ive been curious how some are better than others, even if they kinda look the same to me.
not sure if the flair should be engineering, sorry in advance
In: Engineering
Sloping armour meaning the effective armour thickness increased, better engines to move the heavier tanks larger gun to penetrate the opposing armour shaped charges to penetrate armour, stabilisation so that the gun barrel doesn’t wobble each time the tank hits a bump enabling fire on the move. It is rather a big topic was there something specific you were thinking about.
Improvements in engines and transmission strength enabled a lot of the improvements
The two main gauges of effectiveness of a tank are the strength/thickness of the armor, and the penetrating power of the main gun. Putting more armor on the tank makes it heavier which means you need a stronger engine and transmission to get it moving at a decent speed. Putting a better(aka heavier) gun on a tank makes it heavier as well. If you want your tank to move at a reasonable speed then you’re going to have limits set on it based on what engines you can make.
Old tanks during WW2 were improved by giving them a better gun or by adding more armor to the front face to better deal with the new enemy guns, but this often resulted in slower tanks and lots of breakdowns.
Modern tanks have special ceramic armor that is super durable, long 105mm or 120mm cannons that shoot depleted uranium arrows at high speed, and weigh in at 50-70 tons versus the 20-40 tons of WW2 era tanks. This extra weight is used by the high power guns and lots of fancy armor, but it requires large diesels or turbines that make 1500 HP instead of 300-500 HP of olden days.
Like a combat tank?
The very earliest “landship” designs were just huge armored bulldozers built to plow over the trenches of WWI and resist small arms fire from machine guns. Slow, clumsy, and vulnerable to heavier cannons or some mad lad with a sticky bomb.
In WWII the German army went heavily into mobility. They didn’t have the will or the manpower to fight the sort of head-to-head slugfest of WWI and designed lighter, faster armored vehicles that could outflank the static fortifications to savage the rear guard rather than survive a direct assault.
These necessitated a different approach to counter, and so both sides developed man-portable anti-tank weaponry to allow more nimble infantry to defeat armored vehicles.
Now that the threat of bazookas and RPGs was omnipresent, the late and post-war period saw a lot of development in armor design.
First tanks began employing sloped armor so that cannon fire and anti-tank weaponry would bounce off rather than detonate.
In the middle of the cold war more advanced reactive armor designs start showing up, with armor that actually exploded outward when hit by an anti-tank weapon to neutralize it.
Modern fighting vehicles feature the combined strength of all these designs, as well as modern computer stabilization and target tracking systems to make the main gun an extremely versatile piece of artillery at short, medium, and long range.
More powerful engines allowed them to have thicker and heavier armor while still being able to move swiftly. Better material science allowed them to use materials that perform better as armor than just plain steel. Better electronics enabled tanks to have stabilized guns that always point in the same direction, even while the chassis underneath is moving, and they also provide better aiming. Then you have more powerful, heavier guns and better ammunition that is designed to pierce armor, explode into lots of fragments or explode after a certain delay after impact.
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