Alternative History Armoured Fighting Vehicles Part 3
- Thread starter Claymore
- Start date
- Status
Obscure T-72 prototypes:
Object 177: Simply a T-72A with the 1K13 sight necessary to use the Svir gun-launched ATGM complex (same one as Refleks, but suited for the T-72 series). Aside from the lack of the hull front addon plate fitted after 1983 and not seen here, this is what the East-German T-72M1M upgrade would visually look like (this is the sight you see behind the primary gunner's sight, opposed to the cupola).
The unique T-72AV seen on this bridge possesses the same 1K13 sight which is more visible, and it might actually be the Object 177 prototype upgraded to this configuration.
Object 179: A T-72A with the same 1A33 FCS, 9K122 Kobra gun-launched ATGM complex and 2A46M-3 gun (2A46M with weird muzzle gas diffuser seen on T-64B prototypes) as the T-64B.
Edit: a US comment from 1954 we should remember (they also tested APFSDS in 1950 but to no avail due to the limited extent of the program and the lack of experience):
Object 177: Simply a T-72A with the 1K13 sight necessary to use the Svir gun-launched ATGM complex (same one as Refleks, but suited for the T-72 series). Aside from the lack of the hull front addon plate fitted after 1983 and not seen here, this is what the East-German T-72M1M upgrade would visually look like (this is the sight you see behind the primary gunner's sight, opposed to the cupola).
The unique T-72AV seen on this bridge possesses the same 1K13 sight which is more visible, and it might actually be the Object 177 prototype upgraded to this configuration.
Object 179: A T-72A with the same 1A33 FCS, 9K122 Kobra gun-launched ATGM complex and 2A46M-3 gun (2A46M with weird muzzle gas diffuser seen on T-64B prototypes) as the T-64B.
Edit: a US comment from 1954 we should remember (they also tested APFSDS in 1950 but to no avail due to the limited extent of the program and the lack of experience):
Last edited:
This and Duwang's actually look like they're starting to fit into a sort of design lineage, one that actually looks like it'd have made sense for a Germany without WW2 to have headed down - rather than radical redesigns, what we've got is gradual improvement over the hulls of the Panzer III and IV, gradually creeping in a sort of Panther-esque direction even without the experiences of actual war to speed things up. It could very well be that some kind of armed conflict does happen, and we see the kind of Panzer V with the side skirts come into existence then after experience fighting anti-tank rifles serves as a wake up call about how vulnerable the sides of a tank actually are.
If that's the case, then I imagine that this could be the next step in the lineage:
That's not my creation (I'm bad at sculpting rounded turrets in Sprocket and need more practice, so you can find the source here), but it is based on the design for the VK45.02(H), which is the sort of evolutionary link between the Tiger I and Tiger II. Considering the gradual increments that we've seen with this lineage, it'd probably not have a turret like that (or maybe it would - one thing that you've both maintained is the Panzer IV style turret shape in the rear arc, which could potentially evolve into this kind of shape) and probably not the same gun, but the hull itself definitely looks like the way that it'd have developed going on from this alternate Panzer V. Going with the originally discussed trio of a) a tank designed to kill tanks, b) a tank designed to support infantry and c) a heavy tank to force a breakthrough, then what we'd probably have here is a sort of Panther-King Tiger hybrid - less armor than the latter but with more firepower than the former, able to do job A whilst the Panzer V does job B, and another design we don't have yet does job C, picking up where the Panzer III left off in the first and the Panzer IV in the second.
The top one on the left is an Ottoman Empire light tank of the early 1930's from the TL-191 universe and it was made from an M13/40 hull with the suspension from an Sd.Kfz Hanomog halftrack .
The one on the top right is a Panzer ausf.F AA tank of Imperial Germany circa 1941 and also from the TL-191 universe and is a modified Pz.III/IV with raised engine deck, the Cortz/Claymore suspension and a Kugelblitz turret armed with twin 30mm cannons.
The one on the top right is a Panzer ausf.F AA tank of Imperial Germany circa 1941 and also from the TL-191 universe and is a modified Pz.III/IV with raised engine deck, the Cortz/Claymore suspension and a Kugelblitz turret armed with twin 30mm cannons.
Several years ago I came up with the idea "what if just before the battle of Kursk, the Germans took the Panther turrets from the troublesome ausf.D's and mounted them the Ferdinand hulls"? And then promptly placed a Panther turret onto a Ferdi.
The tank above is what I imagine that AFV evolving into.
Captured French 280 or 220 might be worth a try. The194 GPF is probably too long and they were already in use as heavy mobile guns (so too were the tracked 220 and 280 but being heavier were more likely to be ok gins with broken tractors.
marathag
Banned
If you want a turret basket, you need to angle the rear plate less, or move the turret forward
So, after having seen that tank, I couldn't help but load Sprocket up again and take a shot at myself - consider this to be an AU of some kind, one of the ones with the roots in the distant past (probably about 300-to-400 AD) that made its way to the industrial age, as I don't want to quite associate with nations involved seeing as the tanks are a sort of mish-mash of various historical trends. That said, I do try to make this plausible enough, so there's no hovertanks or lasers here, but plenty of rambling about suspension and transmissions 
If you don't want the worldbuilding/stagesetting part (fair enough to me - I just wanted a background to anchor my designs to, so don't skin me alive for the map and lore when they aren't the critical AU part- that's the tanks), just skip on down til you see the picture of the tank that looks sort of like a squashed rhomboid, and read on from there. With that said:
With conflict now inevitable between the Wittenberg Pact and the Western Powers, one could have expected there to be an air of fear and malaise settling over Europe - a level of uncertainty as to what might come tomorrow...yet this was not actually so. By all accounts, practically all sides and nations involved in what would become the Great War were confident of a quick and decisive victory: the Wittenberg Pact and the Wendish Empire in particular boasted of having a numerical advantage, whilst the Western Powers were confident in the power of their superior industry to carry the day. Out of all of them, few had any idea of how things had evolved over the years of the 19th Century, and where technology had led...yet there were some, who voiced warnings of concern: the Anglecynn had long maintained client states on the island of Eire, and the troops of these clients had fresher combat experience than many, and came with grim warnings of the dangerous power of modern rifles, quick firing artillery, and the dreaded machinegun. More, there had been various observations and examinations of conflicts around the world, from civil wars across the Atlantic to conflicts in far Asia, particularly during the collapse of Tianxia. Those who had seen such conflicts had noted that defensive capabilities had begun to grow far beyond the capacity of offense to overwhelm, that a fixed position with a machine gun could be nigh insurmountable, and control such a breadth of the battlefield as to force the attacker to rely on, or dig, cover, lest they be scythed down in a hail of gunfire.
These voices, however, were considered a minority. When the first divisions of the Wendish Empire crossed into Rhenland, it seemed as if these observations had been proven wrong - armies remained keen on maneuver, and forming into fighting squares, Wendish riflemen had advanced into Rhenish land, and in what seemed to be a repeat of history, it seemed as if raw martial elan and numbers would carry the day. Forming their infantry into traditional columns and squares and combining their rifle fire with charges of cavalry and bayonet, the conflict seemed to have evolved so very little from those of the nineteenth century. It was a game of maneuver, of courage, and eager fighting. The advance of the Mossavians had not been nearly so eager, the Alps presenting a strong defensive barricade, but there was confidence that if the Wendish could punch through into the Rhenish interior, then they would be forced to the table, and the war ended before it could even truly begin.
