Always curious about tanks that have been and has been curious to know and now I have two questions.
What tanks project was an exceptionally promising idea and even had an exceptionally good future but, in the end, they were abandoned either for any reason?
What tank project were already a bad idea from the beginning and that continued?
Note: sorry if it has errors English is not my first language
Idk, tank wise, probably aircraft though, the Ekranoplan.
I guess the Maus is a good one, it was too heavy, too slow; would get bombed very easily. Same with the P.1000 Ratte. (Which never left the drawing board)
Another one is the STRV 2000, it was going to be top of the line, and it was cancelled because of the cost of development and overall unit price.
The Valiant tank A38 was quite famous for its failure. According to David Fletcher, it was so bad that the School of Tank Technology kept the prototype as a cautionary tale for students and had them inspect the tank at the end of their course to study its problems.
Worst would be the maus. A terrible idea that didn’t recognise the reality of warfare of the time.
The best is a personal decision and for me that’s the AC4 cruiser tank. The tank in game as a British premium is actually an AC3, the AC4 would have had a new turret design, increased armour thickness and reduction in shot traps. The designers had even talked about the 3.7 inch anti air raft gun, this same gun became the 32pdr on the tortoise.
Aside from meme projects like the Maus: Vickers A38 Valiant, Ferdinand and the MBT-70 project are all obligatory answers for this
Apart from those bad projects, which were the best?
Most successful, the MBT/KPz-70, they paved the groundwork for Abram’s and Leopard II tanks.
Germans heavies in WW2, and Germans heavies in WW2.
Good: Probably the Vickers MBT Mk. 7
A promising vehicle and future concepts cut short by German export restrictions.
Bad: H-35, H-39 french post great war 2 seater tank concepts
A whole series of vehicles after the FT-17 featuring good armor, but featuring shite guns for anything other than light infantry support and bad 2 crew layout.
It’s not the same.
As the name indicates, the Tortoise’s gun fires 32 pound rounds (15 kg). The 3.7 inch AA gun fires 28 pound rounds (11 kg).
The multi turret “landship” craze of the pre WWII era gave birth to some really bad stuff, and all big industrial powers of the era tried their luck with this sort of design.
I could say the Maus, A38 Valiant and/or the Ferdinand but i don’t want to re-hash does since everyone knows the flaws of those projects so here is some of the lesser know worst tank projects or ones that people don’t talk
ARL-44: France tried to built a Panther of their own with little input from other countries from possible (aside from captured German tech and stock but that’s besides the point) with predictable results. Terrible armour quality, poor maneuverability not helped by using obsolete track design and notoriously unreliable
Asad Babli: Dollar store T-72M-1, need i say more
Panzer 68: Unreliable, poorly built and poorly designed with one especially bad flaw involves the gun firing at random if the radios are used as an example, the Panzer 68 has to be completely refurbished just to fix most of the problems
OT M-60: I know it is an APC not a Tank but it needs to be mentioned here since it was one of the worst built and least reliable APCs to be ever operated, it was so bad that during the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqi’s who operated OT M-60 explicitly told the Yugoslavs that if they want to maintain good relations with Iraq they need to cease all arms sales to them
M114: Like with the OT M-60 it’s an APC not a tank and also like the OT M-60 it was intended to replace the M113 in Reece and command roles but was rejected due to severe reliability issues and being largely less capable than ironically the vehicle that is suppose to replace
As for best tank projects i’ll list the following
EE-T1 Osorio: One of the best if not the best 3rd generation MBT to be built perfectly exemplified by the Saudi trials beating the rest of the competition in every metric which included MBT’s like the Abrams, AMX-32 & AMX-40 for example. It was rejected largely due to a lot of shady back deals done by the Americans
M60 Patton: Best American Tank to be built since the Sherman family, essentially a workhorse for many countries including the US. Is still being used by several countries to this day
Centurion: First MBT to be built and it was a very well designed and competent tank, proving the Universal Tank Concept to the world
as i said it became not it was. the 32pdr was a modified 3.7 inch gun.
Yes, I agree, the best… Ever.
Everyone keeps harping on the Maus but the reality is that it’s design was a success it worked and ran. What makes it a failure isn’t inherently a flaw of itself but that its design was completely outside the realm of reality of combat for Germany by September 1944 when the V2 hit the testing grounds…
Its essentially the A-10 warthog of Tanks. The A-10 is a plane that is useless for most nations (even the US) unless they’re able to establish Air Superiority first. The Maus with Air superiority would do the same thing the KV-1’s did to German Panzer IV’s with short 75’s and Panzer III’s with short 50cm’s they wouldn’t be able to do a thing to it… Even in game the Maus despite facing cold war tanks firing weaponry from the late 40’s to the 50’s and 60’s its a formidable opponent to Ground targets so much so that Gaijin removed it from the game because its “hard to balance”… the only other vehicle to be treated in a similiar manner that I can remember is one of the French 1.0BR tanks that has to be unlocked by grinding past it to like 3 or 4 other tanks and that’s because its so terrible…
Just for reference the Maus’s design started in 1941, When Germany had air superiority over Europe till practically the Allies landed at Normandy in June 6 1944…4 more were in production in July when Krupp canceled them literally a month after the Allies landed. All further development was canceled in August a whole 2 months after the Allies had landed…
Panzer 61.
The tank itself was bad from the start, it suffered electrical faults both in development and during service, and was used long after Panzer 68 was in service which itself had a number of electrical faults.
Extremely dangerous tanks for the crews, surrounding personnel, and the tanks themselves.
But the 5 cm Pzgr.40 goes through it pretty easily.
Not to mention, destroying its tracks/running gear to kill its mobility was often enove for the crew to abandon.
I would like to remind people what happened to the KV-1 when they encountered troops that maybe had Pz. II, but more likely had some 37 and 50 anti-tank guns.
It lost and got overrun. And the KV-1 was relatively numerous.
A vehicle that did everything it needed to and wasnt continued. So idk if that vehicle was much of a failure tbh given it gave footing for a lot of good french tanks after it.
Like OP is asking for bad vehicles that were continued way past the point they should have been scrapped and good vehicles cancelled for one reason or another.
So a bad vehicle that accomplished its goals and was scrapped when it was needed to doesn’t feel like it fits the bill
Just thought of another, the Bishop 25PDR mobile artillery piece, while the gun was underwhelming in every way possible, its mobility was rubbish, as it was on the Valentine Mk.IX chassis I believe, but It had very little vertical gun traverse, meaning the crew or engineers would have to build hills and slopes to even get their shells to impact target.
Still think it would be a fun vehicle to see in war thunder.
Here’s an entrenchment made for it.
One with its crew, but not in their natural habitat of the North African desert
Less than 150 were built, and only produced for a full year before completely switching over to the Sexton, or as the American designation, M7 priest.
