavalry tanks were faster and more lightly armored to exploit the opening. Basically the British and French thought they needed two different medium tanks to do what the Americans, Germans, and Soviets did with one medium tank (breakthrough and exploit). The British (and inadvertantly/to a lesser extent, the French) basically recognized early on that Medium tanks designs had many inherent advantages over light tanks and heavy tanks and sought to use "Medium" tanks to fill the same doctrinal roles as the light tanks (by way of cruiser/cavalry tanks) and heavy tanks (by way of the infantry tanks). Eventually they realized that specializing their medium tanks in such a way resulted in generally sub-par performance all around and went with a "universal" tank by way of the Centurion, which became the Main Battle Tank.

Heavy Tanks were designed largely to engage other tanks and fortifications and to spearhead attacks against the enemy frontline - being able to absorb and neutralize heavier fire than what the medium tanks would be able to handle on their own, but lacking the mobility needed to truly effect a breakthrough. This role necessitated heavier armaments and armor, and as a result necessitated a larger/heavier vehicle.

Main Battle Tanks folded most of these different functions into one catch-all vehicle, in part as a realization that having separate tank types to fulfill narrow functions was impractical and logistically burdensome, but also because advances in technology enabled a single tank to successfully operate in a wider varierty of environments and against a wider array of targets than what had been possible before. Thats not to say that MBTs are a catch-all for just about every mission set, just that they are well-rounded "multirole" designs that can successfully attack, breakthrough, and exploit, as well as being able to engage other tanks and provide direct infantry support all in one package (which also allowed it to subsume the function of assault guns and tank destroyers which were highly specialized designs intended to tackle unique and specific logistical and operational hurdles).

BTW, modern Main Battle Tanks would actually be more aptly described as an evolution of the Medium Tank concept, not "a heavy tank with a working engine".

 Kilkrazy wrote:

The British later introduced the Scorpion tank as a reconnaissance vehicle, however this [] have been replaced by armoured cars and helicopters.

Britain's military is still so desperate that we have plenty of Scorpions still in service.
Probably will for years.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
the T34 which influenced the Panther.

Wrong. The plans for the Panther were in development long before any T-34 was ever met.
Plans started in 1938 under the VK development.
T-34 was an unknown until 1941.

Wikipedia explains how the development of the Panther was specifically influenced by experience of the T34.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_tank#Design

Yes. And typical for Wikipedia it hails the sloped armour and wide tracks.
Because as we know Russia invented those.........

ValentineGames wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:

The British later introduced the Scorpion tank as a reconnaissance vehicle, however this [] have been replaced by armoured cars and helicopters.

Britain's military is still so desperate that we have plenty of Scorpions still in service.
Probably will for years.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
the T34 which influenced the Panther.

Wrong. The plans for the Panther were in development long before any T-34 was ever met.
Plans started in 1938 under the VK development.
T-34 was an unknown until 1941.

I thought that was the Tiger which was already under development, not the Panther.

ValentineGames wrote:
Yes. And typical for Wikipedia it hails the sloped armour and wide tracks.
Because as we know Russia invented those.........

That does nothing to invalidate the point that the development of the Panther was influenced by the T34.

It's not?

At the end of the day the whole light/medium/heavy tank classification system was a lose abstract created by the militaries of the world as they tried to work out doctrinal and design issues in the early years of tank warfare. All of those issues became moot as technology and field experience produced a different design/doctrinal concept now called the MBT.

ValentineGames wrote:
Yes. And typical for Wikipedia it hails the sloped armour and wide tracks.
Because as we know Russia invented those.........

Wikipedia, which mandates sources be cited, and the military history community on wikipedia is well described as citation Nazis, basically repeats the common literature on the T34 giving undue weight to sloped armor and wide tracks. Shocker... except it's not that undue, since in 1941 medium tanks that fast, well armored, and well armed with wide tracks and sloped armour actually weren't very common. The French SOUMA 35, and the Char B1 had two of those traits each but not all three. Same with the Czech tanks of the early war. British tanks of the war are infamous for being poorly designed, always being either too underarmored, too undergunned, and too underpowered (sometimes all three), and the main German tanks up to 1941 only had sloped armor in certain places and still looked mostly like boxes on treads and for much of the early war German tanks were arguably under gunned until later upgrades to the Panzer IV and the mass production of the Tiger and Panther.

You had to wait till 1942 to see anyone produce a tank that carries the full package like the T34, when the Americans put the Sherman into production and the German's the Panther in 1943.

The Russians maybe didn't invent all those things, but they were the first ones to build a mass production tank that utilizes all of it at once and it was pretty effective.

It’s also worth noting that the truly revolutionary part of the T34 was the suspension which gave it its mobility. And that it’s inventor had failed to sell it to several countries, including the US, before the Russians adopted it. The Russians got the T34 to where it was because of everybody else passing on one of its most important features.

The Soviets got lucky is all it came down to really.

 Grey Templar wrote:
It’s also worth noting that the truly revolutionary part of the T34 was the suspension which gave it its mobility. And that it’s inventor had failed to sell it to several countries, including the US, before the Russians adopted it. The Russians got the T34 to where it was because of everybody else passing on one of its most important features.

