The Land Ironclads!

Ok so what if some enterprising young officer who was an engineer had read "The Land Ironclads" by H.G. Wells and produced some sort of "tank" like vehicle before World War One as apposed to just before the end of it. How would this have changed the war? I seriously doubt it would have resulted in a World War 2 style of mobility warfare due to the slowness of early tanks in OTL but I still think we might have seen a more fluid front. what are your ideas?
 
Damn things *were* designed. You have to get the generals to embrace them, which is hard (because, really, early tanks were pretty pathetic things good only for a very limited number of tasks, and they were very lucky breaking through trenches was high on the list.

It's likely that if armoured vehicles exist in the early stages of WWI on any larger scale, they will begin with light armour and up-armour and up-gun gradually as defenses get better. Armoured cars are actually good for something even at 1914 tech level, if you have an imagination.
 
The British Army was using Hornsby Track Tractors to haul artillery in 1906, and similar tracked devices all the way back to Crimea. The real trick is to have a (minor) trench war sometime before WWI, so as to force the military into thinking about how breach them...

Edit: Imagine one of these with an artillery piece mounted to it: http://www.aonx97.dsl.pipex.com/TE-page/Town/thetford.htm

Simon ;)

*cough* US Civil War, anyone... ;)

Or might that be a bit too early? :eek:
 
*cough* US Civil War, anyone... ;)

Or might that be a bit too early? :eek:

My first thought was Petersburg as well. Perhaps some of the Europeans might have looked into something like a tank a bit sooner after seeing the slaughter in North America if only they didn't get a dose of real strategic mobility in the Franco-Prussian conflict. I think the Prusso-Germanic armies made a lot of people forget the sludge of trench warfare. Perhaps without that pristine example, the nations looking more seriously into development something along the lines of a steam tank?
 

MacCaulay

Banned
Samuel Morey, or: 1824, with a two-stroke engine.

We spent 4 pages hashing out stuff with 1824 as a POD. Samuel Morey patented a 2-cylinder internal combustion engine in that year, but when his wife, daughter, and mother all three died in the same week, he put all his motors on a boat and sunk them in the middle of a river.
We basically just wondered what would've happened if his family hadn't died, and he'd kept going with his engine development, as well as spreading it to other areas.

On that one, we finally decided that Chickamauga and Vicksburg (there were extensive Rebel fortifications and the Union knew they were there for a long time, hence a long time to build vehicles) were probably the most likely battles to afford it.
We'd worked out unit sizes and commanders, and some dates of usages, though we were still kind of fuzzy on other things.

By the end, we were working out mathematical stuff to see how the things would work. You might want to take a look at it.
 
*cough* US Civil War, anyone... ;)

Or might that be a bit too early? :eek:


You mean something like in the following video. Even though its an entertainment movie it does show a good example of an armoured wagon pulled by horses and mounted with a revolving turret gattling gun. If they could have only protected the horses.

Wagon using the gattling gun starts at 5 minutes in the video. Example lasts for less then 1 min.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvu7Euyep5g&feature=related
 
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