Earlier today there was a thread about post-apocalyptic tanks, which is a very cool idea. However...

Because that's such an easy thing to do

I like the idea of doing it Mad Max style, with the players' tank starting out missing the turret and most of the armour having been cut off to be used elsewhere. Essentially all they have is a frame, some tracks, and an engine. Over time they jury-rig and duct-tape together parts to make the tank a tank, even if it is technically a rolling pile of scrap.

Materials to repair tanks are rare, facilities even more so, but they're around. Either the factions having their every so important strong points build around oil fields, or there being a few neutral guilds around either capable of producing parts, or drilling and refining oil needed, who mostly manage to stay neutral because trying to get rid of them will just result in them detting fire to their fields. Also, most repairs are jury rigged shit and most tanks look increasingly orky/bubbaed/hillbilly armoured/nigger rigged. Also, many groups lovingly decorate their tanks with paint jobs and trophies.

This means when taking out a tank, you'll often wanna leave it in a good enough condition be able to be repaired so you can capture it for yourself.

Isn't this just Metal Saga/Metal Max?

See The A-Team for details.

youtube.com/watch?v=H7zc1iySY1I

>when taking out a tank, you'll often wanna leave it in a good enough condition be able to be repaired so you can capture it for yourself.
This would be a thing, I'm sure - you'd want to capture the tank by trickery, maybe kill the crew, at worst maybe burn the inside or make it throw a track, but full-on exploding the tank would be a last resort - you'd want them as a threat for when you ambush a tank more than anything else

Again I'm seeing parallels with knights who were often ransomed.

Also it's an excuse for tanks with heraldry

What if you started building T-34s?

People could and would use any amount of mechanical scrap parts to keep the tanks running. You don't need a shiny factory to upkeep even moderately complex machinery.

Hell poor ass Cuba has basically all of its cars from like 1950 still working because of the trade emabargo. Everyone there just dealt with it and made their own parts.

>>ITT: Post-industrial assholes who have know idea how anything is actually made.

Yeah, I can just forge a T-34 turret casting in my backyard because it's like old. Right?

>tanks with heraldry

I can't help but imagine some lookout screaming at his warlord that the Beast of War has taken to the field.

Also, the constant capturing and recapturing of tanks tickles my fancy for the African front in WW2.

I think the joke here was that quite a lot of the T-34's made during the war were poorly made because the Wehrmacht was already knocking on the Kremlin's door.

>A Pre-War mega corporation started a monopoly for the war
>owning everything needed to mine, produce, or replicate the materials to repair their tanks and vehicles they made and sold in the same area
>may be hidden deep underground
Apex corporation/Topsiders from Endtown?

just chiming in to say this in general sounds like low-tech version of Battletech universe. In BT for example, the tech for making spaceships is long lost, so there is a universal treaty for nonagression towards what few remain. Colonies are just small city-sized complexes on the planets and battles are fought by a handful of noble-knight-like Mechwarriors in their mechs, the equivalent of today's tanks where assault power is considered. There's also a universal shortage of parts, so they absolutely cannibalize anything they can salvage out of enemy remains, and what they can't use, they trade off for stuff they can.

There were cases of T-34's with the welding being thicker than the frontal armour and there were cases where there were gaps in the welding to the point of the armour even falling of under enough stress.

Or for a more directly relevant example, the T55 is still in use here and there.

You just gotta start by building tools, and then build tools with them, and so on up to making a half-decent T-55 clone.

The fucking T-34 is still in use in Somaliland. You use what you got.

>His nation doesn't use modernized T-55's

Metal Max/Saga did it right.

>In the not so distant future... Desperate to find a way to save Earth from pollution, mankind created a gigantic supercomputer and named it Noah. Noah's solution, however, was to exterminate its creators. In a matter of days, civilization fell to terrifying weapons and monsters created by Noah. This cataclysmic event came to be known as the Great Destruction.

>As the years passed, the number of human survivors grew, slowly but steadily. They formed villages and towns, living off of technology that they were able to salvage from the piles of wreckage.

>Among the survivors were those who rose up to fight Noah's robotic henchmen. To track down and eliminate these threats to humanity, they utilized the most powerful weapons still operable after the Great Destruction- Tanks! As a sign of respect, people nicknamed them "Hunters."

m.youtube.com/watch?v=58tcNJ1OXos

No, the T-34s were poorly made, period.

