The fiercest serpent may be defeated by a swarm of ants.
— Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, discussing the Yamato-class battleships; his proposition was to build more Shokaku-class aircraft carriers instead.
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Examples
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General
- Paratroops in general. True, they are the cream of the crop in each and every army, provide a potentially unexpected avenue of attack, and jumping out of a perfectly good plane mid-air is just plain awesome. However, paratroops suffer from a number of downsides. First, unless the drop zone is secured, the jump planes are easy to shoot down and the descending paratroopers are similarly vulnerable to ground fire. Second, paratroops are generally unsupported by heavy weapons such as artillery and armored vehicles, which cannot be easily carried by planes and are very difficult, if not downright impossible, to safely drop by parachute. Third, parachute operations are heavily dependent on the element of surprise: once deployed, the paratroop is at a disadvantage, as their opponent can call for more firepower and reinforcements. Fourth and finally, if the paratroop cannot link up with friendly forces in a timely manner, then it will eventually run out of supplies, at which point surrender is the only rational option. The experience of WWII paradrop operations was that large scale paradrops usually fail (Market Garden is an obvious example, not helped by the fact that Bernard Montgomery, the mastermind of the operation, tried to use paratroopers as regular army units to hold and defend strategic objectives, which is exactly the opposite of how paratroop regiments are supposed to function) and even successful ones (Normandy, Crete and Operation Varsity) are costly, and typically only succeeded because the regular armies were able to arrive and reinforce them within a few hours to a day at most, but small scale operations (up to company level) usually succeed (an example would be the POW rescue in Los Baños). Helicopters have more or less superseded both gliders and paratroops in most armies around the world.
- Case in point to this is the Battle of the Bulge in the twilight months of World War II. As a result of the above-mentioned Market Garden and related military operations, the American 101st Airborne found themselves far ahead of the Allied Army's support, and the logistical issues stemming from Market Garden meant that getting reinforced was a long way away. Unfortunately for them, the Wehrmacht were aware of this, and staged a large offensive from the Ardennes which completely overwhelmed the under-supplied and under-supported 101st, pushing them as far back as the city of Bastogne. To the 101st's credit, they stubbornly held Bastogne even as the German military leaders claimed to have completely surrounded the city, but it was not until General Patton's Third Army arrived from the south to chase off the German forces that the Screaming Eagles were finally relieved, and with heavy losses.
- On paratroop gear, the German wartime RZ (Rückfallschirm, Zwangablösung) parachute. It was designed to open quickly, the rationale being the lower the drop, the less time on chute fall (and thus less time floating slowly, exposed to enemy fire). Unfortunately, it opened extremely violently, resulting in bruises and broken ribs. Moreover, it had one single riser instead of the normal four, making controlling it in-flight impossible: the paratrooper hung on the parachute like a spider on the web, helplessly, and the only thing he could do was to try to pivot into the wind. The German jump position was a crucifix dive instead of the leaning rest, and instead of the safe parachute landing fall, the paratrooper landed on all fours, making wearing gauntlets and kneepads a must. The descent speed was faster than with Allied parachutes and thus landings were always hard, and many Fallschirmjäger broke their arms or ribs on landing. The rig itself took almost three minutes to undress and could not be unharnessed prone. The horribly unsafe RZ rigs were largely responsible for the horrendous Fallschirmjäger losses. Jumping with the RZ rig is prohibited today for safety reasons, and Fallschirmjäger re-enactors use normal four-riser Bundeswehr canopies attached on RZ harnesses on jumps. Even stranger is that the Luftwaffe at the time had and even used perfectly normal four-riser parachutes, but only as rescue rigs.
- Russia took paratroops to the logical extreme by forgoing the parachute entirely, running trials with soldiers jumping out of a low-and-slow flying plane, sans parachute, and aiming for snow drifts and water to break their fall. Naturally, this didn't get very far in practice, not just because a plane flying at the speed and altitude needed for such a drop would be vulnerable to anyone with a good arm and particularly heavy rock, but also because it was really difficult to judge just which snowdrifts and/or bodies of water were sufficient for a freefall, and which would turn the unfortunate trooper into a puddle of borscht soup on impact.
- Funny enough, the British also tried this idea for deploying agents behind enemy lines, and actually managed to make it effective — and non-fatal for the jumper. How? Well, they had in their possession the Westland Lysander, a small, ungainly plane that was too slow to be a frontline combat aircraft — but what it could do was fly very low, and very slow — as in 65mph slow. While this was still a bit on the fast side, by locating freshly-plowed fields filled with soft dirt—and equipping their agents with a specially-padded suit—it was in fact possible to deploy behind enemy lines by having the Lysander come in low and slow and allowing the agent to roll out of the aircraft and onto the ground, relatively unscathed. Granted, such events were highly niche, planned thoroughly, and utilized specialized equipment so such an approach towards massed paratroop deployments was unfortunately not on the books.
- The Russian airdrop operation at the Hostomel Airport, done during the first days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, showed the downsides of paratroopers in full. Without adequate planning and supplies, the Russian VDV lost a lot of helicopters and soldiers when Ukraine counterattacked, forcing them to retreat into a nearby forest. While the VDV eventually took over the airport with reinforcements, by then it was too badly damaged for strategic use, rendering the mission pointless and forcing the Russians to abandon their attempts to take Kyiv (near Hostomel airport).
- The Russian "Tsar" projects. After Tsar Bell and Tsar Cannon, it has become sort of Russian joke to call "tsar-something" anything impressive-looking, but unusable.
- The Tsar Bomba was the highest yield nuclear weapon in history at 50 megatons. That's almost 1600 times the power of Fat Man and Little Boy. The test of the bomb was the most powerful single thing ever done by mankind.note In spite of that there was never a need for such a single, powerful nuke, since it is far more efficient to destroy a large area using multiple, smaller thermonuclear warheads instead of one giant one.
- What could be more awesome than War Elephants? Unfortunately, they tend to panic in battle, trampling friend or foe with indifference. Elephants are also extremely expensive with regards to food and upkeep, and have slow gestation and growth periods, meaning they are nigh-impossible to domesticate properly. Yet another issue was simply getting them, as they weren't exactly easy to find in Europe (though places like India, which have ready access to elephants, made much more use of them). It's theorized that the use of war elephants outright rendered some subspecies of elephant extinct due to it placing such a heavy burden on them.
- During Timur the Lame's invasion of India, his forces faced 120 armored Indian war elephants with (for even more awesomeness!) poisoned tusks. In an act of genius, insanity, or both, he ordered all his camels lit on fire and sent the screaming animals towards the advancing elephants. The massive beasts panicked and trampled over their own forces. Timur's army then easily ran down the fleeing enemy troops. Timur then picked up the Idiot Ball himself, incorporating the elephants into his own army, perhaps figuring that no one else would figure out his strategy.
- War elephants had been made obsolete in Europe by the Roman ways (yes, ways) of dealing with them, that include such things as ox-driven chariots equipped with huge spikes to wound the elephants and pots on fire to scare them (these ultimately failed, but provoked many losses among Pyrrhus' war elephants), insane numbers of flaming arrows (scary enough to make Pyrrhus war elephants panic and stomp his own troops), extremely loud horns, and simple axes and thrown spears. By the era of the Empire, military manuals actively described the whole field as obsolete.
- Despite common depictions of the contrary, only one of Hannibal's 37 elephants survived the crossing of the Alps and the first battles in northern Italy and did little more than parading Hannibal around.
- During the decade-long Numantine War (sometimes nicknamed "Rome's Vietnam") the Romans themselves hired a company from the allied African kingdom of Numidia. As they were about to charge before the walls of Numantia, however, the local warriors threw a stone hit one of the elephants in the head. The elephant panicked, the other elephants panicked in turn, and before they knew it the entire herd was stomping the Roman lines behind. The Romans would never use elephants in Hispania again.
- King Mongkut of Siam once tried to send a herd of elephants to American President James Buchanan to aid in transportation and as beasts of burden. By the time the letter ended up in America, Abraham Lincoln was the president and the American Civil War had broken out, and he obviously (but politely) turned it down on the grounds that American climate is not suitable for elephants, and that steam engines would do the job better anyways.
- The awesome but impractical nature of elephants is exemplified in the origin of the expression "white elephant". In Thai culture white elephants are perceived as very auspicious symbols, and gifting a noble with a white elephant was one of the highest honors a king could've bestowed him with. At the same time elephants were very expensive to feed and care for, and being a King's gift it was impossible to use it as a normal working elephant to earn its own support. Thus it was a constant drain on a noble's finances, so several white elephants too many can easily bankrupt less prosperous ones. But despite all this, turning down a King's gift was not only impossible but unthinkable. So, as rumor goes, the Siamese kings sometimes used them as a hint or outright punishment for the too troublesome and/or ambitious courtiers.
- In another (possibly a myth, as there is no definitive evidence) attempt at weaponizing animals, the Swedish once attempted to create a unit of moose cavalry (Sweden having a limited supply of good cavalry horses but plenty of moose) in the 17th century. It turned out that moose are vulnerable to more disease than horses, are far more difficult to feed on pastures using fodder (since wild moose are used to foraging large areas), and are too peaceful in nature- they are too fearful to allow themselves to be ridden into battle and are too easily frightened by gunfire. The idea ended up being stillborn.
- The nuclear survival bunkers constructed by the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, such as Cheyenne Mountain or Mount Weather. Theoretically they can survive a near or direct impact from a single nuclear strike and have some self-reliance for food and air, but they cost a ton to build and were built in an era when accuracy for nukes was measured in miles instead of yards. Both sides stopped building them when they realized the other side could manufacture a dozen nukes to target each bunker, something which no amount of mountain will protect you from.
- The Spartan military. A well-bred elite warrior class trained from childhood for war is undeniably awesome. However, since every male Spartan had to go to war, in addition to the fact that they didn't intermingle with the lower classes, any major defeat would take a significant chunk out of their future population. Since having fewer soldiers would potentially lead to even more defeats, the population went into a free fall over the centuries. The Spartan army just had fewer and fewer men until they ceased to be a relevant threat altogether. For this reason, the Peloponnesian War can be considered a pyrrhic victory for Sparta; despite winning the conflict, they lost so many Spartiates that by the time of the Spartan-Theban war, they could barely fill their right flank with Spartiates, which was the most important side of an ancient Greek army. In fact, as early as the first phase of the Peloponnesian War, Sparta was already facing significant manpower problems. At the 425 BC Battle of Pylos, the Athenians defeated a Spartan force on the eponymous peninsula and trapped 420 Spartan hoplites on the nearby island of Sphacteria. 120 of these were Spartiates, which represented a full one-tenth of the total number of Spartiates in the state. The Spartan government thus treated this as a full-scale crisis and attempted to negotiate peace with the Athenians. Over a mere 420 men in total! By the time of Philip and Alexander, Sparta could barely muster 1000 men, a far cry from the 10,000 that they could muster at the height of their power.
- The Spartan training method as well, for that matter. Contrary to popular belief, the Spartan hoplite was nowhere near as effective as their hellish training and constant exercising would suggest. They were certainly better than the average Greek hoplite, but not by enough to offset their numerical disadvantage, population issue and sometimes just plain smart thinking from their enemy. There have been multiple occasions in history where the Spartan army lost to enemy forces of equal size, sometimes even smaller. Not only was their fighting effectiveness not that much better, but their morale also wasn't that much greater than the average hoplite either. During the battle of Tegyra, 300 Thebans routed over one thousand Spartans by simply breaking through the middle of their line.
- Their Training from Hell of The Spartan Way ultimately meant that enormous proportions of their male population either died or failed out of the Agoge, meaning that in spite of every boy being drafted, perhaps very few even made it to the actual force. Secondly, tactical inflexibility meant that Spartan armies often were ultimately just outmaneuvered or cornered. And thirdly, records show that Sparta did not have an amazing record of Curb Stomp Battles; they could be beaten and it was not a rare event, and it was at the hands of armies of citizen soldiers and mercenaries.
- The training and singularly-focused martial culture required to produce a Spartiate meant that, to a far greater extent than its contemporaries, Sparta relied on large numbers of slaves – the helots, an unusually cruelly oppressed slave class. This meant that the total number of Spartiates, especially in later years after the Peloponnesian Wars had killed many of them, was actually extremely small. They were tactically effective, but Spartan institutions could not economically or culturally sustain enough individuals whose defining feature was that they did not labor, for their contingent to be reliably decisive in battles. Worse, the crippling imbalance between a minority of armed-to-the-teeth homoioi and oppressed-but-seriously-pissed-off helot slaves meant that the Spartans regularly could not field their army, or have it on campaign too long, or too far away, for fear of a slave revolt killing their families at home and crippling their shaky economic foundations. This fear was totally justified - there were a number of strategically very significant helot rebellions.
- Some military thinkers in history advocated coastal fortifications as a superior defensive investment compared to warships because you didn't have to worry about the difficult engineering problem of putting large guns and thick armor on something that was supposed to float; you didn't need to worry about space to store ammo; and you couldn't sink a shore fortification. While coastal forts did have their uses and could tangle with warships in the right circumstancesnote , there was one major problem: that being that ships moved and forts didn't. Even setting aside the obvious problem of ships moving out of range, WWII Germany's famous series of shore fortifications on the French coast, for example, was highly impractical as they had to set up forts everywhere the Allies could attack, whereas the Allies just had to move their ships to the few places they did attack, so most of those forts were wastes of money. Shore fortifications did have their niche as area denial tools in particularly important chokepoints; Vladivostok, for example, was left alone in both the Russo-Japanese war and WWII because Japan didn't think it was worth it to brute force their way through the fortifications, and WWII Sweden devised a defensive naval strategy that involved fortifications working in tandem with coastal warships to deal with a probably numerically superior invading force. But most of the time shore fortifications were best used as storage facilities for spare battleship guns.
- Old-school mass armies, at least since the end of the Cold War. While it has a great intimidation factor and can cover much territory, armies prioritizing quantity over quality are very inefficient. Modern militaries are so equipment-intensive and have such high personnel costs that fielding millions of adequately-equipped men is simply too expensive- and reducing equipment levels to compensate for that is can put one at risk of a Curb-Stomp Battle. The Chinese military is an example of this in practice: their old-school "people's army" performed poorly in Vietnam and took horrendous losses, which was a catalyst for Deng to begin modernizing the PLA along Western lines, which intensified after The Gulf War, in which a modern Western coalition defeated what was at the time the fourth-largest standing army in the world in four days, vindicated modernization efforts. Then there's the fact that large scale wars between great powers that would necessitate large armies were pretty much considered suicidal with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
- Conversely, an Elite Army can also prove to be this. While the very high training and equipment levels are undeniably awesome and also possess an intimidation factor, casualties (of both men and equipment) are a near-certainity in modern warfare, and being unable to weather said casualties due to having too few personnel can be just as crippling of a flaw as having too many inadequately-equipped personell. There is also a limit as to what a handful of people can do, and at the end of the day no man can be in two places at once.
- The entire Axis military in World War II was the epitome of Awesome, But Impractical. The Germans had tanks with superior armor and firepower compared to any fielded by the Allied forces while also inventing wonder weapons like the ballistic missiles and fighter jets. Likewise, the Japanese had some of the biggest and most powerful capital ships that out-displaced even entire US naval task forces in some battles. Yet despite their advances, Axis military technology was notoriously expensive and unreliable, meaning that their forces couldn't replace losses or produce enough equipment to cover multiple fronts. Not helping matters is that while Axis technology was superior on paper, the lack of experienced soldiers and sloppy logistics meant that their weapons couldn't perform to their full potential in practice. By the end of the war, the heavy casualties in the early stages of the war meant that Japan lacked experienced sailors to crew the Yamato-class battleships. Likewise, Germany's disrupted supply chain lead to a shortage of fuel and spare parts, resulting in more German armored fighting vehicles being lost to mechanical failure or crew abandonment than enemy combat. Axis logistics was so abysmal that Canada, a minor Allied nation, had more trucks than all Axis forces combined. Furthermore, the Axis nations never fully cooperated as an alliance, meaning that they didn't share technological advancements whereas the Allies regularly improved on each other's technology like when the British installed their Merlin engines in American P-51s for superior performance.
- Imperial Japan’s naval doctrine of Kantai Kessen
(“Decisive Battle”) was essentially this on a strategic scale. Knowing that Japan could never match the United States in a prolonged naval arms race, the Imperial Japanese Navy planned to compensate through quality and one overwhelming victory: as the U.S. fleet advanced across the Pacific, submarines, aircraft, cruisers, and destroyers would gradually wear it down before the main Japanese battle fleet annihilated the survivors in a climactic engagement, ideally producing another Battle of Tsushima and forcing the Americans to negotiate on the Japanese' terms. On paper, this was formidable; it encouraged exceptional night-fighting training, powerful torpedoes such as the Type 93 “Long Lance,” and heavily armed capital ships intended to destroy a superior enemy fleet. In practice, however, the entire strategy depended on the Americans advancing where expected, suffering sufficient losses beforehand, accepting battle on favorable Japanese terms, losing decisively, and then deciding that one catastrophic defeat was reason enough to end the war.note Once the Pacific War became a prolonged industrial conflict, those assumptions collapsed: the United States could replace ships, aircraft, and trained personnel on a scale Japan could not remotely match, while increasingly using carrier aviation, amphibious operations, and island-hopping rather than obligingly fighting the exact battle Japan had spent decades preparing for. Worse, the IJN’s fixation on the spectacular decisive engagement contributed to neglect of decidedly less glamorous necessities such as convoy escort, merchant-shipping protection, logistics, and replacement personnel. Japan thus built an exceptionally dangerous navy for the grand battle it wanted, only to discover that winning a long maritime war required far more than one glorious fleet action. - According to some veterans, the US Army's approach to infantry fighting during World War II can be best described as attempting to turn standard infantry into expert marksmen, insisting that every man be a perfect shot and that every shot kill the enemy. In reality, most isolated riflemen didn't shoot to kill because they were too scared and felt that they couldn't even make a single difference in a prolonged fire-fight. Most of the effective killing done by infantrymen wielding rifle-caliber weapons actually came from machine gunners, who simply overwhelmed their enemies with the sheer number of bullets that could come out of a machine gun. The Germans were ahead of the Americans in this regard, with their emphasis on the machine gunner and his assistants as the key members of the squad. See the development of the M14 for why emphasizing the individual rifleman as the primary killing power of any army doesn't really work (or why one gun cannot take over the roles of five or six different ones, for that matter). In spite of the development of the select-fire assault rifle as the general issue infantryman's main arm and the full-power general purpose machine gun as the platoon's primary firepower, it appears that several armies (including the US Army) still insist that the rifleman lead the way with perfectly placed single shots. This, of course, leads to the machine gunners being neglected and their guns being unable to do much good away from base.
- Sometimes a military bureaucracy will become so preoccupied with maintaining the secrecy of a classified technology or a plan for a classified operation, that they’ll go too far and make it inaccessible even to decision makers and technical specialists who will be necessary to its implementation. Hell, sometimes they’ll come up with an idea and just plain forget to tell anybody. Sure, enemy spies are less likely to find out about it if you tell almost nobody that it even exists, but look what happened to the Canal Defense Light, a tank equipped with a powerful arc lamp that could be used to blind the enemy: since few British commanders knew it was available, it was hardly ever used. This also bit the British in the rumps at the Battle of Jutland, where they were so concerned with the secrecy of Room 40, their signals decryption office, that even Admiral Jellicoe, the guy commanding the Grand Fleet in said battle, wasn't given access to most of the codebreakers' data- including things of such vital importance as where the enemy fleet was headed.
- Another case is the Mark 6 Exploder, which was used in the U.S. Mark 14 Torpedo; the plans for the exploder were locked up in some obscure place where nobody could look at them, and since few people knew how the detonator of the torpedo actually worked, it took longer than it otherwise would have to discover why the torpedoes were failing to explode when used against Japanese ships. Worse, any submariner who opened the thing up and actually fixed the issues out of frustration would be cited for "improper maintenance" since they had clearly done something against the book, which they had never been allowed to read in the first place. And just to add insult to injury, these attempts at fixing the torpedo made it difficult for engineers to tell if the torpedo was failing because of the most obvious issue, or if a sailor had actually fixed that one and the torpedo failed because of the several other critical problems in the torpedo's design that weren't initially obvious because the first issue masked them; for example, one problem was that the torpedo ran too deep and so didn't get near enough to its targets to properly detonate, but if somebody set the depth control sensor to shallow running so they actually went where they were supposed to go, the magnetic detonator was also faulty and so sometimes wouldn't set off the torpedo... and if some exasperated submariner turned the magnetic detonator off, the backup contact detonator was also faulty, and engineers obviously couldn't tell how a specific torpedo had failed after said torpedo had been fired.
- A world-altering example is the British Official Secrets Act, which is a major factor in the relative unimportance of the British computing industry. Despite making incredible advancements in computing machines during WWII, all the post-war commercialization happened in the USA. British philosophers, mathematicians, and engineers were not allowed to discuss their work, and thus were very limited in their ability to develop it. In one notable example, Tommy Flowers tried to start a company building programmable electronic computers after the war was over. However he could not find investment because people did not believe that such a thing was possible, and he was not allowed to tell them that he had already built several of the things at Bletchley Park.
- Most of the weapons adopted by the Russians with Rusting Rockets in The New '10s lean towards this trope. Nearly all of them extremely ambitious, which is helped by the hyped marketing (by various groups including Russian state media). But even if they do live up to the hype, Russia cannot afford to procure many of them quickly due to its economic state, and most of what they do have currently are prototype models hastily refurbished for combat as opposed to serial production models. While Russia could fund mass production with sales of the T-14 and SU-57, most nations opted instead to either buy non-Russian equipment or stick with their old Soviet-era wares.note Even if Russia could afford to build more Su-57s and T-14s, they can’t domestically produce (and also can’t import, especially since additional sanctions in 2022) important manufacturing components like microchips for sensors and weapons guidance. This is why the Russian military relies more on their larger stock of (upgraded or otherwise) Soviet-era weaponry in the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War. note The existing vehicles are Too Awesome to Use because there aren't enough of them to make a meaningful strategic difference, meaning it isn't worth the potential risk of them being destroyed (or worse, captured and analyzed) by Russia's adversaries.
- The Su-57 allegedly has maneuverability and stealth comparable to the F-22, but the F-22 is the absolute best in the stealth category and has maneuverability similar to Russian fourth-gen aircraft. The Su-57 by comparison has design that only makes it LO note , and it has to use Su-35 engines as a stopgap as it's Iz 30 engines are not ready yet. Furthermore, Russia only has a handful of Su-57s compared to the 187 F-22 that the USAF has in service, and their economic state means they are unlikely to be able to procure more on short notice. The only current tangible advantage the Su-57 is being an purchasable option for states that were/are adversarial to the US (since it, unlike the F-22, is being offered for export in the future, and unlike the F-35 doesn't require the buyer to be on good graces with the US). Even so, most of the nations interested in it haven't confirmed export orders yet, rendering this advantage questionable (for the current time being).
- The T-14 seems like an incredible leap forward in tank survivability, especially compared to legacy Soviet/Russian tanks such as the T-72. The turret is completely remote-controlled—allowing the remaining crew of three to be encased in a separate armored capsule inside the hull—and the tank incorporates the Afghanit hard-kill active protection system to intercept incoming projectiles. However, it is still a very risky leap as nobody else has deployed tanks with unmanned turrets, and once again it is questionable whether Russia can truly afford such an expensive vehicle. The automotive performance of T-14s on parade is also not encouraging: the handbrake seems to be the best-made part.
- Warriors coming from a warrior caste/nobility like European knights or Japanese samurai, complete with honour codes. Being trained from the youngest age possible to be a warrior sounds glamorous, but this also means it takes much longer to train a new knight or samurai if they die in battle. Additionally they're really expensive (both to hire, pay and equip; this is why feudalism initially became a thing, as a king would pay his knights for their service with land so he didn't have to pay them with money) and because they're so devoted to warfare they rarely if ever can work normal jobs in peacetime. The aristocratic mindsets and honour codes can also prove a liability if the warrior caste feels they don't have enough privilege or respect (which led to a civil war in Japan's case during the early Meiji Restoration), or they may decide to rush into battle to gain prestige (one of the biggest factor that lead to the French defeat at Agincourt). In Japan in particular after the end of the Sengoku Period a lot of samurais had to be reshuffled into being civil servants because having such a huge warrior caste in peacetime was too expensive.
- The Spanish Armada sounds like an awesome plan. The English have been sending out pirates like Francis Drake with plausible deniability (though the crown profited from his actions as an investor) and screwing with your rebellious provinces in the Netherlands, so you decide to land an army on their soil, smack them around a bit, and force them to come to terms. Sounds great, especially when it's being considered by the greatest military power of the age, ordered by an emperor who is, technically, in charge of roughly 50% of the world's landmass. Slight problem, the plan as conceived by Philip II's whimsical mind (after rejecting a minor and much more manageable project of invading Ireland first) was basically impossible. It would have required incredible coordination between the Navy and the Army of Flanders (which didn't happen) and phenomenal luck crossing the English Channel (which didn't happen). Building up the resources necessary meant working with tons of involved aristocratic, ecclesiastic, and bureaucratic nonsense such that, once the ball got rolling, it was impossible to stop the operation. An amphibious operation of that scale was essentially impossible at that time, even absent the natural wind and currents of the English Channel. Though English historians in the centuries since have touted it as English superiority at its finest, the fact is that the English attempt at their own amphibious invasion of Spain a little while later failed in the same way for the same reasons.
