Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
214,425
edits
Tanks, But No Tanks: Difference between revisions
Repaired the damage that Tanks, But No Tanks did - yes, we know that examples on the trope list are examples of the trope, there's no need to add word cruft. No, "abovementioned" is a word and doesn't need to be changed. There were run-on sentences and cruft in the new examples. And you potholed "egregious".
(Added examples and removed a statement explaining that the Main Battle Tanks replaced both tanks and tank destroyers as there are still tank destroyers on the battlefield.) |
(Repaired the damage that Tanks, But No Tanks did - yes, we know that examples on the trope list are examples of the trope, there's no need to add word cruft. No, "abovementioned" is a word and doesn't need to be changed. There were run-on sentences and cruft in the new examples. And you potholed "egregious".) |
||
Line 58:
* One ''[[Adam-12]]'' episode had a scene where the boys pulled over an M8 armored car only to discover that it was duly registered and thus perfectly legal to drive on the street. However, both the boys and the owner, who presumably should have known better, kept referring it as a "tank" throughout the entire scene.
* The "German" halftracks in ''[[The Rat Patrol]]'' were all American halftracks in German markings.
* ''[[The Dukes of Hazzard]]'' episode "Follow That Still" mostly averts this trope with M113 APC being played by a real M113. It does get referred to as an armored personnel carrier to the point that it borders on [[Insistent Terminology]] but it gets called a tank twice (though to be fair one of the people who calls it that is [[The Ditz|Roscoe]]) and the fact the cannon is still functional despite it being surplus purchased for a museum
* A Challenger I showed up in ''[[Doctor Who]]'' as part of the forces who shoot down the Racnoss mothership. While such modern vehicles are rare to see in fictional media - ''especially'' science-fiction - Challengers, as main battle tanks, are not exactly optimised for anti-aircraft duties.
* ''[[The Walking Dead]]'' features a (surprisingly clean, all things considered - shouldn't it be covered in bits of zombie?) British Chieftain standing in for an abandoned M1 Abrams. This is most obvious because of a scene where Rick climbs in the tank through the belly hatch. The Chieftain has that but the Abrams does not as it sacrificed hull integrity.
Line 70:
** The ''Battlefield'' series has been guilty of this trope since the original game. ''Battlefield 1942'' has only one real heavy tank for the Heavy Tank class -- the infamous [[Nazis With Gnarly Weapons|Tiger I]]; the Red Army's Heavy Tank is the T-34/76 Medium Tank which is treated as having better armor and a better gun than its Medium Tank counterpart the T-34-85 (which actually has a larger gun and turret and the same armor); while the Allies get the M10 Wolverine Tank Destroyer (which has a bigger gun than its medium counterpart the Sherman but the same armor as it is built on the same hull). The ''Road To Rome'' expansion added the Armored Car class which used the M3 Grant and Carro Armato M11/39 Medium Tanks for the Allies and Italians respectively. The base game also has Axis factions sharing armored vehicles when any such activity was far less extensive than the Allies' Lend-Lease Agreement. The ''Secret Weapons of WWII'' expansion has the M8 Greyhound Armored Car in the Medium Tank category for the British Commandos.
** ''Battlefield: Vietnam'' put both M50 Ontos Tank Destroyer and the M551 Sheridan ARAAV as Lights Tanks. To be fair, however, the Ontos does fill the Tank Destroyer niche in-game complete with an NVA/Viet Cong counterpart listed as a Scout Car, and the Sheridan is a light tank in all but name.<ref>The Sheridan isn't called a light tank due to internal politics. First it was referred to as a reconnaissance vehicle because it looked better than having two tanks (the other being the failed MBT-70 program) in the ledgers given to Congress; later, the Armored Reconnaissance Amphibious/Airborne Vehicle designation was created to avoid calling it a light tank as the current doctrine was focused on Main Battle Tanks being the only tanks.</ref>
** ''Battlefield 2: Modern Combat'' has the Middle Eastern Coalition using the 2S25 Sprut-SD Tank Destroyer as their tank. Even weirder is that the original PC version of the game had them using more appropriate T-90s. They had a model for T-72s from the
** ''[[Battlefield: Bad Company]]'' erroneously has the M3A3 Bradley, BMD-3 Bakhcha, and 2T Stalker as the Light Tanks for the US Army, Russians and Middle Eastern Coalition respectively when they are all Infantry Fighting Vehicles. The Stalker deserves special mention as it and the MEC's main battle tank the Black Eagle never left the prototype stage in reality; both were canceled before the game came out but these next-generation designs are used not by the Russians who designed them but the Middle Eastern Coalition. [[Fridge Logic|Outside of the fact the MEC only appears in the final level, why would the Russians still use older Soviet designs and export their next generation ones?]]
