The Weirdest Tank Locomotion Experiments Ever Tested

Louis Boirault's thirty-tonne machine carried its own road ahead of itself at 1.6 kilometres per hour; sixty years later the ZIL-2906 crossed Siberian swamp on two rotating aluminium screws and could barely move on a hard road. Between them sit nine other attempts to replace the tank track. This military-history documentary examines eleven experimental locomotion systems—from a French frame-laying machine ordered on 3 January 1915 to a Soviet screw-propelled capsule recovery vehicle built from 1975. We cover Boirault's frame machine nicknamed Diplodocus militaris, Nikolay Lebedenko's nine-metre wheeled vehicle assembled near Dmitrov, the Hansa-Lloyd Treffas-Wagen, the pedrail-footed Orionwagen, the Holt Steam Wheel Tank, the Pioneer Tractor Company Skeleton Tank built from threaded water pipe, J. Walter Christie's convertible M1928, exhibit thirty-seven at Kubinka, General Electric's Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine, the four-tracked Object 279, and the ZIL-2906. Some of these designs solved the problem they were built for and failed elsewhere: Lebedenko's wheels cleared obstacles but concentrated their load onto a tail roller that sank, and Object 279 achieved 0.6 kilograms per square centimetre of ground pressure at the cost of steering that strained its running gear. Others left something behind. Boirault's principle survives in every modern track, Christie's suspension reappeared in the BT series, the T-34 and British cruiser tanks, and pedrail feet and screw drive found permanent work in agriculture, mining and swamp machinery. Each design bought lower ground pressure with a different currency—diameter, legs, extra tracks, augers—and each paid for it somewhere else. The ground decides what a vehicle may become. Which of these failures came closest to working: the Skeleton Tank's open frame, the Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine's legs, or Object 279's four tracks? #MilitaryHistory #TankDesign #ExperimentalVehicles