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All these serious tanks are just too functional, what we need in here are displays of how fresh and new the idea of a Tank was, how ideas of what a Tank should be, and how a Tank would work were still to be threshed out.

The Tsar Tank.



The A7V



The MKI



Sadly they don't make Tanks like these anymore.

A7V actually performed quite well in the very limited engagements it was in. And the Germans were building the truly monstrous Grosskampfwagon, the 2nd biggest tank ever actually produced. The armistice kinda ruined any further development prospects unfortunately.

There's something inherently awesome about MLRS tanks until you realize how finite their firepower truly is.

lol looks like a real life SRM carrier from battletech

Okay so the first can't really be anything else. The matilda mk 2, literally boasted 65mm on the rear plate. Its small and compact, not really well armed but damn its well armoured, a solid tank all round, literally. Been around these things in museums since I little. Look how tiny it is!


So the centurion, does stand up to its name, a cold war gladiator that did well against its contemporaries if ever there was one.
The earliest version, I love the first model that little blister with a 20mm, they were ike 90% to having a modern looking tank, and then...
The latest version, even if its more a prototype. Essentially the same thing under all that spaced armour.

Next up


Essentially the English designing the same thing, but in different times.

Churchills, those big heavy hill climbers.Here's one of the first mk3s deployed in Africa, in colour!
Its actually highly likely those holes in the side were punched by British 6 pounders.


Marder


Never thought it too remarkable until i saw one of these for the first time in a museum only last year. Really really made an impression, parked next to a T72, a centurion and 2 leopard 1s(an old Australian welded one and a Bundeswheir cast) and the cheiftan really just stood out.


And the Lynx it just seems to me the epithimy of a large armoured car. Amphibious, all terrain. really cool vehicle.


and lastly
becasue its a novel new(or MK1 female style, old) idea designed after tough experiences in urban warfare, yeah gun tanks and anti infantry, anti light and anti material tanks, really really interesting

Chieftains in BAOR urban camo are always a joy to see in colour.

A little disappointed we reached this far without mention of the Valentine.



Designed and built by Vickers-Armstrong in the thousands. Under powered with the early 2 pounder gun certainly, but the North Africa campaign would have been much more difficult without them. Strong, sturdy and above all, extremely reliable. Best of all was it's low profile, giving it a real edge where cover was limited. The eventual Mark IX was the best of the bunch.




I'm a fan of the Italian Fiat 2000 which sadly never saw use as it was still in production by 1918. I used it as the basis for my converted skorpius dunerider because it is just so comically weird.



Huge love of course for the Tank. It was just the 'tank'. And they are beautiful creatures. You cannot dislike them.




For more modern tanks I much prefer the aesthetic of the Challenger 1, nice sleek design.

Valentine would have been my next choice, but my list was already burgeoning
Anyone here know that the Kiwis deployed them during the invasion of 3 islands in the Solomons?(Yeah its little known but the New Zealand army actually had a limited participation in the east pacific) They performed quite well.

Speaking of rare tanks - how about laser cannon armed one?

No, that's not a joke, Soviet Union actually made such design but cold war ended before it was put in mass production:



More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K17_Szhatie

Also, speaking of A7V - interestingly enough, its competitor in German army was vastly more advanced design, Sturmpanzerwagen Oberschlesien:



Too bad they went with badly armored, slow, too tall box requiring 25 crew instead of something with turret and 5 men crew that could actually move and fight with some competence. But I guess it was too simple and had not enough overengineering and material wastage

Not my favourite but the 2B OKA is just showing off with a barrel like that.

well there's one thing we know about the designer of that one!
He must be compensating for something....

Worse than you think it is a 460MM cannon fifing nuclear shells...that breaks the vehicle every time they fired it.

Well my guess is you're not going to be worried about wear to the gun or vehicle as there is a nuclear echange taking place, although something possibly more concerning for the crew would be the US developed Honest Abe mobile missile launcher, an unarmored heavy truck capable of launching a nuclear warhead not really far enough to clear the vehicle from the blast radius.

 Pyroalchi wrote:

8. Sherman: Here it is my "history" with it. When I first saw it I found it pretty ugly and wondered about the very high profile. Later I wondered why it was so "weak" compared to T34, Panthers and Tigers, but over the years, learning more and more about it I found the whole concept behind it was just... very well thought through. There were so many good ideas and obvious work put into it to make it transportable, perform good in the pacific, africa as well as europe, make it easy to produce and maintain. And it's success is prove enough. So looking back: a great tank, often underappreciated.