- The phalanx formation is a fantastic example of this trope. In theory it's a mass of troops equipped with heavy shields, spears, helmets, and some other armor that can trample anything but another phalanx, and in proper circumstances (such as being deployed on flat terrain) is indeed nearly invincible. In practice, however, it suffered from numerous weaknesses:
- During the first battles between the Greek cities in Asia and the Persians, the Greeks suffered complete defeats because the Persians didn't try and fight them directly but simply showered them with arrows until the phalanx broke and then sent in the cavalry to finish off the stragglers. While the phalanx did with at Marathon, that was the result of the Greeks doing something as stupid as charging down a hill against the Persians and catching them by surprise (it helped that they waited for the Persians to decide to re-embark on their ships and put the horses on, leaving them unable to deploy the cavalry for flanking manouvers) - and that was the first time the Greeks ever won against the Persians in open field.
- Another weakness is that the phalanx is a slow and cumbersome object, and the moment the enemy could get around it the battle was over. The famous Battle of Thermopylae fought between a Spartan-led Greek army and the Persians in 480 BC is the perfect example: for two days the badly outnumbered Greeks held the line at a chokepoint, with the terrain preventing the Persians from just showering them with arrows, but when the Persians discovered a path bringing them around the chokepoint the Greeks were forced to retreat to avoid being boxed in. The Spartan and Theban exile contingents then took position on a hill to cover the retreat of the rest of the army... And were exterminated with arrows.
- A third weakness was the fact most Greek hoplites were citizen soldiers with little training beyond keeping themselves physically fit and marching in step keeping their spears pointed at the enemy. The weakness was exposed in a rather embarrassing way at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC, where the allied Greek army faced the Persians and managed to close in and the Tegean contingent suffered the humiliation of losing to Persian light infantry when the desperate Persians started grabbing their spears and then, with the pointy stick eliminated, just stabbed behind the shields, as while the Tegeans also carried swords they never bothered to learn how to use them (the follow-up Spartan reinforcements, composed of trained professionals, actually knew how to use the swords and countered the Persian spear thefts by doing exactly that).
- A fourth weakness was that the Greek phalanx depended on short spears - meaning an enemy with longer weapons could hold them back. The Persians, after the debacles in their invasion of Greece and later a mercenary army stranded in their empire, developed chariots with scythes on their wheels longer than the spears, while Philip II of Macedon improved the phalanx by using professional soldiers with full if light armor, no shield, and the spears replaced with pikes, that also countered the new Persian chariots and even their arrows (the rear ranks kept their pikes angled and waved them, meaning very few arrows got through). With his new phalanx and the use of combined arms, he was able to conquer Greece and start his invasion of Persia itself, invasion that would be completed by his son Alexander the Great.
- Even the Macedonian-style phalanx, however, maintained the weakness of being a slow and cumbersome formation. While it wasn't a problem for Alexander and his generals as they knew how to cover the flanks, in time their successors got careless, and by the time the Hellenistic kingdoms faced the Romans the latter delighted in finding inventive ways to simply sidestep the phalanx, but just the fact that they had more nimble, more adaptive troops in the form of their legions often proved to be more than enough. To the Romans it helped they used to fight in hoplitic phalanxes and experimented their weakness on their skins at the Caudine Forks (a mountain pass where a Roman army marching to fight the Samnites got its travel barred at a point just large enough for the Samnites to deploy their nimbler manipular formations but not enough to form a phalanx. The battle was so hopeless the Romans surrendered without a fight) and, after reforming their doctrine to never get caught like that again (specifically they copied the Samnites, though for a few centuries they kept their veterans in a phalanx as support), got a keen interest on other ways to defeat a phalanx - starting with having their veterans pin down an enemy phalanx with their own and resisting just long enough for the younger and middle aged troops to flank the enemy and start chopping.
Land Vehicles
- War wagons, essentially horse-drawn wagons which could carry soldiers inside a castle-like wooden box with holes to shoot crossbows or handguns out of, were a novelty of the Late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. They were introduced to great success in the Battle of Sudoměř by Czech general Jan Žižka, who would sometimes literally trample the Holy Roman Emperor's forces with them. After further advancement in field artillery, however, war wagons started becoming big, easy targets which didn’t require many cannonballs to destroy, and they couldn’t be up-armored much further without becoming impossible for horses and men to move them around. In this way the war wagons were finally defeated by the imperial artillery in the Battle of Wenzenbach. A variation came later at the Battle of Ravenna, where the Spanish deployed war wagons and artillery together to great effect (they ultimately lost the battle for unrelated reasons), but sources are unclear about whether the wagons offered any advantage compared to just having more cannons, and this might be why the war wagons were never used again by any major European nation.
- Multi-turreted tanks, a major fad of the 1920s and early 30s which turned out to be a dead end. They were most popular with the British and the Soviets, but almost everybody was trying to get in on it at one time or another.
- One of the problems of interwar tank development was how to arm a tank to deal with various types of opposition such as infantry, tanks, aircraft, and fortifications, and engage multiple targets in various directions. The idea of the tank was still new enough that the answer wasn't yet obvious, and what a lot of people did was look for analogy with warships. This makes sense when you consider how ironclad warships had preceded the tank by decades, and the fact that Britain's tanks had originally been developed by the Landships Committee under the auspices of the navy, hence the use of naval terminology for tank parts such as "hull", "bow", "deck", "hatch", etc. There were some thinkers such as J.F.C. Fuller who believed that battles between tanks would be like battles on the seas, complete with different speed and weight classes such as "cruiser tanks" and "battleship tanks", as well as "harbors" on land to which they would return for resupply. Just as battleships required big guns to punch through heavily armored warships at long distance, smaller, quick-firing guns to hit fast-moving torpedo boats, and automatic cannons to shoot down aircraft, the thinking was that a tank needed multiple types of armament that could all be targeted independently. Needless to say, in reality the battles were nothing like that, and all these designs quickly fell out of favour and were replaced by more practical ones. The idea of a tank with guns pointing everywhere may have seemed neat and effective, but the difficulty a commander faced in coordinating all the guns, the increased crew requirement to man each gun, problems in ammunition management and supply for varying calibres of weapons, increased weight, effect on armor layout, and the complexity and cost that multiple turrets and sponsons added to production led to the idea falling out of fashion by the second half of the 1930s.
- The Vickers A1E1 Independent, a single prototype ordered in 1924 and delivered in 1926, was the design that started the multi-turreted dreadnought fad. It was very long in order to cross wide trenches, and had four machine gun turrets surrounding a main turret with a three-pounder gun. One machine gun turret could point its weapon straight upwards for anti-aircraft use. The penny-pinching government refused to pay for a production run, but various countries around the world were inspired to copy it. Both Germany and Russia obtained the plans through espionage, and a British officer named Norman Baillie-Stewart was court-martialed in 1933 for selling its plans to Germany.
- The Soviet T-28 tank was probably based on the British A1E1 Independent, and also somewhat resembled the Mark III Medium: three turrets, one cannon, and up to five machine guns. It was more advanced than anything else when introduced in 1931, but it didn't age well and the Soviets kept it in service beyond its effective life. The advancement of anti-tank guns rendered it poorly armored in proportion to the large target it presented, and its tracks were so long in relation to the distance between them that maneuvering in anything other than a straight line was very difficult. Finnish troops captured seven of these beasts during the war, giving them the nickname Postivaunu (Stagecoach).
- The Soviet T-35 heavy tank deserves special mention here, being something of an Independent on steroids and the only five-turreted tank in history to enter serial production; it weighed 45 tonnes and took 11 crew members to operate, carrying a 76.2 mm gun, two 45 mm guns, and six machine guns. It was also slow, very poorly armored for such a heavy vehicle, and incredibly expensive and complicated to produce; only 61 were built, of which 48 were on hand when the Germans invaded. The excessive length made it difficult to turn, and it was top-heavy enough to make tipping over a potential danger. It wasn’t an unreliable vehicle per se, but the Soviets drove them hundreds of kilometers without maintenance in their haste to stop the Germans, causing more losses from mechanical issues than from combat. Worst of all, the T-35's turrets, when aligned a certain way, actually blocked the escape hatches. So, if the tank was hit, the poor bugger crewing it had to hand-crank his turret out the way before he could bail out - or, if the turret was damaged and unable to rotate, presumably use his sidearm to shoot himself rather than burn to death.
- The T-100 and SMK were competing prototypes, produced in 1939 by Factory 185 and the Kirov Works, respectively. They were supposed to replace the T-35 with something simpler, more reliable, and more heavily armored; the original request was for a central 76.2 mm main turret raised on a pedestal, and two 45 mm secondary turrets fore and aft, but the aft turret was deleted from the design before construction. An apocryphal story tells of Stalin snapping the third turret off a wooden model, exclaiming, “We are designing a tank, not a department store!” The two tanks looked similar, but the SMK was marginally better at 55 tonnes instead of 58, using torsion bars instead of coil springs, and most other components differing as well. The SMK was named in honor of the assassinated Communist politician Sergey Mironovich Kirov. The Kirov team had actually been dissatisfied with the multi tier layout to begin with, and simultaneously produced a single-turret version, the Kliment Voroshilov, which despite its own problems outperformed both of the problematic multi-turreted tanks in trials. All three prototypes were sent to be tested in battle with the 20th Heavy Tank Brigade against the fortified defenses on the Karelian Isthmus, Finland; despite the SMK bouncing at least a dozen shots of 37 mm, one jammed the overly-exposed main turret ring, and while preoccupied with this problem the tank drove over an anti-tank mine, wrecking the running gear and forcing it to be abandoned. The KV with its single turret would be the only one of them to get produced.
- In 1926, while Weimar Germany was secretly experimenting with tanks in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, they ordered several companies to produce prototypes for a heavy tank, called Großtraktor ("large tractor") to conceal its real purpose. This had the main gun turret in front, and a lower-slung machine gun turret on the rear. From 1929 these were tested at the proving grounds in Kazan, USSR which the Reichswehr was using in cooperation with the Red Army at the time. They had many mechanical problems, including the transmission, and ended up as monuments or practice targets.
- Picking up where the Reichswehr had left off with the Großtraktor, the Nazis ordered the Neubaufahrzeug ("new construction vehicle"). In 1934 they produced two prototypes in mild steel, and then three with proper armor in 1935-6. There were two machine gun turrets borrowed from the Panzer I, the first mounted front right, the other rear left. Between them was the elevated main turret, a Krupp design whose appearance would be echoed on the latter Panzer IV, with a short-barreled 75 mm main gun and a coaxial 37 mm. On one hand this was a lot of firepower on paper, and they looked pretty cool. On the other hand they were slow, complex, unreliable, short on operational range, and protected by no more than 20 mm of armor. Development of the Neubaufahrzeug was stopped in favor of the more mobile and all-around better Panzer IV. As a result they became propaganda vehicles, being shown off in the 1939 Berlin International Auto Exposition. In 1940 the three armored ones were sent to help in the invasion of Norway, mainly by trying to trick the enemy into thinking they had real heavy tanks. They had a lot of mechanical problems that kept them from seeing much action, the exception being one which was penetrated by a Boys anti tank rifle and was subsequently blown up by its crew.
- The British A15 Crusader had a front-mounted machine gun turret which, despite having a wider field of fire than a hull-mounted machine gun, was both an uncomfortable position to man and an easy weak point for an enemy soldier with an Anti-Tank rifle. It was left empty and eventually deleted in the Mark 3 variant. The Cruiser, Mark I (A9) had two machine gun turrets on the front, which weakened the frontal protection and were unbearably hot to crew during the North Africa campaign.
- The Vickers 6-Ton light tank, designed in 1928 and also known as the Mark E, showed the world that even light tanks could get in on the multi-turret action. The Type A had two side-by-side one-man turrets, each with a water-cooled machine gun, so they could spray the enemy in two directions at once. Of course, this made it useless against anything except infantry. The type B with a single two-man turret introduced the important innovation of a “duplex” mount combining a proper tank gun with a coaxial machine gun, meaning it had more firepower than the type A and thus became markedly more popular.
- The American M2A2 light tank accepted in 1935 looked similar to the Vickers 6-Ton type A: it had twin turrets, one with a .50 cal machine gun and one with a .30 cal. The two side-by-side turrets limited each other's field of fire, and like most countries the U.S. concluded from the Spanish Civil War that a tank armed only with machine guns was useless against other tanks. The M2A2 and its slightly upgraded A3 version were superseded by the stopgap M2A4 in 1940, with improvements including more armor and one turret mounting a 37 mm main gun.
- The M3 Lee Medium Tank was developed as a stopgap so the U.S. would have a medium tank with a 75 mm gun while they waited for the M4 Sherman to arrive; this meant putting the 75 in a limited traverse sponson in the hull. Ordinance Department head Gladeon Barnes wanted it to be a turretless tank, but the Infantry arm which still held sway demanded that the 37 mm in a turret also be retained because of its ability to fire canister shot. So in addition to the hull 75 there was also a turret with the 37... and on top of the turret was a rotating commander's cupola with a .30 cal machine gun that he could fire. Basically, a mini superimposed turret. The machine gun cupola was replaced with a simple hatch in the M3 Grant variant made for the British, because by this time even they realized it was silly.
- Overlapping somewhat with the multi-turret dead end was the idea of tanks with loads of machine guns. Since tanks were mostly controlled by the infantry arm in most countries during the interwar period, they wanted tanks that could kill a lot of enemy infantry. The United States in particular had what Harry Yeide has called the "cult of the machine gun". The M2 Medium tank had a turret with a 37 mm gun in case it had to fight an enemy tank, but primarily it was designed to be a mobile machine gun nest. It had nine .30 cal machine guns: one coaxial, two fixed-traverse machine guns in the glacis to be fired electronically by the driver, one sponson mounted MG on each of the hull's four corners, and two more stuck on the outside of the turret as spares. As the tank drove over an enemy trench, the rear sponson machine guns could aim at bullet deflectors on the rear fenders to ricochet the rounds down into the trench. The tank started production in 1939, just in time for World War 2 to begin in Europe and show that it was already obsolete. Trench warfare was gone, it was really inefficient to have four out of six crew members just be machine gunners, and a 37 mm was no longer adequate for the anti-tank role. The Army also determined from tests that a 75 mm high explosive shell was actually more effective against infantry than machine guns, so they experimented with putting a 75 in the hull of the M2 as a prelude to producing the M3 Lee. Equipping the 75 was a step in the right direction, but the M3 Lee and some very early M4 Shermans retained the glacis-mounted driver's machine guns as a last gasp of machine gun fever.
- Throughout World War II, having a hull-mounted machine gun with its own gunner (usually doubling as an assistant driver/radio operator) in addition to the coaxial machine gun on the turret was viewed as a necessity. If an enemy foot soldier happened to pop up in the front arc of the tank with a Panzerfaust or some such, the bow gunner could react quicker. He could potentially shoot more accurately on the move—if not with pinpoint accuracy, then at least suppressively—because turret gun stabilization was either non-existent or imperfect, while the BOG could somewhat compensate for the bumps by moving the gun up and down with his body. On the other hand, the weak point created by drilling a hole in the front armor to stick a machine gun through was increasingly dangerous as tanks got more powerful guns, and by removing the machine gunner's position it would be possible to either add much-needed ammo racks for the larger shells that tanks were now using, or move the driver to a more optimal central position and give the hull front a glancing "beaked" shape. By the end of the Korean War, the improvement of turret gun stabilization and the benefits to be gained by deleting the bow gun caused it to finally disappear.
- Electric transmission on heavy armored vehicles, which has been tried in various prototypes and production vehicles since World War I. In theory it could avoid the reliability problems of a mechanical gearbox, respond better to the fluctuating torque requirements of a tracked vehicle driving off-road, enable neutral steering in the days before that was a standard feature, allow the vehicle to drive as fast in reverse as it did forwards, and accelerate quickly. On the other hand, electric tank drive has tended to be bulkier and heavier than the mechanical equivalent because of the need for both combustion engines and generators to supply the motors with electricity, and many vehicles with this system were underpowered or had overheating problems. The quantities of copper required were also problematic during World War II. Today's vehicles could ditch the internal combustion or turbine engine and be purely battery-electric, which would also lower their noise and heat signatures, but even lithium ion batteries are still expensive, heavy, and slow to charge. An electric powertrain requires specialist electricians to repair instead of your normal AFV mechanic. And furthermore, some of the extra abilities aren’t really practical to use: driving in reverse at 60 kilometers per hour would be potentially dangerous and in almost every case quite pointless. Because they’ve been through decades of refinement, diesel engines and mechanical transmissions for tanks have reached such a level of efficiency that electric can’t get enough of a performance edge to justify the bother.
- Military turbine-powered road vehicles have dubious practicality. The only two nations to field a fully turbine-powered vehicle were the US and USSR (notice the pattern?), and the Soviets canned their turbine-powered tank, the T-80, as soon as the end of the Cold War happened, because they couldn't pour money into their fuel tanks anymore: one T-80, including building, maintenance, and fuel expenditure, was equivalent to three T-72 or T-90. A common joke has it that the Americans are only keeping a turbine-powered tank because of their habit to solve any problem by drowning it in money. On the other hand, the turbine engine does have the benefit of being capable of consuming multiple fuel types (a boon when capturing fuel caches), and the ridiculous fuel consumption was partly addressed with a suitable auxiliary power unit to keep the communication equipment running without the turbine. Finally, due to the immense heat being dumped by the turbine, infantry can not sit on top of the tank or work as close support due to the incredible temperatures, which was the push that finally encouraged development of a multi-fuel diesel engine variant of the tank.
- Heavily-sloped side hull armor, as like most famously done on the T-34 medium tank of WWII fame. While sloping side hull armor also offers increased protection compared to non-sloped side hull armor, doing this plays merry hell with a tank's internal volume. The crew gets less space, there is less space for roof hatches (making the tank difficult to escape should something unexpected happen), the size the of turret ring is restricted (which makes upgrading the tank more difficult, because this also limits the size of the turret that can be put on it), and all of this for less benefit as tanks normally face incoming fire from the front; if a tank gets hit from the sides/rear, it's usually an ambush and no amount of sloping can help in this case. Unsurprisingly, the next Soviet medium tank/main battle tank, the T-54/T-55, ditched the T-34's side-sloping.
- The Soviet KV-1 heavy tank, named after the Soviet defense commissar and politician Kliment Voroshilov. It was created as a single-turreted version of the SMK multi-turreted tank, and was the more successful of the two during test-fielding in the Winter War, leading to it being accepted for serial production. It was so heavily armored that it was practically immune to the common Finnish and German anti-tank guns of 1939-1941, while the 76.2mm ZiS-5 gun that it had was able to punch through the armor of early German tanks from a thousand meters away. However, KV-1s, weighing 45 tons, were too heavy for most bridges to support and had no ability to ford rivers, severely limiting their mobility. In addition, the KV was slow, expensive to produce, and very prone to mechanical issues due to being a heavy tank the size of the Panther but using components and machinery that were used in pre-war medium tanks. Out of the 600 KVs the Soviets had at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, 200 broke down without ever seeing the enemy, and another 200 were incapacitated by non-penetrating hits. Other variants of the KV-1 were just as impractical:
- The KV-2 version was created in response to the Red Army's difficulties with the Finns' fortified Mannerheim line, and the problems plaguing the KV-1 went from bad to worse as a result. In order to equip the huge bunker-busting 152 mm howitzer so that it would have 360 degrees of rotation, the Soviets built a very tall turret for it, increasing the tank's overall height to 4.9 m (16 ft)! Unfortunately, this turret was a giant, impossible-to-conceal target, so to protect the unfortunate crewmembers who have to operate the massive gun, the Soviets made the turret armor a whopping 110 mm thick on the front and 75 mm on the sides, hoping to compensate for its huge profile and lack of sloping. Unfortunately, this made the turret so heavy that the traverse motors couldn't turn it against gravity. As a result, the tank couldn't operate at even a slight angle, or the turret would seize, and on a more pronounced lateral slope the top-heavy turret put the whole tank in danger of toppling over. The extra weight added to the tank further reduced reliability, and the recoil of the gun was so powerful it could damage the turret ring, gearbox, or engine. Ultimately, the Soviets stopped producing the KV-2 due to how poor their combat performance was, and focused their efforts in putting a (newer, more accurate) 152mm howitzer in a casemated superstructure, resulting in the far more effective and successful SU-152.
- The KV-1S—the S stood for Skorostnoy, meaning "fast"—was an attempt to correct the mobility problems of the KV-1. Armor was reduced to save weight; the old turret was replaced by a new low-profile cast turret with a commander's cupola and proper protection for the turret ring; and a new planetary transmission was used to improve reliability and replace the old clutch-and-brake steering. Production began in August 1942, then stopped in late 1943 because they realized they'd gotten the tradeoffs all wrong: a slight increase in speed wasn't worth sacrificing armor—the only advantage that the KV had over the T-34, especially considering the cost—when what the Soviets really needed was a tougher and more powerfully armed heavy tank to deal with increasingly gnarly German guns and tanks. The remaining tanks were upgraded to the KV-85, which was just a KV-1S with a more powerful 85mm gun. This was merely intended as a stopgap until the more powerful IS-2 was ready.
- Despite being the icon of Boring, but Practical for their army, even the famous Soviet T-34 medium tank qualified as this in the first months of the war with Germany. The original version was a well-balanced tank with good mobility courtesy of its powerful diesel engine, Christie suspension and wide tracks, in addition to good protection from its 40-45 mm of sloped armor on all sides, and a 76.2mm gun whose firepower easily outclassed what the Germans had at that time; the tank was a nasty shock to German vanguard forces during the summer of 1941 in the beginning of Operation Barbarossa. However, all was not rosy for the T-34; its crew ergonomics were awful note , production quality varied widely (due to the German invasion punching deep into the USSR until they were within range of T-34 production facilities- factory No.112, for example, was notorious for shoddy quality on their T-34s) which negatively affected reliability, and crews were often hastily trained if at all (to the point that sometimes the crew would be those who built the tank in question themselves, since they at least already know how the tank works). Fortunately, things started to look up once the Germans were held off and eventually kicked out of the USSR, with the T-34's early reliability and ergonomics kinks being worked out slowly and the tank itself receiving upgrades, before 1943 introduced a comprehensive upgrade in the form of the T-34-85, which had a cast 3-man turret with a 85mm gun.
- The A7V was the first and only German-made tank to see combat during World War I. the tank looked like a huge metal box, and could reach higher speeds than the British Mark IV, in addition to being heavily armed with a 57mm cannon and up to six machine guns, and also having more armor than the British Mark IV tanks. Unfortunately for the Germans, they only managed to make 20 out of a planned 100, the armor was not hardened (so despite being thicker than the Mark IV it was only immune to machine gun fire), and it required 18 crew per vehicle- far more than the British Mark IV that only required 8. Unsurprisingly, most of the time Imperial Germany relied on captured Mark IV tanks instead.
- The German army fielded some of the most dangerous and terrifying tanks during WWII. However due to a mix of needlessly complicated design, poor reliability, and low production numbers, these tanks were considered to be failures. To wit:
- The Panzerkampfwagen VI heavy tank, aka the Tiger I was arguably the most (in)famous tank of t, the war, featuring thick armor (100mm at the front and 80mm on the sides and rear) almost impervious to the guns that its opponents can reasonably bring to bear (at the time) at a distance of 1000m or more, while the 88mm KwK 36 L/56 gun (a derivative of the famous 88mm Flak 36) was able to penetrate them from 1500m away. In addition, it was by no means slow especially for a tank that weighed 57 tons. The Tiger I soon gained a fearsome reputation, to the point that Allied crews would often misidentify the much-more-common Panzer IV as Tigers and automatically assume a Tiger was the culprit whenever one of their armored vehicles blew up/took a hit. However, the Tiger was also something of a white elephant: it was difficult (and expensive) to manufacture, difficult to transport, and very difficult to maintain. It broke down often, and would not go very far before requiring a full overhaul, which meant having to send it back (often by rail) to the factory that built it, something which takes a lot of time and takes it out of combat readiness. It was also too heavy to cross most bridges, the initial ability to snorkel through rivers was left out of later models to reduce production time, and it was difficult to recover if knocked out.
- The Panzerkampfwagen V Panther tank was the Germans' next generation successor to the Panzer III and IV, intended to give the Germans a standardized tank that nevertheless stood well against Soviet armor such as the T-34. On paper it looks like the best fighting tank in the war: it had better mobility, frontal armor, and gun performance against tanks than the Tiger I, yet it was far cheaper and produced in quantity second only to that of the Panzer IV. On the other hand, it's L/70 gun had a weaker HE shell than the L/48 gun used by the Panzer IV due to it being specialized for long-range open terrain anti-tank combat, and it was rushed into service which meant that, like the Tiger, it was infamous for breaking down all the time and would require frequent overhauls; most infamously, the final drive was so fragile even neutral-steering/pivot-steering would run a high risk of breaking it. Most of the technical issues were more or less fixed eventually (apart from the final drive that remained a problem until the end of the war), but by then it was too late: fuel shortages, lack of alloys for good armor and components, lack of spare parts, and insufficiently trained crews reduced their combat effectiveness so much it hardly mattered how good the design was. The French army used Panthers after the war and managed to operate them somewhat more effectively, yet noted their inherent problems in a comprehensive report.