And then Rhenish rail delivered to the frontline their latest models of machine gun, and things changed so very quickly. Both sides had been constructing field works, basic trenches and obstacles to be better control the battlefield...but with the arrival of powerful automatic weaponry, able to sustain an enormous rate of fire courtesy of its water cooled jacket, the Rhenish Army effectively stopped the Wendish dead in their tracks, and steady streams of shells from beyond the Rhine allowed for enormous bombardments. Losing the offensive momentum and losing ground as well, the Wends were a strange bedfellow for Mossavia (much of the last three hundred years had seen them as rivals, though the growing power of Rhenland had forced them to some level of reconciliation), but were recognised as a powerful land force, brave and courageous, with strong martial traditions...martial traditions that, in this conflict, served little more than to get Wendish soldiers killed - believing that they could turn a defensive situation into an offensive one with a powerful counterattack, a mustered offensive through the city of Halle in the region of old Brandenburg resulted in the exact penetration that they had desired, but lacking the mobility to exploit it, it soon became a meat grinder, and one that nearly resulted in the loss of an entire Wendish field army. That alone could very well have ended the war, were it not for the timely arrival of Danelander troops to shore up the lines.
And it was lines that the conflict was beginning to turn into. What had first been a series of races for critical positions had slowed down into a far more grueling campaign. This was a war like none other - the first grand European war of the industrial age, and it was to be dominated not by acts of heroism and aggression, but instead, it was to be a conflict of will. Entire nations lay mustered for warfare. Industries churned out shells by the hundreds of thousands, and general conscription saw millions of men mustered for the war effort. Mass offensives had to be organized on a grand scale, and yet for all that, a hundred thousand men might be poured into the meat grinder, and little gained from their sacrifice. At sea, it was another matter - fleet battles and actions favored the Western Powers in the Atlantic, where the Danelanders had no choice but to play defensively in the face of overwhelming numbers, though the reverse was true in the Mediterranean, where Vasconian warships could shell Aquitanian harbors after the failed landings on Sardinia...a thing that spurred counterattacks through the mountains, which proved to be as defensible as the trenches of the old German plains.
What followed, then, was the thing that no one had expected.
A stalemate.
For all the power and confidence that both sides had bore at the start of the war, neither of them could obtain a true, decisive victory. Trenches were not simple, single lines as they had been in the first days of the war. They had evolved into sprawling defensive works, mile after mile of layered lines. Battalions might serve for two weeks on the front, and then be withdrawn to recover in the rear lines whilst another was rotated to take their place. In some places, they had even traded wood for concrete, and reinforced the trench frames into powerful lines of almost bunker like defenses.
Yet for all that, the winds of change were already beginning to howl. The Industrial Age had ended the old way of waging war, but had already started to labor upon the next. The harbingers of this came in the form of the armoured car - a revolution in its own right, and one that set the stage for the giants to come.
An Aquitanian armoured car. Sufficiently armoured as to resist rifle fire and capable of carrying a small cannon to neutralize machine guns, such vehicles were considered to be one of the perfect offensive tools...but lacked the ability to cross the trench lines.
In this regard, the war was quickly proving to be a furnace of innovation. Although there were those stubborn few generals stuck in the old way of doing things, forever believing that they might be one good offensive away from a war winning breakthrough, leaders on both sides had come to the conclusion that this was a new kind of warfare, one in need of new weapons to be fought. The sun had dawned on the year of 1919, but the gears of industry had begun to turn. Already, the war had revealed the power of biplanes - although untested in European warfare until the Great War, they had taken to the skies and made battle over the trench lines, growing faster and more powerful, and capable of carrying bombs able to reach enemy artillery parks behind the lines...a thing that had led to subtle shifts here and there. Although vulnerable to ground fire (and particularly to the earliest autocannons, which were little more than machine guns scaled to a larger design), they had proven that there was ways to innovate and improve on this, that there were new weapons waiting to be devised and developed, things that could, perhaps, break the deadlock, and give the first to claim mastery a chance to claim a much wanted total victory.
In that, Mossavia and Rhenland both came to the same conclusion, at almost the same time.
Something had to be able to cross the no man's land. Something had to be able to break the trenches. Something had to exist that could protect the infantry that walked in its wake, and carried enough firepower to take out the most critical targets so that the soldiers with it could fight at their best. Both came at it from different perspectives. Mossavia was a land of mountains and hills, with a poor tradition of cavalry...but they had eagerly embraced the railway, which made navigating such lands easier, and proved a critical boon to their mining industry where powerful machines could pull vast cargo, or travel directly into the shafts themselves on rugged, continuous tracks. Rhenland was strongly industrial, and had some of the largest car factories in all of Europe, but also produced quality agricultural equipment (much of which went for export - Merovingia, although troubled with internal problems enough to stay out of the Great War, had been an eager customer before the conflict), especially tractors, which utilized similar continuous track to pass through muddy, rough terrain...terrain not too dissimilar to that of the hellscape of no man's land, covered in broken trees, tumbled wire, muddy craters and loose, blasted earth. What followed was a critical decision, and an equally critical realization, where they begun to marry armoured car and tractor, just as Great Mossavia worked to merge train and excavator. The Mossavian designs were more conservative. The Rhenlander ones more experimental. The former underperformed. The latter was unreliable. Neither came anywhere near close to an actual field ready weapon, but the idea had been refined, consolidated, improved.
And in the late November of 1919, the Rhenish had a critical breakthrough. Having exchanged information with their allies in Anglaland, who provided them with working samples of newer and more powerful petrol engines using then state of the art sleeve-pistons,they had an engine capable of producing a hundred horsepower and reliably drive an armoured vehicle through the muddy wastes.
No sooner did they achieve this, however, than a disaster happen - the war in the northern lands of Italy had not been developing in the favor of the Western Powers. Having gathered together forces from its own armies that could be spared and those of its southern client states after a treaty with the Avars and Keszthely guaranteed the security of the eastern borders (although that region was faring little better than the west - although Mossavia had often acted as a regional policeman, it was now distracted, and they bore themselves a smaller mirror of the grander conflict as the Avars and Keszthely waged war on the Huns to the south east, and all three against Romania. This would soon prove a dangerous situation for all, as with them in turn distracted, it allowed the Armenian Empire to invade the Hungarians from the southeast once all of them had exhausted one another, eventually paving the way for the conflicts to merge and for Armenia to join the Western Powers), a thing that allowed them to gather critical amounts of strength. Combining it together with a vast reserve of shells, and the hope that the winter seasons would prove for good offensive weather (the mud was seen as a more dangerous threat than frozen earth) Mossavia punched into the Aquitanian client state of Milan, and succeeded in forcing a major breakthrough. The statelet effectively collapsed, and the only thing that prevented the assault from reaching the southern border of Aquitaine proper was the timely arrival of reinforcements...and the desperate deployment of the first dozen of the new Rhenish vehicles.
This ultimately proved to be a costly mistake. Although the Mossovian attack had succeeded, it had failed to take Milan proper, and saw what was seen as part of the softer underbelly of the Western Alliance fortified...yet two things became clear.
The first was that, somewhere along the lines, the grand Mossovian Army had sprung a leak - the Rhenish and their allies knew things that they should not, including, worst of all, offensive timetables. They knew when the attacks were coming, and the result was that Mossovia had effectively walked into a meat grinder in the later stages of the offensive. The First Lord of Great Mossovia (a title akin to that of Prime Minister in other nations) suddenly had a serious crisis on his hands, as the exact nature of Western Alliance penetration into the Mossovian military was still unknown...and in collaboration with its allies, Mossovian generals often ended up taking part in the development of joint battleplans, which meant that there was the serious risk that allied battle-plans were in the hands of the enemy - a thing that endangered the entire war effort of the alliance. The fact that this was revealed now was seen as a disaster, but in the future, as a relief - better it be discovered on a single attack rather than on a grand summer offensive as was hoped for in 1920...but before such a thing could be discussed, the problem had to be found, and quickly, and what followed was a manhunt of such scale as to be immortalized in fiction and film.
