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
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.
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