Editing Tank (section)

==Real vs Fictional Tank Designs==

Its important to know that games like WH40K subscribes to the rule of cool, rather than logic. So while things like the [[Land Raider]] or [[Baneblade]] looks cool; in a real combat situation, these tanks would range from highly impractical to down-right detrimental for everyone involved. Here's a short list of why real-world tanks, aren't designed like most fantasy tanks.

===Profile===

One of the main concerns of a tank designer has always been reducing a tank's profile as low as possible. This is for this main reason: it makes the tank harder to spot, and shoot at, at range. The others are mainly for mobility, like making the center of gravity lower so it doesn't flip over on uneven terrain, or smaller so its able to operate in various locales. Plus smaller tanks mean less material used, so that can be used on another tank or given to another project. 

Sure it seems odd that this would be taken into account, given a tank is as large as a city bus; but since WW2: it wasn't really ''that'' hard to disable a tank (rocket launchers, mines, anti-tank guns, AT grenades, aerial bombers, artillery, better concealed tanks, to name the most common), if your opponent had the weapon to do so, and if they didn't: making a tank unnecessarily large just made it easier for your opponent to spot you. Thus, making your tank's profile as low and small as possible, contributed in making it less of an easy target, while still being able to act like a priority target for your opponent.

As with so many other aspects of tank design, there is a trade-off involved. Making a tank ''too small'' can compromise its ability to function as intended on the battlefield. Interwar tankettes were the most extreme example of this, with some that were smaller than the average automobile but lacking armament more powerful than a machine gun and armour that could protect against the same. With larger tanks, you could still run into similar problems by simply not leaving enough space for sufficiently powerful armament or engines (a problem which plagued many British tanks during the Second World War) or by making it too cramped for the crew to efficiently work with (which is common to many Soviet tanks before and after the Second World War). 

===Speed===

Like what we've described above: it wasn't that hard to stop a tank with the proper armaments (or at least avoid it once spotted) and once your opponent has the guns to stop it, your hulking behemoth will slowly turn into a liability soon enough. (And even if they didn't have the guns; that makes your tank too-slow of a threat, which begs the question as to why you have it there in the first place). 

Tanks were also pretty vulnerable on their own, requiring infantry support to deal with targets at close range (the co-axial gun only had limited elevation and was slow to aim as the entire turret had to face the target, and the pintle-mounted gun was limited to the line of sight of the gunner) as a nutter with a powerful-enough explosive could easily run/sneak to an unsupported tank and blow it to smithereens, or disable it (which pretty much meant the tank is still toast). 

Nazi Germany got around this problem by using mechanized infantry (troops transported in vehicles) to support their armored forces, so everyone picked up on that and started making tanks fast enough to keep up with infantry transports to create a combined-arms assault, allowing tanks to deal with hard targets while infantry dealt with other targets that were too small for the tanks to take care of.

So, people started distancing themselves from heavyweight tanks, and started using lighter, but more faster tanks in modern combat (plus advances in modern technology made it that even a medium tank could still be as survivable and powerful as a true heavy, while still retaining maneuvrability).

===Mobility===

An immobile tank, is a dead tank, so people have gone to great lengths to either reduce, or outright remove the many ways on how infantry could disable a tank from moving; but the most common of this is by taking out the tracks with mines or explosives. This was partly fixed by putting the tracks at ground level, covering the tracks with armor, and adding additional armor skirts to further guard it from attacks from the side, ensuring that little of the tracks were exposed to direct enemy fire. Sure it was still vulnerable up-close and mines can still do a number on it, but that's what your infantry support is for (you did bring them, right?).

While the British Mark 1's rhomboid-tracks looks cool; having that on a tank today made it ''incredibly'' easy for an opposing force to disable your vehicle, as the tracks could be easily targeted. Plus even if you were to cover it in armor; it made your tank unnecessarily bigger, and people wanted to make their tanks as low and small as humanly possible. It also made maintenance and repairs unnecessarily complicated (Have to repair the tracks? Too bad, now you gotta get on top of your tall tank to fix that. Hope snipers aren't watching.).