The second was a far grander prize. Having yet to entirely finalize the design of their armoured vehicles, the first deployment of them had been one of shock on both sides. Mossovian infantry had proven helpless in the face of the Rhenish monstrosities, which cut through the hastily dug trenches and defensive works that had been constructed on the way to Milan. Utterly immune to gunfire, these tracked monstrosities cut through practically all resistance, and did horrific damage to Mossovian morale in the area. The nature of this vehicle and its development is discussed more in the sibling work of this book (Steel Giants: A History of Armour), as this one focuses most on Mossovian equipment...but it would be remiss to not mention the critical role that this strike played. The first was that it served as a vast incentive to finish their own program, and the second was one of even greater importance, and came from a simple problem. The technology of the Rhenish armour was not yet finished, and the results were that they were terribly unreliable.
It was no surprise, then, that one eventually broke down in a place that the Mossovians were not merely able to capture it, but deliver it back to the homelands for study.
The result was a critical series of events, and none were more crucial than when they sent the Five (the number of this unit of the original twelve prototypes of what was actually known as the Kürasswagen) to undergo technical trials.
A picture of Five, undergoing technical trials on the outskirts of Praha. This vehicle has since been lost, but a replica exists inside the Mossavian War Museum.
The capture of even one of the prototypes of the Kürasswagen was, effectively, a game changer for the Mossavian effort to design such a vehicle of their own. The most critical part was not even the Anglecynn originated engine (of which there was no doubt of its origin, seeing that it still had the original maker's marks), but more to do with the suspension structure. For all their efforts, the Mossavians had, for the most part, been heading the wrong direction entirely - their armoured program was derived not from tractors that needed to cross muddy ground, but from such things as steam shovels and tracked mining machinery, things that were intended more to cross rocky ground, which were completely different requirements. Mossavian suspension of the time had little give, and more than that, the early prototypes had what was soon believed to be a catastrophic mistake in the way that their transmission was designed in the form of a "clutch braking" based power transmission - to rotate the vehicle, the driver and crew would disconnect a tread from the engine...a thing that meant that the vehicle could not turn in place, had poor performance on slopes ,and was enormously slow to turn. Compared to that, the Kürasswagen had a more elegant solution, utilizing two separate transmissions to divert power as needed; the resulting vehicle could turn in place and maintain speed in the turns, and had vastly superior performance in muddy terrain as a result - whereas even the best of the Mossavian prototypes would eventually "slip" on the mud and be unable to move, the Rhenish design could turn and rotate, crossing the battle scarred terrain with ease. It was the same feature that they had incorporated into their tractors and which had made them a favorite of farmers everywhere, but here, it allowed them to cross even the roughest battlefield.
And when they found that, the Mossavians knew that they had found the missing piece of the puzzle.
They threw out their existing prototypes as the failures they were, reusing what they could, and started over.
It took weeks.
It took months.
Buyt eventually, eventually, they came upon a design that would revolutionize warfare. The Rhenish had beaten them to the punch for the first ever tracked combat vehicle, but theirs was flawed. In the views of the Mossavians, theirs was perfected.
It was thought by many at the highest level, and even the Emperor, as a sign that they were going to win this war at last. It was because of this that it was considered a secret beyond any other. It could not have a grandiose name. It could not even be revealed to the public, or shown to anyone except as nothing more than a wooden box wrapped over the true form beneath. Only a small handful would be allowed to crew them, an elite few trusted enough to keep the secret. They were selected for a seeming immunity to loose lips - they even had to swear an oath to be abstinent of drink, so as to be sure that they would not release the secret when drunk.
But on stamps, on papers, the mark was there.
It wore a mask. A veil to cover it from prying eyes that the Mossavians knew were there.
"We have an infestation of wood-borers, eating our trench boundaries," one document would say. "They're everywhere. Our men cannot walk without tripping over them."
It was a simple lie, but a clever one. The vehicle was masked in reports as wood-boring beetles, feasting on the wooden beams that supported the trenches: at the amassing points, news went out that the were terrible infestations, and if these vehicles were operational and ready, they would soon be reporting that these beetles were hale and hearty, and resistant to what insecticides they had available. This not only served to prove conclusively that the Rhenish were reading their messages (Mossavian spies reported that the Rhenish army was delivering great shipments of insecticide to the frontlines to prevent the beetles from spreading to their trenches), but maintained operational security and surprise for the upcoming counter-attacks. More, it permanently coined the Mossavian term for such armoured vehicles as a "bug" or "beetle", a term that would spread beyond their borders, and eventually come to represent the entire new family of vehicles. Although the Mossavians had not been the first to utilize beetles in warfare, it was clear from the start that they had found something of a winning formula, an ideal recipe that seemed to be the direction that the concept needed to evolve.
But all the secrecy of the world would have meant nothing if the vehicle could not perform.
But the first true bug would soon pave the way to a new way of war:
There were many differences between the B1 and the Kürasswagen, both obvious and less so, a thing that unsettled more than a few who looked to the Kürasswagen as a more tested and proven design, even if mechanically flawed by poor reliability. There, the B1 seemed strange and odd...yet its designers stood firm, confident that they had a worldchanger on their hands. There were many small differences and improvements, and little pieces of its mining heritage shone through - the B1 was the first armoured vehicle to be equipped with an electrically powered lamp, for example. It had thick, chunky treads, an engine mounted in the front, and to the alarm of those that manned it, the driver was sat over the fuel tank as a space saving measure...and being directly besides the engine, unshielded as it was to allow for quick repairs, the damage done to a B1 driver's hearing was most certainly a hazard.
Those were all differences, but it was the turret itself that was the greatest change. The Kürasswagen had no such feature - its weaponry was instead mounted in the front of the hull, which was far longer and larger than that of the B1. Instead, and taking inspiration from armoured cars and ships alike, the B1 had its weaponry mounted to a small turret. Carrying a crew of three compared to the Kürasswagen and its four, with one man in the hull as the driver and mechanic, and two in the turret, counting a gunner-loader and a commander, who had an elevated cupola to look around and surveil the battlefield without needing to expose themselves to rifle fire, this turret presented a whole new way for a beetle to make battle: able to advance and fight without needing to rotate the entire hull, the B1 could engage enemies from any and all angles around it. This allowed for a faster response to enemy attacks, and that meant that the armour layout of the B1 could differ greatly from that of its Rhenish counterpart.
