Tankery, The Thread

[Haighus]

But how many TLA can we apply to a single AFV?

I think that's a fair way to define a tank. Once you add infantry capacity I suppose it could be argued it depends on the vehicles intended role?

Role and concept will surely come into it. I wouldn't disqualify just for troop carrying ability but a vehicle primarily designed to carry infantry is an APC it isn't a tank just because they stuck a turret on it.

That said Bradleys are credited with more tank kills than Abrams in the First Gulf War. That was down to The Tow missiles and poor opposition though.

It's worth considering that Allied forces didn't consider vehicles like the Hellcat, M10 or M36 as Tanks

I guess the Great War British tanks would be more correctly refered to as "Landships" as that was their correct name the Tanks bit was just to through German spies off the scent.

So, in this case, are you equating 'tank' with Main Battle Tank then? Because I consider tank to be broader than MBT as a definition, which would include the Bradley, but the Bradley definitely isn't an MBT.

Tank shouldn't just cover vehicles which are designed primarily to take out other tanks, because that excludes many WWII tanks, including the original Sherman and Matildas designed for infantry support, as well as pretty much every light tank designed for scouting. The Bradley as an APC tank would basically be a continuation of the infantry tank concept, but bringing infantry protection to a greater level.

[Psychosplodge]

Tanks where initially for infantry support so I don't think you could really take that role away from them. Well I suppose the apache can do it but has different weaknesses and logistical requirements.

[eldargal]

[Psychosplodge]

[grimmas]

Nope I wouldn't equate "tank" with MBT, especially considering that MBT have only been around since the later part of the Tank's existence.

I still wouldn't class a Bradley as a Tank though, similar but it is on a bit of a tangent and to be fair the military does classify them as IFVs. Carrying infantry isn't a tank role as soon as you design it around a troop compartment it becomes something else. Infantry tanks were a concept but they did die out with the end of WWII and that role has been subsumed with that of APC. IFVs didn't evolve from infantry tank though they are a development of the pure APCs

Then I would say a Scimitar and Scorpion are both Tanks but I've met those that would disagree.

[Haighus]

I dunno, the Bradley is pretty capable as a tank though, albeit using missiles against other armoured vehicles more than the autocannon.

What would you count the Space Marine Predator as? It is essentially a modified Bradley as it was originally constructed with a small transport compartment in the rear, but removed in later versions for increased ammo capacity. Seeing as the FW HH list is for the later Great Crusade and HH only, we don't have any rules for the transport version currently. However, the Space Marines, certainly by the 41st Millennium, treat it as a tank.

Wikipedia says a tank is:

A tank is an armoured fighting vehicle with tracks and a large tank gun that is designed for front-line combat.

Front line combat is quite a non-specific term though.

[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank[/url]

[CoffeeGrunt]

IIRC, the defining factors of a tank are:

- Traversable turret, without this it's just an Assault Gun,
- Caterpillar tracks,
- Significant armour,

There's lots of little variations. Gun fixed forward? That's an assault gun. Turret mounted far back? Self-propelled gun. Both of those tend to be less common now, as WWII was the era of throwing designs at the wall to see what stuck. In the modern day, anything that carries troops is an APC, and most artillery is very distinct from what WWII envisioned. Tanks of today are almost all Main Battle Tanks, and thus are designed almost entirely for engaging and destroying their opposing equivalents.

So whether something is a tank or not only really applies to historical tanks, in an attempt to categorise the mad rush of development in the first half of the last century.

The role historically didn't define what a tank

[Necron2.0]

Pardon me if I missed it, but you simply cannot have a discussion like this without at least a mention of the German Maus (super heavy tank, of which I think just one was ever built):





There also needs to be a mention of the Ratte:


This was a conjectural design (no prototypes built). Basically, after a couple bottles of schnapps, some tank designers got the brilliant idea of mounting a battleship turret on an armored mobile chassis.

[Necron2.0]

Of course, being more general in the definition of a tank, there is the Tsar Tank from WWI:


The Russians built one. In its initial test, it quickly got stuck in mud to the point that it could never be moved again. At that point, it was torn apart for scrap. Given it was named "Tsar," that was somewhat prophetic.


Not to be outdone for silliness by their bourgeoisie predecessors, the Soviets came up with a real gem - the Antonov A-40 flying tank.



In order to get it to the point where it wouldn't fall out of the sky like a rock, the "tank" had nearly no armor and next to no armaments. But hey, it looked like a tank, so maybe that would count for something.

[Kaptain Badrukk]

The 120 ton O-I , japan's forray into superheavies?
[URL="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-I"]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-I[/URL]
Never made it into production. Lighter than the Maus by 68tonnes, making it easier to build an engine for.
But still packing a 105mm main cannon with rocket pods, a 47mm cannon, and a trio of 7.7mm machine guns.
200mm armout too. Not bad, but sadly like the Maus it never made production.