- The Panzerjäger Tiger (P), nicknamed the "Elefant", or "Ferdinand" (earlier versions; after the designer Ferdinand Porsche) was a tank destroyer made from hulls of Porsche's failed design for the competition that would eventually birth the aforementioned Tiger 1; because Ferdinand Porsche had built 91 hulls of this design, it was decided that, rather than scrapping them, they would be used as the basis for a new tank destroyer with a casemated 88mm PaK 43 anti-tank gun as its armament. The resulting tank destroyer was all but impervious from enemy guns at longer ranges due to its thick mantlet and frontal armor, while the 88mm PaK 43 could perforate Allied tanks at similar ranges. However, much like the other Tiger, the Ferdinand/Elefant suffered from severe mechanical issues, such as the engine being so overburdened that there were reports that just driving up a gentle slope on a hill would set the engine on fire. In addition, due to its immense weight of 65 tonnes, Germany's Panzer-IV based armored recovery vehicles could not tow a single Ferdinand by their lonesome- there had to be at least three to four just to tow one Ferdinand/Elefant. Ultimately, the Ferdinand/Elefant suffered more losses due to being abandoned/destroyed/disabled by their own crew than they did to enemy fire.
- The Tiger II was the bigger, badder sequel to the already big and bad Tiger I, intended to replace the previous stopgap with something designed from the ground up for heavy tank supremacy. Improvements included simplified suspension, thicker, sloped armor, and the long-barreled 8.8 cm KwK 43 L/71 cannon, which was derived from the Pak 43 used in the Ferdinand and thus became the most powerful gun ever mounted in a revolving turret on an operational World War II tank. It could perforate Allied tanks from up to 3km away, and there is no record of a Tiger II ever having been perforated through the front during the war. However, the Tiger II had some serious performance issues. Because of production limitations due to the Allied bombing campaign targeting German industry, the Tiger II's initial drivetrain was from a tank twenty tons lighter, resulting in frequent cases of broken transmissions and destroyed engines. It required 300,000 man-hours to build, cost as much as two Tiger I tanks or nine M4 Shermans, and guzzled large amounts of fuel which the Third Reich was dangerously short on. The sheer mass of the vehicle, at 70 tonnes, also rendered them horribly difficult to recover if something goes wrong (such as falling off bridges or getting stuck in too-deep mud). More Tiger II's were rendered unrecoverable due to mechanical failure and getting stuck in terrain than those that were destroyed. When they were destroyed, it was usually due to being in terrain "lesser tanks" had an easier time negotiating and liberal use of the air superiority that the Allies so enjoyed at that point of the war.
- Related to the Tiger II 71.7 tonne Jagdtiger, the heaviest enclosed armored vehicle to see service in the war, which was essentially a Tiger II with a gigantic 128mm Pak 44 gun mounted in a fixed casemate instead of a turret. On one hand, its frontal armor was nigh impenetrable at up to 250 mm thick, while its large-calibre gun could be accurate out to about 3.5 km away and was guaranteed to destroy any kind of Allied tank it hit note . On the other hand, its engine was not powerful enough for such a heavy vehicle, resulting in the Jagdtiger being slow, a fuel-guzzler, and prone to mechanical breakdowns, making it heavily dependent on the German rail transport system to get anywhere, a transport system that by this time was increasingly disabled by Allied air attacks. The gun was so powerful as to be overkill in almost any situation, and the ammo was so massive that the projectile and propellant charge had to be loaded separately, resulting in a horribly slow rate of fire. The gun could only be moved 10° to the left and the right each on account of the casemate, and while the Jagdtiger could neutral-steer, turning a 70-ton armored vehicle often broke down the running gear at an inopportune moment. In addition, by the point it was available, Allied air superiority made it very risky to use, and well-trained and/or skilled German vehicle crews were in severe shortage.
- The Germans also built the Sturmmörser Tiger or Sturmtiger, consisting of a heavily armored casemate installed on a Tiger I surplus hull and armed with a colossal 38cm rocket mortar for destroying buildings. Oddly enough, this rocket mortar had originally been developed by the Kriegsmarine as a coastal antisubmarine weapon. First a normal charge would lob the round out of the barrel, and then once it was clear of the vehicle the round's rocket propulsion would fire. The huge 350 kg/770 lbs. projectile was capable of crashing through about eight feet of concrete and blasting most hardened defenses to rubble. There is also an unconfirmed report of a single one of these shells taking out three M4 Shermans near Duren and Euskirchen during the Battle of Remagen. A company of Sturmtigers saw action in the Warsaw Uprising: the unit commander reported that the 38cm rocketgun was extremely effective. So effective, in fact, that the Sturmtiger risked damaging friendly forces or even itself if either got too close to the projectile's roughly 500 meter blast. The circumstances of urban combat were forcing them to use one Assault Mortar at a time in the direct fire role, using a naval antitank sight to aim down city streets. Apart from the risk of collateral damage, there was also the problem that the massive blast of the mortar shell usually had the effect of replacing an impassable enemy fortification with an equally impassable chaos of rubble and craters, which sucked for the troops who actually had to follow through. Finally, they were at the end of the day Tigers with the expected maintenance and fuel requirements, more so because they were eight tonnes heavier.
- The Panzerkampfwagen VI
- The famous German half-tracks for used for supply and as infantry armored cars all used the same Schachtellaufwerk type of chassis and track, only scaled up or down to their respective size. Unlike tank tracks, which were classic links held together by pins, in Schachtellaufwerk tracks designed to allow high road speeds all track links were fitted on needle bearings with individual sealing and lubrication. That makes a few hundred lubricated bearings for each vehicle, with expected costs and hardship of maintainence. And all for no useful purpose, since there were strict orders to drive them at lesser speeds than possible anyway. The interleaving and overlapping wheels were also a big maintenance issue, namely that mechanics would have to disassemble the running gear assembly just to replace one wheel.
- The Einheits-PKW concept of the Wehrmacht preceded the development of the Volkswagen Type 81 Kubelwagen. Standardized passenger cars in three classes (light, medium, and heavy) were designed for versatility and good off-road handling. The problem with this was that the cars made in this program were horribly complex and overweight for their engine-power, making them fuel-inefficient and occupant unfriendly (especially off-road). Many design details like 4-wheel steering on the light and heavy cars and mid-chassis spare tires as rough-ground buffering gave mechanics a nightmare.
- The early Cold War saw the final development of the heavy tank concept. The Soviets, who had started the Iosif Stalin heavy tank series to counter the German Tigers and Panthers, continued making new IS models to keep ahead of its postwar Western rivals. Meanwhile, the US and allies such as Britain and France created their own heavy tank programs to counter the IS-3. Gigantic guns meant to kill enemy tanks at extremely long range were combined with thick steel armor, so they could perform over-watch support for the lighter tanks and take out the opponent's heavies. There were several problems with them, however: weight was increasing to the point where the powertrain technology of the time couldn't keep up, causing low speed, fuel economy, and reliability; the size of the shells they fired reduced the number of rounds they could carry and required two-piece loading, hence a slow rate of fire; and their size made them slow and difficult to transport to the combat zone, or to recover if knocked out. By the 1960s they were obsolete in the face of improved High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) rounds and Anti-Tank Guided Missiles (ATGMs) which no practical thickness of homogeneous steel armor could protect against, and against which they were sitting ducks with their low speeds and large profiles. Indeed, there was little need for a heavy tank’s oversized gun when an ATGM could kill any enemy tank at long range just as well, and at a lower cost. The heavies were rare and expensive, yet still just as likely to be taken out by mines, tank destroyers, artillery, and aircraft. Therefore they were abandoned while all focus went to developing balanced and increasingly capable Main Battle Tanks such as the Chieftain, M60, and T-64.
- The IS-3 used the same giant 122 mm D-25 gun as the IS-2, which had terrorized the Germans in the Great Patriotic War. It also incorporated a new "pike" nose with compound sloping which made the upper glacis almost impenetrable, and a turret shaped like an upside-down soup bowl which was more protective and presented a lower profile.. However, the IS-3 wasn't as great as it looked. The low turret may have been protective, but it also reduced gun depression and headroom for the crew, especially the loader. Neither the gun nor its rudimentary fire control were precise at long range. Its two-piece ammunition was unwieldly, meaning that just 2-3 shots per minute were possible and only 28 rounds could be stored. Furthermore, it was built during (late) wartime production, so production quality was shoddy and there was a tendency for hull welds and turret castings to crack, which is why production was ended in 1946 at 2,311 units. Engine, transmission, and running gear breakdowns were also frequent. IS-3s were being constantly rebuilt afterwards to correct these issues, not only costing a lot of money but also reducing the amount ready-for-action at any given time.
- The IS-4 was also derived from the IS-2, but at 53 tonnes it was more massive than both IS-2 and IS-3. It had a turret similar to the IS-2, but lengthened the hull and had heavier armor with a sloped glacis. By the time it entered production in 1946 it was overweight and less advanced than the IS-3, so less than 250 were made.
- The IS-7 was a magnificent beast, the heaviest of the IS tanks at 68 tonnes and a technological marvel of its time. It had very heavy and well-angled armor, proof even against its own gun and the German 128 mm, yet also a 1050 HP diesel engine and 8-speed planetary gearbox that enabled a fantastic road speed of 60 km/hr (33mph). Besides an even bigger 130 mm gun it had infrared scopes and an automatic loading assistance device which enabled up to 6-8 rounds per minute. However, the gun had to be return to a neutral position for this device to work, and that rate of fire didn't account for the fact that the device itself had to be reloaded. The tank also had a silly armament of eight machine guns. This included two KVT heavy machine guns—one coaxial and one pintle mounted on the roof that could be remote controlled—and six 7.62 mm SGS-43 machine guns: two coaxial, two fixed forward-firing ones on the hull, and two fixed backwards-firing ones on the turret. Nick Moran reckons it could have stood to lose five of them. Alas, it was expensive and difficult to produce, and the weight made it impractical to transport by rail. It would have been an incredible breakthrough tank but good for nothing else; larger numbers of medium tanks and the less massive T-10 were considered more appropriate for doctrine. Only 7 prototypes were made and it was rejected for production.
- The T-10 was produced beginning in 1953; it was originally going to be called the IS-10, but got renamed after the death of Stalin. It was essentially an improved IS-3 with a new, longer 122 mm gun with fume extractor, larger turret, improved engine, and tougher armor. However the T-54/55 and T-62 tanks already had comparable firepower and armor while being more flexible. As the T-64 tank, which outclassed it in firepower, armor and mobility, became available in significant numbers, T-10 production was stopped in 1966 and all further heavy tank projects were cancelled.
- The last Western heavy tanks, the American M103 and British Conqueror, both used the tremendously powerful 120mm M58 rifled gun. This was supposed to allow them to out-range the gun of the IS-3, and defeat its armor at a distance where the IS-3 couldn't hit or perforate them in return. Both were impressive in their own way, but there were problems.
- The 59-tonne M103 suffered from initially using the same powertrain as the much lighter M48 tank, leading to a sluggish 21 mph top speed, an operational range of only 80 miles, and serious maintenance issues. It also carried only 34 rounds and lacked proper NBC protection. The Marines received 220 M103 tanks out of the 300 built, while the Army received the remaining 80; it operated a single battalion of M103s in Europe from 1958 to 1963, when they replaced them with 105 mm-armed M60s and gave their 80 to the Marines as well. The final M103A2 upgrade actually turned out to be a really cool tank and well-liked by its Marine Corps crews, especially with the M60's new diesel engine which provided improved power and fuel economy. However, by this time it was basically an anachronism and was never used in combat. All of them were withdrawn from service by 1974.
- The Conqueror was ridiculously huge at 64 tonnes and used a Meteor engine, giving it a 35 km/h (22 mph) top speed and 161 km (100 mi) operational range. This was a little bit better than the M103, and while it did have Churchill-like cross-country mobility, it still was not fast by any means. The M103 dealt with the heavy two-piece 120 mm ammo by having two loaders in the turret, but the Conqueror only had one; special fitness courses had to be offered to help Conqueror loaders develop the necessary strength. The British kept their Conquerors parked in West Germany from 1955 until 1966, when they dumped them in favor of the new Chieftain MBT which was smaller and more mobile, yet had as powerful a gun and equal or better armor. As some final trivia, there was also a Conqueror variant with a 183mm gun that never got off the drawing board.note
- The FV4005 tank destroyer was a modified Centurion tank armed with 183 mm gun capable of destroying any tank at ranges of up to 1.8 km (2,000 yards). Most notably, firing test showed that FV4005's gun could blow entire Centurion turret was blown clean off as if the ammo rack had detonated...except that range targets don't have ammo stored in them. However, FV4005's gun was encased in a large turret protected by only 14 mm of steel, making it highly conspicuous and fragile. Even with a mechanical loading mechanism and two loaders, the rate of fire was abysmal. Furthermore, the FV4005's intended target of Soviet heavy tanks were never produced in quantities that would justify the FV4005's enormous firepower. Yet most importantly, technological advances allowed smaller tank guns and guided missiles to pack as much firepower for less space and weight. Fundamentally, the FV4005's firepower was overkill and didn't have any additional benefits to offset its Glass Cannon design.
- British tank doctrine and production for most of the Second World War. Either they'd make the right tanks for the wrong doctrine, or they'd have a great design that got let down by the limitations of their military industries, or the tank would have practically everything going for it except for maybe one important part of the design that wasn't quite right and dragged it down from fantastic to just mediocre.
- When the Second World War began, Britain—like most countries—still considered the infantry/cruiser concept to be basically sound. The well-armored but slow-moving infantry tanks such as the Matilda II and Churchill were supposed help the infantry create a breakthrough at some point in the enemy line, and then the lightly armored cruiser tanks such as the Cruiser Mk. I and Crusader would use their greater speed and operational range to rush through the gap and wreak havoc deep inside enemy lines. This would prove to not be the case, since World War II turned out to favor a more dynamic and maneuver-based warfare picture of World War II which favored Jack of All Stats medium tanks such as the U.S. M4 Sherman and the Soviet T-34, which was adequate enough to fulfill both the infantry and cruiser roles. Thus, the British were left with a tank doctrine that was ill-suited for World War II; the infantry tanks were too operationally inflexible due to their slow speed, while the cruiser tanks often had rather unpleasant encounters with German armored vehicles that were not as fast but had superior firepower and protection.
- Compounding this was British military bureaucracy and industry issues slowing down development, so that the designs were not as impressive by the time they made it into production note .
- To their credit, the British were aware of this, recognizing the need for such a "universal tank" early on (with Bernard Law Montgomery its biggest advocate) but the idea didn't get very far until the Rolls-Royce Meteor engine became available as the powerpack for such a tank; Britain used the engine to make a workable late-war stopgap in the form of the Comet, a derivative of the Cromwell that was not only low and fast, but also had a powerful gun and a well-armored turret. That allowed them to take the time to develop a new model from scratch to be the best possible modern tank. The result of this was the Centurion-also powered by a Rolls-Royce Meteor engine-which barely missed the World War II but was a huge success during the Cold War and beyond, marking a huge comeback for Britain in tank design.
- French tanks in the Battle of France, 1940. France had a leg up with their FT-17, the forefather of the modern tank, during World War I, and in the interwar their tanks were easily a leg up over the Germans- helping by them not being restricted by the Treaty of Versailles and thus not having to do much in terms of concealing their tank programs from prying eyes. Thus, their tanks individually were easily better than the Germans' at the Battle of France, with there being cases of tanks (mainly the B1 heavy tank) holding off multiple German tanks by their lonesome. However, they were let down by a few flaws; subpar mobility, a two- or three-man crew layout that often overstresses the crew (since each crew member often had to overlap in roles with another task; for example, the commander having to load the gun in addition to commanding the tank), lack of effective communication and coordination, and France's overall reliance on a WWI-style warfare that was ill-suited to counter the Germans' highly mobile, coordinated assault into France. As a result, France was utterly unable to counter the Germans' attack and was forced to capitulate against an army that France could have easily handled.
- The Tank Destroyer doctrine of the U.S. Army, and the related choices of what kinds of vehicles got produced during world War II.
- The U.S. assumed that because the Germans could always pick a small area of Allied front and make a concentrated attack with their panzers, the initial German breakthrough was almost impossible to prevent. Therefore the Tank Destroyer branch was created to give them a defensive reserve with mobile anti-tank firepower which could counterattack and stop the panzers before they did too much damage. To suit their specialized mission—in which speed, situational awareness, and cost-effectiveness were valued over armor protection—the TD battalions were equipped with lightly-armored self-propelled guns instead of tanks. They started out using half-tracks and trucks with anti-tank guns mounted on them, then upgraded to vehicles such as the M10, M18 and M36 that were fully tracked and had open-topped rotating turrets. Apart from the vehicles they used, TD force also differed from the tankers in that they had a purely defensive mission and were supposed to stay concentrated in large battalions instead of splitting into smaller units.
- But when the US went to war, it turned out they were almost always on the offense and the Germans rarely made the sort of concentrated armored attack that the TD battalions were designed to counter. Meanwhile the US infantry, sometimes lacking fire support from tanks, would request it from anything that had tracks and a gun on it. The result was the strict doctrine for their employment being quickly abandoned, as tank destroyers were split off into platoons and sent to help the infantry as mobile artillery and tank substitutes. In this role, the Crippling Overspecialization of the tank destroyer designs came into play: thin armor and open-topped turrets meant they were vulnerable to infantry swarming and grenade shrapnel, which was not helped by many TD designs lacking bow or coaxial machine guns and thus forcing the crew to use either the pintle-mounted .50 or their own small arms to counter such threats. While the TD crews did score higher kill rates against tanks, it was likely more due to the specialized anti-tank training they received rather than the specific equipment they were given or the doctrine they were organized under. The separate, independent TD branch was abolished at end of the war as tank manufacturing advanced to incorporate bigger turrets and guns, meaning they could supersede the tank destroyers in anti-tank work without sacrificing effectiveness against other targets. Tank destroyers themselves evolved into small, light vehicles with anti-tank guided missiles that can offer disproportionate firepower against tanks for their small mass.
- The United States M6 heavy tank began as an interest by the Chief of Infantry to the US Army Ordnance Corps in 1940, and while initially conceived as a multi-turreted monster bristling with cannons and machine guns, the final design was a one-turret monstrosity weighing 57.4 tons, up to 100mm of armor on the front, and a three-man turret with a main 3-inch M7 gun and a backup 37mm M6 gun, in addition to a lot of machineguns: twin .50 machine gun for the assistant driver, two .30s for the driver that was fired electronically, a .30 on the commander's cupola, and a .50 for the loader. The monstrosity was powered by a Wright R-1820 Cyclone radial aircraft engine with a specially designed transmission (as the Cyclone produced too much torque for any existing armored vehicle transmission). By the time it was finished, the Army realized that the M6 had no doctrinal use; its crew layout was inefficient, it was too big and too heavy for standard bridges, flatcars and ship cranes, there were serious mechanical issues, and they would rather ship two 30-ton tanks to Europe rather than a single 60-ton tank. All this trouble for an increase in firepower that was simply not enough to justify the additional costs and troubles. In addition, the tank's tall silhouette meant that it was easily seen (and targeted) by enemies, while it wasn't much more well-armored than a medium tank either. Production was stopped in 1943, and while there were attempts to revive it by the Ordnance Corps, none were accepted as the vehicle's faults were all still there, and with the M26 Pershing up-and-coming, the M6 was obsolete. They never saw action because they stayed in the US for propaganda and testing purposes, and ultimately the Army preserved one and broke down the rest for scrap.
- Tankettes during World War II. The idea of miniature tanks sounds awesome: you can make a bunch of your infantry more mobile and give them more firepower against other infantry at a relatively low cost. Italy was particularly keen on tankettes because they were small enough to navigate narrow mountain paths that were all but impassable to full size tanks and that Italy expected to use them on,note and for a country without much heavy industry they were a lot cheaper to buy or produce than real tanks were. Similarly, Japan liked its tankettes, all of which had great mobility in non-ideal terrain (such as supposedly "impassible" jungles) and could easily cross improvised bridges. While they performed well during the early days of armored warfare and against poorly-equipped infantry, they quickly became outclassed due to the fast pace of armored vehicle development. Their disadvantages were their very thin armour (vulnerable to most heavy weapons and even small arms fire), light armament (most couldn't mount any weapon larger than a machine gun or autocannon, meaning they were useless against most heavy armoured vehicles), their cramped interiors, and a general lack of versatility and mobility in rough terrain depending on the design of the tracks with respect to ditch crossing and ground clearance. Most tankettes were phased out of frontline service, or relegated to non-combat or low-intensity duties. Miniature armored vehicles have come back thanks to better alloys and weapon technology, but only in very niche roles where proper tanks and infantry fighting vehicles would be impractical. For example, the Wiesel is light enough to be airdropped from a helicopter, is protected against rifle fire, and can use an autocannon or TOW antitank missiles.
- Main battle tanks in urban combat are something of an imperfect solution. On one hand, putting a platoon of four 60-ton M1 Abrams tanks in the streets is one hell of a way to deter resistance by awing the population, or if necessary to blast out stubborn enemies who are fortified inside buildings. On the other hand, such monsters are too wide to navigate any streets narrower than two lanes, too heavy to cross bridges built only to withstand cars, and largely blind unless a commander opens a hatch to get a good look, which would expose him to sniper fire. Even with the TUSK modifications and infantry support, American tank commanders are very leery of entering close quarters where they can easily by ambushed and disabled by any yahoo with an RPG. It's for this reason that the US Army is interested in looking into IFVs and light support vehicles for urban combat, which, while not nearly as impressive as tanks, are lighter and more maneuverable, allowing them to move with infantry to support them, instead of having to rely on support from infantry themselves.
- The worst part is not knowing if the enemy has hidden tanks within the city as well, as was the case in the Normandy Campaign after D-Day. German Panzers tended to hide within towns, knowing that the Allies wouldn't dare bombard any French town that still had civilians in it. As a result, Panzers were hunted down one at a time by tanks, tank-destroyers, and infantry armed with anti-tank weapons. The fight usually resembled a chaotic wild-west shootout, but with tanks and supporting units in place of the usual gun-fighters. And sometimes the tanks would smash through houses just to get at each other's weak spots!
- Turretless casemate tank destroyers have fallen out of the wayside since the end of World War 2. During the war, many nations created such vehicles by installing big guns into tank hulls instead of mounting them into turrets. These casemate vehicles have the advantage of mounting big guns that would be too large to fit inside the limited space of existing turrets. They would be much smaller in profile and quicker to manufacture than conventional tanks, as they did not require turrets. However, the lack of a turret meant that a tank destroyer couldn't react to flanking maneuvers or infantry ambushes, limiting their roles to defensive positions. The turretless design also meant that a tank destroyer would have to constantly turn its entire body to aim, leading to a strained and degraded drive system. The mass production of main battle tanks, which excel in nearly every given role, limited the cost-effectiveness of casemate tank destroyers. Yet most importantly, the absence of large conventional wars between superpowers meant that manufacturers could spend more time and money developing tanks whose turrets could mount as big a gun as any tank destroyer. Even armies needing a cheap stopgap tank killer could just mount lighter yet equally lethal anti-tank missiles on recon vehicles and IFVs.
- The chariot was a staple of bronze age warfare. At that time horses were much smaller animals than they are today, meaning it usually wasn’t practical for a single horse to carry a fully-equipped warrior on its back. The chariot enabled warriors to move rapidly around the battlefield, and was an impressive symbol of status. But after bigger horse breeds and the art of horseback riding (and fighting) were developed, the chariot declined in relevance due to a number of drawbacks:
- On a strategic, economical and logistical level, chariots require competent artisans capable of building the chariot itself, its axle and its wheels, and keeping it maintained in the field. This means a commander needed to find sources of quality wood and keep fed the entire team of chariot artisans in the field. Easy Logistics is very much not a thing in real life.
- Chariots required a full team of horses, usually 2 or 4, which was expensive to maintain, especially when you take them out of the stable and into battle. Losing one horse could cripple the chariot.
- The charioteer needed his hands to control the team, and while it was possible to do it one-handed and wield a spear in the other hand, it was clumsy and awkward. Generally, chariots would carry two soldiers, one to drive and the other to use a bow or spear to kill people. This means even more people to keep fed while on campaign.
- Chariots have much less agility than a single rider and their horse, and require relatively flat terrain free of obstructions (trees, rocks, water, etc...) to be effective. This wasn't too much of a problem in ancient Egypt or the near East, but the chariots were very limited in use outside of these flat plains and deserts.
- Chariots fared a little better when not directly in combat, such as a battle taxi to bring a warrior into battle (and take him out of there quickly if things go south), but even gimmicks such as Spiked Wheels couldn't stop their obsolescence. By the time of their second encounter with the Romans (who invented the Caltrops after their first encounter resulted in a horrible defeat against Gauls that used chariots to flank them) they were about as useful on the battlefield as a musket would be in the 21st century.
- The scythed chariot deserves special attention, because it should have been a good idea: the Persians developed it after a series of bad experiences against Greek hoplites, both during their invasions of Greece and when Cyrus the Younger's attempted coup resulted in ten thousand mercenary hoplites roaming their empire trying to get back to Greece smashing through anyone who tried to stop them and unwilling to just talk after their leaders got murdered during a truce, exposed their superiority against their lighter infantry, and were supposed to charge close to the phalanx, turn, and then let the scytes exterminate the hoplites' first line and break the phalanx' cohesion, paving the way for their infantry to finish the job. The problem was, by the time they developed and actually deployed them they weren't fighting the Greek phalanx of hoplites equipped with short spears and shields anymore, but the Macedonian phalanx of pezhetairoi (foot companions) equipped with long pikes and no shield, meaning the chariots had to turn when the phalanx was still well outside the scytes range and the pezhetairoi could advance and kill the horses running across the phalanx' front without taking any risk.