** ''[[Battlefield 3]]'' is not as bad as the other entries as all the tanks are real tanks. However, this trope does still occur due to questionable placement of vehicles in the campaign. For example the Iranian Army is shown using T-90As when in reality they use modified T-72s (which also appear in the campaign), and the [[It's Raining Men|VDV]] uses BMP-2Ms instead of the actual air transportable BMD line which does get referenced in dialogue in the same mission.
** ''Battlefield 1''":
*** The game lacks faction tanks (unlike previous entries), which makes for Entente tanks (such as the Mark V Landship and Renault FT-17) which were captured and used by the Germans so often it outpaced their own tank production, but not so much for the German A7V "Moving Fortress" which had only 20 built.
**''Battlefield V'' has multiple examples. Let's start with the "Light Tanks" which only includes two actual light tanks (the German Panzer 38T and Japanese Amphibious Ka-Mi), three armored cars (the British Staghound T17E1, American M8 Greyhound, and German Sdkfz 234 Puma<ref>itself an erroneous name as it refers to variant of the 234 which was armed with the 50mm gun intended for the Leopard light tank. The stock 234 seen in the game is the 234/1 armed with a 20mm gun. The 50mm is an upgrade along with the 75mm L/24 gun from the 234/3.</ref>) and an amphibious landing vehicle (the American LVT). The heavy tanks class has the Churchill Gun Carrier Tank Destroyer and the Sturmtiger Self-Propelled Artillery. The US is depicted as using the T48 Gun Motor Carriage Tank Destroyer which wasn't used by them because it was passed over in favor of the M10. Finally, the most [[egregious]] case is the Valentine AA Mk 1 SPAA which was a fictitious vehicle meant to stand in for the real Crusader AA vehicles.▼
*** The tank category also features the Pierce-Arrow Anti-Aircraft Armored Lorry (erroneously stated to be used by the French, when it was built for the [[Brits With Battleships|Royal Marine Artillery]]) and the Garford-Putilov Armored Car.
*** The inclusion of the French Char 2C, the only operation superheavy tank in the world. It wasn't in service until 1923. It would have been more appropriate to use the FCM 1A<ref>A prototype 30 ton superheavy design that was offered as an alternative to the larger C model which was ultimately selected.</ref> which had been built during [[WWI]].
** ''Battlefield V'':
▲**
*** The heavy tanks class has the Churchill Gun Carrier Tank Destroyer and the Sturmtiger Self-Propelled Artillery.
*** The US is depicted as using the T48 Gun Motor Carriage Tank Destroyer, which wasn't used by them because it was passed over in favor of the M10.
*** The Valentine AA Mk 1 SPAA was a fictitious vehicle meant to stand in for the real Crusader AA vehicles.
* The first ''[[Command & Conquer]]'' used upgunned M2 Bradley IFVs as the Brotherhood of Nod's "Light tank". ''Renegade'' changed them into small (and quite low-profile) tanks.
* Subtlety averted in the [[Halo (series)|''Halo'']] franchise. While the [[Hover Tank|Covenant Wraith]] appears to be a case of this trope being the counterpart to the [[Tank Goodness|UNSC Scorpion MBT]] despite the main weapon behaving more like a mortar than a tank cannon, [[All There in the Manual|the official lore]] refers to it as an Assault Gun Carriage instead of a tank.
* ''[[Call of Duty]]: World At War'' has a wrecked Tiger II tank show up in a mission during the Siege of Stalingrad in 1942 a year before it was designed and two before it entered service. There is also the level where Private Dimitri gets to control a tank in a series that often avoids the [[Do-Anything Soldier]] trope but it also misidentifies the tank as a T-34-85. The tank is equipped with a [[Kill It with Fire|flamethrower]] making it the OT-34-85.
== [[Real Life]] ==
Line 95 ⟶ 102:
== Troping ==
* The first troper to describe [[Audie Murphy]]'s famous stand in the [[Draft Dodging]] article (under subversions) placed him in a burning tank instead of on an M10 tank destroyer - a tank-like vehicle with thin armor, an open turret, and a big gun. That said, the definition of "tank destroyer" gets complicated. The British had two classifications for tanks: "Infantry" and "Cruiser." Infantry tanks were heavily-armored yet slow and, as they were mainly intended for infantry support, only rarely equipped with armor-piercing ammunition. Cruiser tanks were fast, lightly armed vehicles intended to engage and destroy enemy armor. The US used the same distinctions but called them "tanks" and "tank destroyers" respectively. Gradually, as armor got heavier and engines got better, both were merged into the single "main battle tank" category that dominates the battlefield to this day. Categorisation gets even more complicated when Soviet and German tank destroyers are factored in. Vehicles such as the SU-85 and Jagdpanther (based on the T-34 and Panther respectively) were simply turretless and sometimes up-armoured versions of an existing tank chassis, mounting a limited-traverse gun in the hull that was typically bigger than the original tank could carry.
{{reflist}}
| |||