Tank Goodness

"Ready to unleash eleven barrels of hell!"

"Yea verily, though I charge through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am driving a house-sized mass of fuck you."

—Anonymous Mammoth Tank crewman, Tiberium Wars

"Your foe is well-equipped, well-trained, battle-hardened. He believes his gods are on his side. Let him believe what he will. We have the tanks on ours."

—Colonel Joachim Pfeiff, 14th Krieg Panzer Regiment, Warhammer 40,000

In large modern warfare engagements, infantry may as well be Cannon Fodder. You want something that can Hold the Line. Something with a BFG, crawler treads and tons of armor. You want a tank.

Real Life tanks have large cannons to take on other tanks and fortifications, and (usually) secondary weapons to deal with infantry or aircraft. In fiction, other tanks may use anti-infantry or anti-aircraft weapons instead of cannons.[1] The tank's size and mobility may also be used as a weapon to crush people, cars, and walls. The armor is thick enough to stop small arms fire, most of it in the front, with the weakest areas being the rear, bottom and top. Expect enemies to take advantage of this For Massive Damage.

Of course, the above paragraph refers to tanks around the size of today's main battle tanks. Sometimes that's not enough. They need to be bigger! Big enough to crush the other tanks! And carry loads of weapons! While racing donuts around them! No, we're not compensating for anything!

Other armored fighting vehicles, like armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery and tank destroyers may be called tanks. They're not. Don't be fooled! Likewise, don't listen to the deranged lunatics who keep wanting to put legs on them. Ridiculously impractical, that.

Related to Cool Car, Cool Bike, Cool Train, Base on Wheels, and other vehicle/warfare tropes—this is basically Cool Tank. Has nothing to do with Shorttank, which makes you say Tank Goodness in a completely different way. Also has nothing to do with playing a damage-sponge character in an MMORPG, or with the oxygen storage unit strapped to the back of a SCUBA diver.

For armed tank-like vehicles, which have legs instead of good ol' treads, see Spider Tank. For ones which float, see Hover Tank. For ones that can travel underground, see Drill Tank. When the military geniuses of the world finally realize there is no firepower like battleship firepower, one may witnesses the ultimate tanks: Land Battleships.

When tanks are useless in media, see Tanks for Nothing. For inaccuracies with armoured vehicles, historical and otherwise, see Tanks, But No Tanks.

If you looked up Mechanized Infantry and expected to see a giant robot with a gun, try looking up Real Robot instead.

Examples of Tank Goodness include:

Anime and Manga

  • Guntanks from Mobile Suit Gundam were the secret weapons of the earth forces, more or less, and bridged the gap between mobile suits and mobile armor. Guntank descendants also pop up in Zeta Gundam (Guntank II), Gundam Unicorn (Loto) and Mobile Suit Gundam F91 (Guntank R44).
    • Gundam also uses Land Battleships in many continuities.
    • Oh, and we can't forget the Magella Attack, a tank with a turret(Magella Top) that can detach and become a flying hovercraft.that can only fly for less than 5 minutes and often find the Magella Bottom destroyed by enemy fire since it was unprotected and with minimal armament with its 3 barrel 30mm gatlings and crash for running out of fuel
      • Or wielded as an anti-armor cannon by a mobile suit.what can you do with the ones that crashed other than this?
      • Zeon also rigged together wrecked Zakus and Magella Botton chassis to form the Zaku Tank. Sometimes just used as a construction machine, sometimes as an actual fighting vehicle.
    • Don't forget the good'o Type 61, with its double 150/155mm cannons, got its own Crowning Moment of Awesome in MS Igloo 2, King of Ground battles.
    • Speaking of Igloo, the Hidolfr pretty much epitomizes the top quote from this page. Just one of these 220 Metric ton, super-heavy-armored, semi-transforming behemoths with a top speed of 110km/hr is a match for about six Zakus and their artillery support.
    • In the Alternate Universes, we have the Tragos (Gundam Wing, also a Hover Tank), Daughtress Tank (Gundam X), ZuOOT/GaZuOOT and, Linear Tank (with its hexagonal INNER barrel; railguns don't need rifling, after all), and in a sense, the BuCUE and RaGOWE (Gundam Seed) and Union Realdo Hover Tank (Mobile Suit Gundam 00).
  • The minitank Bonaparte from Masamune Shirow's Dominion Tank Police manga is a partial Aversion. The whole police force uses tanks and the Bonaparte is the smallest one, and has the lightest weaponry. But it pulls its share of the workload partially because of its small size (it can go places the others cannot), and because its driver is a little crazed.
    • Bonaparte was made from the salvaged remains of a larger tank, Squad Leader Britain's Tank Special. It was the only tank on the force made from steel instead of bioplastic.
  • In the "Cannon Fodder" segment of Memories there's an entire city that is effectively one gigantic tank. It sports many, many turrets of all sizes built into its structure and creeps slowly through the desert on treads. The biggest turrets have entire work-crews loading and firing automobile-sized shells but only get off a few shots per day. They appear to be at war with a similar city-tank, though it's never seen on screen.
  • Southern Cross (a.k.a. the "Masters" arc of Robotech) had the Spartas Hovertanks, which could transform into Humongous Mecha and Walking Tank modes.
  • Those Who Hunt Elves has a tank possessed by the spirit of a cat. Whole towns are devastated when it spots a mouse.
  • Pumpkin Scissors has a number of tanks. Too bad none of them can stand up to one guy and his handgun...
  • Space Thunder Kids shows that one can never have enough tanks. Now to destroy them to victory!
  • Desert Punk features the massive tank Fire Dragon Kong. It was the most dangerous machine in the desert, but Desert Punk managed to beat it by shooting a rock structure down on it, then the Machine Gun Brothers shot it until they hit the gas tank and it exploded. Until then, it was pretty freaking deadly.
  • During Mustang's coup d'etat in the manga version of Fullmetal Alchemist, one of the military men, while commenting on the opposition's fighting power, remarks that it's not like they have tanks. Guess what shows up a few panels later.
    • Earlier in the series, Maj. General Armstrong used a tank to repel Sloth, driving it into a freight elevator, then down a narrow corridor, nearly crushing the Elrics in the process.
  • At the beginning of Venus Wars, Ishtar invades the Aphrodian capital, Io, using parachuting Superheavy tanks.
  • Future War 198X has an awesome (and fairly accurate) huge tank battles on the North German Plains.
  • In later light novels of Zero no Tsukaima, Saito obtains a King Tiger II tank from second world war.
  • In the Ah! My Goddess manga, Skuld builds a tank for a rubber band fight.
  • Girls und Panzer. Tank battles can be awesome and adorable at the same time.


Comic Books

  • The vehicle that gives Tank Girl her name.
  • Y: The Last Man. After Alter's first attempt to seize the biohazard suite is foiled due to Russian sniper Natalya, the next time she shows up her Amazon Brigade is driving stolen M1 Abrams tanks.
  • Tank Vixens, although the tanks mostly served as a prop for weaponized Fan Service.
  • The Silver Age DC Universe's Haunted Tank. A World War II tank haunted by a Confederate General. Which ends up with a black crew member.
    • Haunted Tank recently reappeared in a Vertigo series.


Fan Works

  • Considering the page quote, it should come as no surprise that badass tanks are common in Tiberium Wars. Tanks are depicted fairly realistically, with the interior of the tanks being cramped, noisy, and hot, and realistic tank tactics being used. The interior of the Mammoth Tanks are described as being more spacious, but still loud and uncomfortable.
  • Despite the rise of Mecha and Engels, tanks are still viable and effective in Aeon Entelechy Evangelion, and the tank crews joke about various disadvantages of the mecha and boast about the advantages of the tanks.


Film

  • Star Wars has hovertanks as well as relatively real Humongous Mecha.
    • The Expanded Universe (and Episode 3) has the Juggernaut vehicle, which could be turned into a full-fledged tank just by replacing the wheels (all ten of them) with tracks. It's essentially a slab of metal with guns.
    • The AT-TE of Episode 2 is designed very similarly to a tank despite technically being a mecha, with a low profile, multiple antipersonnel weapons, no real head, and a massively powerful swivel-mounted weapon on top. If you removed the legs, it'd be identical to a tank.
      • If you removed the legs, it'd be identical to a small hill. You'd have to add treads...
      • If you pull the legs remember to patch up that hole between the front and rear sections because getting one shot in there is going to be a real bummer. Oh, and whoever decide big glass cockpit were the way to go ought to have been shot.
  • James Bond himself commandeers one of these in the big chase in GoldenEye
    • The third level from GoldenEye 007, where you must find a plane in a runway and escape from the dam, also lets you shoot down the heavy machineguns with a tank. (there is also the level based on the movie's chase scene, but it's just a timed level, no chasing occurs)
  • When the Batmobile in Batman Begins was first revealed to the world, fan opinion was mixed. Then the movie came out. Gordon wants one.

"It's a black... tank."

  • The Beast of War is about a Soviet tank in Afghanistan that becomes separated from the rest of the army. As the lone tank battles through mujahadeen guerrilla attacks, its crew slowly tears itself apart.
  • The Sgt Bilko movie had a hover-tank which didn't work because firing the gun produced so much force that it couldn't be controlled. They faked it with some fireworks.
    • Of course, the movie ends before the military figures out they've been duped. It's not clear why they can't be satisfied with a hover-APC, as it can simply fly over landmines and Czech hedgehogs.
  • In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Sultan of a fictional Arab nation lends support to the Nazi Grail expedition by providing them with transportation including tanks. The film shows one modified WWI tank, a Mark VIII with a turret dropped on top with the Rule of Cool.
    • Hatay was not a fictional nation (nor was it Arab). It merely existed for one year before willingly being absorbed into Turkey.
  • The Landram was used in the Pilot Movie of the original Battlestar Galactica Classic to save some humans from the Cylon rigged Casino on planet Carolon.
  • UltraSeven featured the Dinosaur Tank as an antagonist. This was Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
  • Rambo used one in Part 3 to play chicken with a gunship.
  • Kelly's Heroes features some great tank action. The soldiers have on their side Oddball, a proto-hippie tank commander with three Shermans manned by gypsies. The Shermans provide the backbone of the group's offense along the way to the loot, which is guarded by German Tiger tanks. A big tank battle ensues, but ultimately the final Tiger is just too much to handle, so the soldiers negotiate with the German tank commander to split the loot he's guarding.
  • The a Team movie (as seen in the trailer) involves a battle between a tank and airplanes. Said tank is is in midair, in the middle of parachuting down. Awesome.
    • And after they shoot down said aircraft, what do they do next? They fire the tank's cannons to adjust its course and allow for a safe landing. They are flying a goddamn tank.
  • In Tank, James Garner's character uses a WWII Sherman tank he'd bought and restored to break his son out of prison, then drives it to the Tennessee border to seek a fair trial for his son and others framed by a corrupt Georgia sheriff.
  • The animated Korean film Aachi and Ssipak starts out with a tank battle between police and a gang of mutants who drive small one-man tank, motorcycle, roller blade machines. Yeah, they're hard to describe and yes, the cartoon is weird.
  • Captain America: The First Avenger has several examples. HYDRA's armored vehicles powered by MAGIC! are everywhere, and stolen by Allied troops to even the playing field. Captain America himself highlights a primary flaw in size escalation when he takes out a comically-oversized three-story tank (A modified German Maus, which actually existed, and was actually that big, though in the real war only two hulls and one turret were ever built and none of them made it to the battlefield) with the classic Insert Grenade Here.
  • In the 1987 homage/parody Dragnet, Friday assaults the bad guys' headquarters with the police version of this; instead of a gun, the tank sports a battering ram with a smiley-face on it.


