Fighting armor with infantry - the T-Gewehr

Even early in the World War, armor-piercing ammunition was developed for rifles to help defeat trench armor. The Mark I and Mark II were somewhat vulnerable to the 7.92x57mm steel-cored K bullet, but the Mark IV was essentially impervious. Thus, the Germans created a rifle around a 13.2x92mm steel-cored round that had been in development for the Maxim machinegun.

The first "modern" tank - the Renault FT

The Renault FT was the first tank that looked like what modern readers will consider a tank - an armored chassis with a rotating turret on top containing the main armament. The design was done by the Societe des Automobiles Renault, who had declined Colonel Estienne's original request to produce an armored vehicle based on the Holt tractor (the Colonel would move on to the Schneider company that produced the CA1). After Colonel Estienne approached Louis Renault again, Renault agreed to produce an armored vehicle, but to his design.

Other Universes: The Grand Unified Traveller Universe

This essay is a bit different from my standard fare. It's a parallel Traveller universe, with an attempt to include some of the ideas and species from other GDW games. Your Mileage May Vary, caveat emptor, and here be dragons - this may not be for everyone. You have been warned.

The First Medium Tank - Mark A Whippet

While definitely useful, the heavy tanks lacked a certain flexibility on the battlefield due to their low speed and large size. The Medium Mark A, called the Whippet, filled a role that cavalry once filled, the faster unit used for scouting and to exploit holes opened up by their slower, heavier counterparts.

The last British Heavy - the Mark V

As German anti-tank weapons proliferated, even the Mark IV was showing flaws on the battlefield. The steering was problematic, it was vulnerable from behind, and the overheating machineguns were a significant flaw.

Incremental Improvement - the Tank Mark IV

While the Tank Mark I had been an impressive vehicle when it debuted, it was clear very quickly that it had significant flaws, some easy to fix, others less so. It was slow, difficult to maneuver, had a tendency to damage its heavy guns, had only 14-round strips for the Hotchkiss MGs, was thinly armored enough that special rifle bullets could penetrate the front armor, and had fuel tanks perched above the driver at the front of the tank. Clearly, improvements were needed.

Other Wars: In honor of the blog's Australian visitors

Editor's note: After coming back from TravellerCon US, I want to broaden my scope a bit, but still focus on the original intent. To help people recognize when I'm going off-topic, anything not connected to WW1 or the Interwar period will have the Other Wars title.

So the blog's been up for a few days now, and I've been checking in fairly regularly. It's been reassuring to see that there are visitors; there's always a bit of fear, I think, that an author is the only person interested in their topic. One thing I like with this is that it tracks general information on who's visiting - lots of Americans, the UK second, Canada and Germany tied for third. And then, in a tie for fifth, there's Australia. Australia gets forgotten about when discussing armor, probably even more than Canada does (the T2K Facebook group had a nice discussion about Ram tanks, Kangaroos, and Skinks just recently). So, while it's a little outside this blog's stated remit, I have a remedy.

Before there were tanks...

...there were armored cars. It was gradually becoming obvious by the late 1800s that automatic-fire weapons were going to make cavalry obsolete as a scouting force (unless you wanted to know where the enemy was by noting where your cavalry didn't return from). Making cars proof to light rounds seemed like a good way to develop a protected scout, and some of the earliest vehicles came from France and Austria-Hungary.

Schneider CA - the first French tank

Soon after the Tank Mark I debuted, the French began deploying their first tank, the Char d'Assault Schneider, also known as the Schneider CA or Schneider CA 1 (although the CA 2, CA 3, and CA 4 were never built). A box on treads, it was far more common for the Schneider to bog down than it was for the Mark I. The overhanging nose had been intended to crush barbed wire, but it ended up being an almost crippling design flaw. Approximately 400 were built, and they served into the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, by which time they were totally outclassed by more modern vehicles. One significant flaw with the early Schneiders was that their fuel tank was at the top front of the vehicle (to allow for gravity feed to the engine), meaning many penetrating shots would dump fuel into the driver's area.

In the beginning, there was the Tank Mark I

The Tank Mark I established the rhomboidal shape of British heavy tanks of the First World War and very early Interwar period. The Tank Mark I had 150 examples built, in a combination of Male tanks (armed with 57mm 6-pdr guns along with Hotchkiss machineguns) and Female tanks (armed only with Vickers and Hotchkiss machineguns). Virtually identical was the Tank Mark II, which also had 150 tanks built. The objective was to create a vehicle that could withstand small arms fire, cross the barbed wire and craters of No Man's Land, and assault enemy fortifications.

Tank Guns of the Vespers War

This post provides the statistics for the tank guns I am using or expect to use in the course of setting up the ground vehicles of the First World War and Interwar period. People who are savvy about those times might identify some of the lesser-known tanks I'll be doing from the guns I've selected. As always, the information provided is based on the information I have available, and I welcome any additional information that might help me further refine my work.

What is the Vespers War?

In 1991, a KGB Alpha Team stormed the Russian Parliament, killing President Boris Yeltsin and paving the way for Communist Party hardliners to re-take control of the Soviet Union. This led to an escalation of conflicts resulting in a late-1990s nuclear war, the Twilight War.

Of course, this didn't happen in our world, but it's the alternate history for the second edition of Twilight: 2000, a game published by GDW (and still available from Far Future Enterprises). The game, in its various iterations, covered quite a bit of late 20th-century military technology, and some prototypes that, as of 2016, have not seen service.

The interest of this blog is to look earlier in history. Much like Vespers are said before the Twilight arrives, the Twilight War was not the first technological war, and while others have looked at providing statistics for Second World War technology in the House Rules system, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has addressed the First World War, the Vespers War that introduced tanks, airplanes, and poison gas to the world and began the long, slow decline to madness that was the Twentieth Century.

My goal is to provide information on the various vehicles that were used during the First World War and possibly the Interwar Period, along with game statistics allowing people using the GDW rules to play with these vehicles in their games.