Do Tanks Have Keys – To complete the evolution of the basic elements of the modern armored fighting vehicle, it remained only to adopt tracks as an alternative to wheels. This became inevitable with the appearance of the tracked agricultural tractor, but there was no incentive for this until after the outbreak of World War I. A tracked armored vehicle was proposed in France as early as 1903 but failed to arouse the interest of military authorities,
as did a similar proposal made in England in 1908. Three years later a design for a tracked armored vehicle was rejected by the Austro-Hungarians and then by the German general staffs, and in 1912 the British War Office turned down yet another design.
Do Tanks Have Keys
tank, any heavily armed and armored combat vehicle that moves on two endless metal chains called tracks. Tanks are essentially weapons platforms that make the weapons mounted in them more effective by their cross-country mobility and by the protection they provide for their crews.
Weapons mounted in tanks have ranged from single rifle-caliber machine guns to, in recent years, long-barreled guns of 120- or 125-mm (4.72- or 4.92-inch) caliber. It’s not the size and power of military vehicles that appeal to Borglum as much as their sheer orneriness.
“With a Caterpillar or a John Deere, they try to build things in a way that makes sense,” he says. “With the military stuff, it’s like if they can stick something in somewhere and it fits, that’s where they stick it on. It’s like they go out of their way to make it a pain in the ass.”
Jeff Wise is a contributing editor for Popular Mechanics and the author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger. For a daily dose of extreme fear, .css-3wjtm9{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-thickness:0.125rem;text-decoration-color:#1c6a65;text-underline- offset:0.25rem;color:inherit;-webkit-transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;}.css-3wjtm9:hover{color:#595959;text-decoration -color:border-link-body-hover;}check out his blog.
When World War I ended in 1918, France had produced 3,870 tanks and Britain 2,636. Most French tanks survived into the postwar period; these were the Renault F.T., much more serviceable than their heavier British counterparts.
Plus, the Renault F.T. well equipped with traditional ideas about the primacy of the infantry, and the French army adopted the doctrine that tanks were a mere auxiliary to infantry. France’s lead was followed in most other countries;
the United States and Italy both assigned tanks to infantry support and copied the Renault F.T. The U.S. copy was the M1917 light tank, and the Italian was the Fiat 3000. The only other country to produce tanks by the end of the war was Germany, which built about 20.
The press of U + number allows you to queue 1 point to its respective stat. M + number will queue points until the stats are full. Pressing U without queuing any points or dying will reset the queue.
I trundle along a maze of dirt roads, gaining confidence and speed until I’m approaching this vehicle’s max speed of 18 mph. Launching up a small hill, I come over the crest and find myself heading onto an iced-over pond.
After decades of driving in the Northeast, I know how this is going to play out: the skid, the spin, the sideways crash. But now the tank comes down, smashes through the ice, the water goes flying, and we go rolling along, right on course.
It’s a frosty, bright November morning in rural Minnesota, and the 60-ton battle tank is heartily rumbling, like a big metal cat ready for the hunt. My head is poking out of the driver’s hatch, beneath the 22-foot-long cannon barrel.
This beast, an ’80s British Chieftain, was designed to tear up the toughest, most advanced armor the Soviet Union could throw into battle. Opposing me, 30 feet away, sits a 15-year-old Ford Probe. I climb into the driver’s hatch of the FV433, and Borglum sits atop the armor just behind me.
Instead of a steering wheel, you hold two levers. Pulling on one side slows down the tread, so that the vehicle skews in that direction. Tenderly I nurse the gas pedal and creep forward, acutely aware of the vast bulk I’m now directing.
I make a few turns and carefully accelerate to walking speed. This doesn’t feel like rumbling along in a car—it’s more like grinding through a thick plank with a circular saw. We head out to play on the Borglums’ 24 acres of woodland.