Literature

  • The Bolo series in Keith Laumer's stories, especially the Continental Siege Units (the Mark XXXIII's were called Planetary Siege Units). Their firepower is usually given in megatons per second and have an AI far above human level in both intelligence and ethics. And don't even get started on the Planetary Siege Units that are deployed in independent brigades of 24 units each!
  • David Drake's Hammer's Slammers stories.
  • Michael Moorcock's The Land Leviathan
  • Discworld featured a steam tank of sorts in Small Gods—notably, because its existence was enough to shift the balance of power and change history, Lu Tze of the History Monks sabotaged its construction.
  • "Bun Bun" in John Ringo's Posleen War Series. See also the Tiger IIIs from the Posleen War Series novel Watch on the Rhine, by Tom Kratman.
    • Bun Bun (and the rest of the She Va vehicles) are self-propelled artillery, not tanks. It may be ridiculously big, but it carries a battleship's gun and very little armor for its size.
  • Averted in the Starfist military sci-fi series, thanks to the development of highly effective and extremely light man-portable anti-armor weapons making heavily armored vehicles obsolete. This actually drives the plot of one of the novels - a megalomaniac manages to conquer a world with tanks, which nobody has seen for literally centuries, and the anti-armor weapons are now museum pieces. The military is forced to use said museum pieces to manufacture new copies, and have to have history professors instruct the Marines in their use. They do put a permanent order to maintain the anti-armor capability as well. How precisely these weapons are supposed to be effective when you're engaging a combined arms force where the tanks are firing from multiple kilometers away is not addressed.
  • H. G. Wells, anyone? He laid out the concept of tanks ("landships") and their coming dominance in wars in his 1904 short-story "The Land Ironclads", widely believed the inspiration for subsequent development of the real thing over the next 4 decades. That's right: he wrote a story about tanks before there were tanks.
    • Beaten to the pop by Da Vinci, although said tank was about as close to today's machines as a galleon is to the Bismark.
  • Robert A. Heinlein's "If This Goes On—" -- story has these. They are sort of "landships". His novel The Puppet Masters has amphibious tanks or "mud turtles".
    • To get an idea of the "landships", think of a WW 2 battleship that goes overland like a tank!
  • The Draka Hond tank is the king of the battlefield in the Eurasian War, and the Draka produce them in Soviet Union-like numbers from their massive transcontinental empire.
  • The Sovremenyy. the Russian jaggernaut (ice cruiser) rumbling across the south polar plains in Swedish dieselpunk novel Iskriget.
  • Fyodor Berezin is in love with this trope. As an example, the modern Soviet tanks from an alternate reality in his Red Stars duology (where the USSR dominates the world) are four-tracked monstrocities with huge cannons. This is explained by the fact that USSR struck first in World War Two, destroying Germany's military-industrial complex instead of the Soviet one, allowing factories to keep building heavier and heavier tanks, like KV-3, and KV-4 (for reference, the Real Life KV-2 was armed with a howitzer cannon and 5 of these obliterated over 20 German tanks in one battle).
  • While this seems to be the case with the Race landcruisers in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series, they're no more (and probably less) advanced than modern-day tanks. However, they're monsters in the books' World War Two setting, compared to what the human "empire and not-empires" can put out. The shells are laser—sorry, skelkwank-guided and can punch through any human armor. As mentioned by several characters on both sides, had the Race arrived only a generation later (as some of them wanted), the humans would've wiped the floor with them.
  • World War Z: HEAVILY Averted at the Battle of Yonkers. Tanks do very little to kill the massive hoard of zombies that start flooding the bridge.


Live Action TV


Music

  • Ghost Division and Panzer Battalion by Sabaton are odes to tank units.
  • Achtung Panzer by Raubtier is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: tanks are coming, "Feel the armored fist", as the chorus says.


Tabletop Games

  • Warhammer 40,000 takes this Trope and makes sweet, sweet love to it. All races have access to some form of armored death machine, with the exception of the Tyranids (who have a broad variety of armored death biomechanoids, but they all walk, crawl, hover, fly or slither rather than rolling). But it is the Imperial Guard who have access to the widest range of vehicles - from the ubiquitous Leman Russ main battle tank and Chimera armored personnel carrier/infantry fighting vehicle to the Baneblade super-heavy tank, pictured above in all its glory (yes, it really does have eleven barrels of hell.[2]) Then there's the Shadowsword, which is basically a Baneblade chassis housing a Volcano cannon—usually the main armament of Titans the size of buildings. As for the other armies, the Space Marines and their Chaos counterparts (who can daemonically possess their tanks) have access to Predator tanks based on the Rhino APC along with the awesome troop transport/battle tank that is the Land Raider, while the Eldar and Tau use highly maneuverable skimmer tanks, although they tend to take their personnel carriers and turn them into tanks by adding an appropriately powerful gun that removes the capacity to carry troops. The Orks? Well, they use cobbled-together battlewagons and looted Imperial vehicles that shouldn't even be able to move, let alone fight in combat. The Necrons have the titanic Monolith, a horribly-beweaponed flying tomb that is ludicrously hard to kill.
    • See also the treadhead thread.
      • A lot of the credit also has to go to Forge World, which is apparently what happens when you give Warhammer 40K fans/World War II buffs a Games Workshop license and a load of resin. Even counting old discontinued designs, they're responsible for about half the tanks of the Imperial Guard, and up to 70% of the tanks for the Eldar and Tau.
    • The Imperial Guard's Leman Russ has to be considered the most successful design of them all though, in terms of overall utility and practicality (Baneblades may be powerful, but are exceedingly rare and used sparingly). The vanilla Leman Russ is already an excellent vehicle that is powerful against infantry (even Space Marines) with a decent anti-vehicle punch, but it can be customized using a wide variety of variants. The long-barreled Vanquisher, for example, is an excellent tank killer, while the Exterminator mows through infantry like a scythe through wheat.
      • There are now at least 7 variants of the Leman Russ in the codex, as well as an equal number of artillery tanks, including one that has a nuke as its standard armament.
      • The Space Wolves used to get the Exterminator variant, in tribute to the face that the Leman Russ is named after their Primarch, Leman Russ.
    • Many mid-sized tanks based on the humble but very reliable Rhino chassis, an APC based on a tractor template that can run on practically anything, from jet fuel to wood.
    • With the 5th ed. Imperial Guard Codex, the Guard now have Tank squads, meaning they can have up to eighteen tanks (compared to three for most armies)
      • Also meaning Lord Castellan Creed can infiltrate them
      • In addition, almost every single Space Marine (and Chaos Space Marine) army can take a ridiculous number of Land Raiders (due to them being Dedicated Transports). The Blood Angels and Deathwing are the biggest violators, the former capable of taking a whopping 17 Land Raiders (one for every choice on the list) while the latter is at a humbler 12. Blood Angels also take this trope Up to Eleven and Airdrop every single tank into battle. If 17 adamantium boxes of death filled with supersoldiers isn't enough to make you shit your pants, imagine them raining from the skies like bird poop.
    • One Tau tactic relied on using their antigrav transports as a protector from incoming fire; the enemy couldn't charge them without going through the tank first, but the Fire Warriors could "pewpewpew" their targets with impunity.
      • The infamous Fish of Fury and its variant the Double Fish of Fury.
    • Another Rhino variant, the Exorcist Tank used by the Sisters of Battle has a single weapon that fires a random number of missiles per turn, going up to six at once. Any one of these missiles can destroy any tank in a standard game, and all six at once can utterly decimate elite infantry squads. It's quite the popular choice for that army.
  • Even Warhammer Fantasy Battle Fantasy gets a slice of the action with the Steam Tanks.
  • Twilight 2000 lets you come out of character creation with your squad having an M1 or a Challenger II (mentioned above); unfortunately in the context of the game this is likely to prove Awesome but Impractical.
  • The Ogre in Steve Jackson Games' wargame of the same name is a computer-controlled mobile fortress with a size measured in acres.
    • The main and secondary guns of an Ogre fire SATNUC rounds. That's SATuration NUclear Cluster; a round splits into submunitions over the target, each of which takes a split second to aim, and then detonate, producing a shaped charge of nuclear plasma.
    • The Biphase Carbide armor of the Ogre is several meters thick. It cannot be breached even by nuclear weapons. The only hope a defense force might have of stopping one is to destroy its exposed tractor-treads—and even these require nukes to put a dent in them. Of course, good luck getting your forces in close enough to do damage to its treads; the Ogre's arsenal can vaporize a whole tank battalion without even blinking.
  • Another miniatures game: Brigade Models makes a game called Land Ironclads, which takes ground combat to a World War I as forseen by H. G. Wells and friends. They explore a world where tank combat did as these futurists expected, and followed the same model as their present-day naval combat, with scout tanks, cruiser tanks, and dreadnought-tanks.
  • The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game has a few tanks, such as Oni Tank T-34
  • While BattleTech unabashedly assigns the 'king of the battlefield' role to its Humongous Mecha, conventional combat vehicles are still very much in evidence and frequently use the very same engines, armor, and weapons that BattleMechs do. Well-designed tanks in particular (available in hover, tracked, and occasionally wheeled, though the last seriously suffers in terms of terrain restrictions) can readily match 'Mechs of comparable weight in terms of firepower; the 'Mechs' primary advantages are superior terrain handling and toughness (due mainly to having more hit locations to soak up damage and even being able to lose some and still walk off the battlefield), not arbitrarily bigger and better guns. Tanks, meanwhile, are canonically cheaper and easier to produce...
    • Epitomized by the Demolisher series of tanks. Massive tanks ranging from 80 to 100 tons carrying dual Autocannon-20s, some of the largest ballistic weapons in the game, and with enough armor to weather assaults. In the canon, it was specifically designed to hunt and kill BattleMechs, which it could do readily—few units, even in the assault weight class like the Demolisher, can carry two AC/20s, and even fewer can shake off a hit from just one of those cannons.
  • In Weird War Two, a dice and paper WWII RPG which basically mixes myth, horror, and WWII, there are demonically possessed Nazi tanks from hell. There are also super haunted ghost tank hunters for the allies. These tanks can have special abilities and Special Ammo. Tanks in this game are downright deadly to anyone not sporting big guns or lots of infantry with AT weapons. So having a tank on your side is Tank Goodness.
  • Paranoia has the Mark IV Warbot, designed by R&D in hopes of replacing the entire Armed Forces. While Nigh Invulnerable to conventional firepower, it can be disabled by attacking its bot brain (including an overzealous scrubot with a steel scrub brush, and an inferiority complex due to a barometer falling off), or flat-out destroyed by firing into a thermal exhaust port. At one point, another Alpha Complex captures one and renames it the OGREbot (a Shout-Out to the Steve Jackson game).
  • The Tank form in Mekton gets you a 2pt bonus to your armour and lets you appoint either the 'head' or the 'torso' to have a 360 degree arc of fire as the turret. Of course, you can also build a mecha that turns INTO a tank, thereby getting Humongous Mecha and Tank Goodness bonuses at the same time.
  • Rifts first introduced tanks to the game in the Traix and the NGR Sourcebook, and has pretty much made a point in outfitting nearly every country on the planet since with outrageous tanks to go along with their Powered Armor and Humongous Mecha. The standout examples include the Karthum-Terek, a massive tank with guns capable of harming starships and enough redundancy built in that it literally has to be blown to pieces in order to destroy it, and the Neo-Abrams, which manages to combine both realistic practicality (by real-world standards, no less!) and overwhelming munchkinism in the same package.
  • Dystopian Wars has a large number of War Machines. For scale, a Small Tank base is the size of a Modern Tank. A Land Ship in game is so large they can mount Saint Paul's Catherdral on it's chassis.

