Tank Goodness: Difference between revisions

 

{{quote|"''Yea verily, though I charge through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am driving a house-sized mass of ''[[Precision F-Strike|fuck you.]]''"''

 

{{quote|"''Your foe is well-equipped, well-trained, battle-hardened. He believes his gods are on his side. Let him believe what he will. We have the tanks on ours.''"

 

In large modern warfare engagements, infantry may as well be [[Cannon Fodder]]. You want something that can [[Hold the Line]]. Something with a [[BFG]], crawler treads and tons of armor. You want a tank.

* In later light novels of ''[[The Familiar of Zero]]'', Saito obtains a King Tiger II tank from second world war.

* In the ''[[Ah! My Goddess]]'' manga, Skuld builds a tank for a [[There Is No Kill Like Overkill|rubber band fight.]]

 

== Comic Books ==

* [[David Drake]]'s ''[[Hammer's Slammers]]'' stories.

* Michael Moorcock's ''The Land Leviathan''

* "[[Shout-Out|Bun]] [[Killer Rabbit|Bun]]" in [[John Ringo]]'s [[Posleen War Series]]. See also the Tiger IIIs from the [[Posleen War Series]] novel ''Watch on the Rhine'', by Tom Kratman.

** [[Bun Bun]] (and the rest of the [[She Va]] vehicles) are self-propelled artillery, not tanks. It may be ridiculously big, but it carries a battleship's gun and very little armor for its size.

* [[H. G. Wells]], anyone? He laid out the concept of tanks ("landships") and their coming dominance in wars in his 1904 short-story "The Land Ironclads", widely believed the inspiration for subsequent development of the real thing over the next 4 decades. That's right: he wrote a story about tanks before there were tanks.

** Beaten to the pop by Da Vinci, although said tank was about as close to today's machines as a galleon is to the Bismark.

* [[The Draka]] Hond tank is the king of the battlefield in the Eurasian War, and the Draka produce them in Soviet Union-like numbers from their massive transcontinental empire.

* [[Fyodor Berezin]] is in love with this trope. As an example, the modern Soviet tanks from an alternate reality in his ''Red Stars'' duology (where the USSR dominates the world) are four-tracked monstrocities with huge cannons. This is explained by the fact that USSR struck first in [[World War Two]], destroying ''Germany'''s military-industrial complex instead of the Soviet one, allowing factories to keep building heavier and heavier tanks, like KV-3, and KV-4 (for reference, the [[Real Life]] KV-2 was armed with a howitzer cannon and 5 of these obliterated over 20 German tanks in one battle).

* While this seems to be the case with the [[Lizard Folk|Race]] landcruisers in [[Harry Turtledove]]'s ''[[Worldwar]]'' series, they're no more (and probably less) advanced than modern-day tanks. However, they're monsters in the books' [[World War Two]] setting, compared to what the human "empire and not-empires" can put out. The shells are laser—sorry, skelkwank-guided and can punch through any human armor. As mentioned by several characters on both sides, had the Race arrived only a generation later (as some of them wanted), the humans would've wiped the floor with them.

* ''[[Warhammer 40,000]]'' [[There Is No Kill Like Overkill|takes this Trope and makes sweet, sweet love to it]]. All races have access to some form of armored death machine, with the exception of the Tyranids (who have a broad variety of armored death ''biomechanoids'', but they all walk, crawl, hover, fly or slither rather than rolling). But it is the [[Imperial Guard]] who have access to the widest range of vehicles - from the ubiquitous Leman Russ main battle tank and Chimera armored personnel carrier/infantry fighting vehicle to the Baneblade super-heavy tank, pictured above in all its glory. As for the other armies, the Space Marines and their Chaos counterparts (who can ''daemonically possess'' their tanks) have access to Predator tanks based on the Rhino APC along with the awesome [[Military Mashup Machine|troop transport/battle tank]] that is the Land Raider, while the Eldar and Tau use highly maneuverable skimmer tanks, although they tend to take their personnel carriers and turn them into tanks by adding an appropriately powerful gun that removes the capacity to carry troops. The Orks? Well, they use cobbled-together battlewagons and looted Imperial vehicles that shouldn't even be able to ''move'', let alone fight in combat. The Necrons have the titanic Monolith, a horribly-beweaponed flying tomb that is ludicrously hard to kill.

** Of the superheavies, Baneblade (yes, it [http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Baneblade#Armament_and_Upgrades really does have] [[More Dakka|eleven barrels of hell]].<ref>If you want a quick breakdown: Baneblade battle cannon mounted in the turret, with a co-axial autocannon, Demolisher cannon mounted in the hull, two sponsons mounting twin-linked heavy bolters with two lascannons mounted on top of those, and a further twin-linked heavy bolter mounted in the hull</ref>) is the most widespread. But then there's the Shadowsword, which is basically a Baneblade chassis housing a [[Wave Motion Gun|Volcano cannon]]—usually the main armament of [[Humongous Mecha|Titans the size of buildings]]. And so on. See the [https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2020/06/40k-esoteric-baneblade-variants.html table of Baneblade variants] (not quite complete — there was also Deathhammer back in [[Horus Heresy]] era).

*** A lot of the credit also has to go to [https://web.archive.org/web/20150809212706/http://www.forgeworld.co.uk/ Forge World], which is apparently what happens when you give Warhammer 40K fans/World War II buffs a Games Workshop license and a load of resin. Even counting old discontinued designs, they're responsible for about half the tanks of the [[Imperial Guard]], and up to 70% of the tanks for the Eldar and Tau.

** The Imperial Guard's Leman Russ has to be considered the most successful design of them all though, in terms of overall utility and practicality (Baneblades may be powerful, but are exceedingly rare and used sparingly). The vanilla Leman Russ is already an excellent vehicle that is powerful against infantry (even Space Marines) with a decent anti-vehicle punch, but it can be customized using a wide variety of variants. The long-barreled Vanquisher, for example, is an excellent tank killer, while the Exterminator mows through infantry like a scythe through wheat.