To say more than that and to understand more than that, we must first get into the technical specifications of both bugs. There, we must start with the hull forms - even at a glance, they are obviously different, but the critical factors there comes to size. Designed to be carried from factories in the core of Mossavia on railway, there was the limit of gauge as to how wide the vehicle could be, and the desire to produce as many of them as possible as quickly as possible, and thus counteract the advantage of the Rhenlanders in having achieved a viable design first, dictated a small vehicle. The Kürasswagen measured in at a hefty 1.5 meters tall, 1.38 meters wide, and yet six meters long, giving it a total weight of some 9.76 tons, three and a half of which were armour plating. Compared to this, the B1 was vastly smaller: only 1.25 meters tall even counting the turret, only three quarters of a meter wide, and again 1.24 meters in length, the B1 was small, and would soon prove infamous in that regard. It is said of them from primary sources that the three crewmen were practically packed atop of one another, with little room for personal effects or basic comfort, and that required compromises in the way that things were placed. One obvious factor there is that the driver is, again, sat next to the engine and atop of the fuel tank, giving them easy access to both in the event they need to perform mid battle repairs, but inviting the risk of being doused with burning petrol in the event of damage, and making it hard to hear what, exactly, the commander in the turret might have to say and what orders they might give. Such cramped conditions meant that the bug had an absolute height limit for crewmen - it took physically small men to man the B1 properly, and even then, they would not be able to stand up fully, but would remain crouched, kneeling, or seated. The only way out from there would be through the turret hatch or the driver's hatch, neither of which promised a quick exit in the event of an emergency.
Yet despite the small size, one would be mistaken to think that the B1 was so much lighter - it wasn't, and weighed 6.85 tons, or nearly two thirds the weight of the larger Kürasswagen at a fraction of the size. This raised grave concerns amongst those that had came to view it, raising fears that the bug could sink into the wartime mud and be rendered helpless, but there was a reason for that weight, and it came in three things.
The first was that, for its size, the the B1 was well armoured. Compared to the Kürasswagen, which had about 35mm of armour all around, the B1 had plates of varying thickness: its upper-front glacis plate was 30mm thick at an offset angle for about 45mm of protection, with an added on plate over the driver's side for a further 10mm. The lower-glacis was similarly armoured, with a 32mm plate, rendering it practically impregnable at anything approaching traditional angles at nearly a hundred millimeters of effective protection. The lowest plate was 25mm, angled enough to provide 32mm of protection from frontal fire. Altogether, this gave the hull a strong protection, one afforded by the smaller stature of the vehicle itself. Compared to the Kürasswagen , the sides of the hull were far less armoured, at just 10mm of protection, but this was deemed acceptable, as the short length of the vehicle and its turret might allow it to quickly come about to face an attacker from the side, and infantry small arms were, at least then, not yet a serious threat to an armoured vehicle (the invention of anti-armour rifles would change this arithmetic years later), with similar levels of protection on the roof and belly, leaving the rear with a humble 5mm plate, albeit covered by its trench crossing equipment.
That would bring one to the turret,which at first would not prove a happy posting for many, but would eventually earn its praise. Likened by many soldiers as a cook pot due to its rounded shape and the hooks on either side of the turret roof (used for transporting the turrets during the production process), these impressions were little improved by how the crewmembers, already hunched over, had to effectively stand on the main ammunition rack that was in the vehicle's floor beneath them. This was not good for morale, but more comforting was the fact that the turret was actually, perhaps, one of the safest places to be. Its cylindrical shape gave it complex angles to provide protection from almost any direction, and the entire thing was made from 25mm of steel on all sides except the front, which had 35mm, meaning that whilst manning the gun was cramped and deeply uncomfortable, even terrifying, it was actually one of the safest places to be, and well protected from fire from the Kürasswagen, which had a 30mm cannon that could only penetrate 35mm of steel at the absolute best of times anyway. Compared to that, the B1's turret was effectively impervious, and could withstand repeated fire, or could, were it not for the riveted construction presenting the serious risk of spall. To help protect against this, crewmembers could be issued thick protective jackets akin to medieval gambesons, but these only served to make a cramped interior even more so, whilst offering iffy protection at best.
Making it somewhat worse, though, would be the matter of firepower, the second consideration that came from its weight. Compared to the 30mm of the Kürasswagen, the B1 on paper has an impressive sounding 50mm cannon, but with the tank being so cramped and small, the size of the ammunition itself begins to become a problem. Primarily designed to destroy machine guns and similar equipment, the B1 was not intended to directly fight enemy armour, and so traded propellant length for calibre, and the gun could reach a maximum muzzle velocity of a mere 316 m/s compared to the Kürasswagen's, which was nearly twice that. This meant that the B1 could only penetrate a maximum of 20mm of plate, insufficient for anything but the rear of the Kürasswagen...but its designers had learnt the lesson of how such vehicles might've failed, and it was through spalling that the vehicle was designed to engage the enemy - throwing large high explosive shells at the foe, the large calibre gun could effectively demolish enemy armour without penetration by quite literally blowing the rivets from their armour, or even outright shattering the plate under repeated fire. Although uncomfortable and perhaps unsafe, the nearly permanently crouched nature of the gunner over the ammunition store meant that this cannon could be reloaded in under two seconds from the hull, as they had to do little more than crouch to grab another shell, allowing for nearly continuous fire on target - a show of terror in its own right, as the repeated bangs of shellfire on an enemy hull would be liable to either kill the crew via the concussive effect, or drive them into panic.
And so the B1 is a small tank with strong armour, and a large if unconventional gun. The question there, then, is what of mobility?
Mobility was the most critical aspect of the entire design program, for it was there that the B1's predecessors had failed on both sides of its heritage. The crowning jewel of it all was the engine - an L&K 8.4 liter V4, able to output a total of 70hp, more than ten per ton, giving it a top speed of eight miles per hour when crossing the blasted wastelands of no man's land. It was there that the B1 was built to thrive, and there, it could. Its frontal armour made it suitable for direct assaults on a prepared defender even one with armoured bugs of their own. Its cannon was well suited for such work, able to lob shells capable of collapsing trenches and dug out emplacements, or outright destroying machine gunners and their crew with a single near hit...and with speed, she could cross the treacherous landscape, and pave a way for the infantry to follow.
And in the midst of 1920, years after most thought the war would be over, the rumbling sound of Mossavian began to echo on the battlefield of Waibstadt...
...and on that fateful day, the history of warfare changed forever.
The more fun part, which is well worth the price of making the AU!map for me, is this thing...
...which is the B1 from the above post without any funky filters on it. This design is made using Sprocket, but more than that, the entire thing was basically hand sculpted from a raw cube - the cylinder turret alone took like an hour to make, and a lot of effort. The design has its troubles (as is mentioned above, the gunner is basically standing on the ammo locker, and I say standing when the term "crouching" is probably more accurate, meanwhile the driver is probably lain on their belly like they just flopped into a casket) , but fundamentally speaking, I don't think that such issues make it unrealistic, or that something like this couldn't have been built in OTL's WW1 period. It's basically a sort of hybrid of the Leichttraktor (providing overall layout), the FT-17 (providing the hull front) and the earliest BT tanks (providing some of the turret shape and hull length), all of which were thrown into a blender to create design that seems...very much real? It's basically a tank before the concept of "tank" could be divided into light, medium or heavy, having traits of all of them, but not really fitting into the roles of any. Ignoring the AU part (which I'm expecting to get grilled over), the tank itself seems like it could've existed without any real changes: people would look back at it as the awkwardly designed, uncomfortable box that it is, but being that it comes from WW1, I don't think it'd stand out from the crowd if, say, the FT-17, FCM 1A and/or the Whippet was next to it.
