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.