As I write this, I am in
the third week of a break from blogging. I decided that this was the time and
place for something different that I had really been considering all along, a
post on history and tech. This particular post will be on something I already
covered in a Youtube rant, the Landkreuzer project, and whether giant land
vehicles ever have and ever will be viable.
Now, the facts of the
project mentioned will really be only a prologue here. At some point during
World War 2, there was a request within Nazi Germany for designs for a tracked
vehicle or vehicles weighing over 1000 tons, reportedly at the request of the
Reich’s dictator. Everything from there has been unclear, particularly the
extent to which any of it was taken seriously. At any rate, two major designs
with nominal designations emerge in the lore. One is P1000, a tracked chassis
mounting a battleship turret with 28cm guns. The other is the P1500, a
self-propelled version of the actually built 80cm Gustav railway gun. And this
was the extent of “super tank” development in real life.
But, of course, the idea
has taken on a life of its own in science fiction. Even before the first tanks
were fielded, H.G. Wells portrayed very large armored vehicles in “The Land
Ironclads”. In the 1960s, the concept took on new life with Keith Laumer’s Bolo series, which portrayed the titular battleship-sized, AI-driven tanks with
“hard SF” realism. Giant tanks and tank-like vehicles continued to appear in a
range of subgenres and media, like The Legacy of the Aldenata, Warhammer
40K, and the Kenner Megaforce toy line. I personally threw in my hand with Aliens
Vs. Exotroopers, featuring the 10,000-ton mobile lab Omega Aleph.
Meanwhile, real life intermittently matched fiction with the development of
giant tracked vehicle like NASA’s “crawler” and the Bagger 288 mining machine.
So, was all this ever
“realistic”, either by the minimal definition that such vehicles can be built
and function or in the stricter sense that they could have a useful purpose in
war? On the first question, the answer must be a qualified yes. Vehicles like
the Bagger 288 have exceeded 200 meters in length and 10,000 metric tons in
weight. Given this precedent, there is no reason to doubt that human industry
could build terrestrial military vehicles as large as naval craft if sufficient
demand arose. On the second question, the real question becomes one of
definitions. Of course, one can imagine a far future or alternate universe
where battleship-sized craft launch ICBMs or Harrier jets or railgun slugs able
to reach outer space. But does this meet the definition of a “tank”? This is
where things get complicated, and this is where we can consider something that
was actually built, the Maus tank.
The Maus, in brief, was
an experimental tank developed and built from 1941 to 1944, principally by
Ferdinand Porsche. It was the furthest development of Nazi Germany’s
“superheavy” program. The final prototype weighed 188 metric tons, more than
three times the size of a Tiger I and six times the size of a T34. This made it the largest terrestrial military
vehicle ever built, though it never saw combat. Both a 128mm anti-tank gun and
a 15cm howitzer appear to have been considered for armament, though only the
former is known to have been fitted on a working turret. Tests showed that it
would run reliably, to the dismay of vocal opponents of the project in the Wehrmacht.
However, its highest reported or plausible speed was 20 km per hour, and its
weight posed severe problems for existing infrastructure. This was not, however, the reason that this was an obvious dead end I am annoyed even to have to
talk about.
To see why the Maus was
not workable as a tank, we must consider the problem of armament. It is an observable fact that tank armament
has always plateaued around 12cm, and the exceptions serve to show why this was
the case. The KV-2 was a Soviet attempt to put a full-powered 152mm howitzer in
a rotating turret on an existing heavy tank chassis, but this strained the base
design so severely that it was reportedly prone to tipping over. On the Nazis’
side, the Sturmtiger/ Sturmorser mounted a mindboggling 38cm rocket launcher in
a heavily modified Tiger hull, but it was universally classified as a
self-propelled artillery piece rather than a tank. Finally, the much later
Sheridan light tank mounted a short-barreled 152mm gun originally intended to
launch a missile. Though this weapon was much lower-powered than that of the
KV-2, it still produced severe recoil that could reportedly lift the
lightly-built vehicle off the ground. The utility was further limited by low
ammunition storage capacity. In light of this running problem, the bottom line
for the Maus was that it had more than three times the weight of a more ordinary
armored vehicle, but even with the 15cm gun, it could not offer more than twice
the caliber or killing power of such a vehicle.
That is the practical
problem, which might have been overcome. The deeper one is theoretical. The
conceptual role of a tank is offensive and linear, which in turn means engaging
an enemy at relatively close range. The noted 12cm limit for tank armament is
very much the upper limit for what is necessary or useful in this role. Beyond
that, you are transitioning to indirect fire, a jump as fundamental as that
from a battleship to an aircraft carrier. There is conceptual and tactical room
for a hybrid “howitzer tank” that can do both to some degree, as long as the
fairly specific flaws of the KV-2 and Sheridan are dealt with. However, when
the range of a vehicle’s primary weapon exceeds 16km, the best protection is to
be at least as far from enemy forces of any size. If anything larger than a
reconnaissance vehicle formation is close enough to engage with direct fire,
let alone do so from behind, something has already gone wrong.
And that brings us to by
far the most actually interesting superheavy vehicle of World War 2, the Karl.