Video Games

  • A very early example was the simple, 4-bit graphics of the tanks games in Combat for the Atari 2600.
  • The 1980 Coin Op game Battlezone 1980 had you driving a tank against other tanks in a first person view.. The US Army expressed enough interest that it was the first basis for electronic simulators.
    • For the 1998 Activision Battlezone 1998, these are hovering tanks thanks to Bio-Metal
  • Act of War RTS brings all kind of cool tanks including Real Life the T-80 and Abrams, along with the more exotic stealth tank Akula and the S.P.I.N.N.E.R, a drone vehicle also capable to convert into an AA platform or a suicide bomb drone factory.
  • Command & Conquer is probably the RTS series with the most tanks ever created, in all sizes and tastes, ranging from the mundane to the fantastical. A number of them meld elements of other established unit types, and some of them are called tanks even though they would be classified differently in Real Life. Story-wise, whenever a new technology is developed or revealed, there's usually a version of it mounted on a tank.
    • C&C games are particularly notorious for the fact that most of their tanks do not have a dedicated anti-infantry weapon to compliment their primary weapon.[3] As part of the strategic balance, the player has to bring along dedicated anti-infantry support. While in many cases the tanks can use their weapons to damage infantry, the most reliable anti-infantry tactic is to run them over (with a very satisfying splat). In fact, some of the bigger tanks turn this into an anti-tank tactic, as they're capable of driving right over smaller ones!
    • The double-barreled Mammoth Tank is one of the series' mascots, lovingly referred to as the "Mammy" by fans. It appears in some form or fashion in just about every title:
      • In the Tiberium universe, it's first built by GDI in the First Tiberium War. Almost every Tiberium RTS featured a new iteration of the tank, except for Tiberian Sun, in which Mammoth Tanks from Tiberian Dawn were bonus or recoverable units.
      • In the Red Alert universe, it's a Soviet tank from Great World War II (Red Alert 1, taking place between 1946~1953). In Red Alert 2 onward, this became the Apocalypse tank, and by Red Alert 3, the tank traded its Mammoth Tusk missiles for a magnetic harpoon and armor-eating grinder.
      • The Generals equivalent is the Overlord tank, built by the Chinese. Each individual Overlord could have its own secondary system built in; a bunker for soldiers, gatling guns to deal with infantry and aircraft, or a propaganda tower to boost morale. It can also drive right over top of lesser tanks, destroying them in the process.
    • In the Tiberium universe, the Brotherhood of Nod's Stealth Tank is another staple and mascot, with its trademark cloaking device giving it the ability to decloak, spew missiles, and cloak immediately afterward.
      • The Allies of the Red Alert universe have an analogue in the Mirage Tank, which uses Heat Cannons in RA2 and Prism Cannons in RA3—but in both games, it disguises itself as nearby objects (trees in RA2) and can fire even when disguised!
    • In the Red Alert universe, the Soviets have had a Tesla Tank in each of the three major wars (not necessarily in every game, though). Much like their base defenses, they're all about Shock and Awe.
    • Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge has the Mastermind, a giant brain in a tank that Brainwashes any enemy organic ground units that get too close. Which can backfire if it controls too many.
    • The GDI faction Zone Operations Command (ZOCOM) in Kane's Wrath gets the Mammoth Armed Reclamation Vehicle (MARV), the big mommy of all Mammies—it's a humongous tank with three main sonic cannons, four secondary turrets whose function changes with the unit inside, and a fully functional on-board Tiberium refinery.
  • The Landmaster from Star FOX. In Super Smash Bros Brawl, The Landmaster is available as part of Fox, Wolf, and Falco's Final Smashes.
  • The Battlefield 2 mod Project Reality gives the player no less than eight different playable tanks, ranging from the rustbucket T62 & T72 all the way up to the cutting edge, hell on treads M1A2 Abrams and Challenger 2.
  • The Siege Tank from StarCraft. In competitive play, it makes up the backbone of about 4/5ths of viable Terran strategies. Most range of any unit in the game, check. Most single attack damage of any unit (other than one that costs money to use), check. It transforms into self-propelled artillery, check.
    • They get even better in the sequel with MORE range, MORE firepower (against most units) and an even cooler transform.
    • StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty's campaign has giant tanks as well, which you can get as mercenaries.
  • Steel Beasts is a tank simulator that has painstakingly accurate depictions of various tanks from around the world. It originally focused on the American M1A1 Abrams and Leopard 2A4, but has expanded to include other NATO and Warsaw Pact tanks including the Challenger 2, T72, and newer versions of the Abrams and Leopard 2. The development staff included real-life tank crews, and the simulator is so realistic that come countries even use specialized versions to train their own tankers.
  • Also: the Scorpion Tank from Halo. "66 tons of HE-spewin', ceramic-titanium armored, dee-vine intervention!" Comes with 90mm or (novels only) 105mm main gun.
    • Halo 3 says it best: Tank beats EVERYTHING!
      • And in Halo Wars, the super upgrade for Scorpion Tanks turns them into a Mammoth Tank expy called the Grizzly, featuring the double barrelled turret and quadruple treads. Dedicated anti-vehicle counters and aircraft tend to at best break even with them.
      • The campaign also has the M-145D Mobile Artillery Assault Platform, AKA "Rhino". It's based on the Scorpion chassis, but is armed with a plasma howitzer. And yes, it can destroy a Scarab with half-a-dozen shots. Too bad you can't build them in skirmishes.
    • There's also the Covenant Type-26 Assault Gun Carriage, known to laymen as the "Wraith". A big chubby blue thing with front armor over a foot thick (made of a polymer that human scientists previously thought was impossible), and instead of firing shells out of a barreled gun it launches huge "mortars" of superheated plasma capable (in the novels) of pretty much flash-vaporizing any poor sap that gets hit by it... and everyone within about 10 ft. of said poor sap as well. And as tanks go, it turns on a dime.
  • Every Call of Duty game contains tanks at some point. Call of Duty 2 lets you play as the crew of one.
    • To clarify: Your Soviet character in Call of Duty gets transferred temporarily into tanks, while in Call of Duty: United Offensive and Call of Duty 2 you briefly play as a dedicated tank commander separate from the infantry soldiers you usually play as.
    • Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare may not have tanks in the traditional sense, but you do get several opportunities to blow them up with Javelin missiles.
    • War Pig, from the levels "The Bog" and "War Pig". They even get a Gunship Rescue ...well, Tank Rescue moment.
      • Which saves the day by shooting another tank through a building
      • Only topped by a scene in Modern Warfare 3 where you get a Gunship Rescue from a tank driving through a building to squash some bad guys that had you pinned down.
  • Medal of Honor: Allied Assault lets you drive a King Tiger tank. Yea verily, it is awesome.
    • The first game in the franchise is the only one that doesn't have tanks of any kind.
      • The first game did have a tank, in the town square during the second mission, but it was essentially a set-piece and was never a threat. Though the preview for the game showed the cannon moving, the tank just sat still the whole time.
  • Operation Flashpoint features tanks heavily. As the infantry character in the campaign, you soon learn you have a lot to fear from enemy tanks, especially after a whole platoon of them chases you out of a town you'd only just managed to take, mowing down many of your allies in the process. Later, you take control of a different character who is a rookie tank commander, and he soon gets command of an M1A1 Abrams tank (the strongest vehicle in the game, by far).
    • Tanks also play a big role in the Resistance expansion pack, the poorly-equipped guerillas the player leads have no tanks to start with, so one mission involves stealing a bunch of enemy tanks while they're being serviced at a remote depot. A couple of missions later you make full use of them when you lead a huge tank force (more than a dozen vehicles) in a pitched battle with a larger force of Russian tanks.
  • In Metal Gear Solid, Vulcan Raven uses a tank during his first boss fight. The Metal Gears themselves have been described as giant walking tanks.
  • Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime: How do you make The Goomba kick total ass? By giving it control over a magical tank and making smarmy references to the last game in the series. And it fucking works!
  • Politank-Z from Waku Waku 7, which is a bizarre amalgamation of tank and Humongous Mecha that walks on two legs but has treads for feet anyway. It has the slowest, but one of the most powerful super moves, and can turn into a helicopter if necessary. To top it all off, it's actually a police vehicle, piloted by the chief of police.
  • Warcraft III has Steampunk tanks -- all dwarf-built, of course.
    • Of course, Warhammer Fantasy Battle had them before, yet another bone of contention between their respective fans.
      • They started out as Steam Tanks (a Warhammer unit) before being rapidly renamed "Siege engines" in Frozen Throne.
      • Warcraft started out as a Warhammer game before the deal with Games Workshop fell through. Then it was rapidly spun off into its own 'verse.
    • World of Warcraft gives us player-controlled siege tanks, and the first boss of Ulduar, the Flame Leviathan.
  • There's a brief scene in MOTHER where the main cast gets to rent a tank, drive it across Shifting Sand Land, and blast an otherwise undefeatable Humongous Mecha into smithereens. Why, you ask? Well, why not?
    • And later, in Mother 3, your party actually takes down a tank used by the Pigmask army.
  • The Metal Slug series has the cutest tanks in fictional history, with a distinct resemblance to the one from Dominion Tank Police.
    • Cuter than tachikoma? I don't think so.
  • Valkyria Chronicles:
    • The first game has Welkin's Edelweiss, passed down to him from his war hero of a father. Many Imperial generals will show up with a custom tank as well. One of the main "Boss" fights in the game is against an enemy tank the size of a large building. So much so, that the player has to move his characters onto the enemy tank to take out power cores, before the players anti-tank and actual tanks will stand a chance against it.
    • Also, near the end of the game, the Empire fields a tank so huge, that it can run over entire villages.
    • Valkyria Chronicles II gives you a fully customizable tank, as all classes get a tank, and you even get to name it. Different kinds of tank and APC chassis, choice from three turret types, various armor, shoulder and back parts and decal and sticker options.
    • Valkyria Chronicles III uses the same mechanic as II, but further refines it and adds more customization options, as well as making the heavy tank easier to move around.
  • Armored Core would be the ultimate Tank Goodness poster child: most games offer the tank legs. Very slow, but usually very heavily armored, has very low energy drain, has built-in boosters, so it actually saves the main body weight, and carry loads like nothing else. With that in mind, most kinds of tanks can fulfill requirements of More Dakka, Macross Missile Massacre, Tactical Nukes, or all of the above, with Stone Wall defenses. There Is No Kill Like an Overkill is guaranteed. And then, starting from PlayStation 2 Armored Core titles, you have the option of having Overboost, and later additional boosters. At that point, tanks can finally achieve Multi-Track Drifting, made even more possible by mounting the best generators. And even with all that, most players don't really consider it, since Gundamlike bipedal robots are just cooler.
    • Also, Armored Core 4 has regular modern tanks. They might as well be plushies for all the good they do.
      • AC 4A allows tank legs to store oversized backup weapons, like, oh, another set of Chain Guns. Or Bazookas. Or damn near anything else in the game. It's possible to make a mech that has 6 Chain guns, two of which are actually 4 rifles attached to each other. Said mech is usually very hard to kill, but can run out of ammo in about 2 minutes of concentrated fire. I've yet to see something stand up to a full 30 seconds though, as most NEXTs only have around 60K HP, tops.
  • In the 2nd Touhou Project game, Story of Eastern Wonderland, Rika pilots a tank for her boss fight. This is a fairly big deal, considering that the rest of the world appears centuries behind technology-wise.
  • The Leviathan, found on some maps in Unreal Tournament 2004. Damn slow, so chances are the match is over before you reached the enemies, but if you do, he's practically unstoppable.
    • The Goliath tank is also very respectable. It maneuvers like a greased brick but has a substantial amount of hit points and a very lethal main cannon.
  • The mostly-forgotten RTS 7th Legion had several tank variations, including three that were mostly identical except each successive iteration added another main cannon to the turret.
  • The most popular early online game after Net Trek was a Macintosh title by the name of Bolo. Gameplay consisted of a fight over stationary bases that could refuel ammo and armor, destructible automatic pillboxes that could be rebuilt anywhere on the map, and your tank's ability to almost completely alter the terrain of a map thanks to a construction worker that could stockpile building materials in your tank.
  • Used in droves in Supreme Commander where anything with treads that is Tier 2 or above qualifies. The UEF Pillar heavy tank follows the relatively normal two-barrel turret model, the Cybran Rhino mounts a heavy laser chaingun, and the Aeon Obsidian just mounts one huge cannon. Anti-infantry weapons are not a concern because infantry are too small a scale to exist in this game, and even the heavy tanks are small compared to later units, which usually become either towering mechs are Land Battleships. The UEF Fatboy probably stands out even then-sure, it's a king Military Mashup Machine, but it's the only one with tank-style treads. That can crush buildings.
  • Also in it's Spiritual Predecessor, Total Annihilation, a good quarter to a third of the units are tanks. While not as impressive as Supreme Commander's loadout, being ten years older, they're nonetheless quite nice.
  • Dark Reign has three HUGE ones: the Tachyon Tank for the Imperium (hovering plasma-cannons with self destructs), the Triple-Rail Hover Tank for the Freedom Guard (which was enormous and orange), and the Shockwave for same (which took Tank Goodness to new extremes: it self-destructed, causing a shockwave (hence the name) the width of the screen to travel one screen-length, destroying nearly ANYTHING in the way. Also, it had a shark-face on it).
    • Probably the most terrifying tank, though, was the Freedom Guard's Tank Hunter. It wasn't that big, but it was designed to take out anything, including the above three, within mere moments.
    • The basic Plasma Tank (Imperium) and Skirmish Tank (Freedom Guard) had full AA capability—two of the very few instances of a RTS 'bread-and-butter' vehicle that could protect themselves against aircraft. The Plasma Tank was amphibious too (the standard for Imperium vehicles). To compensate the Freedom Guard had the Phase Tank, which could burrow underground and pop up to roast enemies with its distinctive laser blasts.
  • In Destroy All Humans!, tanks show up when the Alert level had reached all the way up to Military. They're slow, but they're tough, hits hard, and Psychokinesis is useless against them untill you buy the second upgrade. Time to bring out the Ion Detonators.
  • Same goes about the Rhino tank of Grand Theft Auto. Many players never bothered with the plot, but simply used the cheat to summon a tank and rampaged about the town. (with the 'Civilians Have Weapons' and 'Riot' codes on, Hilarity Ensues.)
    • Especially funny as the regular police try and use spike strips to stop the tank...
