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.