Mendelejev 1911 heavy tank, 1/72 cale

[charleswlkr54]

Just noticed something about the original tank (Not your model!) Seems to me this would have had the same problem with the main gun as tghe British Mark I Male had, and that is in crossing the trenches the muzzle would bet ja,,ed in the mud and get plugged up, which is why the British had to shorten the barrles of the 6 pounders the later ones had. Barrel obstructions are not good news!

[CharlieC]

Originally Posted by charleswlkr54

Just noticed something about the original tank (Not your model!) Seems to me this would have had the same problem with the main gun as tghe British Mark I Male had, and that is in crossing the trenches the muzzle would bet ja,,ed in the mud and get plugged up, which is why the British had to shorten the barrles of the 6 pounders the later ones had. Barrel obstructions are not good news!

With a 120mm gun - range about 10000m - the tank probably wouldn't have to try to cross trenches under fire. The war on the Eastern front didn't degenerate into the trench based defensive struggle as it did on the Western front. If this device had been built and deployed my guess is that would have been used like a heavy SPG with additional troops to prepare the ground for movement by filling in trenches, etc.

Regards,

Charlie

[ct ertz]

Yes, true, but remember, when this was designed some French troops still wore baggy red pants and red fez's and short blue and red jackets, and horse cav was still thought a viable field arm. Trench war was not on any ones mind, except for maybe a few old Americans who survived Vicksburg or Petersburge fifty some years earlier. Great field battles were the line of thought. Old style trenches meeting new fangled tech, well there were bound to be difficulties.

Charlie beat my post!

[CharlieC]

Trench warfare was certainly part of military thinking at the end of the 19th century. The Boer war had shown that small numbers of troops well dug in could prevail against much larger forces. The German army had worked out standards for field fortifications in the 1880s and went on the figure out the best type of gun to demolish them. The superiority of the 15cm German howitzer at the start of WW1 was a direct result of years of study and experiment. However, the officer corps of most armies in WW1 seem to have been ill-educated and ill-equipped to fight a modern war. The results, in terms of the grotesque casualty count was almost predictable given the example of the US Civil War some 50 years earlier.

Regards,

Charlie

[ct ertz]

And sadly, the blue-print was there for all. At the battle of Franklin, Tennessee, Union soldiers had breastworks, ditches, and instead of barbed wire they had shrubs of Osage-orange to do the same work. Instead of machine guns they had cannon loaded with double canister. And many of the union men had seven shot Spencer rifles, five shot Colt rifles, or 16 shot Henry rifles. When the Confederates tried to do a frontal attack across open ground, the result was not that much different then some WW1 battles, just on a smaller scale. The South suffered 6200 causalties to the Norths 2300. But a closer look is even more shocking. The death toll for the South was 1750 to the Norths 189. The South lost six Generals killed that day. Although some of the equipment changed, I think many a Civil War vet could have related real well to the WW1 vets.

[Paperwarrior]

...and lets not forget the lessons learned about trench warfare during the Russo-Japanese war. There were some hard lessons learned there. Funny thing is there were many western European observers there, but nobody thought it more than a sideshow....nothing to learn there.

[rebelatsea]

The Russo Turkish war was even more a pointer to things to come at least on land.

[ct ertz]

The new tank supporting the troops at the front!

[Gerald43]

Thank you for model!

[ct ertz]

Thanks for sharing Gerald! It looks like it turned out great!