A KV-1 and a T-34 were sent to the US to be evaluated. Poor welds meant rain got in them, and electrical systems shorted. Going though puddles meant water seeped up from below. The air filter didn't filer the air, but it restricted it so much, the US Army suspected sabotage. One of the tanks couldn't be evaluated because the transmission seized, and couldn't be repaired.

Don't blame the Germans for any of that.

The British also thought the T-34 was poorly made, but they liked the actual design of the tank enough to consider building copies of it and the KV-1, but with a bunch of improvements - mostly in construction methods and crew ergonomics, which were shockingly bad by their standards.

Oh, and they also planned on mounting a 17-pounder gun in the T-34 and a 6-inch howitzer in the KV-1.

A large portion of the setting was a site of a massive battle where thousands of tanks fought one another, their wreckage stewn about over a hundred miles. Certain factions "harvest" from these hulks for salvagable parts in order to trade for essentials.

This is an opportunity for making a game set in this environment though.

I think that models like the M1A2 and that would be white whales in this post apocalyptic world. The sheer amounts of parts and logistics would basically make these to expensive to keep. Plus, if we're after some mega war, surely we've burned through all the modern stocks of tanks.

However, if factions large enough to have tanks exist there's a good chance they're trying to build tanks. But they've got shit materials and facilities so we're going to have problems like spotty welding or the filters going kaput

A Stalker type game set in and around Kursk could be pretty neat

>What reason, be it somehow realistic or fantasical as you want, would you have to justify having a surplus of material for tank up-keep, Veeky Forums?
Remnants from WW3. Factories and warehouses with unused tank equipment are sometimes looted for spare parts. Although in general the maintenance on tanks is higher than wheeled vehicles so logistically speaking armoured cars would generally be a superior choice to a tank.

Much like Battletech, one can make the assumption that wheeled vehicles are less common due to a lack of infrastructure such as roads in order to support them, as well as the simple fact that wheeled vehicles are lame: lamer than the lamest of mechs and bob-semple tanks, and such are not worth depicting beyond perhaps a cursory mention.

How do they take them apart though?

If there aren't any roads then tanks would be even less viable than armoured cars in an environment where spare parts are hard to come buy.

RIP wheels and tracks.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I was definitely including the OP of the last thread when I said that.

What are tools?

OP of the previous thread?

Sounds alright - it's not exactly a unique idea by any means, I just think Tanks + Knights = cool

Camouflage for campaigns, paint for parades

>post-apocalyptic tank supply problems

Easy.

The only tanks that still run, are biomechanical tanks.

My image is rather silly, but it points out an interesting point. When you have a tank that can just eat rusty chunks of skyscraper girders to patch up holes, and fix broken pieces of treads, you have a much easier time going around post-apocalyptic landscapes.

This board is faithful to the Omnissiah, Dark Mechanicus fags aren't welcome here.

Battletech any good?

Tanks and mechs are badass, but I call bullshit on the claim that wheeled vehicles aren't capable of badassery.

Motorcycles only have two wheels, though, they're barely wheeled.

I agree, though they have to try a bit harder thanks to how common and ubiquitous wheeled vehicles are

This can carry ~400 tons of coal and shit in the hopper, so a "technical" built from an ultra-class haul truck could have 400 tons or armour and guns
(also extra fuel, but that doesn't rhyme)
(Also ultra-classes haul trucks in general are cool as fuck)

Did you just describe a more bio-tech oriented version of Horizon Zero Dawn?

>400 tons or armour and guns
You see this, Albert? This is what we need.

You're not getting this out with a crowbar.

Why not both?

I just looked up Dora's weight

1300+ tons, with some shells alone weighing more than 7 ton.

The entire train, when it went on the march, was 25 carriages long - 1.5km, a lot of it for the enormous rail-building crew it needed to aim the damn thing

Look up the Toyota War(s) in Africa. As well as any vehicle pics about Libya, Syria and Iraq. You'll be surprised about the sort of stuff people can come up with from things like tractors, bull dozers and other civilian vehicles

dumping what little pics of my middle east folder I have. Note the playstation controller

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That's pretty much it from here except for one or two goofy pics

Oh my. Those gun changes are really fucking sexy. God damn!