The Sherman really does get some love now, with plenty of people extoling it's virtues, but I appreciate that you point out one of it's biggest attributes: utter flexibility. The Sherman was designed prior to the US even entering the war, and certainly before the late war monsters were deployed.

tanks like the Panther and Tiger existed for a very specific purpose: to engage and destroy enemy armor on the Russian steppes. (Yes, tigers fought in Africa and both fought in Italy and France, but they existed to destroy T-34s). the Sherman was a really innovative design that had a lot of flexibility baked into it, and was part of an overall doctrine that simply didn't rely on tanks to fight tanks. That doctrine may have been flawed (although it's notable that the Stug III G, the most produced German armored vehicle, was essentially a tank destroyer), but it's hard to find examples of major operations that swung on the Sherman underperforming.

the Sherman was also crazy reliable, and if the best quality is quantity, the best ability is availability. Patton's ability to swoop north to break the siege of Bastogne wasn't because the Shermans were the toughest tanks, but because they were relatively fast and reliable, and able to make that kind of march.

Honestly, the Sherman and T34 were quite similar in terms of their overall effectiveness. Cheap to produce, good enough gun, good enough armor, good enough mobility. Sherman was better in terms of ergonomics and reliability and speed, and slightly better frontal armor. T34's gun and all around armor was slightly better.

I’ve been watching quite a bit about WWII armour recently, and it to me the Sherman and T-34 boil down to the binary “do you have a tank?” Because if you do and the other guy doesn’t, you’ll most likely win. Whether your tank is theoretically better than the other guy’s tank is in the margins anyway due to other factors such as doctrine, crew training, etc., but also becomes a complete irrelevance when that theoretically better tank just isn’t there!. And through a combination of mass production, mobility and reliability, the allied tanks could be there a lot more.

The Chieftain does a great video on why the Sherman was designed the way it was here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwIlrAosYiM

Regarding "a good tank that's there is always better than a great tank that's absent": one of the reasons why I love amphibic capability in AFVs, bridgelayers and driving pontoon bridges like the mentioned M2 Alligator and M3 Amphibie.

a combination of mass production, mobility and reliability, the allied tanks could be there a lot more.

There is the key when it comes to the sherman

from 1942-1945 all variants of the sherman produced numbered 49,234 at $44,556–64,455 in 1945 dollars,


by comparison the german tanks (RM- in 1945 Reichmarks)

panzer IV 115,962 RM (with L/43 gun)

8,553

STUGG IIIG(the most effective tank killer in the german army during the war) 82,500 RM

8,423 ( of 10,086 of all variants)

Tiger 1 250,700 RM

1,347

Panther 143,912 RM

about 6,000


All those most common german tanks combined only equal 24,323 units so half the numbers at double or more the cost and that is not counting the massive number of russian tanks or the tanks the UK built as well. many german tanks especially the later war ones were pound for pound better tanks in terms of armor protection and gun performance VS a sherman, but there were always more shermans to get behind them.

Not a tank strictly speaking (but not all the AFVs mentioned in this thread thus far are) but I'd go with the Jagdpanther for sentimental reasons. When I was 7 I was taken to a hobby shop and got to pick out my first model kit to build. Seeing the box for a Jagdpanther I remembered being bewildered by how it looked, as if coming face to face with a Star-belly Sneetch. Building it was one of my fondest memories I had with my late father.

Have not seen a jagdpanther in the steel yet. (The local tank museum is expanding quite rapidly and they are aquiring one (and an ISU 152!)Maybe next year.

Saw a panther there, right beast of a thing.
Especially when you consider its got thick armour, an excellent gun, a good turn of speed, decent agility, really good ground pressure and a heap of torque. Really can see why the French adopted them after the war. Really was a good thing for the allies that Germanys limited industrial capacity was being crippled day and night by heavy bombing and that most of its good tank crews were being chewed up on the eastern front when this thing came out.
And that allied air superiority meant that supplies to the frontlines were effectively crippled and the Germans were forced to often abandon vehicles they could not supply with fuel or repair.

Hell you can say the same about the tiger 2. Say what you like about the issues they had(everything that is in early production, let alone rushed into production, has issues; the first cromwells to be tested were super unreliable, and this is a tank that would later drive 5000km without issue, let alone a full engine rebuild as was kinda expected of a tank driving a quarter of that distance.) A King Tiger could climb a hill a panzer 4 was not capable of because of ground pressure and torque it could cross mud a mk 4 would find itself trapped in. It gets a bad rapp these days for being big and impractical, I'm just kinda glad Germany was never in a position to have used them effectively.


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The main issue i see in the US's devlopmemt of armour in WW2 was their unwillingness to upgrade their equipment and their complete willingness to take losses.

Most of the upgrades that went into later model shermans were literally put forwards in 1942 and 1943, when the sherman was by all rights an excellent medium tank. If they implented better suspension and wet ammo storage, and better armour on the sides at this point it could have stayed a decent medium tank, if the US decided to go to 76mm on some of their fleet(or all later production vehicles) before Dday, it would again stayed as a decent medium tank till the end of the war. Any other nation would have swiftly implemented these upgrades to all following production vehicles, and started to upgrade their current fleets. I would, when comparing Britain's war time mentality with that of the US take it back to WW1, through doing stupid stuff the British(also Germans, and Commonwealth) were shocked to lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and decided to minimise losses where they could in the future. The Soviets learnt this at the outset of operation Barbarossa very proactively developed their armoured vehicles and implemented upgeades really quite swiftly look no further than the E and S model KV1(E had a heap of extra armour bolted on, S had armour stripped off to make it faster(or in other words to reinvent the T34, it was not very sucsessful but they were trying something based on information coming from the field), the Red army was in a pretty intense furnace of armour evolution, quite the opposite situation to the US army. The Americans, coming late to the party in WW1 and seemingly never were forced into this insight, what is more they really did not take well to other nations trying to impart such lessons upon them.
Even in WW2 being accused of being an anglophile in America was a big insult. And actually listening to the hard won advice of the British army from its campaign in NAfrica and implementing changes was seemingly seen as politcally dangerously Anglophilic(which makes a bit of sense, the British did invade them the previous century(the war of 1812 and DID favour the Confedercy in the civil war). So inferior models stayed in production and that cost lives.

