Most Insanely Overloaded Vehicles Ever
People have always admired enormous constructions:
grandiose structures made by ingenious engineers.
In the 19th century,
the world saw buildings that still capture us to this day.
World's Strangest Combat Vehicles
Gigantic architectural buildings continue to conquer the world.
So what about tanks?
Did engineers create anything so big it still strikes us with wonder?
Historian Yuriy Bahurin knows exactly just how big
combat vehiclescould have become and why this didn't happen.
The concept of this vehicle
occurred to Soviet engineer Nikolay Lebedenko
at the beginning of World War I.
The idea was to create
a powerful combat vehicle that would be able
to break the enemy front line using its cyclopean size.
In January 1915, the design of this wonder vehicle
landed on the desk of Russian Emperor Nikolai II.
And the previously unknown engineer Nikolay Lebedenko
brought the Emperor
a mechanical miniature of a combat vehicle.
The emperor was fascinated by the miniature
and later officially authorized
the construction of the soon-to-be TsarTank.
Tsar Tank
Lebedenko's Tsar Tank
was also known as Netopyr, a genus of bat.
It was a rare instance of bypassing all the red tape
and heading straight to the decision-maker.
It's a generally known fact: the Emperor and the engineer
cheerfully played with the mechanical toy,
running it on the floor, watching it
surmount improvised obstacles made of piles of books.
After that, they parted as best friends.
The engineer was given a hefty sum of money
— an absolutely incredible amount, even for the time.
Under the auspices of the Emperor, the work on the project went swiftly.
The extraordinary machine was made of metal,
and from the late spring of 1915, it had been assembled secretly
near the Orudievo village in the Dmitrovsky district.
The vehicle was manufactured entirely in Russia,
so the project received careful attention.
It was shrouded in profound secrecy.
The production details were distributed across various plants.
The parts were ordered
under the guise of battleship or heavy industry parts.
The tank was designed to have a top speed of 17 km/h (10.6 mph).
To set the vehicle in motion,
the engineers used the engine from a destroyed German Zeppelin.
The engine moved gigantic spoked wheels
that spanned nine meters in diameter.
The rear roller was significantly smaller,
about 1.5 meters (4.9 feet).
The upper stationary was nearly eight meters
above ground level.
The T-shaped hull was 12 meters (39.4 feet) wide.
An interesting fact
was that Lebedenko intended his combat vehicle
to only be equipped with machine-guns.
However, they were mounted
quite efficiently, allowing for all-round fire.
Another set of guns, positioned on the underside of the tank,
made covering fire possible.
The Tsar Tank was built within the shortest possible time.
This was probably due to the enormous budget
allocated for the project by the Emperor himself.
On August 27, 1915,
the finished vehicle was run through mechanical tests.
Tsar Tank
So here we are: the engines are running,
the Tsar Tank takes off, successfully breaks
a young birch tree with one of its wheels,
and keeps moving confidently on a corduroy road
— a road made of tree trunks laid across a swamp.
However, the moment it goes off the corduroy road
and onto boggy ground, the vehicle becomes hopelessly stuck.
The rear roller and the tank's tail, weighing almost 40 tons
of the vehicle's total weight, get bogged down in the ground.
The tank was skidding hopelessly,
and, as far as is known, the attempts to retrieve it failed.
The Tsar Tank's main flaw was its construction,
which later led to failure in its trial runs.
The fault lay with the irrational distribution of weight,
with the vehicle's highest weight being placed at its tail.
See for yourself: the Tsar Tank reached
as much as 9 meters (29.5 feet) at its highest point.
This is the combined height
of four T-34 tanks of World War II.
By the time mechanical test runs were over,
the Russian Empire was already going
through various internal discords, feuds, and complications.
Then, after some time, the February Revolution happened.
Followed by the October Revolution.
Naturally, the tank was no longer on the agenda.
Incidentally,this is exactly what later allowed
some conspiracists to advance a theory
that all of this was, in fact,
the doing of the British intelligence service
who, while ostensibly helping the Russian government,
actually wanted to weaken it by building the tank.
As a matter of fact, one can say that if Lebedenko's Tank
had been manufactured in substantial quantities,
and if imperial Russia had managed
to set up the production of at least a hundred of these vehicles,
while maintainingthe appropriate level of overall secrecy,
these vehicles would have probably produced
the same effect that British vehicles had on Germans at the time.
Because, all things considered,
the Tsar Tank had the potential to do that.
The Tsar Tank project was extremely exotic,
even by the standards of World War I,
with its revolutions in military art and technology.
During that time, many vehicle projects,
up to hundreds of meters in height, were conceived.
However, the Tsar Tank has remained the biggest combat vehicle in history
that was successfully forged in metal and tested.
The Tsar Tank is undoubtedly a landmark of that era,
a monument to the designer's ambitions.
It's an absolutely unique engineering artifact,
unequalled anywhere in the world.
This is, perhaps, a combat vehicle with the most unusual appearance
that has ever been designed throughout history.
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