I might try and design some other tanks like this, vehicles that make sense in how they'd have come from this lineage. I've actually started to get pretty damned good at Sprocket for a change, so I'm getting better tat turning out designs that look and feel right and realistic, and that's opened a massive door for me, as I'm way better at working in 3D than I am with things like 2D drawings and the like. I've got this idea for a sort of B2, which'd be a bigger, multiturreted monstrosity - sort of like the landship concepts that people liked to try and build just before WW2, so things like the SMK or the T-35, except built in WW1. Kinda like the A1E1 Independent, except...more so? We'll see what I can cook up for the thread
If you don't want the worldbuilding/stagesetting part (fair enough to me - I just wanted a background to anchor my designs to, so don't skin me alive for the map and lore when they aren't the critical AU part- that's the tanks
), just skip on down til you see the picture of the tank that looks sort of like a squashed rhomboid, and read on from there. With that said:****
The History of the Armoured Forces of Great Mossavia
Chapter III: Firm Beginnings - the B1 "Beetle"
The History of the Armoured Forces of Great Mossavia
Chapter III: Firm Beginnings - the B1 "Beetle"
With conflict now inevitable between the Wittenberg Pact and the Western Powers, one could have expected there to be an air of fear and malaise settling over Europe - a level of uncertainty as to what might come tomorrow...yet this was not actually so. By all accounts, practically all sides and nations involved in what would become the Great War were confident of a quick and decisive victory: the Wittenberg Pact and the Wendish Empire in particular boasted of having a numerical advantage, whilst the Western Powers were confident in the power of their superior industry to carry the day. Out of all of them, few had any idea of how things had evolved over the years of the 19th Century, and where technology had led...yet there were some, who voiced warnings of concern: the Anglecynn had long maintained client states on the island of Eire, and the troops of these clients had fresher combat experience than many, and came with grim warnings of the dangerous power of modern rifles, quick firing artillery, and the dreaded machinegun. More, there had been various observations and examinations of conflicts around the world, from civil wars across the Atlantic to conflicts in far Asia, particularly during the collapse of Tianxia. Those who had seen such conflicts had noted that defensive capabilities had begun to grow far beyond the capacity of offense to overwhelm, that a fixed position with a machine gun could be nigh insurmountable, and control such a breadth of the battlefield as to force the attacker to rely on, or dig, cover, lest they be scythed down in a hail of gunfire.
These voices, however, were considered a minority. When the first divisions of the Wendish Empire crossed into Rhenland, it seemed as if these observations had been proven wrong - armies remained keen on maneuver, and forming into fighting squares, Wendish riflemen had advanced into Rhenish land, and in what seemed to be a repeat of history, it seemed as if raw martial elan and numbers would carry the day. Forming their infantry into traditional columns and squares and combining their rifle fire with charges of cavalry and bayonet, the conflict seemed to have evolved so very little from those of the nineteenth century. It was a game of maneuver, of courage, and eager fighting. The advance of the Mossavians had not been nearly so eager, the Alps presenting a strong defensive barricade, but there was confidence that if the Wendish could punch through into the Rhenish interior, then they would be forced to the table, and the war ended before it could even truly begin.
And then Rhenish rail delivered to the frontline their latest models of machine gun, and things changed so very quickly. Both sides had been constructing field works, basic trenches and obstacles to be better control the battlefield...but with the arrival of powerful automatic weaponry, able to sustain an enormous rate of fire courtesy of its water cooled jacket, the Rhenish Army effectively stopped the Wendish dead in their tracks, and steady streams of shells from beyond the Rhine allowed for enormous bombardments. Losing the offensive momentum and losing ground as well, the Wends were a strange bedfellow for Mossavia (much of the last three hundred years had seen them as rivals, though the growing power of Rhenland had forced them to some level of reconciliation), but were recognised as a powerful land force, brave and courageous, with strong martial traditions...martial traditions that, in this conflict, served little more than to get Wendish soldiers killed - believing that they could turn a defensive situation into an offensive one with a powerful counterattack, a mustered offensive through the city of Halle in the region of old Brandenburg resulted in the exact penetration that they had desired, but lacking the mobility to exploit it, it soon became a meat grinder, and one that nearly resulted in the loss of an entire Wendish field army. That alone could very well have ended the war, were it not for the timely arrival of Danelander troops to shore up the lines.
And it was lines that the conflict was beginning to turn into. What had first been a series of races for critical positions had slowed down into a far more grueling campaign. This was a war like none other - the first grand European war of the industrial age, and it was to be dominated not by acts of heroism and aggression, but instead, it was to be a conflict of will. Entire nations lay mustered for warfare. Industries churned out shells by the hundreds of thousands, and general conscription saw millions of men mustered for the war effort. Mass offensives had to be organized on a grand scale, and yet for all that, a hundred thousand men might be poured into the meat grinder, and little gained from their sacrifice. At sea, it was another matter - fleet battles and actions favored the Western Powers in the Atlantic, where the Danelanders had no choice but to play defensively in the face of overwhelming numbers, though the reverse was true in the Mediterranean, where Vasconian warships could shell Aquitanian harbors after the failed landings on Sardinia...a thing that spurred counterattacks through the mountains, which proved to be as defensible as the trenches of the old German plains.
What followed, then, was the thing that no one had expected.
A stalemate.
For all the power and confidence that both sides had bore at the start of the war, neither of them could obtain a true, decisive victory. Trenches were not simple, single lines as they had been in the first days of the war. They had evolved into sprawling defensive works, mile after mile of layered lines. Battalions might serve for two weeks on the front, and then be withdrawn to recover in the rear lines whilst another was rotated to take their place. In some places, they had even traded wood for concrete, and reinforced the trench frames into powerful lines of almost bunker like defenses.
Yet for all that, the winds of change were already beginning to howl. The Industrial Age had ended the old way of waging war, but had already started to labor upon the next. The harbingers of this came in the form of the armoured car - a revolution in its own right, and one that set the stage for the giants to come.
An Aquitanian armoured car. Sufficiently armoured as to resist rifle fire and capable of carrying a small cannon to neutralize machine guns, such vehicles were considered to be one of the perfect offensive tools...but lacked the ability to cross the trench lines.
In this regard, the war was quickly proving to be a furnace of innovation. Although there were those stubborn few generals stuck in the old way of doing things, forever believing that they might be one good offensive away from a war winning breakthrough, leaders on both sides had come to the conclusion that this was a new kind of warfare, one in need of new weapons to be fought. The sun had dawned on the year of 1919, but the gears of industry had begun to turn. Already, the war had revealed the power of biplanes - although untested in European warfare until the Great War, they had taken to the skies and made battle over the trench lines, growing faster and more powerful, and capable of carrying bombs able to reach enemy artillery parks behind the lines...a thing that had led to subtle shifts here and there. Although vulnerable to ground fire (and particularly to the earliest autocannons, which were little more than machine guns scaled to a larger design), they had proven that there was ways to innovate and improve on this, that there were new weapons waiting to be devised and developed, things that could, perhaps, break the deadlock, and give the first to claim mastery a chance to claim a much wanted total victory.
In that, Mossavia and Rhenland both came to the same conclusion, at almost the same time.
Something had to be able to cross the no man's land. Something had to be able to break the trenches. Something had to exist that could protect the infantry that walked in its wake, and carried enough firepower to take out the most critical targets so that the soldiers with it could fight at their best. Both came at it from different perspectives. Mossavia was a land of mountains and hills, with a poor tradition of cavalry...but they had eagerly embraced the railway, which made navigating such lands easier, and proved a critical boon to their mining industry where powerful machines could pull vast cargo, or travel directly into the shafts themselves on rugged, continuous tracks. Rhenland was strongly industrial, and had some of the largest car factories in all of Europe, but also produced quality agricultural equipment (much of which went for export - Merovingia, although troubled with internal problems enough to stay out of the Great War, had been an eager customer before the conflict), especially tractors, which utilized similar continuous track to pass through muddy, rough terrain...terrain not too dissimilar to that of the hellscape of no man's land, covered in broken trees, tumbled wire, muddy craters and loose, blasted earth. What followed was a critical decision, and an equally critical realization, where they begun to marry armoured car and tractor, just as Great Mossavia worked to merge train and excavator. The Mossavian designs were more conservative. The Rhenlander ones more experimental. The former underperformed. The latter was unreliable. Neither came anywhere near close to an actual field ready weapon, but the idea had been refined, consolidated, improved.
