Tank weapon
(Redirected from Tank)
Tiger II of the 501st 
Heavy Panzer Battalion from the Kampfgruppe „Peiper“ during the Battle of the Bulge; riding along are Fallschirmjäger of the Luftwaffe.
Heavy Panzer Battalion from the Kampfgruppe „Peiper“ during the Battle of the Bulge; riding along are Fallschirmjäger of the Luftwaffe.A tank is an armoured fighting vehicle intended as a primary offensive weapon in front-line ground combat. Tank designs are a balance of heavy firepower, strong armour, and battlefield mobility provided by tracks and a powerful engine; their main armament is often mounted within a turret. They are a mainstay of modern 20th and 21st century ground forces and a key part of combined arms combat.
Contents
History
- The use of vehicles for fighting dates to the 2nd millennium bce, when horse-drawn war chariots were used in the Middle East by the Egyptians, Hittites, and others as mobile platforms for combat with bows and arrows. The concept of protected vehicles can be traced back through the wheeled siege towers and battering rams of the Middle Ages to similar devices used by the Assyrians in the 9th century bce. The two ideas began to merge in the battle cars proposed in 1335 by Guido da Vigevano, in 1484 by Leonardo da Vinci, and by others, down to James Cowen, who took out a patent in England in 1855 for an armed, wheeled, armoured vehicle based on the steam tractor. [...] To complete the evolution of the basic elements of the modern armoured fighting vehicle, it remained only to adopt tracks as an alternative to wheels. This became inevitable with the appearance of the tracked agricultural tractor, but there was no incentive for this until after the outbreak of World War I. A tracked armoured vehicle was proposed in France as early as 1903 but failed to arouse the interest of military authorities, as did a similar proposal made in England in 1908. Three years later a design for a tracked armoured vehicle was rejected by the Austro-Hungarian and then by the German general staffs, and in 1912 the British War Office turned down yet another design.[1]
