that looks like a dwarven handgun if I ever saw one
Or a kroot one
Anyways, behold..... WW2 Nazi Germanies insane tank designs.
First, there is the most famous of the german super-heavy tanks-
The Panzer VIII Maus.
Completed in 1944, the Germans only ever built two of these, only one of which received a completed turret. They intended to mass produce the damn thing however.
It weighed 200 Tonnes, was 10.2 metres long, 3.71 metres wide, 3.63 metres tall. Its armour at its thickest was 460mm.
It was armed with a massive 128mm gun, along with a co-axial 75mm gun (Yes, thats the size of gun used by your average medium tank as a primary weapon, being used as a co-axial gun when co-axials are normally machine guns!)
The co-axial gun had a high rate of fire and was intended to engage infantry and bunkers.
It also had an MG34 to increase its ability to engage infantry.
There were severe problems with the design- it was too heavy to cross any bridge in europe, and would have had to snorkel to cross rivers, which is difficult with a tank of that weight. It is also an enormous target, slow and expensive.
But that wasn't the end of it, the Germans intended to mass produce the Maus.... and to build even bigger tanks.
The next biggest design, which despite the utter insanity of it they fully intended to build, was the Landdkreuzer P.1000 Ratte.
This tank was intended to be a huge tank, weighing 1000 tonnes, and was to be armed with 2 280mm Naval Artillery guns, 1 128mm gun, 8 20mm flak guns and 2 15mm mgs.
Its armour would have been up 360mm thick (the Maus's 460mm armour was to be only on its gun mantlet) and it would have been incredibly huge. It would have pancaked any bridge it tried to cross, but would simply have just driven through any river due to its enormous size. Albert Speer (Germanies Minister of Armaments) cancelled the project in defiance of Hitler.
Now, you would think that tank was as big as anyone, even desperate insane Nazi Dictators, could try and design. You would be wrong.
The germans intended to build a Self Propelled Gun variant of the p.1000.
This was to be called the P.1500 Monster. Basically, get the P.1000, make it considerably bigger, and mount a gun so big on it that you can shell London from Paris. It was to weigh 1500 tonnes, to have over 100 crew, and its gun... oh god its gun... It was planned to mount an 800mm gun. Heres a picture of the shell it would have fired-
and here is the Railway gun version they actually built!
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