And in the late November of 1919, the Rhenish had a critical breakthrough. Having exchanged information with their allies in Anglaland, who provided them with working samples of newer and more powerful petrol engines using then state of the art sleeve-pistons,they had an engine capable of producing a hundred horsepower and reliably drive an armoured vehicle through the muddy wastes.
No sooner did they achieve this, however, than a disaster happen - the war in the northern lands of Italy had not been developing in the favor of the Western Powers. Having gathered together forces from its own armies that could be spared and those of its southern client states after a treaty with the Avars and Keszthely guaranteed the security of the eastern borders (although that region was faring little better than the west - although Mossavia had often acted as a regional policeman, it was now distracted, and they bore themselves a smaller mirror of the grander conflict as the Avars and Keszthely waged war on the Huns to the south east, and all three against Romania. This would soon prove a dangerous situation for all, as with them in turn distracted, it allowed the Armenian Empire to invade the Hungarians from the southeast once all of them had exhausted one another, eventually paving the way for the conflicts to merge and for Armenia to join the Western Powers), a thing that allowed them to gather critical amounts of strength. Combining it together with a vast reserve of shells, and the hope that the winter seasons would prove for good offensive weather (the mud was seen as a more dangerous threat than frozen earth) Mossavia punched into the Aquitanian client state of Milan, and succeeded in forcing a major breakthrough. The statelet effectively collapsed, and the only thing that prevented the assault from reaching the southern border of Aquitaine proper was the timely arrival of reinforcements...and the desperate deployment of the first dozen of the new Rhenish vehicles.
This ultimately proved to be a costly mistake. Although the Mossovian attack had succeeded, it had failed to take Milan proper, and saw what was seen as part of the softer underbelly of the Western Alliance fortified...yet two things became clear.
The first was that, somewhere along the lines, the grand Mossovian Army had sprung a leak - the Rhenish and their allies knew things that they should not, including, worst of all, offensive timetables. They knew when the attacks were coming, and the result was that Mossovia had effectively walked into a meat grinder in the later stages of the offensive. The First Lord of Great Mossovia (a title akin to that of Prime Minister in other nations) suddenly had a serious crisis on his hands, as the exact nature of Western Alliance penetration into the Mossovian military was still unknown...and in collaboration with its allies, Mossovian generals often ended up taking part in the development of joint battleplans, which meant that there was the serious risk that allied battle-plans were in the hands of the enemy - a thing that endangered the entire war effort of the alliance. The fact that this was revealed now was seen as a disaster, but in the future, as a relief - better it be discovered on a single attack rather than on a grand summer offensive as was hoped for in 1920...but before such a thing could be discussed, the problem had to be found, and quickly, and what followed was a manhunt of such scale as to be immortalized in fiction and film.
The second was a far grander prize. Having yet to entirely finalize the design of their armoured vehicles, the first deployment of them had been one of shock on both sides. Mossovian infantry had proven helpless in the face of the Rhenish monstrosities, which cut through the hastily dug trenches and defensive works that had been constructed on the way to Milan. Utterly immune to gunfire, these tracked monstrosities cut through practically all resistance, and did horrific damage to Mossovian morale in the area. The nature of this vehicle and its development is discussed more in the sibling work of this book (Steel Giants: A History of Armour), as this one focuses most on Mossovian equipment...but it would be remiss to not mention the critical role that this strike played. The first was that it served as a vast incentive to finish their own program, and the second was one of even greater importance, and came from a simple problem. The technology of the Rhenish armour was not yet finished, and the results were that they were terribly unreliable.
It was no surprise, then, that one eventually broke down in a place that the Mossovians were not merely able to capture it, but deliver it back to the homelands for study.
The result was a critical series of events, and none were more crucial than when they sent the Five (the number of this unit of the original twelve prototypes of what was actually known as the Kürasswagen) to undergo technical trials.
A picture of Five, undergoing technical trials on the outskirts of Praha. This vehicle has since been lost, but a replica exists inside the Mossavian War Museum.
And when they found that, the Mossavians knew that they had found the missing piece of the puzzle.
They threw out their existing prototypes as the failures they were, reusing what they could, and started over.
It took weeks.
It took months.
Buyt eventually, eventually, they came upon a design that would revolutionize warfare. The Rhenish had beaten them to the punch for the first ever tracked combat vehicle, but theirs was flawed. In the views of the Mossavians, theirs was perfected.
It was thought by many at the highest level, and even the Emperor, as a sign that they were going to win this war at last. It was because of this that it was considered a secret beyond any other. It could not have a grandiose name. It could not even be revealed to the public, or shown to anyone except as nothing more than a wooden box wrapped over the true form beneath. Only a small handful would be allowed to crew them, an elite few trusted enough to keep the secret. They were selected for a seeming immunity to loose lips - they even had to swear an oath to be abstinent of drink, so as to be sure that they would not release the secret when drunk.
But on stamps, on papers, the mark was there.
It wore a mask. A veil to cover it from prying eyes that the Mossavians knew were there.
"We have an infestation of wood-borers, eating our trench boundaries," one document would say. "They're everywhere. Our men cannot walk without tripping over them."
It was a simple lie, but a clever one. The vehicle was masked in reports as wood-boring beetles, feasting on the wooden beams that supported the trenches: at the amassing points, news went out that the were terrible infestations, and if these vehicles were operational and ready, they would soon be reporting that these beetles were hale and hearty, and resistant to what insecticides they had available. This not only served to prove conclusively that the Rhenish were reading their messages (Mossavian spies reported that the Rhenish army was delivering great shipments of insecticide to the frontlines to prevent the beetles from spreading to their trenches), but maintained operational security and surprise for the upcoming counter-attacks. More, it permanently coined the Mossavian term for such armoured vehicles as a "bug" or "beetle", a term that would spread beyond their borders, and eventually come to represent the entire new family of vehicles. Although the Mossavians had not been the first to utilize beetles in warfare, it was clear from the start that they had found something of a winning formula, an ideal recipe that seemed to be the direction that the concept needed to evolve.
But all the secrecy of the world would have meant nothing if the vehicle could not perform.
But the first true bug would soon pave the way to a new way of war:
Those were all differences, but it was the turret itself that was the greatest change. The Kürasswagen had no such feature - its weaponry was instead mounted in the front of the hull, which was far longer and larger than that of the B1. Instead, and taking inspiration from armoured cars and ships alike, the B1 had its weaponry mounted to a small turret. Carrying a crew of three compared to the Kürasswagen and its four, with one man in the hull as the driver and mechanic, and two in the turret, counting a gunner-loader and a commander, who had an elevated cupola to look around and surveil the battlefield without needing to expose themselves to rifle fire, this turret presented a whole new way for a beetle to make battle: able to advance and fight without needing to rotate the entire hull, the B1 could engage enemies from any and all angles around it. This allowed for a faster response to enemy attacks, and that meant that the armour layout of the B1 could differ greatly from that of its Rhenish counterpart.
