Curious if anyone knows about any flamethrower tanks in real life that carried armoured external fuel trailers?
The only ones I know about are:
Churchill crocodile
Sherman Crocodile
And the L3 Lf flame Italian flame tank.
The 2 Valentine prototype which later developed into the Churchill Croc
And the M5A1 E9-9
Aside from these, i don’t think there is anything else
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Awesome!! Thank you so much. Really interested in the external fuel trailers designs.
we need l3 flame tank for event vehicle
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dont talk to me or my son ever again
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Sherman crocodile
replaces the 75mm with a flamethrower
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Give off little Peter vibes
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Comet and Centurion Crocodiles (neither ever had flamethrower fitted and were only used for trailer testing)
This mysterious M26 flamethrower variant does keep the main gun however, and was built in 1949 after the failure of another M26 flamethrower variant known as “T35”.
I have this photo of a book that I do not know the name of, but you can see a tidbit about this supposed “T35 flame tank” at the top right.
The T35 flame tank can be seen here:
Below that it talks about an “M26 chassis with a low superstructure and an Iroquois flame gun”, but again does not say if a trailer was present. Considering that the caption for the M26 flame tank with trailer mentions that it was a “resurface” of “the British Crocodile concept”, I assume that previous models did not in fact have this trailer for fuel. At the bottom left there is another flame tank known as the “T66” using the M47 chassis and a T42 turret with replaced main gun, but I suspect that this one also uses internalized fuel tanks.
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I think that is an M46 not M26, look at the gun.
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Good point, I was thinking M26A1 because the text seemed to imply that it was a Pershing, but I forgot about the rear idler and raised sprocket (and we can see the forward pintle MG mount in the photo too).
That being said, hopefully there’s still a flamethrower version of the actual M26 that keeps its firepower, considering that the paragraph states that several other configurations were tried.
Idk, maybe this is just me, but I feel like this would be a gameplay nightmare. Imagine you’re trying to get to a point, a stray bullet tags the fuel tank, and next thing you know you’re on Neptune. If there’s a way to lose the fuel tank, and keep going with your main guns, I will retract this statement.
U.S. Military Tracked Vehicles – Fred W. Crismon, page 368
I don’t know anything about American flamethrower tanks, but it seems quite certain that the T35 did not have a trailer. According to Hunnicutt, the idea of installing a trailer was first conceived at a conference on July 7, 1948, which canceled the T35 project.
Drawing of the flamethrower trailer for the M26 tank. The installation position seems to be somewhat different from the flamethrower mounted on the M46:
T66 flamethrower tank:
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