 Just Tony wrote:
There's something inherently awesome about MLRS tanks until you realize how finite their firepower truly is.

MLRS / Katyusha are about intensity, which is really helpful in a mass battle situation.

@ Oldmate: definitly interesting insights.

From what I read at times (but again, I'm no historian) a lot of "bad" tanks and also planes suffered a lot from political decisions or military leaders with wrong expectations.

It's no tank but one of the most extrem examples I heard of was the Heinkel 177. It was intended as a strategic horizontal bomber. But still fondly remembering the success of Stukas at the beginning of WWII the higher ups demanded it to be capable of dive bombing... a four engine heavy bomber that dive bombs... as you can imagine that basically killed it. I think it could have become a decent plane. No flying fortress but decent. But these wrong expectations prohibited that.

It's similar with the Tiger 1 that was often sold and used as if it was invincible while it definitly wasn't.

 OldMate wrote:
The main issue i see in the US's devlopmemt of armour in WW2 was their unwillingness to upgrade their equipment and their complete willingness to take losses.

It's more that America wins war by out-producing the enemy. This has been true since the American Civil War, the genesis of the modern Military-Industrial Complex that drives American government. In WW2, America kept the factories humming profitably, and they've never stopped, just gotten a lot smarter about how to protect revenue sources with things like the F-35 jobs program.

I’m a bit confused about “unwillingness to upgrade their equipment”. The US made incremental upgrades to existing equipment as well as developing entirely new vehicles.


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I had to share this one, and couldnt think of anywhere more appropriate…




thank all appropriate thankfulness targets for the internet!

Some nice vehicles ! I particularly enjoyed the modern German ones, even if they don't use them o must admit they look really good. The Finnish one too has always been one of my favorites, it's just cute you know !

Here are the two newest french armored vehicles, the griffon APC (officially multi roles) and the reco and combat vehicle jaguar. They look...kinda weird but are the newest armored vehicles I know in a modern army, both packed with jammers, com tech, detectors, infra etc and the jaguar has missiles hidden in it ( only 2, actually).
And this lead me to search on the internet for the newest vehicles of different armies and thus I have to ask to the American guys here: how is it that the Stryker was the last vehicle implemented in the US army ? Like, the Bradley in 40 years old for example !
The Stryker is very much the same as a Griffon from what I could gather, in term of capabilities, communication or protection. There has only been like 10-15 years between the two so that's understandable.
But the French fighting vehicle, out Bradley I could say, the vbci, is only 15 years old too, and now the APC and the light fight vehicles got renewed too

Mod edit - non-wargaming images removed

 godardc wrote:
how is it that the Stryker was the last vehicle implemented in the US army ?

It's not. The MRAPs that replaced armored HUMVEES for urban patrol are the newest vehicles in the US Army.

Going to add some more to the roster.
A movie tank, technically it was armed with 3x functioning 6pdrs, and constructed to handle some pretty rough ground, so it actually had to be made like a tank to hold tegether, and not just be shaken apart in the Spanish desert. Its probably the spiritual father of the leman russ too. I mean look at its gun toting beastliness. You'd never want to go into battle in it, but they did a good job of making it look impressive!



The first ever serious wheeled IFV, the South African Ratel(Afrikaans for honey badger I think?) The South Africans made some pretty neat stuff

 godardc wrote:
thus I have to ask to the American guys here: how is it that the Stryker was the last vehicle implemented in the US army ? Like, the Bradley in 40 years old for example !
The Stryker is very much the same as a Griffon from what I could gather, in term of capabilities, communication or protection. There has only been like 10-15 years between the two so that's understandable.
But the French fighting vehicle, out Bradley I could say, the vbci, is only 15 years old too, and now the APC and the light fight vehicles got renewed too

The Bradleys today are a LOT different from the ones 40 years ago. Different electronics, different armor packages, different comms. Same with Abrams, and in the air the AH64s and UH60s (Apaches and Blackhawks). Our acquisition system is a pain, and knowing that bring a whole new platform on board is pretty difficult, any platform brought on board will always be able to be updated to newer tech/allow for new requirements. Cheaper and quicker to bring in an improvement than a new platform. Look how long F15s and F16s have been in the inventory. B52s? Yeah, it isn't just the army.