I suspect that building it could be done, but what have you really created? Seems to me you’ve just created a large slow moving target.
Yes I agree with all the posters who say the tank would be useless. I even stated so in the OP. I was just wondering if it was mechanically possible and what sort of engineering issues the builder would run into. Would it be so heavy it sinks? What kind of fuel economy would it get? Would cooling be an issue etc.
I think that these enormous tanks would have made German defeat in Russia a much faster proposition. For one thing, the steel consumed in building these monsters would have made the production of smaller tanks very limited. The immense weight of these things would have made them useless in the Russian mud-I can see them sinking in bogs and being abandoned by their crews. And the gasoline consumption would be eneormous. And any tank is helpless, once the treads have been blown off.
I have this image of BunBun as one of my desktop background pictures.
I guess one of these huge land battleships might have been useful as bait. That is, hide some quad 20mm AAA guns mounted on panzer bodies around the thing and when the Allied attack aircraft made runs at it, the AAA could fire away at the aircraft.
If I remember right, Ringos tavern had an animation of sorts on that design. The image that Der Trihs has, I think was the rev one artist concept, and the guys in the tavern just went to town on how it should look.
Its been a while, but there should be another tank design somewhere, regarding the german tank, in watch on the rhine.
Declan
They kinda tried something like that in the Bay of Biscay : since they had big problems getting their submarines away from England and out in the Atlantic where they were safe-ish, they built a handful of U-Boote bristling with flak guns (from memory, I think it was a pair of flakvierlings and a pair of single guns) to “trick” the Allies into attacking them.
It didn’t work.
Too many planes, the boats were much too fragile, the gunners were not really specialists and completely exposed up there, not to mention shooting flak guns from an unstable platform at rapidly moving targets isn’t the easiest thing in the world to begin with. So the U-Flak would typically just bitch out and dive without even firing a shot, like every other U-boot attacked by airplanes.
Nitpick: the P-1000 Ratte and the P-1500 Monster would have technically been self-propelled artillery, not tanks. In addition to the reasons already mentioned why they would have been unworkable, another was that their sheer size would have made it practical to attack them with high-altitude heavy bombers.