To say more than that and to understand more than that, we must first get into the technical specifications of both bugs. There, we must start with the hull forms - even at a glance, they are obviously different, but the critical factors there comes to size. Designed to be carried from factories in the core of Mossavia on railway, there was the limit of gauge as to how wide the vehicle could be, and the desire to produce as many of them as possible as quickly as possible, and thus counteract the advantage of the Rhenlanders in having achieved a viable design first, dictated a small vehicle. The Kürasswagen measured in at a hefty 1.5 meters tall, 1.38 meters wide, and yet six meters long, giving it a total weight of some 9.76 tons, three and a half of which were armour plating. Compared to this, the B1 was vastly smaller: only 1.25 meters tall even counting the turret, only three quarters of a meter wide, and again 1.24 meters in length, the B1 was small, and would soon prove infamous in that regard. It is said of them from primary sources that the three crewmen were practically packed atop of one another, with little room for personal effects or basic comfort, and that required compromises in the way that things were placed. One obvious factor there is that the driver is, again, sat next to the engine and atop of the fuel tank, giving them easy access to both in the event they need to perform mid battle repairs, but inviting the risk of being doused with burning petrol in the event of damage, and making it hard to hear what, exactly, the commander in the turret might have to say and what orders they might give. Such cramped conditions meant that the bug had an absolute height limit for crewmen - it took physically small men to man the B1 properly, and even then, they would not be able to stand up fully, but would remain crouched, kneeling, or seated. The only way out from there would be through the turret hatch or the driver's hatch, neither of which promised a quick exit in the event of an emergency.
Yet despite the small size, one would be mistaken to think that the B1 was so much lighter - it wasn't, and weighed 6.85 tons, or nearly two thirds the weight of the larger Kürasswagen at a fraction of the size. This raised grave concerns amongst those that had came to view it, raising fears that the bug could sink into the wartime mud and be rendered helpless, but there was a reason for that weight, and it came in three things.
The first was that, for its size, the the B1 was well armoured. Compared to the Kürasswagen, which had about 35mm of armour all around, the B1 had plates of varying thickness: its upper-front glacis plate was 30mm thick at an offset angle for about 45mm of protection, with an added on plate over the driver's side for a further 10mm. The lower-glacis was similarly armoured, with a 32mm plate, rendering it practically impregnable at anything approaching traditional angles at nearly a hundred millimeters of effective protection. The lowest plate was 25mm, angled enough to provide 32mm of protection from frontal fire. Altogether, this gave the hull a strong protection, one afforded by the smaller stature of the vehicle itself. Compared to the Kürasswagen , the sides of the hull were far less armoured, at just 10mm of protection, but this was deemed acceptable, as the short length of the vehicle and its turret might allow it to quickly come about to face an attacker from the side, and infantry small arms were, at least then, not yet a serious threat to an armoured vehicle (the invention of anti-armour rifles would change this arithmetic years later), with similar levels of protection on the roof and belly, leaving the rear with a humble 5mm plate, albeit covered by its trench crossing equipment.
That would bring one to the turret,which at first would not prove a happy posting for many, but would eventually earn its praise. Likened by many soldiers as a cook pot due to its rounded shape and the hooks on either side of the turret roof (used for transporting the turrets during the production process), these impressions were little improved by how the crewmembers, already hunched over, had to effectively stand on the main ammunition rack that was in the vehicle's floor beneath them. This was not good for morale, but more comforting was the fact that the turret was actually, perhaps, one of the safest places to be. Its cylindrical shape gave it complex angles to provide protection from almost any direction, and the entire thing was made from 25mm of steel on all sides except the front, which had 35mm, meaning that whilst manning the gun was cramped and deeply uncomfortable, even terrifying, it was actually one of the safest places to be, and well protected from fire from the Kürasswagen, which had a 30mm cannon that could only penetrate 35mm of steel at the absolute best of times anyway. Compared to that, the B1's turret was effectively impervious, and could withstand repeated fire, or could, were it not for the riveted construction presenting the serious risk of spall. To help protect against this, crewmembers could be issued thick protective jackets akin to medieval gambesons, but these only served to make a cramped interior even more so, whilst offering iffy protection at best.
Making it somewhat worse, though, would be the matter of firepower, the second consideration that came from its weight. Compared to the 30mm of the Kürasswagen, the B1 on paper has an impressive sounding 50mm cannon, but with the tank being so cramped and small, the size of the ammunition itself begins to become a problem. Primarily designed to destroy machine guns and similar equipment, the B1 was not intended to directly fight enemy armour, and so traded propellant length for calibre, and the gun could reach a maximum muzzle velocity of a mere 316 m/s compared to the Kürasswagen's, which was nearly twice that. This meant that the B1 could only penetrate a maximum of 20mm of plate, insufficient for anything but the rear of the Kürasswagen...but its designers had learnt the lesson of how such vehicles might've failed, and it was through spalling that the vehicle was designed to engage the enemy - throwing large high explosive shells at the foe, the large calibre gun could effectively demolish enemy armour without penetration by quite literally blowing the rivets from their armour, or even outright shattering the plate under repeated fire. Although uncomfortable and perhaps unsafe, the nearly permanently crouched nature of the gunner over the ammunition store meant that this cannon could be reloaded in under two seconds from the hull, as they had to do little more than crouch to grab another shell, allowing for nearly continuous fire on target - a show of terror in its own right, as the repeated bangs of shellfire on an enemy hull would be liable to either kill the crew via the concussive effect, or drive them into panic.
And so the B1 is a small tank with strong armour, and a large if unconventional gun. The question there, then, is what of mobility?
Mobility was the most critical aspect of the entire design program, for it was there that the B1's predecessors had failed on both sides of its heritage. The crowning jewel of it all was the engine - an L&K 8.4 liter V4, able to output a total of 70hp, more than ten per ton, giving it a top speed of eight miles per hour when crossing the blasted wastelands of no man's land. It was there that the B1 was built to thrive, and there, it could. Its frontal armour made it suitable for direct assaults on a prepared defender even one with armoured bugs of their own. Its cannon was well suited for such work, able to lob shells capable of collapsing trenches and dug out emplacements, or outright destroying machine gunners and their crew with a single near hit...and with speed, she could cross the treacherous landscape, and pave a way for the infantry to follow.
And in the midst of 1920, years after most thought the war would be over, the rumbling sound of Mossavian began to echo on the battlefield of Waibstadt...
...and on that fateful day, the history of warfare changed forever.
****
Big map at the top kinda had feature creep, but I don't particularly care for that part if it doesn't quite add up, that's just AU scene setting to help show where the design comes from and the kind of logic that goes into it. Reading it now, I probably could've jerry-rigged some kind of softer AU together, but the term "Mossavia" got stuck with me when I was trying to name the tank and ended up leading to the map above. Don't @ me over the strange borders of AU-Turkey or something, or how I've violated some AH cliche - I know it isn't great
The more fun part, which is well worth the price of making the AU!map for me, is this thing...