Aircraft
- The heavy fighter concept. Compared to smaller fighters, the usually twin-engine heavy fighters packed much more firepower, and had much longer range, designed to escort heavier bombers and escape using their high speed. In practice, however, the concept failed; they couldn't maintain their top speed for very long, and they just couldn't match lighter fighters in terms of maneuverability. That, and the proliferation of drop-tank equipped light fighters removed their range advantage. Many were converted to night fighters (where they were more successful, since maneuverability wasn't as much of a concern in darkness), fighter-bombers, or bomber destroyers (where they were initially successful against unescorted bombers, but ultimately fell victim to the aforementioned lighter fighters).
- Rocket powered aircraft in general, and The Messerschmitt Me-163 Komet particularly. Designed by Alexander Lippisch and introduced in 1944, it is the only rocket-powered fighter aircraft to have ever seen operational use. Its role was to be an interceptor which could rapidly engage enemy bombers by climbing to 12,000 meters (39,000 ft) in an then-unheard-of three minutes, and it could reach more than 1000 km/h (621 mph) in level flight, the first piloted aircraft to ever do so. However, there were a bunch of problems. First, the sheer speed and altitude. It flew so high without a pressurized cabin that pilots had to train for the brutal conditions in altitude chambers, and were required to eat a special low-fiber diet to reduce painful intestinal gas. It also flew so fast that they couldn't accurately hit slow-moving bombers with their low-velocity, short-ranged cannons: no pilot ever scored more than one victory with it. The stresses from acceleration meant that the cannons jammed frequently anyway. A promising solution to the high-speed targeting problem was a bank of ten single-shot, upwards-pointing 50mm recoilless cannons that would fire automatically when a photocell detected the shadow of a bomber (or, you know, a cloud) above it, but this came too late and was seemingly only used in combat once, on 10 April, 1945note . Secondly, it burned up all its fuel in just seven and a half minutes, turning into an unpowered glider to get back to its airfield. This meant it could only be used for point defense, and rendered it helpless if the enemy decided to pick it off while it was gliding home. It didn't help that the Luftwaffe's detection and command capabilities were nowhere near as good as the UK's Fighter Command had been years earlier during the Battle Of Britain - with only seven and a half minutes of thrust (assuming the engine didn't snuff itself out early, which happened a lot - and with no fuel gauge, the pilot had no way of knowing if all their fuel was gone or if they were now flying a small wooden bomb) their launch windows needed more careful management than the Luftwaffe could really provide, so it was quite possible for a Komet to soar skywards, reach operating height, and then not be able to find any targets and have to come back down againnote . Thirdly, it was extremely unsafe for both pilots and ground crews. The rocket engine used two highly-corrosive chemical mixtures called C-Stoff and T-Stoff, and created thrust by virtue of the fact that these substances were hypergolic, meaning they violently combusted upon mixingnote . Since these were both clear liquids that could be easily confused with one another, and were absolutely never supposed to come in contact with each other outside the engine, there were separate refueling teams for each fuel who were never allowed to be near the aircraft at the same time, and used different fueling ports on the plane. The fuel tanks and other systems would be regularly flushed out with water to prevent accidental explosions. However, even these measures didn't prevent occasional detonations on the tarmac. Moreover, the Komet had a habit of spontaneously exploding if jarred too much by, say, a rough landing, and the T-Stoff in particular was so toxic that a leak could kill the pilot even if there wasn’t an explosion. The plane was made of wood to keep the weight and cost down, and while it had wheels when it was going up, they dropped away from the aircraft as it took off. What did you land with? A single skid. The "best" part was that at this stage of the war, even flat runways were in short supply, so the pilots had to land them in bumpy, rocky fields. The whole idea was so poorly worked out that there were multiple incidents of these aircraft destroying themselves on takeoff with their own launch wheels. Because of the poor fields they were taking off from, it was entirely possible for the rubber-tired take-off wheel assembly to bounce higher than the altitude it was dropped from...and smash into the plane, often resulting in a catastrophic explosion. More pilots died trying to fly/land these things than in combat. Oh, and the engines were considered more valuable than the pilots. What does that tell you?
- Going by post-war analysis of captured records, a total of 373 Komets were made (how many of those actually made it to front-line airfields and actually took off on combat missions is much harder to calculate), and the total reported kills by Komet pilots is a staggering... nine. And it is really quite likely that at least some of those were not actually kills, given that at least one reported kill (of an RAF Mosquito) came on a day when, as far as RAF records are concerned, no Mosquitoes at all were shot down.
- The French came with the idea of SNCASO Trident after the WWII in 1949, hosting two jet engines and a rocket. While it hads impressive performance, it was so dangerous to fly that it was shelved 1958. One prototype survives in Le Bourget air museum, Paris.
- Around the end of World War II many rather impressive prototypes of fighter and bomber aircraft had been designed by various American and Russian manufacturers. Innovative uses of old technology (for instance, contra-rotating propellers) made them fast and powerful; sadly, the innovative use of new technology - namely the jet engine - resulted in aircraft that were even faster and more powerful, but also more efficient and less maintenance intensive. Needless to say, this doomed all the new piston-engine planes into never leaving the prototype stage.
- Related to the above is the turbo-compound engine. It was a late development that used a turbine placed at the end of the exhaust that would recycle power wasted by the piston engine and add it directly to the driveshaft. The engines thus obtained were very powerful and efficient, but were both maintenance-intensive and impractical: the bigger the turbine was the more efficient the engine became, until someone eventually figured out that you might as well leave the piston engine out altogether and simply use the turbine as a turboshaft.
- The turbo-compound could make a comeback. The problem was it put a lot of stress on exhaust valves which would fail and their shards would take out the turbine. A lot of the power that could potentially go to the turbine was also absorbed by those valves. However, if used on a Wankel rotary engine, which has no exhaust valves, turbo-compounding could potentially make a Wankel engine that runs on automotive unleaded gasoline provide fuel economy and horsepower competitive with turboshaft engines, but without the turbo-lag.
- Related to the above is the turbo-compound engine. It was a late development that used a turbine placed at the end of the exhaust that would recycle power wasted by the piston engine and add it directly to the driveshaft. The engines thus obtained were very powerful and efficient, but were both maintenance-intensive and impractical: the bigger the turbine was the more efficient the engine became, until someone eventually figured out that you might as well leave the piston engine out altogether and simply use the turbine as a turboshaft.
- In terms of airstrikes specifically, high risk, highly planned operations which use a large amount of aircraft tend not to produce worthwhile results due to the sheer fact that, as advanced and complicated as military aircraft are, the room for errors are incredibly small; as opposed to ground operations, where at least there is a chance to pull back and reconsider your options if something unexpected happens, in an air battle there is quite literally nothing between you and the enemy, with nowhere to hide. So, if something goes wrong, such as a premature loss of vital aircraft, unexpectedly heavy defenses, or unforseen changes in the weather the only option you have is to press the attack, follow the plan as best as you can, and hope things turn out okay. Such was the case of Operation Tidal Wave, where the precise, low-level multi-squadron airstrike on the Ploiești oil refineries went to all hell due to a combination of mechanical failures, breakdowns in communication, and unexpected defenses that rendered the high-stakes operation All for Nothing with heavy casualties and no lasting effect on the refineries themselves. Of course if you want something of a more modern area, refer to the abortive Package Q operation, which, like Tidal Wave, saw several separate failures pike up to ultimately render the entire mission useless, and which was later successfully completed by a smaller strike. When it comes to massed aircraft attacks, the simpler the operation, the better—for an Airstrike Impossible that did succeed, look at Operation Catechism, one of many operations to sink the German battleship Tirpitz; the entire mission essentially boiled down to "get a shit-ton of Tallboy Bombs, load them onto a squadron of Avro Lancasters, and bomb that fucking ship to kingdom come." Granted, it took three operations to finish her off (the failed operations Paravane and Obviate, followed by the successful Catechism, but the total losses compared to the disastrous Operation Tidal Wave mentioned above were much lower, with a(n eventually) successful outcome.
- Overall, massed bomber raids saw a downward trend in popularity after World War II—sure, it's one hell of a display of aerial might, with the potential to deliver tons of ordinance to a single strategic target and wreak absolutely demoralizing destruction, but the risks of sending so many planes and people into hostile territory almost guarantees crippling losses, not to mention the "demoralizing destruction" usually just ends up increasing enemy hatred of the bombers' side, which consequently leads to increased morale. With the advent of jet-powered aircraft that could fly higher and faster and carry more ordinance, along with unmanned delivery systems such as cruise missiles and drones, the need for strategic bombing soon petered out. Compounding this was the development of guided missiles, both of the ground and air-launched varieties, which would make target practice of a massed formation of big, ungainly aircraft. The most egregious, and arguably most modern examples would be Operation Rolling Thunder, which essentially was Awesome, But Impractical brought to life—mass bombing reminiscent of those seen in World War II, but with modern jet aircraft, SAM systems, supersonic dogfights, and more than 1 million tons of bombs dropped—which is almost half of the total amount of ordinance dropped during the entire European Theatre of World War II. Despite this, losses continued to mount as the Soviets and Chinese continued supplying the North Vietnamese, who stubbornly resisted the bombing raids, to the point that the operation was cancelled in 1968.
- Overall, massed bomber raids saw a downward trend in popularity after World War II—sure, it's one hell of a display of aerial might, with the potential to deliver tons of ordinance to a single strategic target and wreak absolutely demoralizing destruction, but the risks of sending so many planes and people into hostile territory almost guarantees crippling losses, not to mention the "demoralizing destruction" usually just ends up increasing enemy hatred of the bombers' side, which consequently leads to increased morale. With the advent of jet-powered aircraft that could fly higher and faster and carry more ordinance, along with unmanned delivery systems such as cruise missiles and drones, the need for strategic bombing soon petered out. Compounding this was the development of guided missiles, both of the ground and air-launched varieties, which would make target practice of a massed formation of big, ungainly aircraft. The most egregious, and arguably most modern examples would be Operation Rolling Thunder
- It's 1949, and the US Navy high command is pissed. For nearly two centuries, the Navy has been the lynchpin of US strategic defense, but now everyone is talking about the Air Force, nuclear bombing, and Strategic Air Command. The USS United States, supposed to be the largest and finest (and most expensive) American warship ever launched, has been cancelled only 5 days after being laid down. So what do you do? Well, if we can't launch strategic nuclear aircraft from ships, we'll just launch them straight off the damn sea! And so was the Martin P6M SeaMaster born. A transonic flying boat to be used as a strategic nuclear bomber. This was in many respects a cutting-edge, extremely advanced aircraft, designed to float on open water, supported by seaplane tenders or special submarines, hopping from place to place and making it hard for the Soviets to find and destroy them. Trouble is, all this brilliant innovation was dedicated to solving a problem that could more easily be circumvented entirely, and it was, with the fleet ballistic missile submarine and the aircraft carrier - suddenly back on the agenda following the Revolt of the Admirals - eventually beating out the SeaMaster for funding. The program was cancelled as Navy pilots began conversion training to use the new bomber.
- The SeaMaster as originally designed was even more impractical: it was supposed to be ramjet-powered.
- Some awesome Atomic Age aircraft were rendered impractical not so much by inherent design problems as by advances in missile technologies:
- The XB-70 Valkyrie was a six-engined high-altitude strategic bomber designed to travel at Mach 3 (which would allow it to outrun Soviet interceptors). All very impressive — before the development of surface-to-air missiles that could effectively target and destroy high-altitude supersonic bombers. Furthermore, bomber designs like the XB-70 were made obsolescent by advances in intercontinental ballistic missile technology. An ICBM that could accurately hit a target half way around the world in 45 minutes increasingly marginalized the role of strategic bombers. There was also the huge per-unit costs. To get those impressive Mach 3 speeds, the airframes had to be made of titanium and other expensive metal alloys, making it economically unattractive to mass produce them.
- The MiG-25 Foxbat was a blisteringly-fast high-altitude interceptor designed to intercept bombers like the XB-70. Despite its short range and primitive but rugged avionics, it might have been effective in that role. But it also had terrible maneuverability and a limited payload (four missiles, no cannon) which made it rather useless when its intended mission disappeared. While useful in a reconnaissance role, its combat record (in the service of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq) is poor. And since its engines were recycled from a long-range cruise missile design that wasn't meant for re-use, they would melt if it pushed to around Mach 3 (what it was designed to do in the first place),note eliminating its cost effectiveness as well.
- The Foxbat did get a limited, short-term use as a propaganda item as it was by far the fastest and highest flying jet fighter at the time - one incident had a Soviet Foxbat in Syrian colors saunter up to an Israeli F-4 running flat out at operational ceiling altitude, let the F-4 crew get a good look, and then accelerate and climb away - but even this backfired when the US developed jet fighters designed to defeat the plane that they thought the Foxbat was, namely the uber-successful F-15 Eagle. Then, the US got hold of one through Viktor Belenko's defection in 1976, and discovered all the shortcomings.
- Its successor, the MiG-31 Foxhound, is also a pure interceptor, and at first glance looks like a two-seat Foxbat. In reality, it's only loosely based on the MiG-25, and has a stronger fuselage that allows it to go supersonic even at low altitude. The top speed was dialed back to Mach 2.8 (still very fast, and what turned out to be the top safe speed of the MiG-25). The MiG-31 turned out, despite its limited role, to be far more practical, due to its far superior radar and missiles making it effective against terrain-hugging cruise missiles, not just high-flying bombers.
- The Foxhound is also seeing a new use in Russian weapons testing, apparently - with their speed, they're perfect chase planes for the Russian military's new planes.
- Its incredible speed gets another good use when armed with a new Kinzhal SRBM/IRBMnote , an air-launched version of the already pretty impressive Iskander land-based one. Launching it during the top speed dash adds as much as 2 points to the Mach-8 terminal velocity of the baseline missile, making it about as difficult to intercept as a full-on ICBM — however, during Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2023, there were several accounts of US-made Patriot missiles systems intercepting Kinzhal missiles, calling into into question its actual capabilities. Hypersonic speed certainly does dramatically reduce the reaction time that any air defense has, but it turns out at least some 21st century automated air defense systems are fast enough in their reaction time to pull it off.
- The B-47 Stratojet had been a Cool Plane, but the features that made it cool also blew the efficiency to hell: the graceful almost Sci-Fi airframe barely had space for a crew of 3 and the wings were thin enough to be flexible in flight, the aerodynamics were so efficient that the plane would float over the runway instead of touching down, the superior maneuverability mandated the nuclear bomb had to be tossed in a wide looping like a fighter would do in a ground attack flight (less fun when the B-47 weighed almost 100 tonnes at takeoff with full load and maybe 60 tonnes at the point where the ordnance would be released) and the combat range was too short, only 2000 miles or so, shorter than a regular commercial airliner.
- The B-58 Hustler was an awesome aircraft for the mid-1950s (it could climb like a rocket and cruise at Mach 2.2 for hours years before the parents of most Tropers were born), yet it was breathtakingly expensive to build and maintain (just changing a fuselage panel in the field required the specialized jig from the factory to be brought to the airbase) and had an extremely idiosyncratic design that made ground crews pull their hair out in outrage (the fuselage was too small and the wings too thin to carry fuel, so instead they just had the fuel in a massive belly tank slung under the fuselage; the problem this presented was that now there was nowhere to store a payload, so they built the bomb bay into the belly tank.). So complicated and frustrating to perform basic maintenance on that it was dropped after 10 years in service to be replaced by ICBMs.
There were people daring enough at Convair back into The '60s to propose a supersonic transport◊ version◊, either for paying passengers or as a VIP transport for the military. It proved so madly expensive there was no funding even for a prototype.- That tank also was the only place to put the single atomic bomb it could carry, which had to be literally built into it. As it then, naturally, had to be jettisoned at the target together with the bomb, the plane had to rely just on the internal fuel reserves to get back. It also constantly leaked fuel into the bomb compartment, requiring the eventual replacement with the two-piece pod, where the tank and the bomb could be jettisoned separately.
- The XB-70 Valkyrie
- The Messerschmitt Me 321. It began its life as a glider, the biggest glider ever made. The mission for this glider was to rapidly transport large amounts of troops and medium or light tanks into the battlefield. The first problem was how to make something that big glide. Thus, it was made largely of hollow steel tubing, doped fabric and wooden spars. Then came actually getting it up into the sky. Normally, a tow aircraft would be used to drag it up into the air, but two towing aircraft would have to do the job, which would be impossible to synchronize safely. The solution? They just stuck two Heinkel He-111's together with a fifth engine between. Originally it was intended to be used for the scrapped invasion of Britain, but then was used for Operation Barbarossa. After that, feedback from the people who "flew" them led to a big design change. Sticking six powerful engines on it, they turned it from a glider into the Me 323 transport plane, and it still needed the damn Franken-Heinkel to take off (or RATO or three airplanes working in sync) if it was fully loaded. It arrived just in time to support Rommel in his collapsing North African campaign. Where they were shot down in droves, because they were slow, ungainly and massive targets loaded with fuel, ammo and other things that went boom. In one famous incident, 22 were shot down in just one flight. It saw service for little under a year before being retired.
- An escort gunship version of the Me 323 was prototyped, with 20mm gun turrets and additional gun positions, intended to escort loaded Me 323s. However, with only two prototypes produced, it was determined that single-engine fighters would provide better cover than the Me 323 E-2 WT, and the design was cancelled.
- The Convair B-36 "Peacemaker" long-range atomic bomber, which kept the balance of power during the cold war and looked positively badass. When everyone was switching to jets Convair used six huge radial enginesnote - which turned out to be maintenance nightmares, both for their inherent complexity (the ground crews hated having to replace all fifty-six spark plugs in each engine) and because they were never meant to be mounted in a pusher configuration, resulting in many failures (when your plane losing an engine is considered so routine that the mission is allowed to continue as if nothing happened, you know you have a problem). And for all that the plane was still underpowered, so they eventually fitted four additional jet engines to compensate, though they were normally only used for takeoff and shut down while cruising to conserve fuel. The B-36 also featured an innovative control-by-wire system for the engines... but no mechanical backups, so if the electronics failed you were screwed. And the electronics were mounted in delicate housings that would shake themselves apart under the vibrations caused by the turret guns. Even after the design was tweaked and bludgeoned into some kind of functionality, it still had a tendency to spring oil and fuel leaks all over the place or abruptly catch fire. Then again, it could carry ten times the payload of the famous B-17 Flying Fortress, and its morale and propaganda value was enormous.
- Then again, engine failures were less of a problem for the B-36 because its wings were so enormous that the aircrew could actually crawl around inside them and fix the engines in flight if necessary.
- The B-36 was so very prone to engine fires (mostly caused by excess fuel from air intake icing) and failures that the aircrew soon turned the typical phrase "six turning and four burning", indicating all engines were running properly, into "two turning, two burning, two smoking, two joking and two unaccounted for".
- During World War II, the US Military subscribed to the "Bomber beats Fighter" philosophy by arming their bombers with multiple gun turrets for defense against enemy fighters. Many of bombers like the B-17, B-24 and B-29 bombers sported anywhere from from 8 to 13 machine guns. In theory, this allowed long-ranged bombers to rely on themselves for protection as then-existing fighters lacked the range necessary for escort missions. In practice, however, they only worked to a point, and quickly became obsolete in the face of advances in aircraft and ordinance technology following the Second World War. Gun turrets proved useful to defend against propeller planes such as the BF-109, Fw-190, and A6M "Zero" fighters used by the Axis, but even then losses were heavy, and as the interceptors got faster, the turrets simply couldn't turn fast enough to track them, to say nothing of the men controlling them who were barely if even able to track the lightning-fast jets and rocket fighters zipping past them in the blink of an eye.note Even with effective gun turret coverage, however, it was found that it was much simpler and more effective to simply give bombers the long-range fighter escorts they needed, since this also meant that the enemy fighters were forced to divide their attention between attacking the bombers and looking over their shoulders for the escorts. Yet what ultimately shot down this doctrine was the development of beyond-visual-range missiles that gave fighters the ability to safely shoot down bombers from beyond the guns' maximum firing range — and the realization that it was a lot easier to make a bomber simply go faster and thus make it a harder-to-hit target than it was to load it down with guns in the first place. The last US bomber to carry a defensive gun turret of any kind was the B-52, which had a tail gun position that went through several iterations, from a manned turret mounting four 50 caliber machine guns to a radar-guided model with a 20mm Gatling gun, before it, too, was deleted in favor of simply packing the tail with missile countermeasures.
- The concept was briefly resurrected with the YB-40 project, which took the basic B-17E design and removed the bombload, replacing it with a second upper turret, doubling the waist guns, and adding a chin turret, with increased ammunition supply, as a means of augmenting the ability of B-17 formations to defend themselves when carrying out missions beyond the range of fighter escort. However, the additional weight of the armor and weapons meant that it could not keep up with the returning bombers that no longer had the weight of their bomb load to slow them down, and the introduction of the long-range P-51 Mustang that could escort the bombers through the entire missions eliminated the need for gunships. The chin turret from the YB-40 program was, however, added to late B-17F aircraft and all B-17G aircraft, so the resources put into the program were not entirely wasted.
- In World War 2, Japan actually deployed balloons to drop bombs. They tied bombs to high altitude balloons that would ride the natural air currents across the Pacific, at which point a built-in timer would release the payload and bomb whatever happened to be below. In a sense, they were successful, being the only attempt by an Axis power in WWII to directly bomb the Continental US that actually hitnote . On the other hand, the carried bombs were too small and too widely-dispersed to reliably hit anything of strategic value, making them useless as anything other than a terror weapon, although the Japanese did also develop incendiary bomb balloons, with the aim to start forest fires. A family of six in Oregon killed by one of the bomb balloons was the only known civilian death case in the US during the war directly caused by enemy action.
- The notorious Unit 731 of the Japanese Army perfected a system to drop plague-carrying fleas via the same balloons, but the US managed to locate and bomb the launch facilities before it was ready. It wouldn't have really done much damage in the scale of the carnage occurring at the time, but would have been awkward and messy to contain had a plague outbreak started in a major west-coast city.
- Also, thanks to gag orders and censorship, the US government was able to keep any news of the balloon bombs out of the press. The Japanese then believed the project was a total failure and scrapped it.
- The Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit heavy strategic bomber was the culmination of decades of research into stealth and precision bombing: It's a flying wing with no tail or fuselage, the engines and armament are hidden inside the wing/body, and every angle and curve was designed with the help of computers to deflect radio waves away from radar receivers below the bomber. The skin is made of materials that absorb radio waves and convert them into heat, and the engines have a low thermal signature. The intended capability was to slip through dense anti-aircraft defenses to deliver nuclear weapons. Then it suddenly lost much of its value as a strategic stealth bomber when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It has since been relegated to rear echelon status and has seen action as a conventional bomber in only four conflicts: Kosovo, Afghanistan, the 2nd Gulf War, and the Libyan Civil War. On the plus side it performs conventional bombing very well, with an absolutely absurd bomb capacity, a varied arsenal of smart munitions that it can pick out of a revolver-like bomb bay carousel, and fantastic range thanks to its flying wing design. In particular, its ability to get very close before it shows up on radar helps it to slip through gaps in ground-based anti-air radar networks and bomb them, in order to clear the way for non-stealthy aircraft to come in and wreak havoc. However, there's still the problem that it's incredibly expensive to manufacture and maintain with each plane costing over $1 billion, requiring their own specialized climate-controlled hangars to maintain its stealth coating and needing 50 hours of maintenance for every hour spent flying. It also requires a computer-controlled fly-by-wire system to safely operate the complex system of split-brake rudders, differential engine thrust, and "elevons" that control the inherently unstable flying wing aircraft, and if those computers fail the damn thing will crash.
- The Messerschmitt Me-262 Schwalbe, the world's first operational jet fighter. While fast enough to leave any Allied plane in its contrails and an excellent bomber interceptor, its engines were prone to mechanical problems and required high temperature alloys that Germany didn't have enough of. It also required more fuel than the Germans could afford to ration to it. Many armchair historians have cited Adolf Hitler's decision to make the 262 a fighter-bomber as a boneheaded move that delayed the introduction of a potentially war-winning weapon, but this view is mistaken and unrealistic: Hitler was right in believing that the 262 would be the only aircraft capable of penetrating the air umbrella over an Allied invasion fleet, though it wasn't ready in time, and the fighter-bomber issues only delayed production by about a month. And by that point in the war all fighters were effectively fighter bombers, as the Allies realized that fighters made effective ground attack aircraft and used them to replace dead-end types like dive bombers. The fact of the matter is that the Germans rushed the 262 into service about as fast as they could have, and its premature birth was part of the reason for its problems. Finally, even if it had gone straight to fighter units, their primary opponents - the P-51 Mustang and the Supermarine Spitfire - still would have outnumbered them 60 to 1; this was what eventually led to the Allies' primary method of disposing of the 262, via ambushing the fighters as they were landing, since they had more than the aircraft and pilots required to track their jets to their bases and spring the trap. Even as Germany wised up and began posting their own fighters to cover their jets as they landed, this ended up being a moot point, since such exercises meant those escort fighters, and the fuel they burned, were tied up covering for the Me-262's when they could have been deployed on frontline duty.
- The jetpack, sadly, turned out to be this. Starting with the Germans in the later years of WWII, several nations attempted to build a practical jetpack for military purposes (though contrary to popular belief, the earliest designs were intended for short jumps rather than sustained flight - just enough to bounce over a minefield or quickly cross a river). And sure enough, many of the designs did work, they were just too impractical. The engines were incredibly loud, they could only fly for a short time (20-30 seconds), and the pilot could get a nasty burn on his legs if he wasn't careful (not to mention he could break his legs if he wasn't careful coming down). Ultimately all the military applications jetpacks might have had could be done using easier, cheaper, and safer (though sometimes slower) methods. So while working jetpacks do exist, barring a revolutionary new discovery in small-scale rocket propulsion they are doomed to an eternity as scientific curiosities.