  • Iron Tank for the NES is all about tanks. Nothing but tanks. There are human infantry, but those enemies are so easily disposed of that doing so restores health to the player. All enemy tanks are roughly equal with the player's or worse, and boss tanks are often the size of the entire screen.
  • In Jak II: Renegade, the Krimzon Guard defend their Fortress with a "Security Tank". This does exactly as much collateral damage to the area as it sounds like it should, possibly explaining why you never face another one. The War Factory in Jak III is defended by mobile AA tanks (or perhaps AA trains) that move on paths around the place trying to shoot your gunship.
  • The arcade game Tokyo Wars was essentially about all-out tank brawls in various urban settings with the player(s) driving. It is as awesome as it sounds.
  • The A-gear, or Anima Mortar, of Ace Online is a flying hovertank.
  • Heavy Weapon is a tongue-in-cheek ground-based Shmup from Pop Cap Games. The player character drives an atomic powered supertank against the forces of the evil Reds in 1986.
  • Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds features hovertanks. For some reason, a Rebel hovertank can be upgraded (if the game settings are right) to a heavy version which stops hovering and runs on tracks.
  • How you youngsters ignored a pioneer video game like Battle Tanx is a mystery. It had the honorable M1A1 Abrams, the hulking Goliath Tank that was commonly attached on a rail in front of bases, a tiny wheeled tank able to dart about at high speeds and blast at the enemy's rear with heavy machine guns, a tank that exclusively spammed missiles, a tank built around a chaingun, a tank with a gyroscopic cockpit and jets that allowed it to Do a Barrel Roll and sidestep incoming fire, a hovering tank, and an Abrams variant with two cannons.
  • Twisted Metal's Minion drove a tank, which tends to be the most durable vehicle in the game (not counting unusable bosses), and extremely fast. As such he's usually only playable through cheat codes.
  • Super Mario Bros 3. Bowser's army had tanks, made of wood.
    • Super Mario Galaxy 2 has Bowser's Jr's Boomsday Machine, which is a cross between a huge tank and a castle. It shoots homing electricity, electrifies itself, sucks in the surroundings and has a giant firebar spinning around it about halfway it's side. It's about 50+ feet tall and found as the boss in the Boom Bunker level.
  • Taz-Mania's Francis X. Bushman had a "tree trunk tank".
  • The Nintendo Wars series, especially Advance Wars, has a few of these. Black Hole Rising introduced the Black Hole Neo-Tank, a giant cannon surrounded by a spherical hull that drove on four wheels. Dual Strike then one-upped that with the Green Earth Mega Tank, a three-story tall tank with five cannons (one turret with three and two smaller ones). The Mega Tank makes a reappearance in Days Of Ruin/Dark Conflict (renamed the War Tank in the American version) -- in both cases the Mega Tank is the only land unit that comes in a unit of one, and that one tank will still wipe the floor with units of other tanks.
    • Unfortunately, because of high cost, low speed, and for the Megatank low ammunition and fuel, both units aren't worth using unless you're already winning or defending a very small area.
    • Battalion Wars takes it a step further with the Battlestation, a small Land Battleship.
  • In Wing Commander IV, one of the missions in the Circe mission series puts you in the position of halting an offensive by laser-armed hovertanks. For the most part, though, they serve as not much more than cannon fodder for your guns.
  • Prototype has the Thermobaric Tank, armed with two small cannons on its turret and a main gun that fires a missile with a huge explosion. Blackwatch calls for it after their standard APCs and tanks fail to breach some particularly tough hives, and it one-shots all the hives in its way. Unfortunately, you only get it for the one mission, and while there are two more in the game world as part of events, they are despawned the second you destroy a military base or hive, or even if you walk a few feet from it after taking it from the event spot.
  • Mass Effect 1 has the M-35 Mako, a futuristic IFV designed for exploring and combating military threats on distant planets. It has firepower and durability only matched by the most powerful on-foot equipment in the game (and you get it much earlier), ridiculous off-road ability, complete protection from planetary hazards, and of course makes exploring the game's more open areas much faster. And to clarify "ridiculous off-road ability": it can drive up near-vertical slopes, and if it goes off the edge of a massive cliff, it will suffer at worst minor damage to the right front wheel. (Yes, the right front wheel. Not the left front wheel. Not any of the other wheels or any of the other parts of the tank. Just that wheel.) It's so durable that, when you visit the Normandy SR-1's crash site in Mass Effect 2, you find the Mako completely intact. Stuck in the level geometry, but still intact.
  • Gabe had to blow up a Soviet tank in Syphon Filter 3.
  • Star Wars: Empire at War gives the Rebels 3 tanks, a hovering light tank, a tracked heavy tank, and a tracked mobile artillery piece. The Empire also gets tanks, the tracked TIE Crawler and the hovering 2-M. The expansions adds in teh Juggernaut A6 for the Empire, and the new Zann Consortium gets w tanks of its own: The tracked Canderous assault tank and MZ-8 Mobile Pulse Cannon.
  • Battle City for the NES. Steel Reign for PS 1.
  • Dune II included the Harkonnen Devastator Tank, a nuclear-powered super-heavy tank equipped with two fixed heavy cannons and a self-destruct switch. Though it was changed to a humongous mecha in the follow-up game, Emperor.
  • Fallout Tactics eventually gave the player access to a tank. Contrary to the trope name, most players probably never made use of it since there were very few things (and even less ammo) to actually use it on, but it was still satisfying as hell to use at least once.
    • It also has a crew of five which makes it a fine way to transport between missions except for the sixth member of the squad who tends to get run over a lot.
  • Pretty much the entirety of the Metal Max/Metal Saga games. Not that most non-Japanese gamers would know about them (or at least, not without certain sources)
  • Gears of War 2 introduces the Centaur. Being a Light Tank, it can't take much punishment, but damn if it isn't a speedy little thing. The gun packs a decent punch, too.
  • The Rock Crusher from Brutal Legend has a spiked roller and about six mortar cannons. It also has a stage on the top. You can double team with it to summon a BFS that couldn't possibly be used by any other mortal than a Titan from the heavens to smite your foes.
  • The Heavy Weapons Platforms in X-COM. You can buy ordinary ones that can fire powerful armor-piercing rounds or launch explosive rockets at the start of the game, but you can later develop tanks that shoot laser beams. And then there are the Hover Tanks.... The sequel takes them underwater.
    • The game doesn't specify if they're remote-controlled or automated. Vladimir Vasilyev's novelization goes with the former. In fact, in the book, the tank controllers stay in the transport plane during missions, as the signal is too weak to penetrate the force field thrown up by the UFOs. Another Russian novel, inspired by the game (but taking place a century later), has the crippled general in charge of the task force pilot the tank using a VR helmet.
  • Apocalypse adds a fearsome looking AFV with huge tracks, massive armour and mighty cannon that is made totally useless by unaccountably being unable to leave the road and getting destroyed if it hits a pot hole.
  • Iron Tank, a relatively obscure NES game by SNK, had the player blast his way through forests, towns, fortresses, and the like battling tanks of all kinds, running infantry over, and mixing tank shells (don't ask how that works) for devastating effect. The tank's driver was apparently Ralf from Ikari Warriors.
    • Iron Tank was the sequel to an arcade game called TNK III, that featured Ralf. Ikari Warriors was basically a More Popular Spinoff.
  • Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. Yes, tanks are powerful, but enemies such as Fire Dragons, Wraithlords, Sanctioned Psykers, Heavy Destroyers, and more, are so good at destroying them that tanks become more of a fire support vehicle, to aid your infantry than the damage sponges they are presented as in many other games.
    • Except the Baneblade. Which has 11 weapons, each acting idependently, tons of hit points and the most powerfull cannons in the game. Unless you bring your entire army/superunits, changes are it's going to wipe your base out.
  • In Makai Kingdom, starting with the boss of Episode 3, characters will be seen driving around in tanks, mechs, and other such vehicles of destruction. Soldier, engineer and professor units can get the most mileage out of them, and get major stat bonuses when riding one (the vehicle gains up to 50% to all stats depending on the driver's TEC stat). The downside is that the vehicle itself that gains experience from defeating enemies, and not the rider unless the driver has a certain skill.
  • Chrono Trigger example: an early boss (the second, if I recall correctly) was the Dragon Tank. Three guesses as to what it looks like.
  • In somewhat of an inversion, sometimes Spearman beats Tank.
  • Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron had a 40 ft. invincible (sort of) purple Nazi tank in World War I! Of course, that game doesn't care about real life anyway..
  • In Psychonauts, the Big Bad plans to take over the world via tanks controlled by psychic brains, which are extracted from young children.
  • In Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, one part of the story requires Ezio to retrieve a tank built from Leonardo da Vinci's plans as well as burn said plans so the Borgias cannot build more.
    • Said tank is a steam-powered bloated wooden barrel with a dozen cannons sticking out in all directions. You can fire only one at a time, though. Also, the cannons appear to be breech-loaded. The entire beast can be operated by three people, which is pretty impressive.
  • Warzone 2100: The vast majority of the units in this game are modular, customised tanks of some description.
  • The Earth trilogy with similar, but tighter and more unique Faction Calculus design mechanics than Warzone 2100. Tanks are most prevalent in the 2150 episode, especially because there's no footsoldiers around to play with. Commonly fielded by the Eurasian Dynasty in flavors of ground-only and amphibious, although the United Civilized States and the Lunar Corporation aren't paricularly above using tanks. The UCS has a certain token makeshift lumbering tracked-vehicle-turned-tank that's good for dishing out as much damage it can take, while the LC has many designs of the hover kind.
  • Appears in both Golden Eye 1997 and Golden Eye Wii, as per the original movie.
  • As a World War II game, Company of Heroes quite naturally features a goodly array of armor, tanks and otherwise. For the Germans, the Panther and the Tiger are, respectively, the Infinity Minus One and Infinity Plus One Swords. In a very nice piece of detail for an RTS, tanks have strong armor to the front and weaker armor to the sides and rear, meaning that flanking and ambush tactics are vital for defeating them, especially since anything short of dedicated anti-tank weapons it useless against them. Additionally, send them forward without infantry support against a half-decent opponent, and they will get chewed up.
    • By far the strongest tank is the Tiger Ace, changed in later patches to the King Tiger. Other tanks are paper compared to it, though it's still not invincible, extremely slow, and needs to support. Another super tank was added in the expansion used by the Panzer Elite faction called the Jagpanther. Unlike the other big tanks, this a specialized tank killer, capable of even beating the King Tiger in a head to head fight, but it doesn't have machine guns like the King Tiger.
    • A neat (and necessary) feature in the game is the ability of the tanks to drive backwards. After all, you don't want to turn your weakest armor towards the enemy when retreating.
  • A tank was one of the various equipable weapons available during the second half of SaGa 2 (Final Fantasy Legend II in the west), and had the distinction or allowing one to guard against physical attacks while also attacking in the same turn. The Japanese versions named it the less generic Leopard 2.
  • The Turret Shadows in Persona 3 and Persona 4 are sentient tanks. The Chariot and Justice Shadows are also combined into a tank form, but can split apart into independent turret and hull forms.
  • Many of the Mechwarrior games have had tanks as enemies. The level of threat inherent to these enemies has ranged from 'minute threat' to 'kill it now or pay for it later.' In the former category, 2's occasional vehicular enemies and most of 3's ground vehicles. 4 allowed pilots to stomp on vehicles for easy kills, but in turn many of the tanks available can now dish out a serious case of hurt, including the Quad Panzer, the Myrmidon, and the aforementioned Demolisher. One mission in 4:Mercs actually has you facing a massive tank swarm fit to put the fear of God into Assault 'Mech pilots, in case you thought killing vehicles was an easy no-brainer.
  • Mech Commander and its sequel had tanks again ranging from 'barely a threat' to 'that thing just blew off everything below my kneecaps.'
  • World of Tanks in spades. the tanks in the game stretch from the interwar period through World War 2 and into the postwar period, including tanks that existed only as prototypes or only on paper. But they've made the tanks as close to real life as possible without becoming a sim game. There are Light, Medium, and Heavy Tanks, Tank Destroyers, and Self-Propelled Guns. All from the USA, USSR, and Germany.
    • Some of the 'German' tanks are captured French tanks, and the developers will be introducing French and Chinese tanks to the tech trees.
  • Combat Choro Q series is all about tanks, living tanks, fighting each other out in the wars.
  • Lance of the Epic Battle Fantasy series has a tank called the Valkyrie. It's a fully-fledged WWII supertank with several different types of turrets. In fact, the scan data for it says that it didn't get finished in time for WWII.
  • Steel Panthers, the venerable hidden hex strategy game, wasn't so named because it contained furry cats in cages.
  • SOPHIA THE 3rd. NORA MA-01 from Blaster Master, a 4-wheel tank that has destructive blaster cannon, three sub-weapons, and is capable of jumping, hovering, swimming, and climbing wall/celling when it's fully customized.
  • Laughably subverted by the Blitztank from Akatsuki Blitzkampf. With its baby-blue color scheme, cheesy skull ornamentation and tiny mounted cannon that tragically resembles a micropenis, Blitztank is pretty much ridiculed by the entire fanbase. Really, we're talking about a tank that can be beaten up; of course it's going to be lame.
  • The Ground Control series has a number of cool tanks, ranging from light to heavy. In the first game, the Crayven Corporation has a private army using traditional wheeled and treaded vehicles collectively known as terradynes armed with ballistic weapons. Their Grizzly terradynes are large, slow, and double-barreled. The Order of the New Dawn utilizes much mroe high-tech equipment. For example, all their vehicles hover and are thus called hoverdynes. They're armed with energy weapons. The heavy Volans hoverdynes are armed with powerful energy cannons and are an even match for the Grizzlies (the latter have less firepower and maneuverability but heavier armor). The sequel takes place several centuries later with different galactic powers but nearly same equipment. The Terran Empire uses old Order tech but makes a few additions, so hoverdynes share a battlefield with Walking Tanks. The Northern Star Alliance uses abandoned Crayven equipment, while making some modifications. For example, the new heavy terradynes are able to rotate their side armor forward to provide cover for any unit behind them.
  • Dragon Quest's Rocket Slime's battles consist roughly 1/3 of the time in a giant tank.
  • Leopardon finally gets to show off his true potential in Kinnikuman: Muscle Fight. He has a massive arsenal[4] in this game, and is not afraid to fire it all in his matches.