The Soviets got lucky is all it came down to really.

Christy suspension is dead end that sucked up crew space. Still better than the craptastic nightmare of German interleaving wheels though.

If I were in it I would rathera Mark Iii with 50mm long gun. Commanders would have liked them better too.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Interesting note. Soviets made as many T44s (yes T44s) in a short lived period before stopping then Germans made Tiger Is.

 Grey Templar wrote:
The Soviets got lucky is all it came down to really.

The Americans went to the moon with a bunch of former Nazi scientists, we don't claim that the Americans "got lucky." We got there first because our program was better than the competition (what little there was of course).

While the British were bragging about the Comet and the the Americans about the Pershing the Soviets were already designing the T-54, which entered production in 1947. By the end of WWII the Soviets were miles ahead of the US and Britain in tank design, and we can't really just broil that down to luck. For all the 5 Year Plan jokes we can make, all other things aside the Soviets for the middling decades of the 20th century easily hosted the most consistently successful and innovative tank development program in the world. Sure some of the innovations came from non-Russians, but... so what? Arguably the West didn't catch up till the late 60s.

When it comes to engineering having the idea first only goes so far. You might as well be the office lackey crying about how Joe from accounting pitched the inventory overhaul you've always thought would work but never bothered to say anything about.

German Tank development is something completely different

There were a lot of different designs and vehicles were produced for political reasons or connections and not because something was good or needed

One of the first designs for the Panzer IV were a 25-30 ton Panther
but it was not the infantry support tank the political leadership wanted so they produced the tank we know
and as this tank did not work in that role they adopted the Panzer III (as that one did not work either in his designated role) and produced the StuG.

It was not until the mid of the war (after Speer became Minister for industry) that the whole production was changed and the more successful designes get produced and also streamlining started)

Of course the Panther was influenced by field experience but its basic design was there before the war started

Miles ahead?
British had the Centurion in 1946.
M46 started replacing M26 in 1949.M47 in 1952.


US and British tanks were extremely effective in Korea and the Middle East. Centurion was particularly good against T55s for decades. Just ask the Israelis...

 Frazzled wrote:
Miles ahead?
British had the Centurion in 1946.
M46 started replacing M26 in 1949.M47 in 1952.

And yet, when the NATO nations started encountering T-54s and second generation T-55s in mass in the mid-50s, they all scrambled to replace their tank stocks and develop new designs, even scrapping current projects, all because of a tank essentially designed in 1944.

Keep in mind, that well into the 50s the former Allied nations were still mostly using WWII designs. I don't think the T-34 ever officially retired from Soviet Service, they just started selling them all off in the late 50s and brought in the T-55.

There's a good history joke about how the US kept calling successive designs the Patton hoping that one would finally not be trash and we could pretend the others didn't exist. The US was still mostly using Shermans (Easy-8 variant with 76mm gun) into the Korean war, where it performed well against the T-34-85. Throughout the 50s however the US struggled with the unrivaled suck that was the Pershing. Seriously, this tank was hot garbage even in 1944, and we wasted about a decade of production and development trying to make it work. The M46 and M47 Pattons were just redesigns of an already crappy tank, that were themselves littered with design issues. The US wouldn't come out with a good tank design until 1960 when it put the M60 into production. The Sherman wasn't retired until 1957. The Centurion was a pretty good tank, but it was slower and heavier and more expensive than the T-54/55. It's big saving grace was having a good gun in 1947 that became not so good by mid 50s when the T-54/55 started replacing the Soviet T-34 stock. The sad part is that the Centurion had it's biggest successes after being retired from MBT duty, converted and retrofitted to do all kinds of other things instead. Honestly if we're going to salivate over a British tank we should be salivating over the Centurion's successor. It took forever but the Brits finally hit engineering gold when they designed the Chieftan.

There's literally no way around the reality. The T-54 had some early design problems that stopped production in 1949 so they could be fixed, but comparing it to the anything the NATO allies had before the 60s is like comparing a professional boxer to the guy at the local Y. The Centurion was probably the most put together post war design they came up with, and still the British rushed to replace it.

US and British tanks were extremely effective in Korea and the Middle East. Centurion was particularly good against T55s for decades. Just ask the Israelis...

Even a Sherman can take out a T-55 if you slap the gun from a AMX-50 onto it, and say what you want about the Israelis, they're like Orks when it comes to tanks. As hinted above the Centurion frame is easy to modify. The Israeli's upgraded the Centurions they acquired from various people who bought them from the Brits (3 guesses who and they should by Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia) from a 20 pdr to a 105mm, gave it a better engine, replaced the drive system, the electronics. The Israeli Sho't barely even looks like the Centurion from the outside, and it really isn't. About the only thing that wasn't replaced was the frame and armor, and even the armor got supplemented with more modern technology in the late 60s (necessitated by the RPG treating 1940s style armor design like tissue paper, and RPGs are a lot cheaper than tanks).