Maybe tank isn’t the right word, but I swear I’ve seen vehicles with big guns with wheels. Why would you pick one over the other?
In: Engineering
They serve different purposes.
Wheels are better for some things like speed and maneuverability. They’re also lighter and simpler to maintain, and therefore less expensive.
Tracks are better for weight distribution (spreading the weight of the vehicle out) and rough terrain, but they’re heavy and expensive and can’t run as fast as wheels.
Wheels are faster and more maneuverable and are cheaper and easier to maintain or replace. Tracks can handle more weight and are better with uneven or soft terrain. Both have their place in the military.
Tracks are good for rough terrain as they get traction without slipping as wheels are prone to do. However, they require much higher maintenance and are not as efficient for long distances. Thus you might see wheels and a large caliber gun on a vehicle designed for transporting troops in hostile terrain more than short distances.
Wheels are faster, easier to maintain, more maneuverable, and won’t annihilate road surfaces. Generally if you can get away with wheels for a given application, you’ll pick wheels.
Tracks are slow and difficult to maintain and shred pavement, but they have perfect weight distribution and won’t sink into mud/sand/slop/snow, and they can just climb over or crush through low obstacles.
You use tracks when the vehicle is extremely heavy (like a main battle tank) or when you expect it to be operating in rough conditions far from maintained roadways.
AFV, Armored Fighting Vehicle, is a good catch all for what you’re talking about.
Tracks are better for off roading in awful terrain and spread the weight of the vehicle out, which is essential for very heavy vehicles.
Wheels are faster on roads and relatively easy terrain, and are easier to repair in the field. Also, they don’t chew up the road like tracks do.
It’s essentially just what the designers choose to go with for that vehicle’s mission. But also alot of vehicles are derivatives and inherit their parent vehicle’s suspension. Like the Stryker MGS which mounted a 105mm tank cannon onto a Stryker, which was originally a light troop transport.
**Wheeled armored vehicles:**
* Have better road mobility (they’re strategically mobile on their own, while you really don’t want to move a tracked vehicle over hundreds of kilometers on their own. Instead tracked vehicles are usually loaded up on trains/trailers for such long distances)
* Have much better fuel efficiency
* Have lower maintenance costs
* Cause less damage to terrain. Meaning that they cause less infrastructure damage (when travelling on roads) and are harder to trace by observation drones (if you’re for example a self-propelled artillery piece, drew attention 2 minutes ago by firing a lot of big shells and you’re now GTFOing before enemy drones come to investigate).
* Are generally less vulnerable to catastrophic mobility failures. A snapped/thrown track means that a tracked vehicle is stuck. A wheeled armored vehicle with 6 to 8 wheels can frequently handle at least 1 wheel being shredded and multiple wheels being heavily damaged and still keep on rolling until they’re out of immediate danger (but the wheels will need to be replaced relatively soon-ish if they get shot up).
**Tracked armored vehicles:**
* Can handle more weight. The upper limit for wheeled vehicles is somewhere in the 30-40 ton range before their off-road mobility goes to hell. Tracked vehicles on the other hand can weigh up to 80-tons (depending on how wide their tracks are etc) and still handle all sorts of bad terrain.
* Lower ground pressure gives them better mobility in snow, mud and sand. This is important for off-road travel.
As a result wheels tend to be used on lighter vehicles (like light armored troop carriers), vehicles that don’t need to go everywhere (self-propelled artillery that just need to get within 30km or so of their target), vehicles designed for urban combat and occupation (where vehicles tend to use roads and ambush is the major consideration) and vehicles where strategic mobility (the ability to quickly redeploy long distances) is important.
Tracks tend to be used on tanks and vehicles designed to get stuck in (like Bradleys) or on vehicles designed to operate in difficult terrain like snow, swamps, mud, desert (like the BvS10, a tracked all-terrain vehicle used by the UK and dutch Marine regiments and by Swedens northern brigades).
Tracks are also used on a lot of older vehicles, because modern wheeled vehicles are just a lot better when it comes to resisting damage and moving through difficult terrain.
To add to what other people said, tracked vehicle need more logistical support than wheeled vehicle. They need heavier maintenance since there is more metal on metal friction, it’s a lot more work to replace tracks than wheels, track vehicle are harder to recover if they have issues with their tracks while wheeled vehicle might still be able to move or will be easier to tow.
Tracked vehicle also need heavier transport support. You can drive a wheeled APC on roads on the other side of the country, if you try to do that with a tracked vehicle it will probably break on the way and you will destroy a bunch of road, which isn’t really an option. You going to need big ass truck or a train to transport your vehicle.
so, you have, they do exist (the French **AMX-10 RC**, for example, or the Russian BTR series armoured personnel carriers, which aren’t strictly “tanks” but are big armoured vehicles with turrets, so close enough for civilian work )
very generally:
Fully tracked vehicles have lower ground pressure due to the larger contact area with the ground. This means the vehicle will sink less into the ground than a wheeled vehicle of similar weight, which means better cross-country performance over soft ground.
The downside is you have a LOT more mass in the drive train compared to wheeled vehicles, as the tracks of even quite modest tracked vehicles can weigh *literally* tons each. This means the whole drive train has to work much harder to move and support all this extra mass, and is under much more strain, so its heavier, has to be made more robust, is more expensive, and more Maintenance intensive. They also tend to damage the terrain they drive over more than wheeled vehicle, which is OK if its the wilderness in wartime, but less acceptable if they tear up the main street of a town in a peacetime exercise or a sustained occupation where public opinion is something your trying to keep favourable.
Wheeled vehicles, without all the weight of the tracks, are lighter, faster on flat ground, easier and cheaper to maintain, and less expensive. They are good in environments where the ground is going to be reliably hard enough to support the wheels such as heavily urbanised areas, rocky and arid areas, some types of hard packed desert, and so on. But, they tend to have less cross country capacity, and thus can be “left behind” by tacked vehicles they might be working with, or find themselves out-manoeuvred by a tracked enemy who can simply go places they can’t.
So, depending on what terrain you expect to fight on, what the expected use case is, what other systems you have in service, How much you care about keeping the local population on side, armies might choose either tracked or wheeled as best suits their needs. For example, the front line troops expecting to engage in high tempo manoeuvre warfare might have tracked vehicles for the cross country mobility, but the security troops operating in the rear area on convoy protection and patrol duty might have wheeled vehicles, even if those vehicles are heavily armoured and armed.
“Tank” is a specific designation for a vehicle that is heavily armored, tracked, and uses a turreted, large caliber main gun (M1 Abrams, Leclerc, T-90, etc.), “that can fire on the move” in a direct fire-role. If it doesn’t have tracks (a lot of armored personnel carriers, the Stryker, etc.), it isn’t a tank. If it doesn’t have a large-bore main gun (a lot of *other* armored personnel carriers, the M2 Bradley, etc.), it isn’t a tank. If it has a BIG gun but has to stop and plot where it is to shoot at targets it can’t see (M109 Paladin, AS-90 2S19, etc.), it isn’t a tank.
The term you’re looking for is “Armored Fighting Vehicle (AFV),” which encompasses everything. All tanks are AFVs, but not all AFVs are tanks.
“Tank” is something that gets tossed around a lot and many people outside of the military considered any armored vehicle to be a tank
Tanks have tracks. Period.
The weight of a 55 (Russian) to 75 (NATO) ton vehicle (due to the armor required to actually be a tank) just doesn’t mix with wheels.
If it’s got wheels, it’s an armored car or troop carrier – something like a Stryker, Centauro or BTR…. It’s going to be able to drive faster, but won’t be armored enough to take a main-gun hit from a actual tank and survive
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