The principles of driving the tank couldn’t be simpler, but getting a feel for it takes a while. Visibility is strictly limited. Where exactly the sides of the vehicle are a matter of pure speculation. From the condition of the bark on most of the trees, I can tell I’m not the first one to encounter this issue.
After hours of practice, I’ve earned the main course: my moment of glory in the Chieftain. This is undeniably a real tank, a mountain of metal whose scale is hard to get your head around. Based on the initial cost and the amount of gas it guzzles, Borglum says it costs him $1000 an hour to run.
Worse, if it suffers a major breakdown, he may never be able to get it back into working operation. So he’s as cautious about the tank as a teenager coddling his first ponycar. All he’ll ever let a customer do with the Chieftain is drive it forward a few dozen yards, which wouldn’t be very interesting unless you were doing something novel, like flattening a car.
This moment of mechanical omnipotence has come courtesy of Drive A Tank, an internal-combustion fantasy camp founded five years ago by a heavy-equipment contractor named Tony Borglum. I arrived yesterday in the small town of Kasota and met with the 26-year-old at his garage, a hangar-like space crammed with military vehicles: two enormous tanks, a couple of self-propelled guns, an assortment of armored personnel carriers
, and a vintage Jeep mounted with a .50-caliber machine gun. Some countries may be less heavily armed. After my own head-to-head with the Probe, I climb down and find the old Ford is now about a foot high and lodged under the tank’s right rear tread.
Carefully, so as not to catch debris under the tank’s mudguard, Borglum backs the Chieftain off the car and returns it to the garage. An employee drives up in a forklift to haul the carcass away.
Nothing remains but an oil stain, a scattering of glass and plastic, and the surge of raw power still tingling in my hands. Borglum’s father has a concrete-recycling business, and the family is used to run large equipment and machining parts.
This expertise came in handy when, in 2006, Borglum and his father decided it would be fun to start collecting British army vehicles. There’s a small community of collectors in the United States, so the men didn’t have a hard time tracking down machines from around the globe, each one costing somewhere between $30,000 and $100,000.
“I’m used to running excavators that can grab a 40,000-pound rock and drag it out of a hole,” Borglum says. “So driving a tank is light work. It’s just an armored box on tracks—no different than a dozer.”
The use of vehicles for fighting dates to the 2nd millennium bce, when horse-drawn war chariots were used in the Middle East by the Egyptians, Hittites, and others as mobile platforms for combat with bows and arrows.
The concept of protected vehicles can be traced back through the wheeled siege towers and battering rams of the Middle Ages to similar devices used by the Assyrians in the 9th century bce. The two ideas began to merge in the battle cars proposed in 1335 by Guido da Vigevano, in 1484 by Leonardo da Vinci, and by others, down to James Cowen, who took out a patent in England in 1855 for an armed, wheeled, armored
vehicle based on the steam tractor. Drive A Tank’s daylong sessions—which are priced starting at $400—begin with a classroom discussion on vehicle operations. After class the 20 to 30 students in attendance start out in machines such as a 33,000-pound vehicle called the FV433 Abbot.
It’s tanklike, with half-inch-thick armor and a 14-foot-long cannon barrel, but Borglum explains almost apologetically that it’s technically not a tank but a self-propelled artillery piece. (However, I bet if you drove it up the White House driveway, your obituary would refer to the vehicle as a tank.)
I toggle the gearshift with my left foot, push the release button atop a pair of levers used for steering, and press the gas pedal. The behemoth eases forward like a land-bound battleship, the treads clanking with a near-musical chime.
Fifteen feet to go. Ten. Five. A part of my brain, conditioned by years of careful driving, starts screaming, Warning! Imminent collision! And then I’m lurching upward to the sound of crunching and shattering. As I settle back toward level again, I set the brakes, climb out of the hatch, and clamber down to assess the damage.
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Emma Nehls is a military writer and historian with a passion for exploring the intricacies of warfare and the human experience within the military. With extensive knowledge and a deep understanding of military strategy, tactics, and historical contexts, Nehls brings a unique perspective to his writings.
