Another example is the Polish W-46 T-72 engine, whose service life is a mere 2400 hours.įinally there’s the issue of fuel consumption. Since those days the situation has naturally improved, but while an average car can drive more than 100 thousand kilometers without the need for serious service, the Russian T-90 MBT requires such an overhaul after 11 thousand kilometers.
Once again hearkening back to the conditions of Second World War: some late war German vehicles had extremely powerful engines (and other parts) that were designed to basically work under full load for only a few hours. The moving parts in tanks are designed to withstand extreme conditions but this comes at a price. This was once more of an issue than it is now, but in general it can be said that tanks are not meant to traverse long distances on their own. The second problem is the actual durability of the tank.
In one case, it involved a Maus driving on the bottom of a river with a snorkel, while powered by another Maus standing on the shore. This was actually a serious problem for the combat use of late war heavy tanks – an extreme case was the Maus: very few bridges (if any) were sturdy enough not to collapse under the weight of this vehicle, forcing the Germans to research other (often outlandish) ways to allow the Maus to cross bodies of water. While we are used to see any bridge as a sturdy structure (after all, we do drive cars over them), in reality a less sturdy bridge might collapse under the pressure such a heavy vehicle (or several of them) would put on it. Such weight does have a destructive effect not only on the infrastructure the tank is driving over, but also on any bridges and other such structures the tank might be forced to cross. While early in the Second World War tanks were often relatively light vehicles weighing around 10 tons, the main battle tanks of today easily reach weights of 50-60 tons. One recent reason (more recent than others) is the nature of the tank itself. While such things have happened, the most common way for tanks to be transported during the Second World War was by rail or tank transporter. The common misconception, sometimes fuelled by unrealistic movies, is that the tanks are often moving towards the battlefield on their own, covering hundreds of kilometers. They did not spring from the ground after all – there are man-hours filled with logistics behind every such endeavor. Whenever massive tank battles are mentioned, many books and movies speak of legendary battlefields such as Prokhorovka, El Alamein or the Chinese Farm – but rarely mention how the tanks actually got to some of these remote locations.
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