Today i will sugguest the British Mark 1 or Big Willie/Mother WW1 tank.
Brief history
The Mark 1 or the original tank in general. Started as an idea to breach and push through trench fortifications due to the heavy stalemate that was on the western front during the first world war.
The Mark 1 was called a Tank. In order to trick German spies to believe that they were water carriers and not weapons off war. which is why we call Tanks… Tank.
so after some resarch in 1915 and 1916 a first prototype called the Little Willie was created. it actully was supossed to have a turret on the top off the turret as we all know modern tanks like the FT-17, Sherman and T-72 have. However this tank proved too unreliable. so then they ended up creating Big Willie or Mother. Which ended up becoming the Mark 1 we all know and love.
The Mark 1 came in two original versions a Male version as im suggesting to War Thunder with it,s twin 57mm cannons. And a female variant which is machine guns only. there was also a supply varinant with its weapons removed in order to have more space for supplies. Most off the Mark 1 tanks were converted to be supply carriers since the Mark 4 and the Mark 5 became the new frontline tank.
the reer steering wheel was designed in order to help steer the tank. But It was soon realized that the sterring wheel was pretty much useless in order to help steer the tank and was later removed.
The British Mark 1 was the first tank to ever see combat on 15 September 1916 at the Battle of Flers–Courcelette during the Battle of the Somme.
The roof oof the Early Mark 1 had chicken wire put on top off the roof off the tank. However this protection against granades proved useless so it was later removed from the tanks
The Mark 1 was at its first battle not very successful since it broke down alot and usally got stuck in mud. The crew was usally intoxicated by the engine since it was located with the crew.
The Mark 1 was quickly relplaced by the Mark 4 which proved to be better in pretty much every way like fual storage engine guns and speed.
The Mark 1 was quickly replaced with the Mark 4 tank which was a more reliable tank with shorter faster firing guns and better placement of fual storage.
The only Mark 1 that i currently know suvived to this day is currently placed at the Bovingtion tank museum.
The tank had a crew of 8 men, drivers, gunners, loaders and a comander.
The engine was the British Daimler 6 cylinder which could deliver 105 hp at 1000 rpm
The tanks top speed was the record speed off allmost 6 km/h.
The weight off the male variant was 28,4 tons.
The Armor off the Mark 1 was 6 to 15 mm
The 2 main guns was the Hotchkiss qf 6 pdr 57mm
In War Thunder
In War Thunder this machine would obviously require a complete overhaul off rank 1 in order to make this tank be able to be implamented. so i made this british new rank 1 concept tree in order to see where the british Mark tanks could sit in the tree!
maybe we Don’t need a Sperate mode but simple jut a ranking change as in the Moderns get moved high as to like a 13.0 and the WW1 tanks will take the place of the reserve tanks and possible 1.2.
I agree with the idea that in order for WWI vehicles to fit all existing vehicles need to be moved up in BR. Though I’d probably keep the current reserves as the starting off point for new players.
With WWI vehicles unlocked once you get your first rank II (I guess rank III in this case, considering everything goes up). You don’t want a new players first experience to be 6km/h vehicle that takes them 10 minutes to get to a cap circle, unless you make those maps incredibly tiny.
I would love to see older tanks but WW1 is just too early. Most WW1 tanks can’t even fight each other due to the lack of dedicated anti-tank ammunition and gameplay would just be too slow. I’d rather see the baseline being moved down to the earliest cases of tanks intended to be able to fight other tanks, like the Vickers Medium Mark I in the case of the UK. With WW1 tanks most vehicles would be firing HE, being reliant on spalling which would make for rather inconsistant and slow gameplay. Not all countries have proper access to WW1 tanks either
The HE-ammo available at the time for tanks/vehicles is usually good enough to deal with the thin armor of WW1 tanks. With the caveat that you may have to be a bit strategic where you shoot. On the other side there actually was a lot of AP/SAP rounds available for the guns that tanks carried, as they were derivatives of naval guns where SAP was useful, or in case of the German guns which had AP-rounds developed for them to counter Allied tanks.
The Mk 1 was notorious for getting bullet splash between the joints of overlapping plates, and the drivers and commander had direct vision slits - ie a gap in the armour that similarly let bullet splash through - so they wore face armour!!
I may have gotten that wrong that was pulled from my memory so you can correct me if I am wrong I might have been thinking of Americas tank that was similar to the Mark series and i think it had 12.7mm guns but not Hotchkiss so I might has stated something wrong.