Web Original

  • Associated Space has an opening scene involving "Mobile Siege Fortresses", gigantic hovertanks the size and shape of ancient Egyptian pyramids. Which Fatebane sabotages for comic effect.

Fatebane: Pyramids don't roll.


Western Animation

  • Decepticons, while they started out as being primarily aerial combatants (to contrast with the ground-pounding Autobots), like to take tank alt-forms when they're on the ground. Megatron himself has taken particularly awesome ones, in "Generation 2" and Armada.
    • Warpath, Brawl, Quake, and others also had tank altmodes. RiD!Armorhide also has a tank alt mode. The triple-changer Blitzwing usually has a tank as one of his alt modes.
    • Megatron's toy has a tank form [dead link] in the upcoming sequel to the Live Action Adaptation, but the movie itself, rather than make him a jet/tank triple-changer was was theorized by some fans, made him a jet/tank hybrid—i.e., a flying tank.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender has Steampunk tanks, with Firebenders instead of turrets.
    • Also crawler tanks used against the Fire Nation.
  • Swat Kats has several cool tanks, including the infamous Metallikat Express - a high-speed hovertank loaded to the brim with weaponry and missiles.
  • The Simpsons. Bart drove one when he got addicted to ADD meds. Mr Burns used one to lay siege to the Simpson home when he found out that Mona Simpson was back in town.
  • Family Guy. Peter bought Meg a tank instead of a car. Brian and Stewie used it to destroy Superstore USA.
  • In Batman the Animated Series, Harley Quinn ended up being chased by one driven by General Vreeland after accidentally kidnapping his daughter Veronica.

(While driving away)
Veronica: Wait-what are you doing? That's my father.
Harley Quinn: No, that's your father, IN A TANK!

