recently reported that a manufacturer in Henan has successfully manufactured the legendary World War II spherical tank. The tank can accommodate three people inside and has the function of driving on the road. The cost ranges from 150,000 to 210,000 yuan depending on the configuration. This should be the world The spherical tank was successfully reproduced for the first time. The spherical tank
is one of the most mysterious World War II legends. As early as 1917, a Russian inventor first proposed the concept of a spherical tank. This tank was not equipped with weapons and was designed to run over enemy trenches with its own huge rollers.
In the 1930s, an American inventor further improved the concept of spherical tanks. The tank rolls forward on the ground like a giant iron ball. The outside is a rotating metal hemisphere with anti-skid claws on the left and right halves, and the inside is a hollow steel cab. The heavy-duty engine installed in the center of the cab floor drives the outer metal hemisphere to rotate. Rotating in the same direction is forward and backward, and turning in the opposite direction. The
occupants are designed outwards through the shooting hole between the side and the rotating hemisphere in a fully sealed cab. The inventor pointed out that the shot area of a spherical tank is the smallest among all shapes. Unless it hits directly from the front, projectiles flying from all other angles will encounter its curved surface, increasing the probability of being shot.
Although the design of the two inventors was not realized in the end, the spherical tank concept successfully attracted the attention of the Germans. In World War II, a single-man armored reconnaissance vehicle called Kugelpanzer (German "spherical tank") was created and It was exported to Japan and was captured by Soviet troops in the Far East in 1945.
Kugelpanzer is made of 5mm steel plate. The large drums with a diameter of 1.5 meters on both sides are driven by a two-stroke 25-horsepower piston engine. The motorcycle saddle inside the tank can seat a driver. He looks forward through the slit in front of him. And fired through the slit below. The spherical tank is still stored in the Kubinka Tank Museum.
The Kugelpanzer kept in Kubinka continued to attract people's attention after World War II because of its brain hole design. Because the unique temperament of the spherical tank is very in line with the Soviet weapon violence aesthetics, in recent years, it has been excavated by the good guys and deduced a series of Soviet spherical tanks. The overhead design has aroused great response.
One of the most famous is undoubtedly the Soviet single-wheeled high-mobility spherical tank launched by a certain Eastern European model kit. The tank is named "Saro Tank". It is equipped with light weapons and has a rubber track that vertically surrounds the center line of the sphere, which can resemble a unicycle. Drive at the same high speed. The other is a heavy spherical tank launched by a Belarusian game manufacturer. It is equipped with two tracks and two tank guns. It has a very powerful appearance. This design is the basis for our manufacturers to realize the spherical tank. The last thing
would like to emphasize is that due to the driving stability problem that the spherical tank cannot solve, the Soviet Union has never initiated any substantial spherical tank development project. The so-called Soviet spherical tanks that appear now are all overhead designs.