Also while the sponson-mounted guns look cool, they're useless in modern tank combat. Apart from the obvious issues of being unable to bring your full-firepower to bear if your opponent isn't situated right infront of you AND that they have to be larger than the width of your tank: having two of your sophisticated weapon systems near ground level meant a plethora of reliability issues (went through water or muddy terrain? Pray to the Machine God your gun doesn't malfunction if you didn't clean that right away. Went through a building? Hope all that rubble didn't tear off anything important.). 

Also note that this setup was done to for trench and fortification clearing, not tank vs tank combat (since WW1 focused on trench warfare than mechanized assaults). Having your turret in be centered with the hull itself, either with a turret or having it built into the tank itself to save on parts, was infinitely more effective. It also made weight distribution more balanced, which made it easier for tanks to maneuver in rough terrain.

===Logistics===

This should be an obvious point, but the Imperium of Man has only been able to create and maintain ludicrous super-heavy tank designs, because they have the aid of the Mechanicus (even if they've been reduced to a shadow of their former glory) to assist with creation and maintenance, plus having access to thousands of planets full of resources to get materiel and fuel from. Plus the creative liberties of simply accepting that "It just works" and "THE FUTURE", because it'd be boring if we had to explain that a Forge World couldn't build a Baneblade because some mining world couldn't produce the output or the resources for it were earmarked to other projects, rather than something more exciting, like foul traitors constantly assailing their supply lines, or the techpriests need some MacGuffin stolen by the Orks. After all, 40k is a wargame, not a [[Administratum|convoluted bureaucracy simulator]]. 

Another design point for tanks is resource economy. It had (and still has) to be produced using, and maintained with, the least possible amount of resources whilst still being formidable in it's role. If an army would deploy superheavies today, just remotely near the scale of how Imperial forces do during wartime; they'd be bankrupt and end up with a lopsided army. If creation didn't eat up most of their supplies; the amount of resources they'd need to keep these war machines maintained would put the US Army to shame. Once they realize they can't keep it up, they'd start scrapping those and scramble to turn them into practical tanks (assuming they still had fuel left).

It should also be noted that Warhammer 40k (or most military fiction for that matter) tends to focus on the cutting edge of warfare. We have far more images of Leman Russ tanks and the thousand varieties of Guardsmen than the logistical trucks or field kitchens which keep the Imperium's war machine functioning on a day to day basis. In escapist fiction people want to be Luke Skywalker rather than one of the the X-Wing mechanics at Yavin Base.

===Armaments===
Putting two cannons as your tank's main armament like C&C's Mammoth Tank looks neat  and [[Baneblade|UNLEASHING ELEVEN BARRELS OF HELL]] sounds awesome, but that has its own set of problems. One is that putting a lot of main guns on your tank requires you to make the chassis bigger, as you need more room to accommodate the guns, ammunition, and larger engine (as you need more power to keep that sucker mobile), which makes it an even bigger target.

Another is that its a waste of resources; those other main guns, ammo, and materials, would be better put in making another tank, and two tanks are still more threatening than one. It is also either overkill, as the main guns of today's battle tanks can typically penetrate tank armor easily enough, or worthless since if you did meet a tank with armor too strong for your guns, having more of them is not gonna help. The probable rate-of-fire, firepower, or accuracy advantage you have over tanks with only one gun, would be easily off-set with autoloaders, specialized ammunition, better targeting systems, and/or a well-drilled gunner crew. That or an auxiliary missile launcher, which is loads more practical and cost-effective.

One more, is that in the event your tank is destroyed; that's a massive ammo-cookoff you're looking at, which can be dangerous to both the crew and surrounding friendlies.

===The "Soft Factors"===

Then there are a bunch of factors that can't quite be quantified, but significantly impact the quality of the resulting tank. Things such as "How quickly can you reload the main cannon *'''in combat conditions'''*?", "How hard is it to aim the cannon?", "How reliable is the engine?", "Why is it so goddamn hard to steer this thing?", "How much situational awareness can the tank commander have?", "How long does it take to repair?", "Does it have a radio? That you can use in combat conditions?" and so on. They heavily distort the quality of the resulting tank, yet are (mostly) really hard to fit on a data sheet.