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

Last night, I wrote a chapter about the "Mark I" tank not using artillery. Many readers have questions. Let me explain.

Before talking about tank guns, we can use machine guns for comparison:

If the machine gun bipod is placed on a horizontal ground, the machine gunner can flexibly aim at the target up and down and left and right to fire.

But what if the machine gun bipod is one high and one low? When rotating left and right, the muzzle is either aimed at the sky or the ground, and the same is true for adjusting up and down, which means that it cannot aim at the enemy in front, even though the enemy is close at hand.

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

This will lead to a very serious problem: as long as there is a protruding stone or uneven ground, it will push the tank up to one side and down to the other.

In this case, the artillery cannot aim at the target, and it is difficult to hit even if it is close at hand.

Because the tank body is not level, the artillery is not level, not to mention that the gunner is also in an unlevel tank, and he can only observe through a small observation hole, so he can't even know whether it is level.

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

This problem was partially solved in the Renault tank, which adopted a horizontal suspension system. Simply put, it is a triangular structure that converts the vertical force into horizontal force.

The same is a protruding stone. When it hits the track of the Renault tank, the horizontal suspension system will make the road wheels open horizontally, and the stone will sink between the road wheels when it hits the track, so the tank body can basically be kept horizontal.

Summary: Even if the rigidly suspended "Mark I" stops, the artillery cannot aim at the target, unless it is absolutely flat ground, and even if there is a stone 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 outward. The track and the ground are roughly complementary to each other to keep 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 could not fire while moving, with the exception of two tanks: the British Matilda and the American Sherman.

The Matilda had many road wheels and a slow speed, so the body of the vehicle was relatively stable while moving, and shooting while moving had a certain degree of accuracy.

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

The modern tanks that truly achieved shooting while moving were those that achieved horizontal stability on the basis of vertical stability, that is, a bistable system.

With a bistable system, no matter how the body of the vehicle moved or turned, the gun barrel could always maintain an absolute position, so the gun barrel could lift beer, lift a wrench...

On the other hand, looking at the "Mark I", people at the time did not know these things at all. They only wanted to move the cannon onto the tank and fire, so there was a combination of rigid suspension and two main guns.

In actual combat, there were indeed cases where rigid suspension tank guns hit the target, but most of them were close-range, based on feelings and luck, and these special cases could not explain 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.