This was unarmored platform for a 60cm howitzer originally intended to demolish
the Maginot Line, ultimately used at the siege of Sebastopol and the Polish
uprising. At 11.4 meters long and 125 metric tons, this is the indisputable but
unacknowledged record holder for the largest fully self-propelled vehicle ever
used in open warfare. (And no, the claim that the Maus might have been
used in an improvised last-ditch defense against the Soviets would not change
that.) Its chief defect was that it was more movable than mobile, with a top
speed of 10 kilometers per hour, and depended on rail to move any distance. The
latter limitation specifically prevented its use in the particularly insane
plan to demolish as much as possible of Paris before the German army withdrew
from the city.
With this frame of
reference, what becomes clear is that the P1000 was a non-starter, even factoring in
calculations that the vehicle as designed would have been far more than the
nominal 1000 (metric???) ton weight. Putting a turret on a vehicle this heavily
armed was simply redundant, while full armor would inevitably be too much and
not enough: 10 or 20mm of plate would be enough to protect the crew from small
arms fire, but even the armor of a Maus wouldn’t stop concentrated bombing. The
P1500, on the other hand, was in the realm of the remotely sane. The Reich had
already built not only the Gustav railway gun but more prosaically sized
artillery like the famed and feared “Anzio Annie”, a 283mm railway gun actually
of about the same caliber proposed for the P1000. With that frame of reference,
we can at least figure out how big such a thing would really be.
That does bring us to
some daunting considerations. The Gustav was over 47 meters long and weighed an
astonishing 1,350 metric tons, obviously very close to the nominal 1500 tons
proposed for the Landkreuzer equivalent. It also had 8 distinct sets of wheels.
Anzio Annie, officially the Krupp K5, came in at 218 tons, still well over half
again the weight of a Karl, carried between two sets of wheels. The Karl itself
offers both a plausible means of construction and an “eyeball” range for size:
Just strip down a few Karl platforms to no more than 100 tons each (for some
reason, no precise figures for the platform minus gun are in circulation), and use it to replace at least
one set of wheels on a railway gun. We can therefore extrapolate a weight of
400 to 500 tons for a self-propelled Anzio Annie, which is not a lot more than
the mass for the two Maus tanks known to half been built. For the actual P1500,
on the other hand, we are definitely looking at not less than 4 and possibly
more than eight Karls worth of additional mass. That puts the minimum plausible
weight somewhere between 1800 and 3000 (metric) tons, which is extreme but not
entirely unfeasible.
That leaves the essential
question, what could such a monstrosity actually do? In fact, we can at least
deal with the obvious objections. If you’re already over 400 metric tons, there
would be no reason not to throw in a few machine guns and light cannon for self-defense,
which would be enough to deal with infantry and perhaps lone aircraft. It would
still probably need to use the increasingly bombed-out rail infrastructure for most
of its movement, but it wouldn’t be a sitting duck if there was a hole in the
tracks. As for the usually cited problem of Allied bombing, it could be
camouflaged (and for that matter partly dismantled) against discovery by
routine raids and reconnaissance flights. If it came to that, it would be so
much bigger than anything else that simply hiding in plain sight takes on a
counterintuitive element of plausibility. After all, if your enemy’s common
airmen don’t already know you have a vehicle the size of warehouse with the
armament of a battleship, a weird platform with a giant tube on top isn’t going
to look that much more interesting than a tank factory on the left or a munitions
train on the right.
On the other hand, there
are problems that don’t go away so easily. The existing weapons systems of the
Third Reich were already running into the practical limits of their technology, evidenced
conspicuously in the short barrel life of the Gustav guns. At the same time,
there were technologies that were still unavailable, notably practical submunitions.
(As I go into in the video version of this, the most significant experiment on
that vein was, of all things, the United States’ surreal “X Ray” program to
develop bat-deployed explosive devices.) Finally and most fundamentally, as
seen with the Karl and the Sturmtiger, the Third Reich was simply running out
of useful targets that weren’t already bombed to rubble. Given enough lead time,
they could have turned a formations of Landkreuzers on the urban centers of
Leningrad and Stalingrad, the concentrated armored forces at Kursk, and even
the landing craft at Normandy. But without a nuclear bomb they didn’t have or
chemical weapons even the Austrian painter feared to use, they probably weren’t
going to do more damage than they could have with the same tonnage of Stukas, Panther
tanks and V2s.
So, what of the future of
the super-heavy military vehicle? The self-evident reality is that, for as many
times as the tank has been proclaimed “dead”, there is still nothing better for
what tanks are actually meant to do. Indeed, even tasks well outside a tank’s
role, from carrying troops to launching ICBMs, have proven feasible for
vehicles not greatly different in size and configuration. To get to a vehicle
ten or more times the size of a tank, we would have to envision either a new mode
of combat, an exceptional new threat, or both. Short of slugging it out with aliens in low orbit, any mission parameters we could envision would probably
lead to a vehicle very different from what we would call a tank. Again, the
tactical and conceptual leaps could be as great as that from a battleship to an
aircraft carrier (maybe literally with VTOL aircraft and now drones in the
equation), and we are free to admit we may not know what’s on the other side
until we get there. The responsibility of the futurist is to think outside the
box, and we are definitely due for something more than a battleship on tracks.
Dream big, and reach for the sky… Just watch out for whatever is coming back
down.