- Perhaps, however the worst part of this all is, towards the end of its testing life, improvements were starting to be made that could have made it practical enough to regain the Army's interest. Unfortunately, the mind behind it all, Wendell Moore, died due to complications from a heart attack, and the concept died with him.
- The '50s and '60s also saw the US military experiment with one-man helicopter-like flying platforms, which likewise proved possible but not practical. They could stay aloft longer than a jetpack, but only introduced a new problem: soldiers floating above a battlefield are little more than horribly exposed targets begging for someone to shoot them. Old-fashioned ground based infantry at least have the luxury of taking cover behind something. There was also the rather glaring issue that placing the pilot above the spinning rotors meant that if for any reason they fell off (such as if, say, they got shot) means the unfortunate pilot would fall straight into the rotors, which was...not a pleasant way to go, and making even a non-fatal injury and fall into a very fatal one indeed.
- This was the US Army's evaluation of the Sopwith Camel during World War I. While very agile, the Camel was unforgiving to inexperienced pilots, and the Gnome Monosoupape rotary engine had a variety of quirks and shortcomings of its own (which the Americans were very aware of from operating the Gnome-engined Nieuport 28). If not properly handled, the Gnome could burst into flames. Instead, the US Army Air Service opted to adopt the SPAD S.XIII, a less agile but faster French fighter plane, for most of their front-line units. It had far less quirky Hispano-Suiza V-8 engine as its powerplant.
- The Royal Flying Corps pilots joked a Sopwith Camel would earn you either a "wooden cross, Red cross, or Victoria cross", referring to its quirks and idiosyncracies. "Wooden cross" implied an inexperienced pilot would die from an accident, "red cross" implied that he might alternatively get badly wounded, but "Victoria cross" referred to its potential in experienced hands.
- The FIAT CR.42. The best biplane fighter ever built, it was very maneuverable (even for a biplane), and was remarkably fast and tough, for a biplane. It entered service in 1939, when monoplane fighters had got much faster, tougher and better armed, and once their RAF opponents adapted to them all they could was to fight on as a monoplane replacement was put into production.
- The experimental CR.42DB variant, fitted with a Daimler-Benz DB 601A 1,200 HP engine, could reach the speed of 525 km/hr, making it the fastest biplane ever flown to this day. It was still an open-cockpit biplane, and still slower, frailer, and less armed than its monoplane opponents, resulting in it remaining a one-shot prototype.
- The Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka, whose name means "Cherry Blossom", was a rocket-powered suicide aircraft developed by the Imperial Japanese Navy later in World War II. On paper, it could carry three times the bomb load of a conventional kamikaze or conventional light bomber aircraft, and could very well sink a US aircraft carrier or destroyer in one hit,note as well as evade American Anti-Air fire and enemy fighters once its rockets had been switched on. However, because its solid fuel rockets burned up so quickly, it had to be carried within 37 km (23 mi) of its target by a G4M "Betty" bomber specifically modified to carry it. This bomber, already lacking in armor and protection for its crew, was vulnerable to American fighters patrolling the skies, and these bombers were usually shot down miles from the US fleet as a result, usually with the Ohkas still in the bomb bay. Only seven ships were successfully sunk or damaged by Ohkas.
- The world's first supersonic reconnaisance drone, the Lockheed D-21, definitely looked good on paper. It had a top speed of Mach 3.5, was virtually impossible to see on radar, and could fly at altitudes of up to 95,000 feet. So why did it fail? It was designed to be air-launched from the back of an modified A-12 (an early version of the SR-71 Blackbird), but due to their similar speeds, the two aircraft couldn't separate safely, and on its fourth test flight the D-21 collided with its carrier plane, killing the co-pilot. Recovering the D-21 was also an issue; since it had no landing gear, it was instead designed to eject a capsule of film that would land by parachute. This was a far more cumbersome process than expected, and only three D-21 flights actually returned any usable film. Operational D-21 flights, which were launched from B-52s instead of A-12s, suffered from a variety of mishaps. One overshot its target, the Lop Nor nuclear test site in China, and crash-landed in the Soviet Union. Another managed to return its film, but the film capsule was run over by the ship sent to recover it. Still another actually had its film recovered, but the wrong chemicals were used to develop it, and the photos were ruined. And just to top it all off, Richard Nixon's rapprochement with China made the D-21 obsolete overnight.
- The F-14 Tomcat. Though undeniably an incredible interceptor and quite solid in the air superiority role, not to mention being a pop culture icon, the early-model Tomcats were plagued by the craptastic TF30 engines salvaged from the failed F-111B project, which flamed out for any reason at all, and were also big and expensive. The vaunted Phoenix missiles also had weight issues, and were not of much use against maneuvering targets. Worse, as the years went on, the effort of keeping them running rose to unreasonable levels; according to former Navy veterans, Tomcats would frequently fly without a functioning radar, just because it was such a pain to keep running. Add in a lack of upgrades (the best it got were better engines and then new avionics), and the Navy was probably not sorry to see it go in 2006. In addition, the Tomcat has the dubious honor of being the last major warplane deployed before digital fly-by-wire controls revolutionized the entire fighter concept; new planes such as the F-16 and F/A-18 blew away the Tomcat in the maneuverability department. Also, the AEGIS radar present on all new American destroyers and cruisers has rendered the "fleet defense interceptor" concept obsolete.
- The Mi-24 "Hind" is one of the most iconic military helicopters of all-time. It was designed to have the weaponry of a gunship, the armor of a tank, and on top of all of that the ability to transport a squad into battle. In practice, the latter feature isn't as versatile as it sounds. Carrying infantry means having a large amount of extra weight, which limits its maneuverability, along with adding an extra distraction when maneuvering or taking fire, while its capacity of eight soldiers is on the low end of transport helicopters. It isn't too surprising that its successor, the Mi-28 "Havoc"◊, drops the troop transport ability entirely in favor of a streamlined attack helicopter design.
- The concept of a "torpedo bomber" became this by mid-to-late World War II for most if not all sides. Sure, hand-delivering a self-propelled One-Hit KO to all but the toughest and most armored ships from on high might sound fun, but to get the things on target, you have to fly very low (so the torpedo won't just plunge straight down and go under the target on release) and very slow (so the torpedo doesn't break apart or accidentally detonate upon impact with the water), and at that point you're essentially a sitting target for any AA gunner with more than two brain cells to rub together. Compounding this is that torpedoes...aren't exactly the most reliable and robust things to drop from airplanes, so there's a chance they'll miss the target or prematurely detonate anyways, even if you do manage to survive long enough to drop the ordnance; the Americans learned this the hard way during the Battle of Midway, where not a single torpedo managed to score effective damage to the Japanese fleetnote , and the losses among torpedo bomber pilots were astronomical, a fact not helped that most were flying incredibly outdated Devastators (though even the one squadron flying the new Avengers suffered heavy losses as well, and also failed to score any strategic hits.) The Japanese had better luck, since their torpedoes were more reliable, but even then casualties among "Kate" crews pulling torpedo runs were still very heavy. It is also very easy for smaller and more maneuverable ships (like destroyers) to dodge the torpedoes if the bombers dropped them very far from their intended victims. Aerial torpedoes are still used to this day from helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft as anti-submarine weapons, but they are nowhere near as ubiquitous as before, having been supplanted by anti-ship missile-carrying aircraft.
- Dive bombers also saw themselves falling into the ABI category by the end of the war as well; Diving straight down on your target allowed for better accuracy and precision, and even helped with "boosting" the bombs a little to help them punch through armored plating, and it made for one hell of an impression on your hapless enemies, especially if your plane happened to have sirens (or very loud airbrakes, on the part of the American Dauntless) attached. But every second you spent with the enemy in your sights is a second spent with you in the enemy's sights, and being the pilot of a plane designed to plunge towards the things shooting at you was a good way to get killed fast. While the Americans had the prescience of mind to make their Dauntless bomber maneuverable and robust (to the point that it could fight toe-to-toe with enemy fighters if need be) the Germans' Stuka unfortunately fell prey to this trope; besides the siren and the ability to carry heavy ordinance up to and including anti-tank cannons, it was a slow, ungainly plane vulnerable to Anti-Air or enemy fighters, and took increasingly severe losses as the war went on and anti-aircraft technology progressed. Its swan song was the Tali-Ihantala battle in Finland in summer 1944. The two intended successor of the SBD Dauntless was a failure: the Curtiss SB2C Helldiver was wracked with issues during development, and had, in fact, inferior range compared to SBD, and was so disliked by its crews it got monikers like The Beast and Son-of-a-Bitch-second class. What ultimately ensured the obsolescence of the dive bomber was the development of multirole aircraft such as F6F Hellcat and F4U Corsair, as well as guided munitions (guided bombs or air-to-ground missiles), and they would replace the type entirely.
- Hilariously enough, it was probably the Japanese that started the whole multirole warplane thing with the Aichi B7A "Ryuusei." The Imperial Japanese Navy noted that torpedo bombers were too vulnerable to getting shot down and that dive-bombers sacrificed good performance when flying with a lot of ordnance. So, in a strangely logical turn of events, Aichi's engineers had created the very concept of a multirole fighter, as the Ryuusei outperformed the Zero during flight testing. The answer to the issue of performance was adding a lot more horsepower, so that the plane was not as burdened while carrying bombs or torpedoes.
- The AM Mauler was a massive single-engined carrier-capable attack plane of the US Navy built by Martin, capable of hauling more ordnance than the already hefty Skyraider, including the ability to carry three torpedoes (for context, most other planes that can carry torpedoes, like the competing AD Skyraider, could only carry one). Unfortunately, it was a temperamental plane with a nasty tendency of bouncing when landing on deck (putting plane and pilot at risk of missing the arresting cables and going straight into the drink) among other issues, and it was powered by an equally temperamental engine (the Pratt&Whitney Wasp Major, the same engine that powered the B-36 mentioned earlier) that made it unpopular among service crews and pilots alike, earning the "Awful Monster" nickname as a result. Because anti-ship missiles made its signature advantage over the Skyraider irrelevant, and because the Skyraider was a lot less temperamental and easier to fly (in addition to its smaller size being an advantage in cramped carriers), the AM Mauler was only in service for a short time and never saw action.
- A naval plane in Awesome But Impractical was the Skypirate, which was even bigger and heavier than the Mauler, capable of carrying four torpedoes. It also still uses the same temperamental Wasp Major engine, and it proved too big to operate from the then-ubetiquous Essex-class aircraft carriers, needing the then-delayed Midway-class. As a result of this and the collapse of the Japanese in the Pacific, the project was cancelled.
- A naval plane in Awesome But Impractical was the Skypirate
- The Sukhoi Su-47 Berkut. The plane looks like it flew straight out of a Macross anime, so no doubt it's awesome. However, the much touted forward-swept wing is where the "impractical" comes in: the composite material suffered tremendous stress which caused the plane's top speed to be lowered to a measly 1.6 Mach (to compare, the Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker, it's forerunner, achieves 2.4 Mach) and the superb manoueverability at low speeds just didn't warrant the losses the Su-47 suffered in return for the forward-swept wing's implementation. It got cancelled in the late 2000's and replaced with the Sukhoi Su-57 whose much-less awesome trapeze wing offers almost all the advantages the Berkut had and none of the downfalls (though it is, if anything, even more expensive to operate).
- Increasingly, the A-10 Thunderbolt II is being viewed this way.
- On one hand, it's a famous ground attack aircraft with a 30mm Gatling gun designed to rip through armored vehicles with a burst of depleted uranium shells, and carry various bombs and missiles. The fact that it swoops dramatically low with engines roaring and a gun that goes "brrrt!" can elicit cheers from friendlies on the ground, while its combination of loiter capability and old-fashioned firepower are thought to suppress and terrify enemy ground troops more effectively than a high-flying fighter that just drops an explosive payload and leaves. The A-10 also includes an armored bathtub around the pilot, and redundant mechanisms which can enable it to keep flying after damage that would wreck a less durable plane. Supporters in both the military and the media have objected to the idea of retiring it and relying only on multirole fighters to perform close air support, arguing that these are not a substitute for a specialized ground attack aircraft like the A-10.
- On the other hand, as time goes on it becomes harder to deny the flaws of the A-10. Its primitive avionics have led to at least one friendly fire incident, the iconic Gau-8 Avenger would struggle against any modern MBT, even Patton tanks made into ideal targets give it trouble, while being overkill against almost any vehicle lighter, and its slow speed makes it vulnerable to modern surface-to-air missile systems, most of which are now easily carried on vehicles as opposed to the older surface-to-air missile systems that relied on ground-mounted static launchers and bulky radar setsnote , and no matter how tough the airframe and well-protected the cockpit, it simply can't withstand heavy AA, no plane can. Its best weapons are almost all missiles and smart bombs, which can be carried by faster multirole jets, large bombers and even longer-loitering turboprops. Even ignoring all this, there is still the problem that the manufacturer went under decades ago, so the only way to get spare parts is to custom make them or cannibalize existing airframes, and eventually the airframes will just be too worn to keep flying. As it is, while the USAF continues to upgrade the Thunderbolt with more modern systems and avionics, most upgrade packages are notably focused towards allowing for greater long-range strike and loitering capability, essentially turning the ground-attack aircraft into a stand-off missile deployment system instead of a dedicated CAS "gun run" plane.note
- The Su-25 Frogfoot, the Soviet/Russian answer to the A-10 Thunderbolt II, is also afflicted with this later on. Like its American counterpart, this dedicated ground attack aircraft packs a powerful cannon, heavy armor (albeit it is not as heavily armored as the A-10) and enough munitions to wipe out entire tank columns. However, the Su-25 suffers from the same problems as the A-10, such as vulnerabilities to modern anti-air and antiquated avionics. Said vulnerability came to the forefront during conflicts in Afghanistan, Ukraine, the Middle East and the Caucasus where the plane suffered heavy losses to both heavy anti-air systems and MANPADs with half of the Su-25s deployed in the Soviet-Afghan war being lost to enemy fire. Furthermore, avionic advancements allowed multirole fighters like the MiG-29 and F-16 to take on ground attack roles previously dominated by the Su-25.
Artillery, Missiles, and Small Arms
- The TDI/Kriss Vector. A favorite of many modern and near-future military shooters, the Vector isn't just awesome because it looks cool and has a great name. The unusual shape houses a system where a weight moves up and down with the bolt, theoretically countering recoil. Unfortunately it is impractical for two main reasons.
- One: The ergonomics are very weird. The bolt can take an unusual amount of force to pull back, replacing the magazine is awkward (since it uses Glock magazines, the release button is way up at the front of the receiver), and depending on how you hold it the bolt release can easily give you a blood blister upon firing the last round.
- Two: The vectoring system doesn't serve its purpose in full auto, which is supposed to be the whole point. It has been observed that the firing pattern consistently moves up and to the right, and the very high cycling rate remains difficult to control. Ironically, the semi-auto civilian version is very pleasant to shoot due to this system, but the practical benefits beyond that are minimal while the ergonomic disadvantages remain.
- The hand mortar. A combination between a small artillery piece and a blunderbuss- basically 16th century frag Grenade Launcher. The awesome speaks for itself, particularly considering it showed up in an era where the average soldier was still armed with a spear and/or sword. The impractical part? If it malfunctioned, the grenade could detonate in the barrel, ruining the weapon and injuring (or even killing) the user. Given how often early firearms misfired, you can see why not many soldiers wanted to use one. On top of that, it didn't actually extend grenade range that much over simply throwing it (arguably not enough to make up for its huge reload time) and was limited to fist-sized grenades that were surprisingly weak (the projectile design being primitive and the only explosives available being black powder, with 1/3 the energy to weight ratio of modern hand grenade fillers).
- Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Enouy revolver. A revolver with eight cylinders that could fire 48 shots. As a surprise to no one, the gun is unwieldy, unbalanced and heavy.
- Rifles as mass battlefield weapons before the Industrial Revolution. Rifling, or spiral grooves inside the bore of a gun barrel, have been around since the 15th century. The grooves impart a stabilizing spin to the projectile, and even back then rifling was known to increase the range and accuracy of a firearm. However, not only was rifling expensive to implement prior to modern machine tools (as in everything had to be done by hand), the fact that nearly every firearm was muzzle-loading meant that burnt gunpowder residue would foul up the barrel. In addition to the grooves themselves collecting fouling, a rifle needed to use ammunition that was tightly fitted to the bore in order for the rifling to be effective. Compared to a smoothbore musket which could use a sub-caliber ball wrapped in a fabric patch, it was harder to ram a bullet down a rifle barrel to begin with, and it would soon get fouled enough from shooting that you’d need to be hitting the ramrod with a hammer to force the next bullet in. The net result was that a rifleman could get off maybe 1 shot in a minute, while a musketeer with a smoothbore flintlock could do 3 or 4. For centuries the rifle was confined to civilian hunting or specialized sharpshooter units. Muzzle-loading rifles finally became practical for mass army adoption with the invention of the Minie ball and similar ammunition, which could be loose-fitting enough to be easily pushed down the bore, yet also had a "skirt" that expanded upon firing to engage the rifling and form a tight gas seal. A few decades later, the mass production of breech-loaders rendered the whole issue moot because you no longer needed to manually ram a bullet all the way down the barrel.
- Volley guns and organ guns. Basically a bunch of small cannons bound together and fired off in quick succession for More Dakka. While it looked spectacular when it fired, gunsmiths quickly realized that all they really did was add unnecessary mechanical complexity to the old standby of a conventional muzzle-loading cannon firing grapeshot, thus they were rarely used past the 15th century. It helps that the usual cannon only had one barrel to load rather than several, so in net the volley gun's rate of fire might actually be slower than the regular cannons'.
- The 15th and 16th centuries saw the construction of utterly enormous cannons, such as the Dardanelles Gun and Tsar Cannon. Unfortunately their awesome size and power also made them an absolute chore to roll into place, thus inferior to the smaller culverin and falconets for shooting anything more mobile than a massive wall... which the Europeans mostly stopped building at the time anyway in favor of bastion forts.
- The Flamethrower. It was an ideal weapon for WWI and WWII that could quickly torch infantry, bunkers, and vehicles while also having the psychological effect of producing the hellish images of burning people screaming in pain. However, the weapon was eventually phased out since the Vietnam War for several reasons. First, it was a heavy weapon that weighed down the user and turned them into a highly visible target. Second, while its range isn't as atrociously short as depicted in the media, it still wasn't effective for long range engagements. Third, the weapon couldn't be safely stored in such a way that it would not explode if hit by an explosive or incendiary projectile. Finally, even its psychological advantage has its own downside; since flamethrowers were so terrifying, their users were always the first to get targeted or routinely executed if captured. Incendiary rockets and grenades have since been tried as more practical alternatives, although some of these have their own problems.
- While largely obsolete as military weapons, flamethrowers are more useful for agriculture. Flamethrowers are not classified as firearms, and in America, 48 out of 50 states do not forbid unlicensed possession of a flamethrower, meaning that is far easier for civilians to own one. Furthermore, the limitations of flamethrowers like short range and bulky weight actually means they are less likely to be regulated compared to guns. Farmers in particular like using flamethrowers to exterminate nasty pests (like venomous snakes) and clear overgrown poison ivy as, unlike most pesticides and herbicides, they don't leave behind nasty residues that poison what they're trying to protect or accidentally create pests that are resistant to it.
- During the First World War, when trench warfare dominated the battlefields of Europe and the Gallipoli peninsula, one invention that was popular among soldiers was the Periscope Rifle . It was a normal bolt-action rifle affixed to a wooden or metal frame which raised it above the operator’s head, with an aiming periscope and trigger-pulling mechanism which enabled the operator to shoot it without needing to stick any part of their body outside the protection of the trench. In the static trenches of WWI, it makes perfect sense at face value. However, shooting relatively-safely from cover was about the only real advantage such rifles had. The improvised wooden versions were very cumbersome to use, carry, and reload, mainly because the entire assembly had to be pulled down to manually operate the bolt after each shot; fancier designs could shoot a whole magazine before needing to be pulled down for reloading, but naturally these gadgets were more complicated and expensive. Periscope rifles were also fairly difficult to aim and rather inaccurate to shoot: the frame would fly upward whenever one was fired because of the direction of recoil not being aligned with the shooter's shoulder, simultaneously reducing the accuracy and increasing the time it took the shooter to recover his aim after each shot. Granted, the whole idea was to maintain the volume of fire rather than accuracy without putting a soldier at unnecessary risk (imagine a trench with a few dozen of these firing at a time), but unsurprisingly, most sharpshooters & snipers in the various militaries of the war stuck with the conventional scoped rifle, accepting that a certain amount of exposure to enemy bullets was unavoidable if they wanted to actually succeed at their jobs, and eventually the task of "volume of fire" would be handed over to the machine gun, which individually could carry it out better than a dozen or so infantrymen equipped with periscope rifles on any day of the week.
- Machine pistols in general. A machine pistol is a small submachine gun using a small-size pistol cartridge and capable of being fired using only one hand. Unfortunately, those are the reasons why they're impractical: They are usually horribly inaccurate and their rate of fire is so great that they easily spray the whole magazine empty with just one squeeze of trigger. One of the most famous failures is Ingram MAC-10, whose immense rate of fire (1200 rounds per minute) and flimsy stock made the weapon so inaccurate it was nicknamed as "bullet sprayer". But, hey, they can be fun! Just look at the Trejo machine pistol, a Mexican Colt 1911 look-alike with a 7-shot magazine of 22lr. Just good enough for giggle-factor...
- The Nock Volley Gun, a smoothbore flintlock small arm with seven barrels, designed to be fired from the rigging of Royal Navy warships during The Napoleonic Wars. Unfortunately, it turned out most men weren't big or strong enough to fire it without a) being thrown violently backwards by the recoil, b) falling off whatever high place they were firing it from, c) having their shoulder shattered, or d) all of the above. It also took freaking ages to reload, even by the standards of the period. Moreover, because of its enormous muzzle blast, it also had a tendency to set nearby ropes and sails aflame. Those few who were strong enough to use it without injuring themselves would be better off using actual small cannons/mortars.
- The Imperial Japanese Type 97 20mm automatic anti-tank cannon, despite its name, was actually a semi-automatic anti-tank rifle. Relatively powerful for a weapon of its class and possessing a high rate of fire to boot, it was also one of the heaviest anti-tank rifles ever made, weighing an unwieldy 50 kilograms unloaded, requiring at least two people to carry it around. This went up to as much as 68 kilos when fully loaded and equipped with accessories. Eventually the gun was upgraded with a wheeled carriage, so it could be moved around more easily.
- The Gatling Gun was viewed as being this when it was first developed, although it has since been Vindicated by History. With the American Civil War underway, military quartermasters already had their hands full trying to develop logistical standards for weapons and ordinance. They simply did not want to deal with another weapon with its own unique set of ammunition and upkeep needs.
- One of the more notable people to hold this viewpoint of Gatling Guns was General Custer. Custer in general, valued mobility highly, and when given the option to have them present at what would become known as his last stand, he rejected not just Gatling Guns, but artillery in general as they could not fight on the move. It's debated on how much of a difference they would've made in the Battle of Little Bighorn (AKA Custer's Last Stand), with one side saying that they would've saved the day, while the other side saying that they wouldn't have made a difference fighting Indians. That the Gatling Gun in Custer's unit was really heavy and required a minimum of two people to operate it didn't help him, as it would have become a stationary target for Sitting Bull's men.
- The Gatling's contemporaries, most of which were multiple-barrel volley guns on carriages, turned out to be more impractical. The guns with barrels arranged horizontally, sometimes called bridge guns, used a single percussion cap located at one end of the row of barrels in order to let off a salvo of shots. While these barrels were breach-loaded, powder, percussion caps, and bullets were still separate components to be loaded up by the assistant gunners. Imagine having to reload the bridge gun after letting off a salvo. That's what restricted the bridge guns to sentry duty at, well, bridges, of course. 7 salvoes a minute do not mean much without some form of support from other soldiers.
- The Gyrojet gun fired tiny rocket-propelled bullets and was cool enough to showcase in the Bond film You Only Live Twice, but rocket propulsion caused problems. Rather than starting fast and slowing down, it started slowly and accelerated. This meant that within a certain range, the bullet would not be moving fast enough to do any significant damage to anyone with body armor. They were also both more difficult to manufacture and much more expensive than conventional bullets, costing several dollars per round. Finally, air turbulence resulting from the transition from subsonic to supersonic speed effectively destroyed its accuracy. Now, there is one circumstance where a Gyrojet would be an effective weapon, but that circumstance is in the vacuum of space, and if you're going to war out there, you have much bigger problems. So, lack of power at short range, and lack of accuracy at long range, and its only true utility is in a place where no one sane wants to fight a war. While later designs have ameliorated some of these problems, they remain more curiosities than practical weapons.
- Most problems could be fixed if a new model of weapon was using gunpowder to accelerate bullets, what would then accelerate further on tiny rocket mid-flight. In that case, we would get a weapon, whose bullets would start fast and become even faster - essentially, Bolters. Too bad they're not invented yet.
- WMDs fall victim to this. If you use chemical weapons on the battlefield, you automatically allow counter use... and there are a LOT of countries with covert or open stocks of chemical weapons. The standing policy of the United States (which no longer has chemical weapons in its arsenal) is that any WMD attack will be responded to in kind - i.e., with nuclear weapons, the only WMDs America still has.
