Are tanks inevitable?

I think they will arise in some way.
It could happen similar to plane development-
1: Nations start using armoured cars for scouting. Maybe occasionally killing enemy infantry and being unable to be harmed.
2: Nations invent armoured cars for battling other armoured cars (i.e. bigger guns)
3: Nations add more armour onto armoured cars to stop this
And so on.
 
So anywhere without a good road net, tracks are still demanded.

And even where you have roads, if you have a mighty armored army bound to roads - then an enemy having a mighty armored army not bound to roads will have his armored forces bypass yours, off road, and cut them off.

Bound to roads? Who says armored cars are incapable of cross-country? IIRC, even in the desert, Stirling's SAS did pretty well without tracks...
 
Bound to roads? Who says armored cars are incapable of cross-country? IIRC, even in the desert, Stirling's SAS did pretty well without tracks...

It depends on the country on ehas to cross, doesn't it. _Parts_ of the typical desert aren't that bad for wheels (while other parts _are_ bad for wheels).

On the other hand, mud is worse for wheels than for tracks. Snow is, too. Any kind of soft ground is (which explains why parts of the desert are bad, see above). Pointy thingies, say barbed wire and obstacles, as well as some natural types of ground, are also bad for wheels.
Etc.

Additionally, if one is looking at the possible early development of wheeled armored vehicles to abort the development of tracked armored vehicles, one should look at the off-road performance of early wheeled vehicles, not at the performance of today's wheeled armored vehicles.
And the first cars did very, very bad when off road, for obvious reasons.
 
A tank, to me at least, is the main battle tank, a huge beast with very thick armour, a big cannon for direct fire dedicated to fight other tanks and dominate the battlefield. I think at least France and great Brittain would focus on colonial wars so I think there would be less armour, possibly troop carrying capability and it would have a much smaller logistic foot print so it would be easier to transport, move and consume less fuel.

So I think we get very differnt tanks.

Edit: It might be to much logic and reason.
 
A tank, to me at least, is the main battle tank, a huge beast with very thick armour, a big cannon for direct fire dedicated to fight other tanks and dominate the battlefield. I think at least France and great Brittain would focus on colonial wars so I think there would be less armour, possibly troop carrying capability and it would have a much smaller logistic foot print so it would be easier to transport, move and consume less fuel.

So I think we get very differnt tanks.
No, what you got are Italian tankettes of pre-WWII era, FT-17s and Vickers 6-ton. Very real steps in tank development IOTL. Just like IOTL they'll be proven underarmed and underarmoured for war between "real armies", and medium tanks (ancestors of MBTs) would follow.

BTW, are you aware that "tanks don't fight tanks" was an endlessly-repeated mantra in 1920-1942? Heck, even Sherman had been built with very limited anti-tank capabilities in mind, as Americans relied on self-propelled AT artillery and air cover for anti-tank duties...
 
Assuming internal combustion engines and cars develop similar to OTL, would you say that the development of tanks is inevitable? Say, even without a static war such as World War One, could armored cars eventually develop into tracked machines of war?

The reason I ask is because in the TL I've written - linked in my signature - the world fights a semi-fluid 'Great War' (1900-1904) in which neither tanks nor planes take off (no pun intended). This is partly due to the fact that it is earlier in the 20th century so cars and such are less advanced but still exist. Armored cars also exist but I decided to not include tanks. However, I imagine that in the TL's postwar world, researchers will come to the conclusion that tracked, armored vehicles with guns will be useful tools of war. Thus, the development of the tank, despite a semi-fluid war, is inevitable.

Is that a reasonable assumption? Or do many people here think that warfare could have gone into the 20th century without heavy armor?

What if the science of the shaped charge is more advanced in your timeline?

From:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/bullets2-shaped-charge.htm
"Charles Edward Munroe was the inventor of "The Monroe Effect" in explosives in 1885. He noted that a high explosive with a cavity facing a target left an indentation. The earliest known reference to the effect appears to be 1792, and there is some indication that mining engineers may have exploited the phenomenon over 150 years ago."

If you have metalurgy and armor tech advance at the same rate as OTL but have more advanced munitions technology then you can end up with shells which can easily pierce tanks. The tank may have to be abondoned until more advanced armors are developed.

Seems that your early WWI could start and finish without tanks making much of a show.
 
