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
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.
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