- Of course, that doesn't mean the US isn't willing to allow their allies to use chemical weapons themselves. During the Iraq-Iran war, the US supplied Iraq with the technology to make chemical weapons.
- Hitler specifically forbade the use of chemical weapons in WWII (despite having a very large stockpile of the chemicals) because he himself was the survivor of chlorine and mustard gas attacks, and if the Germans used them then the enemy would be used in kind, and Hitler didn't want that kind of horror to be inflicted upon a human being. Didn't stop him from using it on the Holocaust victims, as he didn't see them as human.
- Sure, it's possible that Hitler's reluctance to use chemical weapons was a rare, self-centered mercy based on his own war experience. It's more likely, however, that Germany avoided combat use of chemicals because their logistical transportation was still heavily reliant on horses, compared to other belligerent nations with much greater production and/or imports of trucks. German supply lines would have been terribly vulnerable to any kind of chemical retaliation.
- The third type of WMD that has been developed, biological weapons. All sides had operational weapons before the end of WWII (anthrax for the US weapon, and Plague-bearing fleas that could be dropped from a bomb casing for the Japanese one). These theoretically might have been more devastating, and certainly anthrax could have been more persistent, than the nukes actually used. However, in practice they proved to be absolutely unreliable, as the stresses and conditions of deploying them tended to kill both the vectors (such as infected fleas) and the disease microbes themselves. And even in the cases when the weapons were successfully deployed (like Unit 731 did in China), they usually managed to devastate a couple of villages at most. And the strict wartime quarantine measures, available under martial law, were later shown to be very effective in successfully stopping the epidemic, negating the very reason of the weapon's existence. US learned this from captured Unit 731 members after the war, and quickly abandoned the concept. The Soviet Union toyed with the idea much longer, up to the very end of the Cold War and tried to overcome these shortcomings, but without much success.
- Also, unlike conventional weapons, there's often going to be a chance that the disease will spread to your own soldiers or some neighboring allied countrynote .
- Developing and testing these weapons can also be an own goal. Even into the 2000s, one remote island in the Western Hebrides of Scotland was still too dangerous for humans to even briefly visit, because of its use in WWII as a test-site for biological weapons such as anthrax. The issue of cleaning it up still persists nearly eighty years on.
- Among nuclear weapons, atomic bazookas are the least useful and most hazardous. During the 1950s the US Army invented with the Davy Crockett recoilless rifle to fire low-yield nukes (think the Fat Man launcher from Fallout and you get the picture). As cool as the idea of a man-portable nuke may seem, it just happened to have a nuclear fallout radius that was greater than its optimum firing range. So, it essentially it becomes a suicide weapon as the user would die from radiation poisoning after using it.
- If any select-fire infantry rifle has a burst-fire mechanism, it is certainly this. Mechanically induced burst-fire tries to find a good compromise between full auto suppression and semi-auto accuracy. This ends up not giving enough rounds to properly suppress foes and ruins the accuracy of a single shot at the same time. Training soldiers to fire their weapons in short bursts is cheaper and more useful than a building a burst-fire setting into the rifles.
- Project Thor, aka "Rods From God". A platform in orbit firing kinetic-energy projectiles at targets on Earth. Sounds awesome, right? Well, not so much:
- It takes about 15 minutes from firing to impact, but about 50 minutes (on average) to target.
- Everyone with any amount of skill in orbital mechanics (read: almost every space program on the planet) would be able to calculate exactly where a launch platform is at any instant, what it could possibly hit, when it fires, and once it fires determine very quickly what it's firing at.
- Due to the plasma sheath that forms around a projectile entering the atmosphere, the projectile can't use sensors to retarget itself.
- Finally, the deal-killer: the amount it would cost in money, energy and resources to put enough weapons platforms and projectiles in orbitnote to make Project Thor effective as a weapon system would buy more than enough existing and conventional weapon systems and launch platforms (which have more flexibility) to make project Thor utterly pointless to have, except when conventional weapons can be easily shot down or fooled by countermeasures.
- The AN-94 assault rifle, originally intended to replace the AK-74 as Russia's general issue rifle. It is extremely accurate even in burst-fire mode thanks to a system that fires them at 1,800 rounds per minute, putting out both bullets before the recoil from the first even affects the shooter's aim. However, it is prohibitively expensive, and its internals are much more sophisticated than the AK-74 (including what is effectively a second receiver within the receiver that is moved via a pulley to fire two bullets that fast), relegating it to Special Forces use. The complexity also meant that it'll jam whenever it feels like, and certain jams are extremely difficult to clear - not something you want in combat, especially when you're used to the legendary simplicity and reliability of the AK-74. A great example of such a jam can be seen here.
- The German Schwerer Gustav and Dora Guns were railway siege guns, and the two biggest artillery weapons ever. Each weighed 1,350 tonnes fully assembled, and fired 800 mm shells that weighed seven tonnes. Designed specifically to destroy France's Maginot Line forts, the guns weren't ready at the time of the Battle of France, which at any rate ended up completely bypassing the fortifications altogether, thus eliminating the need for the guns in that campaign. The Schwerer Gustav was used to some effect in the siege of Sevastopol, destroying some forts and landing a lucky hit that spectacularly blew up the otherwise invulnerable White Cliff ammunition magazine underneath Severnaya Bay, but it only fired 48 rounds before wearing out its barrel (having previously fired 250 rounds in testing and exercises). The Dora was only deployed briefly against Stalingrad, but quickly withdrawn when Soviet encirclement threatened. Their disappointing performance reflects the fact that they were highly limited in what kinds of targets they could be used against. Because the shells were so heavy, the maximum range was only 48 km HE or 38 km AP, less than the 64 km range of 283 mm shells from the smaller 218 tonne Krupp K5 railway gun. And since they were significantly affected by barrel warpage and inconsistent powder combustion from variations in the local air temperature and humidity, the dispersion of the shells was too wide to hit precision targets. The guns basically relied on luck to hit what they were aiming at, so they were only useful for area bombardment of a fortified city. They were also awesomely impractical when it came to manpower and transportation. It took the equivalent of an entire regiment just to man, move, fire and maintain one single gun. The railway guns were also so large they couldn't use existing rail lines when emplaced, unlike normal railway artillery which could either pivot on its carriage or would simply use an area where the rails curved and move forward or backwards to adjust the aim horizontally. Custom rails had to be built wherever the guns had to be set up, using dual sets of tracks in a curve. When broken down for transport, the gun was moved in a train of 25 cars length on conventional tracks. Their inappropriateness for defensive warfare left them with little to do after 1942, and being so conspicuous they were increasingly vulnerable to attack from the air as the Allies gained air superiority; after being basically sidelined for the remainder of the war, the Germans blew them up in April of 1945 to prevent them from being captured by the Allies.
- The V-2 rocket, a single-use weapon that cost a fantastic amount of resources per shot, and, thanks to the brutal treatment of the slave laborers making them, still the only weapon that killed more people on its own side than enemies. But since the slave laborers were also considered enemies, it still sorta worked from the Nazis' perspective.
- The main problem was the guidance system, which often failed to hit any of the British Isles, if it didn't crash into a German town first.
- Later it turned out that the guidance system design was basically pretty sound — the missiles' lack of accuracy was largely the result of the deliberate sabotage of the concentration camp prisoners that built them. Boris Chertok, a Soviet rocket scientist and influential chronicler of The Space Race, who worked at their Mittelwerke production site shortly after the war, noted that the workers learned to make unreliable solder joints and similarly cripple other parts so that they looked and worked fine on the initial inspection, but basically shook themselves apart due to stresses and vibrations during the flight. Another issue was that the German spy network in Britain used to report the missiles' accuracy had all been converted to double agents by the British, so when V-2s would land accurately, they would send back false reports to Germany that the missiles weren't aimed far enough, causing the Germans to "correct" the problem and end up overshooting.
- Another problem was the decision to steer the missile by the "gas rudders" — graphite vanes placed into the nozzle that directed the exhaust flow. These were fragile and unreliable all by themselves, and were quickly replaced by Vernier engines of pivoting (gimballing in the engineering parlance) the whole combustion chamber and nozzle assembly together both on the Soviet and the American designs.
- As if all this wasn't enough, the V-2 was intended as "Vengeance" for Allied bombing, and so it was fired primarily at London, rather than at the Western Allied beachheads in France, which were often chock-full of vulnerable supplies.
- The V-2's big brother, the A9 - which, fortunately, never left the planning stage, though it did come worryingly close to actually being prototyped - was much bigger, and intended to strike the US after an intercontinental flight. It would have been so expensive as to make the V-2 look like a bottle rocket in comparison, especially as it would have required an even more massive booster stage to get the required range. Such a booster, the A10, would have used six V-2 engines. The engineers realized that if they couldn't get precise targeting from V-2s there was no way it could be achieved over such long distances, so it was decided that the second stage would be manned. The pilot, had he managed to eject, wouldn't have had much of a chance, as he'd be parachuting into enemy territory. The Nazis even built test sites for this behemoth, but none were ever produced.
- And then there was the A11, which was intended as yet another stage for the A9/A10 combo, and would have used thirty-six V-2 engines. This three-stage monster was intended to target Japan, but the technology of the time would have limited the payload to... 300 Kg. For comparison, WWII-era general-purpose aircraft bombs - certainly capable of causing serious damage, but of little threat singularly - commonly had a weight of 500Kg, and often more. So Germany would have expended huge amounts of fuel, metal and manpower to deliver a payload that would have, possibly, destroyed one or two buildings. Nor did Germany, which was at the time allied with Japan, have any actual desire to attack them. Not surprisingly, this one didn't even leave the drawing stage.
- The main problem was the guidance system, which often failed to hit any of the British Isles, if it didn't crash into a German town first.
- The V-3 artillery cannon, which was a massive 130-meter-long cannon originally designed to bombard London from across the English Channel. While the gun could actually be fired, it was horribly unreliable since it used a series of controlled explosions to propel the projectile instead of a single explosion. This also made the gun prone to exploding, which is what destroyed the prototype. The guns also could not be turned or moved in any way, though given that they were intended to fire at cities (which by definition also cannot be moved) this was considered unimportant, but it meant that the V-3 guns were incredibly vulnerable to air attack. The intention was that the V-3s would fire 24/7, each one landing a 140kg shell in London every 12 seconds. While each individual shell wouldn't do much damage, an actual sustained bombardment would have completely shut the city down since it would never be safe to leave the bomb shelters. In practice, they never achieved such a sustained bombardment and the V-3 guns aimed at London were destroyed by Allied bombers before they could even be fired. A second set of two V-3 guns managed to shell Luxembourg during the Battle of the Bulge, but failed to do any significant damage and amply demonstrated why the original plan never would've worked even without the Allied bombers destroying the guns. Over five and a half weeks, they managed only 183 rounds fired (a far cry from the intended rate of firenote ) and only 44 of them were confirmed to actually hit the city, killing only 10 people and injuring 35. In addition to the inherent technical problems with the design, the Luxembourg bombardment was impaired by severe ammunition shortages due to the German railways being under constant air attack. This resulted in the gun crews improvising a much smaller 95kg sabot round containing only 9kg of explosives.
- The third Vergeltungswaffe (Vengeance Weapon), the humble V-1 flying bomb, proved to be Boring, but Practical. It became the grand-daddy of all cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles.
- The Karl Device, a 124 tonne self-propelled siege mortar designed and built by Rheinmetall for the German Wehrmacht. The second-largest weapon by caliber ever fired in war (600 mm, compared to the Schwerer Gustav's 800mm), each heavy concrete-piercing shell weighed 2,170 kg and contained 289 kg of explosive filler. The SPG could only be effectively moved by rail, and was almost useless as tactical weapon. But it sure blew the hell out of whatever it hit: Here is what it looked like when it hit the old offices of the Prudential Insurance Company◊ in Warsaw. Here is a picture of a dud◊ shell. One was also used during the Siege of Brest Fortress, where the shockwaves from the impact could travel through metres of concrete and still be lethal.
- One of the weapons the Ottomans brought with them during their siege (and eventual conquest) of Constantinople was Basilica, a 27-foot-long cannon that could launch cannonballs as heavy as 600 pounds up to a mile away. It probably didn't see much action due to a lack of effective ammo to get the desired results and required 60 oxen to drag it from place to place. It also took three hours on average to reload, giving the Byzantines a chance to repair the damage between each shot.
- There was also the somewhat-smaller ("only" 17-foot) Dardenelles Gun), which came in handy when repelling a British invasion in 1807 - roughly 300 years after its initial construction - during which the Ottomans fired it with grapeshot and caused 28 British casualties in the process.
- There was also the somewhat-smaller ("only" 17-foot) Dardenelles Gun
- The XM29 OICW. It was a standard 5.56mm assault rifle with a 20mm grenade launcher that had programmable airburst grenades. Issues came about due to weight,note cost,note and the ineffectiveness of both the 20mm grenadenote and the rifle itself compared to the M16A2note .
- The grenade launcher part did manage to spawn the XM25, using a larger and more effective 25mm grenade, which saw continued testing and some actual service. Unfortunately, the XM25 would also fall victim to this trope. Despite its original design as something that would later be recombined with the concurrent XM8 rifle to give another shot at the full OICW package, the XM25 and its ammunition were rather heavy, forcing the user to forego a rifle. This reduced their combat effectiveness, since it limited their close-range combat capabilities, along with its lower overall ammunition capacity. The air-bursting grenades were quite expensive, even moreso than the XM29's at $1000 per round. Eventually, 40mm grenades were developed with air-bursting capability, which were much cheaper and more standardized than the XM25's specialized 25mm rounds, and following lawsuits between the people who were supposed to produce the weapon, the project was finally canned in 2018.
- The South Koreans tried to salvage the design in the form of the Daewoo K11, a combination of a 5.56mm assault rifle and a 20mm bolt action grenade launcher, with such features as a ballistic computer, thermal viewing capabilities and an effective engagement range of 300 meters, all while weighing 6.2 kilograms (13 and a half pounds) while unloaded. It was apparently tested in Afghanistan and while initially showing some serious defects (most notable defects with the striking mechanism and the barrel moving during firing) DAPA managed to repair these and the weapon is now fully functional, even getting export requests from several other countries, most notably the UAE and Saudi Arabia. However, even the improved model was demonstrated to have absolutely abysmal accuracy, with testing at 500 meters showing only three shots out of fifty hitting, alongside the high costs despite the lower equip rate (even with the South Koreans realizing the concept would only work as a specialist's weapon, issued to a couple grenadiers per squad, rather than entirely replacing the standard rifle, the project has cost the equivalent of $100 million USD) which ultimately saw the project suspended in late 2019.
- Arguably, a lot of the weapons in the US Army's Advanced Combat Rifle program could fall into this by the sound of it. Varieties include stuffing two bullets in a single cartridgenote , making cartridges shorter by packing the gunpowder on the side, flechette riflesnote , and caseless ammunition weaponsnote . Unfortunately, none of these weapons produced results that were significantly better than what was available at the time. It didn't help that this program was obsessed with smaller ammunition that didn't perform any better all for the sake of More Dakka (though many rounds, such as the 4.7mm round, were also designed with armor penetration in mind, and the thinking was that even if the bullets were individually less lethal the sheer number would make up for that). Oh, did we mention that the failed programs wasted billions of dollars in the process of proving that the US Army Ordnance Corps couldn't properly design a rifle?
- Then again, the program did produce several rifles that were as good as the M16 and slightly better in some ways (especially in the weight department)... just not better enough to justify the Army replacing all their existing stocks of Boring, but Practical M16s with the new gun (which would likely have been the fantastically expensive H&K G11). The new types of ammunition developed for the project also came with their own teething problems independent of their ballistic properties; for example, the G11's caseless rounds were so fragile that just dropping them could potentially ruin them. Though many of the problems exhibited by the program's entrants could probably have been solved with a little more R&D, the program was already too short on time and money to sit through another development cycle. It's unlikely that the US armed forces will be replacing the M16/M4 family any time soon. It is also known that retooling lots of munition factories to make any rifle to replace the M16 and the M4 would require lots of time and money. Even if a replacement rifle had better performance, the retooling process would make logistics units miserable!
- The Russian equivalent of the ACR program, Project Abakan, similarly failed to bear much fruit. The engineers toyed around with some neat ideas like "balanced recoil" systems to eliminate muzzle climb, and even welding two AK-74 rifles together to increase the total rate of fire, but none of the prototypes would be particularly successful. Tellingly, the rifle that actually ended up adopted at the end of the program was the above-mentioned AN-94, and its adoption may have been more down to Russian politics than to any actual superiority of the design itself.
- The XM214 Microgun. Intended to be a man-portable version of the M134 Minigun, it was scrapped when someone figured out two simple facts: 1) the combined weight of the gun, battery and ammo pack were still too much for any soldier to carry, and 2) such a huge amount of firepower is rarely actually needed - normal machine guns provide more than enough for the vast majority of purposes.
- In the great Soviet tradition of moar firepower, the Soviets designed their rotary GSh-6-30 cannons differently than the US: instead of being powered by electric motors, they ran on the gas they themselves generated, which made them very fast to spool up and ridiculously dakka-capable. It did, however, come with a few issues: because they were adapted from the naval CIWS guns (more specifically, the AK-630), the massive recoil and vibration, while not as much of an issue onboard ships that have the mass and stability to absorb the massive recoil and vibrations, were putting so much stress on airframes that stress fractures and breakage of minor systems was practically a given (they had to install powerful lights near the landing strips, because the aircraft's own landing lights would almost invariably break upon firing of the gun), and not-so-minor ones like the landing gear or, in one case, the entire control panel would sometimes break as well. In addition, it fired so fast a full magazine would be exhausted in less than 2-4 seconds of fire, shells would occasionally rupture prematurely and damage the firing aircraft, and the cannon could be fired no more than ten times, because it was ignited by pyrotechnic charges. As a result, the final generation of Soviet fighters (and the post-Soviet Russian designs to date) have reverted to a single-barrel cannon (and repurposing the pyrotechnic charges of their rotary cannon to give the GSh-301 the unique ability to unjam itself in the event of a dud round).
- In general, fully automatic combat shotguns. Weapons like the H&K CAWS, USAS-12 and the AA-12 are typically designed for close-quarters engagements in built-up urban or thick jungle/forest areas. However, where they have raw firepower, they lack versatility. With the military, shotguns are largely relegated to the role of door breaching and lack the versatility to quickly adapt from a close-range to medium-range threat like a rifle or carbine (requiring unloading and reloading with a different shell type for the new purpose - the CAWS program was actually brought to a halt partly because someone asked what exactly a soldier armed with one was supposed to do if they encountered an enemy further away than the 100-meter maximum range intended for the weapon). For the police, that much firepower is simply overkill, and private citizens who want to own one have to go through a mountain of expensive paperwork. Besides, such weapons have large recoil and high mass of both ammunition and weapon itself - and brutes capable of accurately firing them are better off using belt-fed machineguns (since they have more fire rate, range, are better against armor, and are overall more practical).
- The Mk3 Jackhammer never even got as far as most of the others (which are available for purchase): designed as one of the very first automatic shotguns, the Jackhammer was weighty, inaccurate (which is saying something when you're talking about a shotgun, which with normal buckshot is supposed to use less-than-perfect accuracy as an advantage), and most damning of all, could not be actually be fired in full-auto. The weapon was very quickly scrapped, and only a dozen or so prototype versions were ever made, maybe two of which were actually capable of full-auto fire (and even then they'd immediately jam after one or two shells). There were also plans to make the magazines work as an anti-personnel mine with the addition of a detonator, but that too never got further than a mock-up of a slightly-modified magazine. But that being said, the Jackhammer had a devastating rate of fire and a surprising range when it did work.
- The Heckler and Koch Mk 23 pistol. It's a match-grade-accurate, very reliable and durable handgun developed for Special Forces use. It is capable of making a 2-inch group at 27 yards and has exceptional durability in harsh environments, being waterproof and corrosion-resistant as well as being capable of firing tens of thousands of rounds without a barrel change. The .45 ACP round has considerable stopping power and yet is subsonic, making it suitable for use with a suppressor. However, since the design priority was using the pistol as a primary weapon instead of as a secondary or fallback weapon, the thing is five pounds and sixteen inches long when loaded and outfitted with all the trimmings (specially designed suppressor and laser aiming module). To compare, the Desert Eagle, the king of Awesome, But Impractical handguns, is almost four and a half pounds loaded, and almost eleven inches long. No operator wants to carry a sidearm that weighs as much loaded as an unloaded MP5, and so H&K quickly designed and released the USP series of handgunsnote which retain most of the good qualities of the Mk 23, but with less weight and bulk; the USP Tactical in particular does pretty much everything the Mk 23 does at two-thirds of the weight or cost and in three different calibers, thus leaving the Mk 23's civilian version to end production.
- The M16, when first used in Vietnam, was supposed to represent the pinnacle of the modern assault rifle. It was made of lightweight polymers which reduced the rifle's weight tremendously while still giving the user the option of automatic or single shot fire, decent penetration for its weight, and a number of other features which are now standard design elements. However, cost-cutting measuresnote and a supply issue with the powder used with the ammunition it was tested with and designed for led to a switch late in the game that led to corrosion and jamming issues in the field. To make matters worse, the M16 had been issued without a cleaning kitnote . While quickly fixed (as in by 1968) by the improved M16A1, evolving into a top-class assault rifle in the M16A4 and finally gaining success in its even more successful cousin, the M4A1 that became the standard US service rifle, the reputation lingers, particularly among those that have never used one.
- The immediate predecessor and the rifle the M16 replaced, the M14, was also an example of this. The M14 was a far more traditional rifle than the M16, with a body made of wood, mechanisms based on the M1 Garand rifle and firing a full-sized rifle round (the NATO-standard 7.62x51mm round, which matched the ballistics of the prior .30-06 Springfield round in a slightly smaller and lighter package). Unlike the Garand, it was selective-fire and could fire on full auto as well as semi-auto. The idea of the rifle was to replace several semi- and fully automatic weapons systems with a single do-all weapon that could reliably engage a target at any possible range. The fact that it was a more "traditional" rifle compared to the M16 also meant it was more widely accepted by the old guard of the U.S Military in its approach of emphasizing the role of individual riflemen over everything else. However, it proved to be very flawed as a general infantry weapon. For starters, the M14 is two pounds heavier than an M16. Its ammunition was also heavier than an M16's, with the same amount of ammo becoming a much greater burden for a soldier trudging through Southeast Asia. The heavier round also resulted in heavier recoil, which made the M14 extremely inaccurate in sustained automatic fire (this trend had been discovered earlier by the Russians when they tested the AVS-36, one of Simonov's first automatic rifles, way back in the 1930s - the problem turned out to be that the ergonomics of semi-pistol-grip weapons like these simply aren't designed to keep on target at 700 rounds per minute). Finally, in attempting to be a do-all weapon system, it had failed to surpass any of them. It was too light to be a squad automatic weapon, too heavy to be comparable to a submachine gun and one Department of Defense report went so far as to call it "completely inferior" to the M1 Garand. The only real improvement was that it used a detachable 20-round magazine instead of feeding from 8-round clips like the M1... and John Garand, who would later go on to call the M14's gas system 'junk', had already designed a modified M1 using BAR magazines of that capacity before anybody thought of the M14. Most damning, Springfield Armory could neither produce it in the numbers needed for mass adoption (breaking one of the promises that had effectively sold the weapon over the FN FAL and thus gave the Pentagon the excuse it needed to not buy a foreign rifle; it took seven years before the change to the M14 was completed) nor use the existing production tooling for the M1 (the other promise that sold it over the FAL), since, even if that had been possible (the design turned out to be just different enough that it couldn't be made on existing Garand tooling), it had all either been broken beyond repair or sold off to Italy. To add insult to injury, the Italian firm Beretta actually designed a comparable battle rifle that could be manufactured with the original M1's tooling. Eventually, the M14 was completely replaced as a frontline general-issue infantry weapon. It was however later modified into several designated marksman's rifles like the M21, a role it has proved to be much more capable in.
- In general, drum magazines tend to be this when compared to either traditional rifle magazines or a belt feed system. While they hold more rounds than a standard rifle or submachine gun magazine, and load faster than a belt feed system, they are also heavier than the former and a lot more finicky than the later. Because of the weight, a soldier could only potentially carry one or two. They can be reloaded by hand, but as you can imagine, reloading a 50-, 70- or 100-round drum magazine by hand takes a pretty long time. Finally, they have a tendency to jam. This is why almost every firearm originally made with a drum magazine either had a traditional magazine made for it later or was adapted for a belt-feeding system, and why the G.I. issue version of the Thompson submachine gun cannot load drum magazines at all. The only subversion for this was drum magazines for aircraft-mounted autocannons early in WWII- box magazines could not carry enough ammo without being unreasonably long, while belt magazines- which did eventually replace the drums later on- required a wing redesign that (at the time) nobody had time for and would have taken ready aircraft out for refit, something that nobody wanted to do given that a war had just started.
- The Urumi is an extremely flexible Indian sword, more like a whip that has a sharp edge to it. In the hands of a master, almost no one can get near the user and no parry would be able to successfully block it. In the hands of anyone else, they are as likely to slice their own leg off as kill the enemy. Another downside is that it requires a lot of stamina as swinging it around, even with two hands, is very tiring. There is a reason it considered one of the most difficult weapons in the world to master.
