A different type of wank; armored vehicles that should have never seen service

The Sherman did use diesel engines in the model M4A2 with twin GM diesels. It proved no less likely to catch fire than any other model of Sherman and was in fact the fastest Sherman cross country because of the bottomless torque produced by the superb 2 stroke GM diesel engines one of the all time great engine designs. As krull1m says improvements to the ammo stowage reduced the risk.

Indeed, with the introduction of wet ammo storage, the M4A3 proved far more survivable if hit than the T-34/85, giving the lie to the notion that gasoline engines create death traps. I don't even know how this myth got started, since everybody in WWII used primarily gas engines for tanks except for the Soviets. The only point of comparison between the safety of gas engines vs diesel would be the Eastern Front, yet no one calls the Panther, or even the Panzer IV the "Kraut-cooker" or something similar.
 
Well the quality of each tank, and numbers of units built show it pretty clearly. USSR held to having several tanks types in circulation, and even current generation having a "zomg good but expensive tank" and "looks like above but is cheaper to build".

By '80es Soviets did completely fall out of pace and by end of '80es latest versions of M1A1, Leo2, Chall2 and friends were quite better than anything Soviets had.

AFAIK T-80 factories were mostly in Ukraine so T-90 versions are all T-72 updates, and T-72 show its "quality" in Desert Storm (there is only as much as can be written off by "lolArabs&Tanks", to perform that catastrophically the basic design has to be crap and then some).

All the big myths about fields where Soviets had quality or supremacy are myths. Crap tanks, crap guns, crap metallurgy (because of utterly crap communist materials sciences and even worse quality control on everything), crap jet engines leading to crap jets no matter how good the geometry of design is.

They kept building tiny tanks because they never could build good enough engine, even those small light tanks were almost all underpowered. They defined their entire land doctrine around acknowledging that their tanks cant go against western tanks on anything near equal basis.

Now after all this pissing on all of it, I will say that Soviets had enough stuff that was "good enough", but technologically they were the underdog, scraping to catch up, for entire Cold War.

And in their rare lucid moments they were painfully aware off all this, and were honestly terrified of USA which could outproduce them while having superior quality on any field.

Russian hardware and doctrine were never as bad as Tom Clancy or Stuart Slade would describe them, but were honestly barely keeping in competition at best of times. Of course, even most cursory comparison of WarPac and NATO economies would explain everything and make it painfully obvious.

"OMG the Russians are out to get us" only existed as propaganda to support defense budget increases. Never since WWII had Soviets actually believed they could attack West and win, their only long term plan was "try to keep our act together until historical inevitability and internal contradictions crush capitalists".
 
Indeed, with the introduction of wet ammo storage, the M4A3 proved far more survivable if hit than the T-34/85, giving the lie to the notion that gasoline engines create death traps. I don't even know how this myth got started, since everybody in WWII used primarily gas engines for tanks except for the Soviets. The only point of comparison between the safety of gas engines vs diesel would be the Eastern Front, yet no one calls the Panther, or even the Panzer IV the "Kraut-cooker" or something similar.

Before the Wet stowage in late model Shermans the British Army reckoned a Sherman cooked off 60% of the time after an average of 2 frontal or 1.89 side penetrations by AP ammo. With wet stowage that figure dropped to 20%. Fuel was not a factor in the cook off, in fact often when burnt out Shermans were recovered the fuel tank was found to be still intact with fuel in it. The British Army found that simply by sealing off the belly escape hatch to prevent a chimney effect and adding splinter protection to the ammunition bins cut cook offs by a quarter. Adding a 2nd hatch to the turret roof cut crew deaths by allowing exit for the gunner and loader when hit as often the commander with his head out the hatch would be killed or stunned by the hit and unable to evacuate in time to allow his turret crew out.
 
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British: I'm spacing out on the name, but the first or second heavy cruiser tank the British produced on a Christie suspension turned out to be so unreliable that it never made it to combat units, even though the Brits produced into the thousands of them.
You probably mean the Covenanter_tank . Its designers put the radiator on the frontal armor, where it was most likely to be hit. The crew might also get burnt by contact with the pipes feeding the water through the crew compartment to the radiator and scalded when these pipes were punctured.

Another problematic British WW II design was the Bishop self-propelled howitzer (Not exactly a tank, I know, but the Elefant and KV II already mentioned in this thread were not MBTs either). The armored superstructure of the Bishop limited the elevation so much that it cut the range of the howitzer in half.
 
Another problematic British WW II design was the Bishop self-propelled howitzer (Not exactly a tank, I know, but the Elefant and KV II already mentioned in this thread were not MBTs either). The armored superstructure of the Bishop limited the elevation so much that it cut the range of the howitzer in half.

The OP did after all ask for armoured vehicles, not just MBTs.

Anyway, I nominate the Char B1. The whole darn thing screams the word 'inefficiency'. The commander, who was dumped in the tank's small turret, had to multi-task between the radio, the turret gun and his duties as a tank commander. It's main gun should have been placed on a bigger turret. Instead, it is mounted on the hull, forcing the tank to take its time in lining up its target.
 
The Covenanter

To meet the engine requirement, a horizontally-opposed 12 cylinder engine was used. Although flat it was wide and left no room for radiators in the engine compartment, and so the radiators were moved to the front of the vehicle. The unusual arrangement, combined with the rushed design process, resulted in serious problems with engine cooling. Even when the systems were redesigned there were problems and the piping from engine to the radiators heated the fighting compartment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenanter_tank
 
My vote hast to go to the L3/33. In East Africa (Eithiopia) several were destroyed by locals rolling boulders in front of and behind... and then manually tipping them over!
 
I have heard that the M551 Sheridan was considered a death trap in Vietnam. Yet it was in service until 1996. Does anyone know more?

According to the article, the M551, designed as an air-portable light tank that could be deployed by parachute for scouting, had thin aluminum armor. That, combined with the caseless ammo for the 152mm gun/missile combination (also a POS- the Shillelagh missile system was grossly unreliable and the cannon, although firing a useful HEAT round, was only really useful at close range), meant that it would brew up catastrophically in fairly short order after being hit by a RPG or AT mine that a M-48 could take & usually survive, often still in operational condition. SOP for the crews got to the point of bailing out immediately if hit by one of those because of the chace of a catastrophic fire; the stricken tanks were generally total losses, as the aluminum hulls would often partially melt from the heat of the fire. Losses were fairly high, and much worse than other AFvs in Vietnam. Compounding this was that they were mechanically unreliable. I'd say that the M551 could be worthy of consideration on this list, as was the M60A2, which ditched the 105mm rifle for the 152mm gun/missile system, but at least that was sturdier, and could be rebuilt into something more useful (the M60A2s starting in the late 1970s & early 1980s were rebuilt as gun tanks using the 105mm, being the basis for many of the M60A3s, or as support vehicles such as armored bridge carriers or combat engineer vehicles)

The Army actually started withdrawing them in 1978, but the 82nd Airborne had enough political pull to hang on to them as some of their heavy support weapons for another couple decades; probably their most useful service was as OPFOR vehicles at the NTC at Ft. Irwin.

One of the major drivers behind the abortive M8 light tank project of the 1990s was to provide a useful replacement, but it was cancelled in the mid-1990s (it would have been more reliable, better protected, and used a development of the classic British-designed M68 105mm tank rifle); it's niche was ultimately somewhat filled by the M1128 Mobile Gun System variant of the Stryker armored car, also using the 105mm gun.
 
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