Real Life

  • There's a good case for Truth in Television with this trope. Even though a single tank may not be a rampaging fortress of badassery in itself without combined arms support, it doesn't mean that they're not cool. The M1A2 Abrams, Leopard 2A6, Challenger 2, Merkava Mk.4, T-90,Type-99, Khalid, Leclerc and several others are all examples of Real Life tanks that are pretty damn cool and fairly badass. Plus, they don't suffer from the Crippling Overspecialization of fictional tanks. Most of them also have the neat feature of being totally modular - swapping the entire engine, suspension, armor plates, etc is easier and faster than actually repairing the components.
  • The Israeli Merkava is the most versatile tank of the lot. Not only is it big, bad and extremely powerful, it has been designed first and foremost with crew survivability in mind. Also, its gun/Fire control system allow it to shoot attacking helicopters out of the sky, fire air bursting munitions and launch laser guided missiles. in addition to these features, it can also carry troops into battle,allowing the tank to double as an APC, Mobile command center and even a Medevac platform. Can one possibly ask more of a tank?
    • As of 2010, the Merkavas are being outfitted with 'Trophy' Active Protection Systems - point defense mini-turrets designed to shoot down enemy rockets, missiles and shells before they hit, saving the tank's armor a lot of trouble, and to an extent countering the threat that infantry with RPGs and missiles present to modern tanks. The Americans and Germans have been working on their own versions, Quick Kill and AMAP-ADS, and the Russians already have a similar system, 'Arena' installed on their tanks.
    • To save heavily on logistics, much of Israel's modern armored vehicle platforms just use the Merkava with the tank turret swapped out for something else.
  • The somewhat older gas-turbine-powered T-80, though in a peripheral role in service due to the fragmentation of industry with the Soviet breakup, is still famed for its nickname as the "flying tank"—capable of accelerating fast enough to jump off ramps and even fire its main gun in midair at demonstrations to this day.
  • The newer T-90, which is a major "upgrade" (if you can call the all-new engine, transmission, turret, armor, gun, and control system an "upgrade) of the T-72, could give bursts of speed around 90 kph (thogh seriously overloading its engine and transmission, its designed speed is about 70 kph) pretty much on every terrain, leading to quite a spectacular leaps that earned it the nickname of Flying Tank as well, and it can execute a literal Multi-Track Drifting -- while shooting at target (and occasionally hitting it)... Despite having a diesel engine that's somewhat less powerful.
    • The still-more upgraded T-90MS introduce an entirely new turret with integrated ammo bins in the bustle and radically improved protection (and digital FCS and new autoloader). The Army decided not to order it, as they're developing a radically new MBT, but was very pleased with the turret design and will probably use it to upgrade the existing inventory of T-90s and T-72s.
  • The aforementioned British Challenger 2 was demonstrated to be a very Cool Tank indeed on an episode of Top Gear--you'd expect Jeremy Clarkson in a Land Rover Sport to run circles around the tank. Not so. In fact, he underestimates the Challengers versatility.
    • Of course, Jeremy did make the mistake of trying to outmaneuver the Challenger 2 on broken, muddy ground and steep inclines--their home turf, in fact, in the very field that the tankers practice in. It was there he proved that tires are for speed (which his LR Sport has quite well, if on a well paved road), tracks are for rough terrain. As he puts it "Oh no, I seem to have brought Puff Daddy's car to The Somme. This is where I've had it. You can't drive a car, even as one as good as this, over this kind of surface fast. And you can with a tank." The tank crew also feels free to use some of their other abilities, such as neutralizing his speed advantage by blinding him with obscurant smoke—not a problem to a tank that can avoid large trees with infrared vision and roll over smaller obstacles, but plenty of problems to an unaided driver of a car that doesn't dare hit anything - and the fact that trying to put the pedal to the metal results in a huge dust trail that gives the tankers an easy target to chase. They catch up to him when he tries to drive in a straight line, presenting a predictable target.
    • The Dorchester/Chobham II armour. In Iraq, one CR2 returned to the British operating base with the remains of 60+ detonated RPGs all over it. It was described as looking like an evil, 62.7 tonne hedgehog. Another, after getting stuck in a ditch, spent four hours under sustained RPG fire, and survived a hit to the top of the turret (usually a weakspot on a tank) from a modern ATGW missile. The damage? A few broken sight units and periscopes. REME (the British tank mechanics) repaired it 8 hours (after rescue) and had it in service the next day. The only 'Chally' to ever be destroyed was in a blue-on-blue accident. The Hi-Explosive round from another Challenger 2 detonated in the turret after being deflected by an open crew hatch. The shell detonated the ammunition in the turret bins. The hull, aside from fire damage, was fine.
    • Unfortunately for its reputation, there's emerging evidence of both a Challenger 2 and several Abrams that have had their fighting compartments breached, both with injuries to the driver, by probably-Syrian RPG-29 Vampirs. Still, given that the RPG-29 is one of the most modern anti-tank weapons in the world, some injury isn't that bad, even if it is a black-mark on their aura of invulnerability. Those RPGs penetrated the frontal armour, despite the ERA, which is the strongest armor on a tank safe for the turret front, which sometimes is even stronger. Also, the RPG-29 is actually older than the Challenger 2 and M 1 A 2.
  • The M1 Abrams is also no slouch. It's powered by a literal jet engine and can go so fast, that its treads will actually tear off if you remove the engine governor. The Abrams can also demolish most other tanks and is incredibly resilient with its depleted-uranium reinforced Chobham armor. In both Gulf Wars, not a single M1 Abrams was knocked out by an enemy tank. The majority of damaged/destroyed Abrams resulted from accidents, ambushes with anti-tank weaponry, friendly fire, and scuttling. They're so resilient, that even American weaponry has a hard time destroying them.
    • The Abrams is ridiculously hard to permanently put down even by the full firepower of OTHER Abrams shooting at them. At best, you get temporary knockouts; one M1A1 took a hit directly in the rear from an Iraqi T-72 in the first Gulf War. The crew survived with minor injuries, the assailing tank was quickly destroyed, and the stricken Abrams was quickly recovered and repaired. There's also a story of an Abrams that got bogged down and four T-72s decided to rush it. None of their shots penetrated. The Abrams killed two of them, shot the third as it was running away, and the forth hid behind a sand berm. The Abrams, using the thermal imaging camera, was able to see the hot exhaust rising and shot through the sand berm, killing the final T-72. When other tanks came, it was decided to abandon and destroy the Abrams rather than have to get up specialized equipment to pull it out(The other tanks couldn't). The other tanks tried to kill the now-abandoned Abrams but couldn't. One round exploded the ammunition magazine but the blowout panels directed to force of the explosion upwards. Eventually, a tractor came and pulled it out. The turret was sent back the the US for examination and the tank got a new one and was back in action pretty soon.
    • The Abrams also drinks fuel. As in, 20 gallons per mile. No, not miles per gallon. It consumes about 20 gallons of fuel for every mile it travels. Without a steady supply of tanker trucks keeping it topped up, they quickly become very expensive, hard to kill bunkers. Jet Engines are fuel hogs*:And to make things worse, a gas turbine consumes the same amount of fuel idling as it does driving at full speed. And shutting down the engine every time you're not moving is a bad idea, because combat vehicles often need to start back up in a hurry.; there's a reason everybody else uses Diesel Engines, you give up performance but get a massive increase in combat range. Still, almost all tanks have maximum speeds around 40-45 mph: It's the Abrams which is almost unique in being able to exceed this with the governor disabled.
      • One thing the Yanks With Tanks are (uncontroversially) best at is logistics (no other nation can ship stuff from point A to point B faster and more reliably than the US), the fuel consumption doesn't seem to be that big of a problem. After all, there are thousands of Abrams deployed, and they aren't all running out of energy and turning into fuel-deprived bunkers.
      • Well there was that one time in Baghdad when they just stood around with their dicks in their hands waiting the for the fuel trucks, for about five hours, defended by Bradleys, unable to even lift their guns let alone shoot at anything. Good thing they had that armor.
  • Then there is the also aforementioned Leopard 2, which is a sibling of the M1 Abrams; both tanks were developed out of the original joint American-German project Kampfpanzer/Main Battle Tank 70 (which became too expensive). For a tank it's absurdly fast (capaple of driving 120 kph on road). The only drawback is, that it is nearly uncontrollable and only drives in a straight line; add the most powerful main gun of any tank to that, though, and you are ready.
    • Most Leopard 2s used the same 120mm L/44 gun as the M1A1/2, though the new Leopard 2A6's have the more powerful L/55 version which is shared with the South Korean K2 Black Panther.
    • The Bundeswehr ist currently testing the Leopard 2 A7+/A7 PSO. A tank build for MOUT operations. It has (again) the Rheinmetall 120mm L/44 installed. It also got a remotely controlled weapon station, a dozer blade and a 360° protection for the turret and programmable HE munitions. The tank is a supplement to the normal Leoard 2 forces of the Bundeswehr and not meant to replace the A6 and earlier variants.
    • Word of God has it that, if you get a skilled technician to tinker with the engine, you can boost the engines 1500PS to 1800PS, or exceed 2100PS at the expense of killing the engine before the fuel runs out. It was apparently tested once, where it reached the aforementioned 120kph on paved roads, and a whopping 80kph on mud.
  • The MBT-70 was the prototype for the M1 Abrams, ultimately rejected as too expensive at a per unit cost of $5 million a pop in the 1970's. To put that in perspective the M1A1, is one of the most expensive tanks in the world today, and it costs $5 million now, $5 million in the 1970's would be about $26 million now.
    • To put it more into perspective the last batch of F-4 Phantoms built in the 70s cost about 3 million a piece.
    • The Expeditionary Tank that was developed in Parallel wasn't too bad either.