- This is also the reason why "Bladed Tentacle-Arm" weapon from Science Fiction (particularly used by robots, shapeshifters, and genetic horrors of various kinds) is so effective - since it combines all pluses of Urumi with ease of use and mastering of your fists. Essentially, that just removes the only limiting factor of Urumi. Perhaps in the near future, you could install such bladed tentacles to your body...
- Every military weapon made by Italian gun designer Abiel Bethel Revelli di Beaumont, due to different reasons every time. Here's a quick breakdown:
- Glisenti Modello 1910: the first semiautomatic handgun of Italian make produced first by Glisenti and then by Metallurgica Bresciana già Tempini, it was a cheap and reliable handgun (compared to the Luger P08, which required lots of hand-fitting before leaving the factory) firing an adequate proprietary 7.65mm round. When it came the time for the Royal Italian Army to adopt a semiauto, this was the chosen weapon, but at one condition: it would have to fire a 9mm round. Thus MBT redesigned the weapon to fire the proprietary 9mm Glisenti... And that's when the gun becomes impractical: the 9mm Glisenti is a 9mm Parabellum weakened enough to be fired in the more fragile Italian pistol, but aside for that the two rounds were almost identical, save for the more conical shape of the Glisenti's bullet, and during World War I Italian troops would occasionally capture Parabellum rounds and, unable to notice any difference, load their handguns with those, with explosive results.
- Fiat-Revelli Modello 1914: a machine gun, it was a sound design, had an indexing multiple-column magazine that was more reliable than a belt (even if hellishly complex and slow to load without special tools), and, most important, was Italian, thus freeing the Royal Italian Army from foreign supplies that would come either from Britain (at the time an enemy), Austria-Hungary (technically an ally, but a very disliked one that the Italian government planned to betray at the first chance) or Germany (an ally. This one Italy liked, but also knew they'd stay loyal to Austria-Hungary). Less awesome were the many troubles that earned this weapon a place in the Reliably Unreliable Guns page on This Very Wiki and the fact it was adopted over a better Italian design only due the Fiat company political power and bureaucrats screwing up hard while buying Maxims. Its successor, the Modello 1935, was even worse as it frequently overheated and jammed if not oiled.
- Fiat Modello 1915: AKA the Villar Perosa or, to the soldiers, the Raspberry, Trope Codifier of the submachine gun (and the Trope Maker alongside the German MP18). It was awesome also for other reasons: it was a combination of two independent submachineguns, each gun had an awesome rate of fire of 1,500 rounds per minute, and, firing the slightly underpowered 9mm Glisenti, the recoil was easily manageable. On the impractical side, the magazine for each gun contained a measly 25 rounds (AKA less than one second of fire. That's why the soldiers called it Raspberry), the weak round made it ineffective at longer ranges, and the ergonomics were so bad that you have to wonder how the soldiers managed to fire it while moving (Italian soldiers were very good at improvising).
- Cannoncino Semiautomatic Fiat Modello 1916: a portable automatic cannon for infantry and aircraft use, firing 25.4mm-caliber high-explosive or AP rounds, with a higher rate of fire than its counterparts from Austria-Hungary and France. As an aircraft gun it failed due excessive weight and the rounds being too slow to hit late war airplanes, and production ended up being cut short when the British (by now allies) noticed it was suspiciously similar to their Pom-pom and threatened to sue.
- Villar Perosa Modello 1918: AKA the OVP and the Half Raspberry, it's a derivate of the Villar Perosa, taking one of the Villar Perosa's two guns, modifying it to fire slower (900 rpm, still fast but on the high end of current service submachine guns), and mounting it on a spare rifle buttstock. It was a good weapon, apparently pure awesome... Except the young military officer Tullio Marengoni came up with a less expensive way to do the same thing and attach a bayonet to the gun, resulting in the Moschetto Automatico Beretta Modello 1918.
- Glisenti Modello 1910
- Yet another example of the Soviet love of More Dakka, the ShKAS aircraft machine gun. Quite unusually for a 7.62mm machine gun, it functions like much larger revolver cannons to ensure smooth feeding. It also has an unusually light recoiling section, allowing for an incredible rate of fire of 1,800 to 2,000 rounds per minute in the standard model and up to 3,000 RPM in the rare "Ultra-ShKAS" version. That's at the lowest level the M134 Minigun can reach, and with a single barrel. While (like any rifle-caliber machine gun) the ShKAS was shorter-ranged than a .50-caliber one, the ability to put up a veritable wall of lead greatly increased hit probability once the target did pass within its range. The problem was, the ShKAS was described as having 48 ways of jamming, some of which were difficult to clear even on the ground, and the Ultra-ShKAS was even less reliable. It was also very manpower-intensive to manufacture, a flaw that carried over to the otherwise much superior 20mm ShVAK autocannon that was developed from it.
- Much of its reliability problems stemmed from the very rate of fire it was designed for. Just as an example, the rimmed Russian round required two-phase feeding, first pulling it out of the belt to the back of a weapon, and then pushing it forward into the action. Because of the insane rate of fire, the round was jerked out of the belt with such a force that the bullet would often fall out of it. They had to design a special kind of ammunition with much heavier crimping to fight this problem, but this increased the barrel pressure, leading to a whole new host of reliability issues. On top of this, these special rounds would often mix with the normal ones in the supply chain, causing issues for other guns if they accidentally loaded the ShKAS bullets - but this wasn't so much of an issue because the ShKAS-specific bullets were quite rare, tempting the armorers to load the guns with the normal ones when they weren't available.
- The Luger P08 is absolutely gorgeous for a handgun and is superbly machined and precisely fitted. That's why it was a terrible combat pistol for anyone not well drilled on its usage. The toggle action is notoriously finicky if not racked properly (and will injure a person who attempts a rack on the draw), prone to corrosion at sea if not well-maintained, fails to cycle if fed low-pressure ammunition, and the degree of hand-fitting meant that interchanging parts was practically impossible without the expertise of a proper gunsmith. Additionally, while the Luger was extremely reliable and mud-resistant in the trenches, it was very expensive to produce in large numbers. In both World Wars, the Luger worked fine as an officer's sidearm for shooting prisoners and deserters or as the weapon for specialized soldiers who raided enemy trenches, but it didn't take long for the German army to notice how poorly suited the gun was as a backup sidearm for regular infantrymen, and it was eventually replaced as standard issue by the boxier-looking and less costly Walther P38, which was also quickly adopted by officers as a replacement for the Luger, as the P38 could interchange parts more easily.
- The Canet 12.6" naval cannon, as mounted on the Japanese Itsukushima-class protected cruisers. Intended to give the ships a gun that could actually tackle battleship armor, it proved not only far too large for the ships, but also abominably slow at reloading, even for the era. In their only battle, it took an hour to reload the gun. Unsurprisingly, the Japanese bit the bullet and bought proper battleships shortly thereafter.
- The 46cm/45 Type 94, the gun mounted on the Yamato-class battleships, is the largest gun ever put to sea, and the problems mounting it caused the ships is documented above. The gun itself, though, had two major flaws that made them even less practical. Their armor-piercing shells were designed to dive underwater and strike below the armor belt, with the result they had less penetration under normal conditions, which is one reason the American Mk. 7 16"/50 matches it at longer ranges. Further, the Japanese could only reline the guns at such colossal expense that they simply planned to replace the guns entirely when they wore out.
- Most high-velocity naval guns fall into this category. High muzzle velocity has its benefits - increased range, greater belt penetration, and against lighter ships greater accuracy - but the drawbacks made them very situational based on the navy in question's operational doctrine. That high velocity wore out the guns at alarming speeds, often suffered from decreased accuracy due to the incredible firing pressures, stressed breech mechanisms, and early in the 20th century the guns themselves were too long to hold up, structurally. But above all, high-velocity guns traded in reduced deck penetration at long ranges due to their flatter trajectories. Most of the navies that opted for high-velocity guns expected to fight close to their bases, while Japan, the US, and Britain went for more modest ballistics and sought other ways to improve their guns. See the Italian 15" gun mounted on the Vittorio Veneto classes and mentioned below for a good example.
- The big Cold War-era Soviet anti-ship missiles. You know, the ones that are mounted in massive canisters that seem to take up half the ship they're on. Often supersonic and long-ranged with big warheads, they were a constant headache for the US Navy and drove their development of ever-better air defense systems, but... well, look at that description again. These missiles were enormous, and required either equally enormous ships to carry them, or serious compromises in numbers and stability — which, of course, didn't stop the USSR from putting half a dozen of these on a tiny missile boat, but such boats were practical in closed theatres only, and couldn't be used to shadow American battlegroups, as the Soviet navy was wont to do. Now that technology has made smaller missiles with similar capabilities viable, the Russians are replacing these big old missiles as fast as they can. It also helps that you can put about twice as many of the new, smaller missiles on a similarly-sized boat.
- The American RIM-8 Talos Surface-to-Air missile, one of the "Three Ts" that equipped early American missile ships. The Talos had, by an enormous margin, the greatest range of any missile of its era, with equally excellent altitude performance, an 80% accuracy rate, and the ability to carry a nuclear warhead. Unfortunately, they came with a laundry list of issues that drastically reduced system effectiveness. The 7800-lb, 32-foot missiles had to be carried horizontally in massive magazines that ate up so much space that only a handful of cruisers could carry it. The beam-riding guidance system required two massive guidance radars high up in the ship per launcher and meant only two targets could be engaged at once. And finally, they had a battery that required monthly replacement, and the missiles themselves needed to be tested every two months. And as the final nail in the coffin, unlike the smaller Terrier and Tartar systems, the launchers were incompatible with the later Standard missiles, which meant the ships were obsolete as soon as the Talos was.
- In World War II, the British and the Germans tried out sticky bombs on the field as anti-tank weapons. They suffered from a variety of drawbacks. Both versions were infantry weapons that required the troops to get within throwing distance of a tank. Whereas the German magnetic version was unable to reliably stick to its target, the British glue version was actually too sticky and could easily attach to the user instead of the tank.
- The Walther WA-2000. On one hand, it was engineered to a high standard, very accurate for a semi-automatic sniper rifle (it was built from the ground up as a target rifle, after all), and a gorgeous piece of machinery. On the other hand, it was ludicrously expensive (a single rifle went for anywhere between $9,000 and $12,500 in the '80s. Today, it's valued between $40,000 and $75,000) and, rather damningly, not robust enough for military use (despite what Call of Duty and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker would have you believe). Production ended in 1988, with only 176 rifles made.
- So far as military logistics is concerned, the idea of a universal service cartridge sounds awesome, but has proven to be troublesome. The idea is to give every serviceman the exact same primary weapon ammunition for vastly different roles. The problem is that there are roles with vastly different requirements, so making a universal cartridge doesn't work out too well in the long run (you could change powder loads and projectile properties, but that undoes the whole "universal" idea).
- Bullpup assault rifles like the QBZ-95 and FAMAS never caught on for all their futuristic flash. By placing the action and magazine behind the trigger, a bullpup rifle would be lighter and shorter than conventional rifle while still having a full-length barrel. Conceptually, this arrangement would result in a weapon with the compactness and lightness of a submachine gun while still having the longer range and high muzzle velocity of a rifle. However, when pressed into mass adoption and used in combat operations, the bullpup design proved unreliable and unergonomic. With the action closer to the user's face, many shooters experienced excessive noise and heat irritation; even worse is that some bullpup models like the SA80 do not support left-sided ejection ports, so on top the noise and heat, left-handed users have to deal with hot brass casing hitting their faces. Bullpups also have more complex internal mechanisms including longer firing linkages, leading to unresponsive trigger pulls and reduced reliability. Likewise, changing the magazine was awkward and the arrangement wouldn't allow for easy and quick "drop free" change. Subsequently, many nations that originally embraced bullpup rifles like China and France began moving back to using rifles with conventional firearm layouts that offer more reliability and better ergonomics.
- Laser weapons struggle to find use outside of point defense systems on naval ships and stationary bases. Compared to conventional projectile weapons, lasers have a lower cost per shot, don't require carrying warheads or propellant charges that can cause catastrophic explosions if hit, and can instantaneously hit fast-moving targets because they travel at the speed of light. However, a power plant to supply the necessary amount of electric current is too large and heavy to be carried by a single person or installed in most aircraft or ground vehicles. As a result, such weapons can only be found on either a ship (which are large enough to have the internal volume to justify said large powerplant) or a land base (which doesn't have to worry about powerplant size or weight given their stationary nature). Furthermore, while lasers can easily melt fragile equipment (such as drones, missiles and planes), a laser needs to shoot at one spot continuously for a long time to burn through hardier targets like bunkers and tanks. That requires the user to spend a longer time exposed to attack, and exacerbates the already-high energy consumption. Even worse is that aerial debris like dust, sand and smoke can block laser beams. So while laser weapons may have advantages in point defense against airborne threats, they're not yet powerful or adaptable enough to serve as a primary offensive armament against surface targets.
- Hypersonic missiles- more specifically, hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) such as the Chinese DF-ZF, Russian Avangard, or American AGM-183- possess extreme speed and an unpredictable flight path which makes them extremely difficult for any existing defense system to shoot down and gives them superb range, but once they hit their higher speed they cannot follow sensor input to precisely hit a target. As a platform for short-range ballistic missiles it certainly works well, but against any kind of maneuvering target where the exact location is uncertain, their effectiveness is less certain. They also cost a hefty price, roughly $50-100 million per missile, more than ten times the cost of subsonic cruise missiles.
Experimental Weapons
- The book My Tank is Fight! is all about impractical inventions of World War II.
- During World War I, before the first A7V tanks were even completed, Imperial Germany decided it needed to go bigger and ordered the super-heavy K-Wagen, also designed by Joseph Vollmer. This was going to be a true landship: 13 m (42 ft. 8 in.) long and 120 t in weight, with four 77 mm cannons, 7 machine guns, 30 mm of armor, and a crew of 27! It was so gigantic that it was designed to be shipped by rail in six modules and assembled at its destination. The commander would have to give orders to the crew by means of electric light signals, including two drivers who would have to steer blindly based on the signals they got from the commander. Even assuming that it would have been able to crawl along at 7.5 km/h without getting stuck or breaking down (in which case they probably wouldn't have been able to tow it away in one piece), it would have been a huge target for artillery and cost so much that they wouldn't be able to afford the loss of one. Two prototypes begun under Hindenberg's orders were almost compete at the war's end, and were destroyed under the terms of the Armistice.
- Adolf Hitler loved this trope. Here are just a few of the awesome and extremely impractical weapons that never quite made it:
- If the Tiger and Panther could have been considered Awesome but Impractical, what can one say about the superheavy tank Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus? It's the most massive fully enclosed AFV to ever be actually built, with the surviving example measuring 188 tonnes in mass, 10.2 meters (33 ft. 6 in.) in length, 3.71 meters (12 ft. 2 in) in width, and 3.63 meters (11.9 ft.) in height.
- The project was a collaboration, employing Dr. Ferdinand Porsche and his company to design the hull, Krupp to both design the turret and manufacture most of the tank’s components, and Alkett to perform final assembly. The requirements from Hitler and the military were extremely difficult to meet: armor that would be immune to basically anything the Soviets could shoot at it; a turret big enough to mount a 150 or 128 mm gun, as well as a coaxial 75 mm gun; a powertrain powerful enough to move the heaviest tank ever while still being compact enough to fit inside it; tracks and suspension that could handle all this weight and prevent it from sinking into the ground; and finally the whole tank could be no more than 3.7 meters in width because that was the maximum that could be transported on German rail gauge without blocking train traffic going in the opposite direction.
- First, the layout. In order to keep within the width limit, the hull had to be quite long and also fairly tall, causing it to resemble a huge metal brick. The 1.1 meter wide tracks with volute spring suspension were tucked underneath the hull and contained within the side armor, leaving only a relatively narrow "tub" between them for the lower hull. The driver and radio man sat in a front compartment behind the sloped glacis. Behind them on the other side of a bulkhead was the engine compartment, containing a Daimler-Benz V 12 petrol or diesel engine producing over 1000 horsepower. The engine ran an electric generator system behind it under the turret, which in turn fed electricity to the two electric motors that turned the drive sprockets in the rear. The sponsons over the tracks contained—from front to back—the fuel tanks, radiators, and ammo stowage. The turret was mounted on the rear and constituted another large brick shape more than half as long as the hull and weighed over 50 tonnes by itself. It was armed with a 128 mm Kwk 44 main gun, a coaxial 75 mm gun, and a coaxial MG 34 machine gun; inside were the commander, gunner, and two loaders.
- The 128 mm gun, which saw combat as a field gun and in the Jagdtiger, could destroy any kind of tank at long range and do a lot of damage to fortifications with its giant shells. However, its rate of fire was slow. The coaxial 75 mm gun was supposed to be a more quick-firing secondary armament which would also save the 128 mm gun from having to waste ammo on weaker targets, but it merely served to make the turret cramped and reduce the main gun's ammo stowage to just 32 rounds. A 20 mm antiaircraft cannon and flamethrowers were also proposed but rejected because they’d take up too much space and add too much weight.
- The non-removable side skirts made most kinds of track maintenance impossible in the field, and while it could be put up on three large hydraulic jacks to replace a road wheel, Moran suggests it might have been easier to just dig a hole under part of the track instead. Mechanically speaking, the powertrain and running gear worked surprisingly well. Steering was good, and ground pressure was acceptable. However, because it was so damn heavy the power-to-weight ratio was a lousy 6.4 hp/tonne: they couldn't get it to go any faster than 14 miles per hour on a hard surface, and the operational range was less than 100 miles despite carrying over 1000 gallons of fuel. A giant 14-axle rail transport car was specially designed for it. Since bridges were out of the question, the planned method for crossing deep rivers was for one Maus to drive submerged in water up to 7.9 meters deep, with the crew breathing through a snorkel and a second Maus remaining on shore to run its generator and supply the submerged tank with electricity through cables. This was one of the main benefits of using electric drive. Once the first one got to the other side it would provide electricity for the second one to cross submerged.
- The Maus was nigh invulnerable to antitank guns because of slab-like armor—including a 200 mm sloped glacis, 240 mm gun mantlet, side armor 180 mm thick, and side skirts 150 mm thick—but this couldn't change the fact that it would have been a big, slow-moving target for Allied fighter-bombers. The biggest problem, however, was the extreme difficulty of constructing it and the fact that it was wasting huge amounts of industrial capacity and resources that Germany couldn't afford. Those resources included enough steel in each Maus to make roughly four Panther tanks, and also large amounts of hard-to-get copper for the electric components. The one factory that was capable of producing the Maus got blown up, making it the only tank in the war to have its production completely stopped by Allied bombing. After the war, Allied soldiers would discover several hollow, unused Maus hulls and turrets which testified to all that wasted effort. Had the Maus served it would have met the same fate as other heavy German vehicles, getting abandoned and blown up by her crew after taking a disabling hit or running out of ammo and fuel.
- The government had ordered six prototypes and 135 production vehicles by June 1943. Later that year, though, the companies were ordered to stop all work so that they only completed two chassis in December 1943 and March 1944, respectively. The V1 prototype was a petrol-electric chassis, which was given a dummy turret for driving tests; it was supposed to get the second turret to be finished, which didn't happen. V2 was a diesel-electric chassis, which received the first and only complete turret. At the end of the war, the Soviets captured the prototypes after the Germans had succeeded in destroying the hull of V2, but not its turret. Therefore, they put hull number 1 and turret number 1 together to make a complete Maus for testing; it's now displayed in the Kublinka tank museum, albeit with most of its internals missing.
- The Landkreuzer P.1000 Ratte was the super-heavy tank taken to its ridiculous conclusion. A literal landship dwarfing even the enormous Maus in size and powered by U-boat diesel engines, not only would bridge crossings have been completely impossible for the 1000 tonne vehicle (the plan was that it would simply drive though rivers), but it would also have destroyed any road it attempted to travel on! For long trips it probably would have had to be shipped in pieces by rail, then put together at the front. This tank (if you could even call it that) would have carried two naval guns as its main armament, the same 280mm guns used by the Scharnhorst-class battleships. Its secondary armament was a 128mm gun of the same type used by Maus, the intended location of which is uncertain (variously depicted as mounted in the font hull, in between the main guns in the turret, or on an independent rear turret), and numerous anti-aircraft turrets would've rounded out the armament. It would have had armor up to 250 mm thick. Nevertheless, it would have been a juicy target for Allied bombers and artillery which could have killed it outright, or at least disabled it by destroying the constant train of supply vehicles that would have been required to keep it going. There would have had to be German planes constantly in the air protecting the space above it, and large ground forces assigned to its defense. Hitler's interest in the 1000 tonne tank concept notwithstanding, the Ratte seems to have been at a very back-of-the-napkin stage of design before it got cancelled by Albert Speer in early 1943: if it's true that they were going to use spare turrets from the disabled battleship Gneisenau for Ratte construction, then the tank was definitely going to weigh a lot more than 1000 tonnes since those turrets weighed some 750 tonnes each. It's so nonsensical that some historians believe the Ratte to be a hoax, or perhaps a fanciful sketch that some engineer made for his own amusement. Wehrmacht General Heinz Guderian summed up the absurdity nicely, saying "Hitler's fantasies sometimes shift into the gigantic."
- The proposed Landkreuzer P.1500 Monster took the idea from ridiculous to downright insane. A tracked, super-heavy self-propelled artillery piece specified at 1500 tonnes, the aptly-named Monster was supposed to have a crew of over 100 and use the Schwerer Gustav-type 800 mm gun as its main armament! In reality the idea that it would weigh only 1500 tonnes was sheer deluded optimism, since the railway gun it was based on already weighed 1350 tonnes. If you look at the "Artillery" folder on this page, you'll see that the Schwerer Gustav was impractical as an artillery piece to begin with. What's more, even though the Monster would have been heavily armored, the giant and slow-moving machine with its large train of supply vehicles would be an unmissable target for Allied bombers and heavy artillery. Albert Speer cancelled the project in 1943 before it had a chance to leave the drawing board and waste Germany's resources.
- The designs of Ratte and Monster have both been attributed to Edvard Grotte, an engineer and the director of Krupp who was well known for his bouts of gigantism and reliance on the awesomeness to the detriment of practicality. During the times of the Weimar Republic, when Germany and the Soviet Union entertained a brief alliance, both being something of the pariahs to the West, he did some work in Russia, producing several designs for his Russian employers. While the first of them, the unimaginatively named Grotte Tank, AKA TG-1, was a fairly conventional medium that advanced to the prototype stage, generally pleased everyone, and wasn't adopted largely due to the sorry state of the early-'30s Soviet industry, his subsequent designs were a clear indication of what would then follow. The TG-5 dwarfed even the aforementioned T-35 in its sheer insanity, and was essentially an early version of Ratte, weighing the same 1000 tonnes and boasting 12-inch naval guns. It was to be driven by four marine diesels and to have 1000 mm frontal armor.
- The Japanese, whose dynamics with their allies could be sometimes described as "everything that the Jerries can screw up we can screw up better", and their armor department being the proverbial redheaded stepchild of their military industry, produced the O-I, a superheavy tank that might be best described as the lovechild of a T-35 and the Maus. Equipped with five turrets with 100-to-150 mm guns, and driven with two naval diesels, it was to weigh from 100 to 120 tons in its various incarnations, and used for coastal defence and invasion protection. There's very little information on this tank, but at least one prototype was reportedly built in 1944, and sent to Manchuria for trials, where it was reportedly blown up by the retreating Japanese forces during the Russian offensive the next year. The only material remains of this tank are several huge track links in some Japanese armor museums.
- The Bachem Ba 349 Natter, whose name means "Grass Snake", was a vertically launched rocket-engined interceptor that carried its offensive armament of rockets directly in front of the pilot. Endurance was even shorter than the Komet, and the plane was semi-disposable: missions ended with the aircraft breaking apart and the pilot being thrown free. So impractical it was never used operationally - and the only manned test killed the test pilot.
- Because it wasn't already insane enough, the original project (later scrapped) had the pilot expend his rockets on the enemy aircraft, then steer the Natter on a collision course with one of the surviving bombers and only then eject. With any luck.
- Blohm & Voss BV 40 Glider fighter was proposed to spare fuel and strategic materials for resource-strapped Germany late in the war. By getting rid of the engine and having the pilot lying prone on his belly instead of sitting, they could make the fuselage really narrow to improve aerodynamics and make it a smaller target. The fuselage was made almost entirely of wood. A Bf 109 fighter would tow two BV 40 gliders at once to operational altitude, and the gliders would dive at high speed to attack the enemy bombers with their two 30 mm cannons. The wheeled dolly was discarded upon takeoff, so after its brief attack it would have to land on a single skid. Pretty impressive for an unpowered aircraft, but the prone position was uncomfortable, and the plane was dangerous to fly. Seven were produced before the project was cancelled.
- Related, the Blohm & Voss BV 246 guided glide bomb, which was also designed to be built from non-strategic materials. It never went into series production, but tests showed that it could indeed fly. The awesome part? The use of non-strategic materials...specifically, the wings made of concrete.
- The Silbervogel bomber, a semi-orbital intercontinental bomber. Too impractical to build at the time, and in any case, it would have had two problems: that it wouldn't have been able to carry a large enough bomb load to justify the cost, and that it would have burned up upon atmospheric reentry. The inventor figured out that the thing would never be able to work halfway through designing it, but continued to work on it anyway for the insane amount of money the Nazis were giving him.