No, what you got are Italian tankettes of pre-WWII era, FT-17s and Vickers 6-ton. Very real steps in tank development IOTL. Just like IOTL they'll be proven underarmed and underarmoured for war between "real armies", and medium tanks (ancestors of MBTs) would follow.

BTW, are you aware that "tanks don't fight tanks" was an endlessly-repeated mantra in 1920-1942? Heck, even Sherman had been built with very limited anti-tank capabilities in mind, as Americans relied on self-propelled AT artillery and air cover for anti-tank duties...

But would they develop a real army vs real army thinking? The western world developed a anti war stance after WWI (which of course wheren't extended to dark people who didn't have tanks).
 
But would they develop a real army vs real army thinking?
Yes they would. Versailles made WWII in some shape or form almost inevitable. Besides, there're lesser wars to fight. Sino-Japanese and Spanish wars proved deficiencies of light tanks IOTL (T-34 concept was conceived from Spanish experience). There would be some medium-intensity wars to fight in any TL, this is nature of apes walking on hind legs. Besides, even wars against coloureds aren't quite one-sided all the time. Ethyopians proved to Italians that tankette is a dead end and light tank (in Italian meaning of the term, tankette with turret) is only marginally better, so they switched to "real" light tanks. Some Latin American war will teach the very lesson ITTL, as far as medium vs. light tank is concerned.
 
What if the science of the shaped charge is more advanced in your timeline?

From:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/bullets2-shaped-charge.htm
"Charles Edward Munroe was the inventor of "The Monroe Effect" in explosives in 1885. He noted that a high explosive with a cavity facing a target left an indentation. The earliest known reference to the effect appears to be 1792, and there is some indication that mining engineers may have exploited the phenomenon over 150 years ago."

If you have metalurgy and armor tech advance at the same rate as OTL but have more advanced munitions technology then you can end up with shells which can easily pierce tanks. The tank may have to be abondoned until more advanced armors are developed.

Seems that your early WWI could start and finish without tanks making much of a show.

No. The effect was discovered - and then ignored. Why? Because there was no real use for it, save a marginal one (portable anti-bunker demo charges to be used by assault engineers). Once a serious target arrives - a tank - then the effect is put to good use. So the problem is that there is no incentive to use the Monroe effect without tanks around.
 
No. The effect was discovered - and then ignored. Why? Because there was no real use for it, save a marginal one (portable anti-bunker demo charges to be used by assault engineers). Once a serious target arrives - a tank - then the effect is put to good use. So the problem is that there is no incentive to use the Monroe effect without tanks around.
. . . but there were armored targets around before tanks came to be - battleships (and other ships). It is not impossible for armor piercing shells to be developed much earlier than in OTL. If they exist in TTL to bust bunkers and to sink ships, then smaller versions would be tried against armored cars.

The armored car would then consider mobility to be its best defense against artillery, and the idea of a slow heavy tank would be rejected.
 
I think that the development that airshiparmada made about better munitions has some merit. I mean man portable AT weapons are the main thing that is making armored warfare go out of style today. If say you have an earlier developement of a more potent explosive translating into a practical man portable ordinance launcher, perhaps some kind of mortar or grenade launcher for taking out machine gun nests or something, then perhaps it gets adapted to take out armored vehicles, more or less get yourself a WWI version of the bazooka or panzerfaust. Combine this with the untested nature of the tank, and the unreliability and slowness of early tanks and perhaps rather than no tanks ever, they have a breif appearance on the battlefield and then sink into obscurity due to lack of practicality.
 
. . . but there were armored targets around before tanks came to be - battleships (and other ships). It is not impossible for armor piercing shells to be developed much earlier than in OTL.
But ships are a bit of a different target than tanks. If the jet of superheated gas produced by a shaped charge gets through the armour of a tank it's almost certain to fry a crewmember; ignite ammunition; damage the engine or do some other form of damage that'll put the tank out of action... simply you're talking about a lot of vital and vulnerable things in a very confined space. Ships... well, it's less likely. Sure a hit on a turret at an inopertune moment may result in a cascade of fire spreading to the magazine and then a big bang but between the typical armour layout and the additional space hits elsewhere are unlikely to have any more of an impact (and probably even less) than the more traditional AP and SAP rounds... particularly when you consider the limited effectiveness of HEAT rounds in the early period of their use (e.g. for WW2 vintage HEAT it was rare for pentration of over one times the calibre of the projectile to occur).

