Tank Design

The three major points in the design of tanks have to do with the firepower, protection, and mobility of the vehicle. These issues are all vital in order to give a tank it’s effectiveness in stopping attacks and also battling through to disable and destroy its target.

Firepower is an important concept in design because without it, a tank cannot defense itself. Tanks are often sent in to places where other forms of military vehicles and troop system cannot go. Mobility gives the tank short range movement over territory that may be rough or have many obstacles that other vehicles in the military could not pass through. And protection gives a tank the ability to get through hostile territories without injury to the driver and the crew.

The ways tanks are designed are directly related to the cost. If a specific nation cannot afford many tanks, the tanks that they do have will be made stronger and better able to withstand attacks. If a nation has more money to spend on tanks, they can produce lighter weight tanks that will move faster across the terrain, but may be lacking in enough armour to completely protect themselves against all attacks.

While a tank can protect itself, mobilize to get where it needs to go, and also defend with its firepower, the design of the military tank is not conducive to letting all three areas of design to be at their maximum potential. If you increase any of the three design elements, your other two areas with ultimately have to take a backseat to the most important issue at hand. For instance, if you wan to add more armour to your tank, the result will be an increase in weight while will decrease the mobility of the machine. And increase in firepower will also put you at a loss for speed and armour protection. Because of this, tanks are designed in different ways in order to have a balance of all of these elements within one set of tanks.

And since the Second World War, tank design has moved from the large scale mechanics to design in technological advances. With these advances, military outfits are better able to perform out on the battlefield. This technology comes in the areas of firepower and mobility. There are many upgrades in weapons and the ability to reduce the number of crew members that are needed when sending a tank onto the field. This in turn reduces casualties in the field when a tank is destroyed. Most tanks are equipped with a large caliber gun that will have a 360 degree range of fire. Other weapons can be mounted onto the tank in order to increase firepower to take out soft targets, but as mentioned before, this design will ultimately mean sacrificing speed and armour in order to build up the firepower of the tank.

Because military tanks are designed with those three different aspects in mind, there are multiple models and versions of the same tank available within the military organizations around the world. The bigger the organization, the more design variations they will have.