- The ne plus ultra of impractical Nazi inventions was the Sun Gun, an idea for an orbiting space station with a giant parabolic mirror made from metallic sodium and at least three square kilometers in area. By concentrating the sun's rays into a focused beam it could function as a Kill Sat, with the ability to deliver scorching death from space to all enemies of the Third Reich. Food and oxygen were to be supplied by on-board pumpkin farms. Fortunately, Nazi Germany didn't yet have the technology, industry, or resources to manufacture manned rockets to construct objects in space, much less a space station consisting of hundreds of tons of equipment and millions of tons of sodium. Building this Sun Gun would probably be impossible even today, with all the countries of the world working together! What’s more, a single mirror might not have been able to concentrate that much energy on such a distant focal point, though perhaps numerous smaller ones could have. Oddly enough, the designers also recognized its Mundane Utility: in addition to establishing Nazi world domination, they thought it could be used as a weather satellite and communications platform.
- If the Tiger and Panther could have been considered Awesome but Impractical, what can one say about the superheavy tank Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus
- In 1918, Italy completed two prototypes of the Fiat 2000, a heavy tank weighing 40 t. It had full length tracks, a 240 HP engine, 20 mm of front armor, several machine guns, and a hemispherical rotating turret on top equipped with a 65 mm howitzer. In some ways it was more promising than the comparable A7V, with much better obstacle-crossing ability and an innovative layout, but at an average of 4 km/h it was just too slow, particularly when they tried to use it in Libya. It never entered serial production.
- When Japan began work on copying the Me 163 (based on blueprints and samples provided by the Nazis), they apparently felt that the tendency of the rocket fuel to explode wasn't a bug, it was a feature. The intended use was for each pilot to take a pass or two shooting at B-29s, then ram the next one they saw. The pilot wasn't expected to bail out. Fortunately the war ended before any of these got into service.
- The Northrop XP-79 was intended to be a rocket-powered flying wing fighter that would destroy incoming bombers by ramming them. (No, they thought of that, it was designed to take the impact without significant damage.) Three prototypes were built, two were abandoned after the rocket engine failed to perform adequately, and the project was entirely cancelled when the remaining prototype, fitted with conventional jet engines (and with the ramming concept abandoned), was lost (and the pilot killed) after an unexplained loss of control during test maneuvering.
- The Soviet Union/Russia, like the Nazis mentioned above, came up with some impractical gems for battle. In fact, it sometimes seems that the only reason they would design and build these weapons was just to prove that they could:
- Cast in 1586, the Tsar Pushka/Tsar Cannon is recognized as the largest cannon by calibre, with a barrel nearly 18ft in length and a bore of nearly three feet. However, it wasn't actually designed as a bombard (the mount and shot displayed nearby are decoration made in 1835): its intended purpose was to be the largest shotgun ever made. Mounted on a fortress wall, it was to be loaded with 1,600 pounds of grapeshot and used against attackers. But by the time it was finally completed, the Tatar threat to Moscow greatly diminished and it never had a chance to be used in a battle.note Still made a neat showpiece, though. In fact, showing off the prowess Russian bronzeworkers was a major purpose from the start.
- The Antonov A-40 "Krylya Tanka" is... a Flying. Tank. It's a tank with wings. If anyone remembers making paper airplanes as a child, you can understand where the problem comes in. Tanks weren't/aren't designed to fly for good reason: they're heavy and aerodynamically unsound. To actually make it possible for it to fly this stinkin' thing, it was stripped of most of its ammunition, armament, armor, and headlights. This made it less a tank and more of a very heavy and cumbersome armored car that would have had very limited survival once on the ground, let alone still in the air. Only one was made, and in its solitary test, it did in fact fly... but was still far too heavy and overtaxed the tow-plane's engines to the point it risked a fire. The project, not surprisingly, was scrapped afterwards.
- After limited success with an experiment to create a flying jeep - basically a modified jeep with helicopter rotors allowing it to be towed into the air and for it then to fly under its own power for limited distances - there was serious work done on extending the "flying jeep" idea to a Cromwell tank. This was scrapped on saner reflection when it was realized the rotor blades necessary to support a tank would need to have a two-hundred-foot span, and at least two heavy bombers would be required, plus a one-shot wheeled undercarriage, to get nearly thirty tons of tank into the air.
- Cast in 1586, the Tsar Pushka/Tsar Cannon
- The Western Allies got in on this, too. Due to the German blockades, the British had a huge shortage of steel during the early part of the war, which was needed to create new carriers and the like. One genius came up with an idea: "Pykrete", a mixture of ice and wood pulp, such as sawdust or even old newspaper. The resulting material was not only stronger than regular ice, but still light enough to float and also resistant to melting. The idea was to make a huge unsinkable aircraft carrier out of the stuff. It never got past a theoretical stage, because the giant refrigeration units that would be needed to produce ice on a scale to build a capital ship would consume just as much steel as one built the conventional way.
- Project Pluto and the Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile (SLAM). Imagine a cruise missile. Now, imagine that cruise missiles with a ramjet engine powered by a nuclear reactor the size of a locomotive, flying at low altitude to avoid radar at three times the speed of sound, lobbing nuclear bombs at things. In addition to the nuclear bombs, the shockwaves and radioactive exhaust from the engine would destroy, kill and irradiate whatever it flew over. Project Pluto involved the development of a nuclear reactor and engine that could withstand such air pressure and temperatures, a feat achieved through huge experimental efforts and at great expense. Unfortunately, the problem with building a weapon that spews nuclear waste everywhere is that nobody will give you permission to test-fly the damn thing, and your allies might disapprove of it flying over their countries to get to the USSR. Nuclear-tipped ICBMs turned out to be a lot cheaper, a lot safer, and a lot faster. On the other hand, the guidance system developed for it was used in later cruise missiles.
- The Convair X-6, a nuclear powered bomber. The X-6 had potential if it was practical, such as being able to stay aloft in the air for weeks at a time without refueling. But to shield the crew at a minimal safety level required 12 tons of lead and rubber. There were also concerns about the fact that peacetime crashes carried the possibility of contaminating large swaths of civilian land, both yours and your allies, not to mention the fact that even the best shielding scheme wouldn't guarantee against the constant emission of hot radioactive byproducts directly into the open atmosphere above everyone's heads. While test flights with an operational nuclear reactor on board were conducted on a similar aircraft as a testbed, the all-nuclear X-6 never got off the drawing board.
- The Soviets had their own nuclear powered bomber, the Tu-95LAL, which did partly solve the weight problem of the Corvair X-6 by mainly shielding the crew instead of the reactor itselfnote , but while it was more practical (it even flew a couple of times with the reactor on), it still was too large, unwieldy and expensive, not to mention an absolute nightmare to maintain (fix a tire? Step 1: don full radiation gear...) and hugely dangerous in a crash. When the first practical ICBMs arrived, the project was canceled.
- The nuclear pulse propulsion rocket concept made even the SLAM and Corvair X-6 look sedate and practical by comparison. This design used the periodic detonation of nuclear bombs for launch and forward propulsion. Surprisingly, it might have been quite practical for space travel from an engineering perspective, but it was hideously impractical politically (the nuclear detonations would violate the Partial Test Ban treaty, and that's before even considering public opinion).
- The Mauler was ahead of its time. Aircraft speed increased and helicopters became a viable threat to armor, so the US Army decided to make a mobile SAM system for Forward Area Air Defense (FAAD). The M113 based Mauler would have a radar to track any aircraft so that the fire control would shine a radar beam on the target. The missile would follow the beam and then use IR to finish the job. The operator just had to press a button so the system would do the rest, which piqued the interest of the US Navy and the British Army. The problem? This was 1960 - computers filled entire rooms back then. The radar barely worked, and the missile would fly off course. There were issues with the missiles falling apart or bad rocket casings. The missiles (mounted in a 3 x 3 box launcher) would shake their launcher apart. In the end, the both the Navy and the British Army bailed, and the US Army canceled the project.
- The concept eventually became successful twenty years later with the Bradley Linebacker, which was the same idea, only scaled down. It had the 25mm gun in addition to four Stinger missiles. With it, the Army finally had a FAAD system that could keep up with the M2 Bradley and the M1 Abrams. It even cost the same as a regular Bradley. Problem was, with the Soviet Air Force no longer a threat necessitating its use, it was easier just to use it as a regular Bradley. All were converted by 2004.
- Around the same time as the Mauler, the Navy was working on its new Typhon Combat System to replace its early SAMs. Attention was paid in particular to avoid the guidance channel limitations of early SAMs, as the early missiles required guidance throughout flight and so each guidance radar could only guide a single missile at once. The heart of the system was the AN/SPG-59 electronically-scanned phased-array radar, which doubled as both a search and guidance radar. Unfortunately, it was also the downfall of the system: the Navy never got the broadcast elements to be suitably reliable, and the radar was such a power hog it was only practical to mount it in expensive nuclear ships. Unsurprising, since the Navy was essentially trying to build the AEGIS combat system fifteen or twenty years before they actually managed it. Faced with the rising costs and mounting technical failures, the Navy cancelled the system in favor of iterating existing missiles.
- During the Cold War, some armies dabbled in designing tanks with twin cannons mounted in a single turret or chasis. This arrangement would theoretically provide more firepower by letting the tank to fire two consecutive shots in quick succession. However, the double-barreled tank ran into many of the same problems experienced by the multi-turreted tanks from World War II. Not only would the arrangement add additional weight to the tank, but it would also take up too much crew space, making fighting conditions too cramped and exhausting. Also, the additional firepower would be overkill especially since nowadays a single tank round is accurate and powerful enough to destroy most armored targets. Even if a tank needed an increased rate of fire, there are always autoloader that provides the necessary firepower but with less weight and space. Currently, all armies mount twin cannons only on lighter anti-air vehicles and even then, their cannons have calibers no greater than 57 mm compared to the 90-125 mm guns used on tanks.
- The amphibious Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) was an infantry fighting vehicle was conceived for long ranged amphibious assaults performed by the U.S Marine Corps. In many regards, it surpasses its peers as the EFV can carry 17 troops and has a whopping 2700 hp engine whereas its contemporaries like the Puma can carry only 6 troops and have a 1000 hp engine. However, the EFV's amphibious specialization meant that it cannot mount proper protection like a V-Shaped hull or slat armor that have become standard on most IFVs. Furthermore, the increased range of anti-ship missiles have made direct amphibious assaults too dangerous as it would be much safer to land after clearing out defenses or land on less defended beachheads. The EFV's fragility, along with cost overruns, lead to its cancellation by the Pentagon in 2012.
- So far, railguns are much more Awesome than they are Practical. Despite current tests showing that a railgun can fire a 3.2 kilogram/7 pound projectile at Mach 7 speeds, there are still crippling issues with powering the gun as well as the heat from firing wearing it out quickly,note limiting how useful it would be as an actual weapon. However, the project cost for developing the railgun is a lot lower compared to some of the other examples on this page (along with the finished version expected to a little more damage than a Tomahawk missile at a fraction of the cost), which has seen it survive several rounds of budget cuts.
- More feasible than railguns are coilguns. Some already exist, as seen here. Coilguns circumvent the projectile-on-barrel friction that is the cause of a railgun's severe firing wear, by hurling a maglev bullet.
- It's worth noting that the Naval railgun project has been cut, this is mostly due to shift resources to a hypersonic missile project, and the Navy has the full intention of reviving the project later down the line.
- However, Japan became the first nation to turn the railgun into a feasible naval weapon. While the weapon has yet to see active service, it was successfully fired from a warship at sea whereas all other nations couldn't get past the land test phase. As for how Japan made the railgun into a practical weapon, it came down to having a narrowed scope paired with more mature technology. Instead of using the railgun as a large-caliber offensive weapon for bombardment, the Japanese railgun is a small-caliber defensive weapon intended for intercepting hypersonic and ballistic missiles. By reducing the weapon size and assigning it to defensive roles, the railgun had reduced energy requirements and barrel wear that doomed previous railgun prototypes. Furthermore, it used proprietary alloy in the barrel and gallium oxide semi-conductors to avoid energy overloads.
- More feasible than railguns are coilguns. Some already exist, as seen here
- In World War II, the British experimented with a "Parachute-less Air Drop". Basically, the idea was to use small rocket thrusters to negate the speed at which a supply crate fell from the air, allowing it to safely lower to the ground. Unfortunately, the rockets were very finicky. In tests, they would either activate too soon and thus spend their fuel before they hit the ground, or slam into the ground at near-terminal velocity then fly up into the air, flinging whatever was inside and large splintered timbers about the landing zone. This idea was so impractical, it never got past the 'drop twenty feet from a crane' stage.
- There was a reason for this: very poor supply of silk in Britain to make traditional parachutes. Other fibers are either too heavy, or too weak, and the three major producers of silk were China, Japan and Northern Italy - all in Axis hands during the war. The large (millions-strong) number of parachutes made for the D-Day airborne ops were made with nylon.
- Other nations continued the development, though, and similar technology (in addition to conventional chutes, mind you) was introduced by the Soviet Union to cushion the final landing impact of heavy airdropped loads, such as APCs and supply containers. Both the USSR/Russia and the US used it as a last-second landing engine for their space capsules/interplanetary probes, and as recently as August 2012 the US used a pure rocket-engined sky crane to land its latest Mars rover. The newest Russian capsule is also planned to eschew parachutes and land on aerobraking and rockets only, and Elon Musk has declared that if SpaceX's Dragon capsules cannot make a soft landing on Earth using only rockets and aerobraking, the project will have been a failure in his eyes.
- Project Babylon was Iraq's attempt to build a supergun that would have rivaled the Nazis' V-3 project. The project would have called for the construction of two 1000mm cannons and a 350mm prototype, each 156 meters long. The full-size cannons would have been capable of firing conventional shells over 1000 kilometers, or firing rocket assisted shells straight into orbit. The guns' intended uses were to either deliver nuclear, biological, or chemical tipped warheads or to disable enemy satellites. However, like the V-3, the Babylon guns suffered from the drawback of being locked into facing a single direction, as well as being gigantic and impossible to hide (and even if you could somehow hide it, the muzzle flash from firing it would instantly give away its position). The gun was so impractical the Israelis never considered it a serious threat; after a few shots, the Israeli Air Force would quickly put a laser-guided bomb right down the muzzle. The project ground to a halt after its lead designer was assassinated (whether by Israel or Iran remains uncertain; both were more concerned with his simultaneous work on improving the accuracy of Iraq's ballistic missiles), and the guns were dismantled and destroyed by the UN after the First Iraq War.
- The Boeing YAL-1 Airborne Laser. Essentially a Boeing 747 with a Wave-Motion Gun, designed to shoot down ICBMs with a laser beam during the missile's launch stage. Unfortunately, the laser itself proved too expensive and required too much power, plus the massive aircraft would be a sitting duck against enemy fighters (problematic since the laser would need a line of sight to the ICBM immediately after launch, requiring flight very close to the launch site), and the project was cancelled.
- The so-called Tumbleweed Tank, proposed by Texan inventor A. J. Richardson in 1936, would work like a giant hamster ball with the crew contained in a stationary internal sphere, while hemispherical outer shells on either side would rotate to roll it along. It would turn left or right by rolling the hemispheres on either side at different speeds, and fire on the enemy using machine guns sticking out of the center and from turrets on the left and right hubs. The inventor claimed that it would be gas-proof, and that anything but a direct hit would glance off of its curved surfaces. However, it appears from the picture that the only way to see out would be tiny slits above the machine guns, and since there's no periscope, cupola, or hatches on the roof or front the crew would have been driving and shooting almost blind. It's not even clear how they were supposed to get in and out of the ball! If you think about it, the problems are numerous: The big ball wouldn't have nearly as much flotation or obstacle-climbing ability as continuous tracks; it has nothing more powerful than machine guns; there's no fully traversing turret where a proper tank gun could be mounted; it looks as if the driver is also expected to manually fire a machine gun; and the most vulnerable part of the armor is the dead center of the vehicle. Richardson's version was not built, but in 1945 the Soviets captured a strange German-made "Kugelpanzer" (spherical tank) in Manchuria that uses the same principle. The mysterious object has a single-stroke engine, a crew of one man, a little vision slit, no weapons, and armor just 5 mm thick. No German record has been found of what it supposed to be used for. It might have been made for scouting, but in any case, it now resides in the Kublinka Tank Museum.
- The Panjandrum was one of the few Allied experimental weapons in WWII that was too crazy to work. It consisted of two wooden wheels ten feet in diameter with rockets strapped to them, connected by a central drum that would be filled with 4,000 pounds of explosives. It was designed to be released off a landing craft so that it could run over everything in its path and then blow up the fortifications on the beach. Unfortunately, the thing was literally impossible to control, and had the nasty habit of veering off course and going into unpredictable directions. Not to mention the fact that the rockets would sometimes separate from the wheel, firing off in random directions as well. Suffice to say, the project was scrapped after one demonstration went horribly awry when the panjandrum veered off course and nearly collided with the gathered panel of high-ranking spectators.
- More recent speculation is that the Panjandrum was a deliberate hoax created solely to confuse the Germans and to support the false suggestion that the invasion of France would be via an assault on the Pas-de-Calais.
- The Mark 90 Nuclear Bomb (aka 'Betty') used as a depth charge. It entered service in 1955, and left it in 1960. The Betty had a 5 kiloton warhead. Just for reference, the Hiroshima bomb had a 15 kiloton warhead. Tests showed that the nuclear depth charge was in of itself a feasible weapon, as the immense shockwave generated by the explosion would almost guarantee the destruction of a submarine. Problem was that the detonation of a nuclear depth charge at a shallow depth produced radioactive rain and steam that is much more concentrated than the dust produced by an aerial explosion over ground, which could badly affect the crew that launched the thing. Pairing it with the ASROC (Anti-Submarine Rocket) system solved this problem, but by then there was a comprehensive ban on underwater nuclear explosions, and the development of guided anti-submarine torpedoes provided a weapon that was nearly as effective at destroying submarines, without the potential complications posed by a nuclear weapon.
- The TOG II, a British interwar tank prototype whose name was an abbreviation for "The Old Gang", referring to its designers who had been responsible for tank design in World War I. It was based around the idea that WWII would be just like WWI; thus, the TOG was to be a "breakthrough tank". Slow, lumbering, but heavily armed and armored, designed to dismantle enemy trench lines and allow smaller tanks to pour into the gap and exploit the hole the TOGs had made. It was 33 feet long, propelled by petrol-electric drive, and weighed eighty tonnes; despite this, it reportedly trialed successfully, reporting no reliability or mechanical issues. Sadly, WWII was not like WWI, and this feat of engineering - though not common sense - was not put into mass-production and never saw action.
- Towards the end of WWII, Allied planners had to find ways of breaching the German Siegfried line of defenses on the River Rhine. One school of thought held that very heavy armored vehicles - purpose built for the task - would be sufficient to knock a large enough hole in the German defenses that the Allies could then exploit with faster armor. Both the United States and Britain designed and built vast super-heavy tanks designed for the sole purpose of breaching the lines:
- The US offering was the T28 Super-Heavy Tank. To confuse matters, they later changed the name to 105mm Gun Motor Carriage T95, and finally changed it back to T28. Weighing in at 95 tons, 36 feet long, with a high-velocity 105mm main gun and 300mm of frontal armor (for those reading at home, that's a full foot of steel), this lumbering monster had a top speed of only 8 miles per hour on roads*. It was low and very wide, with a double set of tracks on each side to distribute the ground pressure; in order to make it narrow enough to get on a flatcar or LST, the outer track modules were designed to unbolt from the main body and attach to each other, so the main vehicle could tow them behind it. Getting a T28 to the front would have been a huge logistical problem, and the whole assumption that super-heavy armor was required turned out to be erroneous when unarmored heavy artillery in theatre managed to creep up to the German bunkers under cover of smokescreens or blind spots and then blast them apart. One of the two T28 prototypes was destroyed by a fire. The other was supposed to be destroyed, but the Army somehow managed to misplace the heaviest armored vehicle it has ever built, so it sat forgotten in a field in Fort Belvoir, Virginia for 27 years, until a hunter found it "hidden" behind a much smaller bush and decided to tell the army about it. When he told them what it looked like, at first they didn't believe him! It is now on display in Fort Benning, Georgia, and supposedly in running condition.
- The British came up with the Tortoise, which was (slightly) more practical than its American cousin. Weighing 87 tons, and 33 feet long, it was slightly less well armed and armored than its American counterpart with a 94mm gun and 228mm of frontal armor, it was however designed as though it might actually, y'know, drive somewhere, with a more powerful engine. In trials it was found to be a decent gun platform and also fairly reliable... unfortunately, the military need for it had completely dried up. Six prototypes were built; one - in running condition - is displayed in Bovington Tank Museum, whilst another is used as a target at Kirkcudbright Military Training Area.
- Winston Churchill was so convinced trench warfare was coming back in 1939, he came up with the Cultivator No. 6, a trench-cutting device. It would operate at night, digging a trench to intersect with enemy trenches, so the following infantry would be protected from most enemy fire. A larger version would accommodate tanks. Because Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, he got the Department of Naval Land Equipment to create and build it. The French were prevailed upon to provide soil samples from the front. A scale model performed as advertised, and a full prototype was completed in 1941. By this time, even Churchill had to concede that it was not needed. As its use could not possibly be stealthy, one must assume the enemy would not simply sit and wait for it to break through. Churchill was very proud of his concept: "I am responsible but impenitent." Even weirder: there was a competing design, independent of Churchill's.
- Humanoid vehicles with two arms, two legs, and a cockpit for a human pilot—Humongous Mecha, in a manner of speaking—have been produced by private individuals and companies. For example, Masaaki Nagumo and farm machinery manufacturer Sakakibara Kikai have produced a Gundam-style robot called LW-Mononofu, which is equipped with an Arm Cannon that shoots sponge balls. In theory a military mecha could do things that tracked vehicles couldn't, such as navigate through anti-tank obstacles, switch quickly between different hand-held weapons, or remove debris to clear the way for other vehicles. Unfortunately, we aren't remotely close to making them work like they do in fiction. For example, bipedal walking is actually quite dangerous for a sluggish, heavy machine that can't replicate the complex, fluid movements of human gait, since it would be likely to lose its balance and damage itself by falling. Nagumo's robots don't actually walk by lifting their feet off the ground but have to shift their legs around to simulate walking while actually scooting on wheels concealed under the feet. Promisingly, a South Korean mecha called Method-2 is able to actually walk on two legs, but it can only take small steps at a time and is "only" 13 ft tall. Merely having legs is a weakness: if a robot only has two legs, having just one shot out from under it will make it collapse in a wreck. The Square-Cube Law makes it unlikely that a humanoid mecha would be fast-moving or structurally sound under stress; their large surface area to volume ratio would make them more difficult to armor adequately; and their tall posture would make them easier targets for the enemy than wheeled or tracked vehicles. A solution to some of these problems is to make the robot tracked or wheeled on the bottom, such as Suidobashi Heavy Industry's Kuratas which has wheels on the end of each of its tripod "legs", or MegaBots, Inc.'s Eagle Prime which stands on caterpillar treads. However, even a mecha with a humanoid upper body sitting on a tracked base would have the same problem of an unnecessarily high silhouette. As of The New '20s, the money to be made is in using them for amusement, either selling mecha rides or making entertainment out of robot fights and contests. Meanwhile, militaries are focusing their development on more practical UAVs, bomb disposal robots, etc. Even the legged robots in military testing such as BigDog are small, unpiloted, and have four or more legs. Admittedly, a robot with human-like arms might be useful in the future, but probably for behind-the-lines construction and loading/unloading of cargo rather than front line combat.
- Speaking of robots, the Boston Dynamics "BigDog" was meant to serve as a robotic "pack mule" that could keep up with soldiers in the field across a variety of terrains, essentially becoming a Walking Arsenal so the soldiers wouldn't have to carry heavy or dangerous equipment like mortars or demolition charges. Unfortunately, the government lost interest in the project because it was reported that robot was just too loud. In order to have the power to keep up, it used a small 2-stroke engine that made an ungodly amount of noise, even with a muffler; it essentially would have made it painfully easy to track a squad's location and would have interfered with communication — while installing a four-stroke engine was out of question because their mass efficiency is significantly worse, and a sufficiently powerful engine would've been just too heavy, defeating the whole purpose of having a "pack mule".
- Col. James Burton's Blitzfighter concept is basically an A-10, but stripped down to the bare minimum until it was basically just a GAU-8 Avenger, a titanium bathtub cockpit with a radio and basic navigational instruments, and the engines and airframe itself. While a cheap, easily produced flying gun sounds cool in theory, the truth of the matter was this "Blitzfighter" was what amounted to a highly-expensive COIN aircraft-analogue which had about as much versatility as, well, a flying gun, and one which unfortunately would be utterly useless against modern main battle tanks at the time, the armors of which had already surpassed the GAU-8's piercing capabilites at about the same time the original A-10 rolled off the assembly line in the first place. When his superiors told him it would at least need a radar or thermals, he claimed that you couldn't tell anything about a ground target on radar so mounting radar on attack aircraft was a good way to get refugees killed.
- Soviet Laser Kostomavt Pistols. It's high-tech, but it's shots have from 1 to 10 joulesnote , and has effective range of 20 meters. In other words, it's only capable of destroying cameras and unprotected eyes. Therefore, it's borderline-useless in any plausible practical situation; enemy satellites are kilometers away from your ship - while any kind of serious boarding enemy (be it enemy astronauts, or alien invaders) will have good UV eye protection, making them impervious to laser shotsnote .
- Hypothetically, if laser chemical bullets were made bigger, they could burn holes in someone. Such as, by making bullets 1600 times bigger, it would put their stopping power on level of low-end assault rifles. Problem is - chemical laser bullets of such size would be more akin to cannon shells, and be extremely expensive; in other words, it would be as bulky as a howitzer, yet merely as strong as a rifle.