Edit: As for the actual subject, I'd say it depends on in what you want 'tank' to mean. AA and Dan Reilly propose a route which could keep the heavy armour path out of consideration, but in that case there would still be niches for light armour for recon and self propelled guns for fire support.

i.e. Barring a pre-modern PoD and/or technological stagnation tracked AFV are inevitable (even if only a recon AFV with just enough armour to keep rifle calibre rounds out); the OTL heavy/medium/ main-battle tank line(s) of development are not.
 
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. . . but there were armored targets around before tanks came to be - battleships (and other ships). It is not impossible for armor piercing shells to be developed much earlier than in OTL. If they exist in TTL to bust bunkers and to sink ships, then smaller versions would be tried against armored cars.

The armored car would then consider mobility to be its best defense against artillery, and the idea of a slow heavy tank would be rejected.

Seems unlikely.
Historically, Monroe-effect warheads were used as workarounds, to cope with problems that already had a "proper", but more expensive or bulky, solution. Gimmicks.

One of the problem was portability. There's a limit to the amount an infantryman or assault engineer can carry. Once you get anti-tank "rifles" that need small wheels, you are definitely better off with a rocket-propelled shaped-charge warhead. The infantryman can still carry it around, and it gives him some AT defense capability, without investing more in the "proper" solution, AT guns. But, of course, for this to come to fruition, as mentioned you need the threat: the tank.

Portability is also the issue for anti-bunker shaped demo charges. But for the assault engineer to come forward and need to pack more punch within the limits of what he can carry, so that he can still incapacitate a RC bunker, you pretty much need Sturmtruppen tactics, which in turn were fostered by the environment which also fostered the tank (just like the RC bunker). Sure, a Monroe-effect demo charge might come in handy earlier, against earthworks, and especially against stone/bricks fortifications. But it's not as much necessary.

The other issue that was historically worked around is muzzle velocity. By issuing HEAT rounds, you can give short-barrelled field guns and howitzers some direct-fire AT capability, which they would lose as their muzzle velocities remain low because their barrels remain short, while the tanks' armor grow thicker (the "proper" solution being, of course, producing field guns with longer barrels and an actual AP round for them).
But… if the target is a ship… you would already want as long a barrel as possible for your naval gun, because you also want range, and accuracy at range. So you already have a high muzzle velocity, thus you are better off with some traditional naval round such as AP or SAP. Sure, theoretically a smaller vessel, carrying lighter, smaller, shorter-barrelled guns, might be more of a nuisance to bigger vessels if its puny guns had HEAT rounds. But then again, such a smaller vessel already is a much more serious nuisance if it carries a couple of torp tubes, which it surely will; and torps have a longer range than its puny guns.

As to "mobility is the best defense", that line was tried historically. When the light tanks regularly got skewered, people changed their minds.
 
Both seem to make sense... I'd agree with Cockroach that some sort of armoured vehicles are probably inevitable, but not necessarily the heavies.

BTW... 'bump'.
 
I thought some more on tank development. It is, at least in part, a competition between protection and weapons. Bigger guns, ticker armour and so on. However, as far as I can tell, it is a loosing battle on the part of the armour since it takes 10 kilo of explosive to destroy 60 tones of tank (give or take a lot).
 
I thought some more on tank development. It is, at least in part, a competition between protection and weapons. Bigger guns, ticker armour and so on. However, as far as I can tell, it is a loosing battle on the part of the armour since it takes 10 kilo of explosive to destroy 60 tones of tank (give or take a lot).

Except it is not just bigger guns/thicker armor it is bigger guns, different weapons (Solid, HE, HEP, HESH, shaped charge, Sabot, Guided missiles), thicker armor, different armor (armor slope, composites, stand off armor, reactive armor, active defensive systems), drive trains/speed (petrol, diesel, turbine, gas-electric, diesel-electric).

This is the same race that has been going on since the first guy picked up a piece of wood to block the guy hitting him with a stick. For the last 30 years or so it appears that weapons have an advantage over defense but with active defensive systems and stand-off/cage armor that could be changing.
 
I know that weapons development history is a bit complicated. However, tanks comes out as losers over time.
 
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