I understand the Germans in WWII had plans to build a 1500 ton tanks called the Landkreuzer P 1500 Monster. It would have a crew of possible 100 men, the largest cannon ever, etc.
The project was scrapped before it got of the drawing board. I imagine the tank would be terrifying, but not very useful. I assume spending the resources to make several Panzers or Tigers would get you much more bang for your buck.
However, the question I’m asking is, could we build it today from a pure mechanical standpoint? Would it be able to move under it’s own power and fire it’s cannon? Assume money is no object. The only similar project I can think of is the crawler that moved the space shuttle. Basically, we know it was a bad idea, but was it possible at the time and would it be possible now?
It’s easy to name a bunch of compelling reasons why such a tank would make no sort of sense. But it’s hard to come up with any reason such a thing would be mechanically impossible.
The Bagger series of excavators are larger and heavier, and are self-propelled, though I don’t know at what speeds. It’s not strictly comparable to a tank, but I’d guess that many of the same mechanical issues are similar.
The name of that tank is too long, its easier to call it BunBun
Concidering that the crawler that moved the saturn five rocket into position, sounds like its doable, speed at one mile an hour possibly due to a vertical rocket, so if the rocket is not carried, Im sure that carrier could move faster.
How big a gun do you want, (note in some locations, this is a stupid question). Smaller gun, more shells, bigger gun , less shells. Something to keep in mind when you want to go 8,12,14,or 16 inch. You need the shell plus the propellant bags.
Mission dictates equipment, so this is now a self propelled coastal defense battery.
You’re not thinking big enough. Build it bigger and it can just cross rivers by driving straight through without a bridge. While you’re at it chuck a nuclear reactor inside it to power it and how about we call them Ogres?
Pardon the hijack, but this seems as good a place any to post a notice.
If you are a military vehicle buff in the SF Bay Area, you should make an effort to visit theMilitary Vehicle Technology Foundation (world’s largest privately-owned collection of military vehicles) ASAP. The collection has been transferred to the Collings Foundation and most of the tanks and other vehicles will be shipped back east within six months or so to be auctioned off.
For the OP’s question, why would you need such a gigantic vehicle today? Even if you could do it, and get something that looks like the crawler and has to travel on a precise path, what would be the point? Use precision guidance and you can get away with a much smaller weapon. Though in some instances there really is no substitute for 7 tons plunging at ~1800 feet per second.
Indeed, Schwerer Gustav only fired 48 rounds in anger at Sevastopol which wore out the original barrel; 250 rounds had previously been fired in testing. While the individual rounds effects were impressive; its entire combat career was 48 rounds fired in 12 days, an average of 1 round every 6 hours. That’s not even taking into account that it took from early March 1942 until 5 June 1942 to move the beast from the Isthmus of Perekop to a position and ready it to fire on Sevastopol including building a railway spur for it. It’s sister gun Dora apparently never fired a single shot in anger; add to that that they required a crew of 250 to physically assemble the guns to fire, 2,500 men to lay track and dig embankments and each had 2 entire flak battalions assigned to them to protect them from air attack.
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Indeed, Schwerer Gustav only fired 48 rounds in anger at Sevastopol which wore out the original barrel; 250 rounds had previously been fired in testing. While the individual rounds effects were impressive; its entire combat career was 48 rounds fired in 12 days, an average of 1 round every 6 hours. That’s not even taking into account that it took from early March 1942 until 5 June 1942 to move the beast from the Isthmus of Perekop to a position and ready it to fire on Sevastopol including building a railway spur for it. It’s sister gun Dora apparently never fired a single shot in anger; add to that that they required a crew of 250 to physically assemble the guns to fire, 2,500 men to lay track and dig embankments and each had 2 entire flak battalions assigned to them to protect them from air attack.
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Yes, yes, objections and caveats duly noted Herr Feldmarschal. You keep not focusing on the key part of the Führer’s visionary genius : this thing fires shells the size of a bleeding house and weighing several tons. If we build it, none shall dare question Germany’s e-peen ever again.
Harry Turtledove had a scene with the Dora gun in his Worldwar series. A race of aliens with advanced technology invaded Earth in the middle of WWII. The Germans in the middle of the Soviet Union were fighting them and launched a bombardment against the alien base with the Dora gun.
The aliens tried to defend their base with their sophisticated anti-missile defenses. But the Dora’s 800mm shell was essentially immune - it was just a big chunk of metal flying through the air. Defenses designed to knock out electronic guidance systems or tear up delicate aluminum casings just bounced off the shell without effect.
At the heart of the problem is the way in which the square-cube rule and the law of diminishing returns prevents things being scaled up linearly.
A street bike can be propelled by a one man-powered powerplant. It can function on supension made up of compressed air in the tyres. Scaling up to a motor bike requires an IC engine and piston suspension, representing a sort of disjunctive phase change as one scales up. To carry further passengers requires four wheels, a bigger engine, spring suspension and new tech such as wheeled steering, differentials, etc.
Moving heavy goods requires, for at least economic reasons, the concept of the prime mover and trailer. And now note that at this point, weight and engine power is still increasing, but straight line speed and acceleration have started to go down. The current end of the line are the massive drag lines used for mining coal that must move very slowly on banks of modular, co-ordinated assemblies of tracked bots in order to be moved intact any distance across the countryside, and then only at walking pace.
I expect that a real problem would be suspension. WWII tanks were already hard on their suspension components, because of the weight and speed which were by definition required of tanks. Scaling a tank up to 1500 tons is likely to trigger one of those phase changes, where conventional tank suspension scaled up would be so robust and heavy as to materially contribute to the weight problem it was itself trying to deal with, thereby causing a runaway destructive feedback loop.
It is not a given that there is an engineering solution to this that can make such a tank run at practical speeds on realistically rough terrain. It may ultimately be a materials issue - steel may not be not sufficiently light in any configuration to do the job, and there is no other material with the strength lightness and reliability to replace it.
I just saw a documentary on the Panzer VIII yesterday which is a weird co-incidence with this thread popping up. I am amazed they ever got to the stage of making two prototypes. There just seems to have been so many problems with the basic concept it’s difficult to see how it ever got off the drawing board. In particular having to be operated in pairs in order to be able to cross rivers strikes me as nuts. So what happens if one of the pair gets knocked out? You then have one very large tank that is not going to be able to move with you once you need to make a river crossing.
It seems amazing to me at a time when air power was becoming the dominant force on the battle field that someone decided to make tanks that would be much easier to hit.
The documentary I was watching is on the below for anyone interested.
It also covers the Landkreuzer P 1500 briefly. Not the best documentary ever but reasonably interesting in places.
That is what sprung to my mind, having just finished re-reading the series a couple weeks ago.
In the book they did run into transportation issues with Bun-Bun, crossing a mountain pass became an issue because they more or less bogged down because of the uneven rock walls of the pass being sort of convoluted and just barely wide enough for them to pass, they hit a snag and ended up slightly crosswise and at an odd angle that prevented them from being able to move quickly.
So you have specialized land vehicles that could weight up to 15,000 tonnes. Answer to the OP: yes, but what for? A tank that big, when crossing the river, is vulnerable to torpedo attack.