...which is the B1 from the above post without any funky filters on it. This design is made using Sprocket, but more than that, the entire thing was basically hand sculpted from a raw cube - the cylinder turret alone took like an hour to make, and a lot of effort. The design has its troubles (as is mentioned above, the gunner is basically standing on the ammo locker, and I say standing when the term "crouching" is probably more accurate, meanwhile the driver is probably lain on their belly like they just flopped into a casket) , but fundamentally speaking, I don't think that such issues make it unrealistic, or that something like this couldn't have been built in OTL's WW1 period. It's basically a sort of hybrid of the Leichttraktor (providing overall layout), the FT-17 (providing the hull front) and the earliest BT tanks (providing some of the turret shape and hull length), all of which were thrown into a blender to create design that seems...very much real? It's basically a tank before the concept of "tank" could be divided into light, medium or heavy, having traits of all of them, but not really fitting into the roles of any. Ignoring the AU part (which I'm expecting to get grilled over
), the tank itself seems like it could've existed without any real changes: people would look back at it as the awkwardly designed, uncomfortable box that it is, but being that it comes from WW1, I don't think it'd stand out from the crowd if, say, the FT-17, FCM 1A and/or the Whippet was next to it. I might try and design some other tanks like this, vehicles that make sense in how they'd have come from this lineage. I've actually started to get pretty damned good at Sprocket for a change, so I'm getting better tat turning out designs that look and feel right and realistic, and that's opened a massive door for me, as I'm way better at working in 3D than I am with things like 2D drawings and the like. I've got this idea for a sort of B2, which'd be a bigger, multiturreted monstrosity - sort of like the landship concepts that people liked to try and build just before WW2, so things like the SMK or the T-35, except built in WW1. Kinda like the A1E1 Independent, except...more so? We'll see what I can cook up for the thread
So three scenarios two of which are ASB.
What kind of tank would be developed if a nation had a roughly late WW2/50's technology base and solid industrial capacity? For a WW1 Western Front trench war if they had no prior experience with such a conflict and limited experience in armor design.
What if around 1933 each of the would be major allies (USA, Britain, France and the USSR) and Axis (Germany, Italy, Japan) found samples of each of their primary military vehicles from not only WW2 but also the Cold War and Modern eras? Each nation getting three tanks, three IFV/APC and cars, one of each coming from the previously stated generation and are it's most common variant. With the question being what kind of tanks and armored vehicles would they be able to develop for this alt WW2? From the study and reverse engineering of these vehicles.
Another one would what if a retired persons house and garage (containing a truck, a jeep, power tools and a lawn mower) was ISOT back in time to 1850's Ohio? The retire in question having been a military hobbyist who liked to build various historical model vehicles and had a small library on the World Wars and Cold War. With their house being discovered by a local army garrison. The question being what kind of vehicle could the US and possibly the Confederacy build if given a decade to study and reverse engineer whatever they find in the house, for the Civil War?
What kind of tank would be developed if a nation had a roughly late WW2/50's technology base and solid industrial capacity? For a WW1 Western Front trench war if they had no prior experience with such a conflict and limited experience in armor design.
What if around 1933 each of the would be major allies (USA, Britain, France and the USSR) and Axis (Germany, Italy, Japan) found samples of each of their primary military vehicles from not only WW2 but also the Cold War and Modern eras? Each nation getting three tanks, three IFV/APC and cars, one of each coming from the previously stated generation and are it's most common variant. With the question being what kind of tanks and armored vehicles would they be able to develop for this alt WW2? From the study and reverse engineering of these vehicles.
Another one would what if a retired persons house and garage (containing a truck, a jeep, power tools and a lawn mower) was ISOT back in time to 1850's Ohio? The retire in question having been a military hobbyist who liked to build various historical model vehicles and had a small library on the World Wars and Cold War. With their house being discovered by a local army garrison. The question being what kind of vehicle could the US and possibly the Confederacy build if given a decade to study and reverse engineer whatever they find in the house, for the Civil War?
For your first question I would think a mid-20th century tech level nation with no armour experience might make a Stug-ish or M3 Lee-ish type AFV but with more powerful engines and better weaponry.
Will try to draw a pic later.
For the second question, I think the Germans would build something along the lines of the PZ.III/IV with Leo-I suspension Armed with the L.48 75mm cannon followed up a Panther/Leo hybrid armed with either the 88 KwK.43 or a copy of the Leo's 105.
I have to give some thought to the other nations.
As to your third question, maybe something simple like a Bren gun carrier armed with a Gatling gun?
An interesting question, will give it more thought.
Above are two old designs of mine done for a couple of ISOT TL's with a similar concept.
The critical part here is not so much the technology, but the second condition of it being a WW1 style trench war - what's made it develop in such a fashion? Is air power weaker? Whatever the cause, you might very well still see a radically modern version of the rhomboid, but still a classic rhomboid shape - the rhomboid shape isn't so much the case of technological limitations, but a pretty damned optimal solution for trench warfare. The reason comes to the rhomboids superb trench-crossing ability, which is pretty much unequaled even today: I wrote about this before back in the Into the Frying Pan thread...
This is why this hull profile is still used today. Rhomboids didn't die out and go extinct entirely, they got moved off the battlefield, where the expectations of modern combat didn't see a role for its ability to cross blasted terrain. Here's an image (another that I've already put up!
That two hundred plus ton giant was meant for clearing forests, and not just any forests, but Floridan pseudo-rainforests and swamps as part of a project to build a canal, and just crushed the trees outright. It cleared five acres of ground in an hour in its first ever demonstration, and crushed the edges of swamps to let pest control wipe out mosquitoes in the area. It did all that and did it fine, clearing five thousand plus acres of ground, but political concerns over the environmental impact killed the project. It isn't really used in mines, because again, there are different characteristics for different kinds of suspension and they have things like elevated drive sprockets that give them their familiar triangle shape, but when it comes to crossing soft terrain...
...the rhomboid still lives, and lives on in tracked vehicles that aren't that different from the skeleton tank and the crewed box it had connected to the suspension, just with the box moved to the rear or up onto a platform. There is nothing better for those kind of conditions than the rhomboid shape, and the particular model of continuous track that it uses.
If the scenario is that armoured warfare as we know it never occurred until the 50s and the like, and so we never saw the rise of what we might regard as "modern" warfare, then the result would be that tank doctrine as we know it would probably be starting from absolute nothing, and the idea of "armoured box to get across trench line" is going to care less about maneuverability and more about crossing said trenchline. As such, you're very, very likely to see a rhomboid of some kind, even one built using 1950s tech, as technological change or no, they're still best suited for that kind of task, and the doctrine of the scenario wouldn't really consider anything else.
Said rhomboid, though, would be an absolute beast. 1950s tech should let you make it completely welded and solve the spall issue, and I'd expect it to have a monster of an engine, and a reliable one at that. Like cortz says, though, it'd probably be some kind of StuG-esque assault gun, too, albeit one mounted in a general rhomboidal configuration for maximum terrain crossing ability. As people gain more experience with tanks and start exploring the strategic and tactical possibilities ("we can make these faster and go for breakthroughs!") the rhomboidal part will probably die out as it did in OTL, but I don't see why it wouldn't start in the same kind of place given the same sort of beginning.
A thought I'd have on that is that the Soviets are probably one of the benefactors with a really mixed bag, depending on what "cold war" means as to the gear they're getting. If they get something simple like the T-54, then that's not just a great tank for the time period, but it's also one that isn't particularly hard to construct and can be mass produced...but it has a bit of a problem - the T-54 used a basic welded hull that wouldn't be that hard to put together if you've been welding together T-26s and 28s, but the turret is casted steel, and that's a difficult technique to master.
Is Keszenthely in a personal union with southern Ireland?The History of the Armoured Forces of Great Mossavia
Chapter III: Firm Beginnings - the B1 "Beetle"
Maybe an armored steam truck or wagon carrying a gatling or gardener gun. With a basic artillery piece mounted on top.
Uncle Sam might develop a pseudo M48/M60 Patton type tank. Though lighter to be shipped across the Atlantics & Pacific Oceans.
I am tempted to it changed towards four vehicles with early and late cold war tanks. Considering it was a forty year time period.
That steam truck is just begging for a pair of Maxims - one MG and one pompom.
- Status