Editing Tank

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A '''tank''' is a tracked, armored combat vehicle.  The term is often limited to vehicles intended for direct combat, as opposed to e.g. self-propelled artillery (which stay to the rear) or armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles (which are on the front line but are primarily tasked with carrying soldiers as opposed to fighting directly).  Their invention revolutionized warfare in the 20th century, and any wargame set in or after that time period (or in alternate universes with similar or more advanced technology levels) will have plenty of attention devoted to them -- or to whatever made them obsolete, as in e.g. [[BattleTech]].

The idea of an armored fighting vehicle dates back to Leonardo da Vinci and [[H. G. Wells]], but the modern tank was invented shortly before World War I, and was then spurred to production by the war itself.  When the war on the Western Front got bogged down in trenches, the British Royal Navy had the idea to use tracked, armored vehicles with guns to break the stalemate.  The name "tank" became attached to the vehicle as a codename to disguise the purpose of the large metal bodies being built.  After the first tanks rolled onto the battlefield, other countries called them "battle wagons", "armors", "assault vehicles", and other more descriptive names, but the Anglosphere was stuck with calling them "tanks".

Tanks were built with pretty much any set of features you could imagine, but over time, the militaries of the world settled on several key features:

# A large-caliber primary cannon for destroying enemy vehicles and defenses.  This is why the Navy was the first branch of the British military to design and produce tanks during WWI.
# A turret to house the tank gun, to allow the tank to shoot at targets without having to pivot the entire vehicle.  The French had this one figured out by 1918, and some tanks developed during the interwar period actually had more than one (though this proved impractical).
# A sloped, heavily-armored front face to absorb attacks, including those from enemy tanks.  This in turn spurred the development of ''tank destroyers'' with even bigger guns to penetrate that, at the cost of their own armor, and anti-tank weapons like missiles and mines specialized to attack more vulnerable rear, underside, and top armor.
# Tracks with a profile as low as possible while meeting all-terrain mobility needs.  A stopped tank is a dead tank, and running the tracks over the top of the body is begging for a mobility kill, no matter how cool the [[Wikipedia:Mark I tank|British Mark I]] looked.

Since [[Games Workshop]] seems to think that tank development in the [[Warhammer 40,000]] universe stopped somewhere between the world wars, most of the iconic fighting vehicles of the [[Imperium]] lack some of these features.  We can quibble that some of those vehicles are not really tanks but armored personnel carriers (e.g. the [[Land Raider]]) or other specialized classes of armored fighting vehicles, but GW's design team has a serious problem with looping their tracks all the way up and over the chassis for that 1918 flavor.

[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Vehicles]]