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
**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.
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