I was a tycoon in World War I: Starting to save France

Chapter 73 Why can't the rigidly suspended "Mark I" be equipped with artillery?
Last night I wrote a chapter about how the Mark I tank does not use artillery. Many readers have questions about this, so I will give you an explanation.

Before talking about tank guns, you can compare them with machine guns:
If the machine gun bipod is placed on a horizontal ground, the machine gunner can flexibly aim at the target and fire up, down, left, and right.

But what if the machine gun bipod is one high and one low? If you rotate it left or right, the muzzle will either be pointed at the sky or the ground. The same is true for adjusting it up and down. It just can't aim at the enemy in front of you, even if the enemy is close at hand.

The "Mark I" is the first generation of tanks. It has a rigid suspension, which means it has no suspension system, and the road wheels are directly connected to the body of the vehicle.

This will lead to a very serious problem: as long as there is a protruding stone or uneven ground, the tank will be pushed up on one side and lower on the other.

In this situation, the artillery cannot aim at the target and it is difficult to hit the target even at close range.

The gun was not level because the tank body was not level. Moreover, the gunner was also in the non-level tank and could only observe through a small observation hole. He could not even know whether it was level.

This makes the artillery basically a decoration. It cannot aim or hit the target and will also cause a series of troubles. For example, once the artillery is fired, toxic gas will fill the entire tank compartment and cannot be discharged.

This problem was partially solved in the Renault tank, which used a horizontal suspension system, which is simply a triangular structure that converts vertical forces into horizontal forces.

It is also a protruding stone. When it hits the track of the Renault tank, the horizontal suspension system will make the road wheels spread horizontally, and the stone will sink between the road wheels when hitting the track, thus basically keeping the tank body level.

Summary: Even if the rigidly suspended "Mark I" stops, the artillery cannot aim at the target, unless the ground is absolutely flat and there is a stone pressing against the track.

The horizontally suspended Renault tank can aim at the target when it stops. Its suspension system is soft. If there is a protrusion on the ground, the load will sink in. If there is a depression on the ground, the road wheels will bulge out. The tracks and the ground are roughly complementary to each other, thus keeping the body relatively level, as long as the ground is not too rugged. But it cannot shoot while moving.

Most tanks during World War II were unable to fire while moving, with the exception of two types: the British Matilda and the American Sherman.

Matilda has many road wheels and a slow speed, so its body is relatively stable when moving, and its shooting while moving has a certain accuracy.

Sherman has a vertical stabilization system that can stabilize the gun barrel at an absolute height in the vertical direction, and can also achieve a certain degree of accuracy in shooting while moving.

The only ones that can truly achieve shooting while moving are modern tanks, which have achieved lateral stability on the basis of vertical stability, that is, a dual-stable system.

With the bistable system, no matter how the vehicle body moves or turns, the gun barrel can always maintain an absolute position, so the gun barrel can be used to lift beer, lift a wrench...

On the other hand, people at that time didn't know any of this. They just wanted to move the cannon onto the tank and be able to fire, so there was a combination of rigid suspension and two main guns.

In actual combat, there are indeed cases where rigid-suspension tank guns have hit targets, but most of those were at close range, based on feeling and luck, and these special cases cannot prove anything.

The protagonist knows that rigid suspension cannot be equipped with artillery, so of course he chooses a face-covering machine gun as the main weapon.

(End of this chapter)