I thank you for all of these pictures, user, but holy shit these two are great. Wanna ride that tankcar.

here user, have a enviromentally studious terrorist car

See? That's fucking smart. What's the point of killing your enemies if you're just going to die from pollution? Some next-level warfare, right here.

Looks like this but with tanks.

Can't you just throw random stuff at a Toyota until it resembles more a tank than a pickup? Like the hurpa durpas in the Middle East do, I mean.

This looks straight out of Mad Max. I'd be surprised to know it isn't a prop from one of those movies.

nah it's real, you'd be surprised to find the sort of shit African warlords and ME terrorist organizations can make from random shit lying around

That's not battletech.

Alright anons. I've been toying with this setting for a little while now.

>Expecting a cataclysmic war, certain millitary assets were placed in cryogenic sleep. The idea being that rather than maintaining units at peak readiness and training and retraining new people, why not just mothball them? Take a brain (or image a personality) and pop it into deep sleep, then it can be woken up

>these sleeping units included armoured divisions. To avoid them all being wiped out in a sneak attack/sabotage/lucky strike they were distributed around the country (bongland in this case).

>the big war came and went. Civilization eventually (after a couple thousand years) started to reach medieval levels again.

>aliens pop up. They're about 21st century tech levels. A group who just thought here's a medieval level world, why be space bums when we can be kings?

>during a rape and pillage raid, enough noise and violence is generated by those aliens to wake a platoon of tanks.

>There are no knights left on earth, until now.

If it helps think tank knights vs the Goauld of Stargate.

I'd see a "tank" as roughly equivalent to a dragon or a doomsday weapon in any other setting - maybe a warband controls a huge area, and all scrap metal, redeveloped industries and crops are being funnelled into a kludgy refurbished Tiger II they dug out of an old museum and made to run on ethanol.

>PSX Ghost In The Shell Controller

Doubly shitty because you really need analog sticks for any chance of precision aiming using a gaming controller.

Why would I want a design that at best, succeeded at getting itself killed more than any comparable vehicle

That's only if you skimp on the safety features. A properly built T-34 is somewhere between the M3 Lee and M4 Sherman in terms of reliabilty and capability.

so the three major and two minor issues i see for this is thusly:

Repair and rearmament
Replacement
refueling

all in a setting where the things you normally have to do these tasks are either ancient, lost to time, irradiated, destroyed years ago, etc. The two minor issues are "how would you challenge people who can field tanks when other people are still feudal tribals, or still backslid tribals not quite at internal combustion engine tech levels" and "how do you keep the trite knights and lords riding tanks instead of horses" tier shit out?

what am i missing?

Yes it is. That's how Battletech was at the start, around 3rd/4th Succession War era stuff.

Tanks are rare and slow to move around especially without transporters (wear on parts, fuel, etc). So they can only be in one place at one time. Tribal warbands won't act up around a tank, unless they have a plan to separate tank and crew but will raid place s where there are no tanks instead. So tank knights have to keep moving between important towns to keep them safe. Also perhaps simple railways are made powered by horses to rug tanks between towns to avoid wear on parts and these are often sabotaged.

>Also perhaps simple railways are made powered by horses to rug tanks between towns to avoid wear on parts and these are often sabotaged.
I think this, and canals, would be an interesting idea - obviously they present a big liability in having to be maintained, but rails and water are both very good ways to move very heavy things

>how do you keep the trite knights and lords riding tanks instead of horses" tier shit out?

Every time i see this, it's always Battletanks or Knight on his steed named M1A1(future mod). I want to see something else pretty much anything else.

There's a group of people in our post-apoc game who own a tank.

The way they get by is that they actually have a depot of tanks, but because of the difficulties of keeping a tank running they have decided to only ever keep one of them operational. The rest are freely cannibalised for parts, and the tank they keep running is only very rarely used.

Or that's what we're told, anyway. We haven't actually encountered the tank, it's mostly used by this group as a way of asserting dominance and threatening smaller groups. The prospect of having to fight a fully operational pre-apocalypse war machine is pretty frightening to most people of the wasteland, especially as most of us only have partial knowledge of what a tank actually is.

>metal is hot enough to fry eggs
>touch the barrel

They don't have to be knights, just that the whole thread was moving in that direction. Same principle applies.

