Hello fellow CP'ers.
After I got into a quick discussion on Tanks in another topic, I thought it would be fun to start a thread that looked at some of the crazy weapons that were either put into production or deemed as too stupid to continue. I thought I would try to throw a new topic up every couple of days for debate and to give a little history on it. If you guys are interested in this being an ongoing thing please let me know.
The P-1000 Ratte
Hitler was the evil genius of Superweapons long before George Lucas said, lets make a super laser that destroyed planets. In 1942 while Gernany was still pretty much owning the upper hand in the war Hitler attended a conference where he spoke of his dream of a 1000 ton tank that would literally be a cruiser on land. This Behemoth would literally act as the center piece of armored task forces surrounded by standard tanks. With a heavy 14 inch Steel armor, 2 massive 280 mm basically naval battle ship guns along with a smaller but deadly 128 mm anti armor gun and 10 other machine guns, this beast would be able to barrage targets from an extreme range with devastating fire power while also engaging tank targets in any direction from its massive rotating turret.
Powered by two massive 24 cylinder marine engines that were also used in Submarines the P-1000 would have a respectable speed of about 25 miles an hour.
In terms of concept This thing was a nastier version of
As far as addons, this tank would be equipt with a vehicle bay to hold two motorcycles, multiple storage rooms to supply troops, a fully stocked infirmary and a crew capability of up to 41.
As far as problems with this monster, there were quite a few, it would be fuel hungry devouring massive amounts of diesel to travel under 200 kms. on top of that it wasn't very road worthy and it wouldn't be able to cross rivers using bridges or road ways. To counter this, with its sheer size the German's designed a snorkeling system for the engines, and with its extreme size it would be able to crawl across any river in Europe, and probably lob rounds from France to England.
While the design was on the insane side of things, there was some logic to Hitler's madness in demanding this design. First and foremost it was an indestructible armor combine from hell, designed to crawl across Europe destroying any defenses and act as a siege weapons, at that point in the war there were no weapons capable of pushing through over a foot of steel plated armor. Hitler also had a vision of the P-1000 as a defensive weapon where it could slide into a bunker line and replace destroyed concrete bunkers with a monstrous steel bunker. Of course when he said this his generals probably slapped their forehead, muttered that the Fuhrer knew nothing about mobility war and went back to sipping their coffee angrily.
Fortunately or unfortunately this tank never got off of the drawing board, it was deemed to be nearly impossible to build and if it was would take as long to build as a modern battletank. It was also a over complicated design that couldn't easily be field repaired as most tank crews have to be able to replace treads, fix engines and everything else while under fire.
Sadly the only time we got to see this design in action was in the excellent Red Alert 2 game and by that time it was a Soviet design
Next up the Canon Scooter