  • More Truth in Television: In a recent episode of MythBusters, the cast addressed the idea that the friction between pages of two interleaved phone directories is impossible to overcome. They tested this one first with two people trying to pull it apart... then ten people... then two cars... and, instead of going with trucks or other large civilian vehicles, invoked The Rule of Cool and rented a couple of M551 Sheridan light tanks (which, yes, finally did manage to separate the books... effortlessly).
    • Point-of-fact, the pages tore out, but not many of them actually separated.
  • Modern MBTs have large diesel or turbine engines that can give between 1000 and 1500 hp on average. The biggest Detroit Diesel truck engine (still in the prototype stage) is just 600 hp. That's more than double increase in the power, and then there's the matter of traction as well. Tanks grip the ground with the whole surface of the track, while trucks has only the points of contact—the rather smallish areas where the tire contacts with the ground, greatly increasing the possibility of slippage. And, last but not least, tanks are friggin' HEAVY—just upward of 40 tons for the modern ones, while only biggest 18- or 22-wheelers can be this heavy when fully laden. This also leads to slippage in such tests. In short, tanks make much better tugs than any wheeled vehicle.
    • Heavy tanks may be, but those tracks distribute the load well, so the M1A1 has only twice the ground pressure of a man standing still (the ground pressure goes up when walking).
  • Early heavy tanks designed and built toward the end of WWI era and some years later -- Real Life examples of "Games Workshop tank".
    • French Char 2C [dead link] , outclassing and outweighing any other tank of its time, it was armed with a primary 75mm gun and 4 sponson mounted machine guns. Only, this tank was not produced before early 20ies, and even then would have been grossly inadequate for a WWI battlefield (think "political meddling"). As for WWII... Let's just say that given its size, it had great psychological value, so French command made sure to keep it out of harm's way, because even a small canon would have pierced its WWI-era armor. Of course, this allowed the Germans to capture them and show them in Berlin as "supertanks", even though both armies knew what was the truth. Oh, irony...
    • The Char B1 was pretty good: in one battle, one was lured into an ambush by a bunch of Panzer IIIs and IVs, and flattened them (destroyed 13), and still managed to drive home afterwards (it was hit 140 times, but took no serious damage).
      • The 2C was equally used by the French in propaganda movies. B1-bis' advantage was that only Flak 88 used as Pak could destroy it; so was T-34 in 1941. Hence the German Blitzkrieg doctrine of not fighting tanks with tanks, but to retreat and lure enemy tanks into a trap by "Pak-Fronts" proved sensible. Only when they had to, in later war pretty much all the time, did the Germans use tanks against tanks.
    • Red Army has T-35 (built in 1933-1939) with five turrets, mounting a total of three cannons and six machine guns. Wiith 7-11 crewmen depending on the model. Even more of a Lego-machine, since first it got its four side-turrets from BT-2, later replaced with combination of BT-5 (slightly modded) and T-37 turrets.
      • And proved, like its predecessor, the Vickers A1E1, to be a flop. If you look on the list of how they were lost, most were to various malfunctions due to the combination of complicated machine and USSR tech/craftsmanship.
  • KV-2, which mounted a 152mm howitzer (largest caliber weapon ever fitted on a production tank), but was virtually immobile and couldn't traverse its turret unless it was on perfectly level ground. Its intended role was an assault gun, i.e. self-propelled bunker-buster, better compared with the German Jagdpanzers or StuGs. As such neither did it need much mobility, nor lack of ease of use would be all that detrimental for it. Of course, these lumbering behemots performed well enough slowly chewing through Mannerheim's concrete, in highly mobile warfare of the summer campaign of 41 they acted more as mobile fortifications—unable to hit anything that doesn't stand and wait for it, but armored heavier than KV-1 that were able to survive over a hundred cannon hits and beat lighter tanks by ramming. One well-placed KV-2 was enough to stop a division: tanks and anti-tank cannons failed to penetrate its armour, so Germans stuck until they brought in 88-mm anti-air guns. 105-mm howitzers were able to only to blow off tracks off these monsters, but not destroy them. KV's worst enemy were the Stukas (bombs were more practical against heavy armored but slow tanks) and Red Army's own logistical troubles. Still, the scheme was good enough to reuse production lines, upgrading both assault gun and tank branches, and later turn KV series into IS series.
    • Talking about IS tanks ( Iossif Stalin, by the way), don't forget the IS-2, a heavy, breakthrough tank developed to counter the German Panthers & Tigers whose main armament was a 122mm gun.
    • Although the Soviets won the war by mass-producing the awesome-in-its-own-way T-34 and KVs, they were also prone to Crazy Awesome experiments, such as the unmanned, remote-controlled Teletank and the Antonov A-40 flying tank or strapping a pair of 245-mm rocket rails on top of BT-5 light tank (reappeared in more sane variant as side rockets on KV-1, but cancelled due to low accuracy).
    • One battle in 1941 involved 5 KV-2's ambushing a German tank column. The Soviet tank commander made sure to utilize the KV-2's strengths by trapping the entire column on a narrow road going through a swamp by blowing up the leading and trailing German tanks. Any Panzer that tried to go off-road found itself bogged down and just as trapped. The camouflaged KV-2's rolled out one at a time, fired, and rolled back into cover, making sure the Germans had no idea where they were. By the end of the shooting gallery, sorry, battle, the Germans lost 43 tanks with no casualties on the Soviet side. The Soviet commander's crew counted the hits on their tank - there were over 200 with no penetrations.
    • The Finnish army captured two intact KV-I tanks in the Continuation War, which were quickly put into action against their former owners. They stood the battle quite well - they were always employed as the "spearhead" tanks. They both still exist in driveable condition and were used in making the film Tali-Ihantala 1944. This must be a unique situation in war movies where not only actual vehicles are used in the movie, but also the actual individual tanks which have taken part in the Real Life actions the film depict.
  • Even more Truth in Television, as far as the coolness aspect is concerned. Any Superheavy tank would count even if most of them don't work. They make the list based on sheer principle.
    • During World War Two Those Wacky Nazis developed the Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus, a 188 ton superheavy tank (it means 'mouse' -- who says the Germans don't have a sense of humor) with a 128mm and a 75mm coaxial gun. Two were built, and both were pressed into combat against the Soviets in the last days of the war. Both were scuttled by their crews to prevent the Soviets from capturing them. Unfortunately for them, one crew destroyed their turret and the other their hull, so the Soviets stuck the working turret on the working hull and put it in a museum. On the drawing board was the Landkreuzer P1000 Ratte, theoretically 1000 metric tons (in practice it would have been twice that) with two 280mm naval guns, a 128mm antitank gun, eight 20mm anti-aircraft guns and two 15mm heavy machine guns!
      • And topping it all was the P1500 Monster, which was the 800mm Dora artillery piece with its railroad running gear replaced with about eight sets of tracks. With two 150mm howitzers and multiple machine guns for backup. See the infamous 11 barrels of death known as the Baneblade above? The Monster is larger than that. A Tank from reality is actually bigger and more badass than one from fiction. No wonder it only ever existed on paper.
      • The Ratte was also bigger then the Baneblede and the Maus at it's 188 tons was pretty close to the 250 tons of the Baneblade that are stated in Imperial Armour.
      • It's extremely unlikely that the Maus prototypes ever was combat service, both were most likely desroyed inside their factories without every having fired a shot in anger.
    • Americans meanwhile tried T28 Super Heavy Tank / Gun Motor Carriage T95, redesignated back and forth due to lack of turret. 95-ton monstrosity with 8 mph top speed and 4 sets of tracks for different soils wasn't much more usable than the rest, but at least got to move on its own—there are two prototypes.
    • The author of the book My Tank Is Fight!, which specifically looks into the various super projects of World War II and puts forth hypothetical scenarios involving their deployments, mentioned that were the Rattes or Monsters to be built they would likely have to be built in naval shipyards (and be subject to the same allied bombing raids as the other ships). They would be devastating, sure...for the first encounter, after which they would likely be bombed out of existence from the air. That's not counting even narrower list of accessible terrains and inability to cross most contemporary bridges. Awesome but Impractical.
    • Somewhere in between is Obyekt 279 ("Object 279"), a Soviet prototype heavy tank with a maximum armor of 305mm and a 130mm cannon. It is designed to withstand a nuclear attack, and it seems that it doesn't fail its purpose. Two pairs of tracks (claimed ground pressure is 0.6 kg/cm² — in "human without much load" range; losing one track would push it past heavy tank norm, but still viable on hard ground) and 1000 horsepower to move 60 tons allowed it to be a tank and not a self-propelled bunker—velocity on a road is claimed to be 55 km/h and you can see how it plows through snow and swamp. Canceled, like most projects of its time not related to either nuclear missiles, space race or overdue upgrade of production capabilities.
      • Note that this "flying saucer" shape isn't armor (which would be a weight-inefficient form), it's a screen over it. You can see from reflections how the thin sheet is warped, on some photos slightly crumpled, on close-ups also holes where external parts are attached and hinged access panels. It's probably good both from NBC perspective (at least, makes it easier to decontaminate) and for its primary purpose (a different shape, very slanted, with the widest gap over the least slanted side).
  • Speaking of the failed German superheavy tanks from World War II, there's also what was without a doubt Nazi Germany's scariest war machine—if not its most reliable—the PzKpfw VI, otherwise known as the Tiger. Yes, its design suffered from being overengineered, lacking sloped armour and being costly to produce, but it's arguably the most iconic armoured vehicle to ever have existed, with its thick armour and enormous 88mm cannon. Allied forces suffered "Tiger terror" for a reason, and recommended tactics for Sherman tanks—at least before stuff like the Firefly came about—was to outnumber it five to one, and it was still generally accepted that four of those were likely to be destroyed. Since there were many more Shermans than Tigers, though... (Specifically, 25 Shermans for every Tiger I, II, or Jagdtiger.)