>What reason, be it somehow realistic or fantasical as you want, would you have to justify having a surplus of material for tank up-keep

The setting takes place in the post-apocalyptic future of the Girls Und Panzer universe. For some reason, countries around the world became obsessed with building replica WWII-era tanks for recreation. These mock conflicts replaced warfare, and global military budgets were gradually replaced by tank education and manufacturing.

Then the giant meteor hit. It also happened to be carrying murderous alien DNA or whatever, so now there's giant monsters roaming the wastelands, doing battle with tanks squadrons.

Sadly they didn't have the luxury of hiding on an island for most of the war and letting their allies do the vast majority of the fighting and dying for them, they ever used what they had or got enslaved.

*either used what they had

Some of the last innovations in tank technology before the world ended was addressing their fuel consumption in an ever greenifying world. Thus, a tank's fuel economy is on par with other vehicles, if not better for larger tanks with shit like onboard generators.

Parts and ammunition are where the value is. The number of tanks is ever diminishing, since the easiest way to fix a tank is to rip one apart for bitz.
A man owning even a basic tank is enough to make him the head honcho of a small town. A man owning a really good tank, or enough tanks that he and a few of his buddies can roll is warlord material.

Tanks are rare enough that there can be entirely pedestrian bandit groups that "own" a town or two, but those who have them flaunt them enough that most people know they exist.

Thanks to the end of the world happening fairly slowly, there was time for lots of tank drivers to lose their tanks in all sorts of improbable places, like in mysterious, 40-80 floor ruins that extend down into the sands full of office supplies and lost military hardware.
Also, because it's fucking awesome, people have taken the good parts of tanks (The cannon, mostly, but maybe some armor) and mounted them on all sorts of other shit. You haven't lived until you've chased down bandits in a school bus with a canon on it.
And because bullshit reasons, air vehicles didn't survive, and artillery is agreed upon by all bandits, heroes, and PCs to be unmanly and uncool.

Came here to suggest this as a resource. Metal Max/Metal Saga has a fantastic take on the post apocalypse that should be used more.

>"It was a mine truck before, but now it is a personal moving city"
Be russian and mount a nuclear reactor on it and you never need fuel either.

From the Day R: Survival game where you the player tries to survive a post apocalyptic radioactive Russia by scavanging in craters. Most basic vehicle is a bicycle or cart, motorycles, then cars and trucks, apcs and even a tank or hind helicopter, but the biggest and most self sufficient is a project to mount a small reactor onto a mining truck to turn it into a mobile base.

>The prospect of having to fight a fully operational pre-apocalypse war machine is pretty frightening to most people of the wasteland, especially as most of us only have partial knowledge of what a tank actually is.
That's very cool, though I'm surprised they'd only "admit" to having one tank - even as a ploy it doesn't exactly make them look strong

Sounds amazing

TANKS DO NOT GET GOOD GAS MILEAGE AND THEY ARE HOT AS FUCK

YOU WOULD NOT WANT TO DRIVE A TANK LONG DISTANCE ACROSS MAD MAX TOWN

Oh, someone else played those games?

Someone's gonna die historic in that thing, if they haven't already.

Something like this might be practical, there's tens of thousands of them across the US.

you know, that might be a good/cool explaination. The increasing militarization of the police in response to the slow break down of society in the face of energy crisis and climate change that gradually destroys modern society.

Which, funnily enough, is exactly what happens in Mad Max. People think of madmax they think oh bombs dropped world ended. No. Mad Max takes place in areas that were specifically desert before hand anyway, and the bombs dropped AFTER a very long period of social destabilization and breakdown that pretty much fucked the cities anyway (hence people fleeing into the outback).

Stick that in the United States midwest/southwest and instead of v8's and the outback you have Cadillacs and Arizona. POLICE vehicle has become synonymous with ARMORED FIGHTING VEHICLE as armored firepower was the only way to keep order in an increasingly collapsing and balkanizing United States.The Coastal Regions flooded or were flattened by Nukes. You see that chunk of central/upper midwest/west with fewer dots over all? Those are also traditionally low population density area's, and thus would be less likely to get nuked. This is probably where you'd be set.

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massprivatei.blogspot.com/

Source is this blog which is a fucking gold mine for crazy idea's btw.

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you get the idea

Don't think Tank. Think MRAP or AFV!

The fuck's that thing supposed to rescue you from, dinosaurs?