    • Or the Tiger II (aka King Tiger), a Tiger tank in steroids with an even more powerful gun and sloped armor. However, mechanical problems were quite common and few were built as they appeared in the last year of the war.
    • Awesome as the King Tiger was, the Jagdtiger tank destroyer had even more armour (a freakish quarter of a metre thick in places - ten inches, all but a hairsbreadth) and an even bigger 128mm gun that could trash any enemy tank from two miles away. Fortunately, few were built and mechanical problems were common (along with fuel and equipment shortages). And mobility issues, since a lot of bridges couldn't actually take its 70+ ton weight.
    • Tiger? See also the Panzer V Panthers. The US Army Armor Officers Basic course used to (might still) require an essay on the Panther vs the T-34/85, which was quite comparable. They were close enough that picking either one was acceptable, as long as you gave good reasons and covered the pros and cons of each. A battle between a Panther and a T-34/85 would most likely be decided by the quality of the crews—terrain and surprise being equal.
      • Shermans upgunned with 76mm (American) and Ordnance QF 17-pounder (British) guns didn't do too badly either, and in fact Sherman Fireflies (armed with 17-pounder guns) could penetrate Panther turrets at a decent range and were almost a match for Tiger 1s.
    • Panthers actually were tanks in the blitzkrieg tradition. That is they were made to be heavy cavalry without horses. Tigers were anti-tank guns on tracks.
    • One fact that is often left out is that the Panther had huge flaws, it´s secondary gear shift, and intersected wheels for example. It was poorly constructed and held together for a whopping 150 km, before needing to be maintained completely. The turret had a weak motorisation that left the crew with hand cranking it while tilted, and the intersected wheels made changing the inner row a pain, since you had to removed 3 wheels to change one. The motor and tracks also didn´t hold together that much, needing to be swapped every 1000 and 500 km respectivly. However, the good outweighted the bad by a huge degree, becoming one of the best German tanks of WW 2 along with the Panzer IV, which was, until the end, the workhorse of the german Panzerbattalions.
      • Most of these problems were corrected by the G variant.
  • On the other side of the scale, you have the French Leclerc, one of the fastest main battle tanks in the world. And the fastest one when firing; while other tanks have to slow down to shoot, it can pummel you with twelve 120mm rounds a minute (it has the fastest autoloader of any main battle tank too) while running at 50 km/h.
    • The Leclerc also deals with the poor fuel efficiency of jet engines by using a hybrid diesel/gas turbine setup. The main engine is a mostly conventional diesel, but instead of the usual supercharger it's got a small gas turbine.
  • The British Churchill AVRE mounted a 290mm spigot mortar, designed for breaching fortifications. The projectile weighed 40 lbs, and was known as a "flying dustbin." That wasn't the only modification it received either.
  • Sturmtiger, anyone? The thing was build on the Tiger's chassis. Although smaller, stockier, more armored and armed with a repurposed and modified large naval rocket launcher, the 380 mm Raketen-Werfer RW 61 L/5.4. It had a crane at the back to help loading the enormous shells.
  • What happens when you take an already crawler-tracked bulldozer, weld a few tons of steel to it, seal it up and go nuts? The Killdozer.
    • Done over right by the IDF's 'Doobi' armored Caterpillar D9 bulldozer.
  • Leonardo Da Vinci actually designed a tank. It was built out of wood, was powered by hand cranks, and had multiple cannons pointing all around the tank. One TV show was even able to build a functioning replica.
    • They had to modify the design; as originally drawn, the wheels would counter-rotate and result in it going nowhere, as well as cannons having to stick through the wheels themselves. It was mentioned on the show that Da Vinci would occasionally do this sort of boobytrapping if someone picked up his notes.
    • This design is used in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood as one actually built by Leonardo for Cesare Borgia. It was actually pretty fast, although only firing one cannon at a time. The mission involves destroying all prototypes and the original plans. It can be assumed that Leonardo then made a second set of plans deliberately flawed.
  • The T-34, the tank that broke the Nazi armies. It was built in 1940, and its appearance completely shocked the Third Reich, who did not think the Russians could design good tanks. The T-34 was cheap, fast, and tough. The Mid-Season Upgrade of an 85-millimeter gun meant they eventually could shoot as well as the Panzers could. Although not the first tank ever to have sloping armor, it was liberally used in its design to the point where it became an obvious factor to its battlefield survivability, thus prompting the Germans to come up with what eventually was the Panther. Consequently, sloped armor became a standard feature on pretty much every tank post-WW 2.
    • The T-34's advantages were exacerbated during the Winter seasons of the war. The T-34 was built to operate well even in winter - its diesel engine could start easily and keep running in such freezing conditions (diesel fuel had a lower freezing point than petrol which the German tanks ran on) and cold even nullified defects in radiators that earlier tanks suffered from in summer, and its wider tracks were like snowshoes (the German tanks had narrower tracks meaning they bogged down in mud and snow, and outfitting them with "snowshoes" just didn't work).
    • Being cheap also goes well with the fact that it was relatively manufacture them by the numbers. Crew compartments were crude, sure, but all that time saved furnishing for comfort could result in more tanks being made and sent straight away to push the front lines nearer to Berlin.
    • To quote creator of this tank, M.I. Koshkin: "Even fool can invent something complicated". And this tank was simple.
    • The Military Channel show Top Tens episode on tanks ranked the T-34 as number one, ahead of M1 Abrams. One of the main ranking categories were production numbers and historical impact. The M1 Abrams, while arguably the best modern tank, has not yet made significant historical impact. Also, they're very high-tech and expensive, meaning there aren't very many of them made. The T-34 is the second most produced tank in history(after the T-54/55) and was crucial in turning the tide of a world war. It's, basically, the AK-47 of tanks (which won the best rifle ranking in another episode) — not too impressive in performance statistics, but practically good enough, and fit for production and maintenance in great numbers.
  • The Kubinka Tank Museum near Moscow has got tanks of just about all degrees of awesome in one place. Including the five-turret T-35, including Obyekt 279, and including a 188-ton Maus formed from the hull from the turretless first prototype mated to the turret from the second prototype.
  • The humble M4 Sherman has a poor reputation nowadays due to its performance during the Second World War, when it was forced to fight Panthers and Tigers with an inferior gun and Zerg Rush tactics. However, that all changed when the Israelis got their hands on some Shermans and gave it the love it deserved. Their first major kitbash, the M50 Sherman, ironically replaced the original 75mm gun with a more powerful French 75mm gun derived from the German Panther's Kwk 42. Another kitbash, the M51, did away with the 75mm altogether and opted for a 105mm gun. Both types saw extensive action during the many Arab-Israeli Wars, facing tanks that were far superior to any Tiger or Panther. The Israeli Shermans, along with other more modern Western contemporary designs, consistently beat the crap out of these newer tanks.
    • Just like when inferior German tanks faced superior Soviet ones, or were far outnumbered; one suspects that crew and general army quality has something to do with this. The fact that Soviet export models were greatly inferior to the original models used by the Soviet military is also a factor.
    • The most massively ironic factor? Syria fielded, among more modern Soviet export tanks, surplus Panzer IVs.
    • The Sherman, despite being outgunned and out-armored by the Panther and Tiger, did have some real advantages. It was the very first tank to have a stabilized main gun, allowing a limited ability to fire on the move. It also was quite agile for a medium tank of its era and relatively compact, allowing it to go places a Panther or especially a Tiger could never dream of.
  • The Slovakian's have a Version of the T-72 that has a pair of 20MM Anti-air guns attached to the side of the turret.
  • The very first tank battle took place at Villers-Bretonneaux in 1918. It involved a battle between 10 tanks on the British side (1 male Mark IV, 2 female Mark IVs, 7 Whippets)*:In World War I British parlance, a "female" tank was one armed solely with machine guns, while a "male" tank had cannons as its main armament. Later "tankette" was used for machinegun-only light tank as a separate subtype. and 3 German A7V Sturmpanzerwagens. None of them were very good tanks, yet the battle looked awesome, with both sides acquitting themselves quite well: the Germans lost their lead tank, Nixie (whose crew later stole her back), but knocked out 4 Whippets and forced the female Mark IVs to retreat, while the British and their Australian allies ultimately won the battle.
  • British Infantry Tank II Matilda. Before late 1941 it completely outclassed anything the Germans and Italians could throw in, and the only weapon which had chances to destroy it was the 88 mm anti-aircraft gun. It gained the nickname Queen of the Desert during the Operation Compass in 1940. Obsolete at West by 1942, the surviving Matildas were shipped to Far East - where it proved superior against anything the Japanese had. The Australians dubbed Matilda as Queen of the Jungle. One of the more whimsical modifications was to equip Matilda with Hedgehog depth charge launcher (not used against submarines, but Japanese bunkers). It had a weak engine for its weight, but on small flat islands it didn't matter that much.
  1. ↑ These do exist in Real Life, but they're not called tanks. To make the distinction even more difficult, many of these are based on existing tank chassis, so they look like tanks that have had their turrets swapped out. Cue journalists and the general public calling them "tanks" anyway.
  2. ↑ If you want a quick breakdown: Baneblade battle cannon mounted in the turret, with a co-axial autocannon, Demolisher cannon mounted in the hull, two sponsons mounting twin-linked heavy bolters with two lascannons mounted on top of those, and a further twin-linked heavy bolter mounted in the hull
  3. ↑ In real life, many tanks have at least one mounted machine gun for defense against infantry
  4. ↑ missiles, machine guns, a howitzer, and a beam cannon
This article is issued from Allthetropes. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.