The Roman Empire at its height vs one M1 Abrams tank with infinite fuel and ammunition

Romans. Eventually the crew needs to sleep and Abram tanks are maintenance whores so the Legions sent after it would just have to wait it out.

A more fun question would be what if the Romans got hold of the new BMP-T "Terminator"?

The Romans. I don't think you guys appreciate what thousands of highly motivated humans can accomplish with brute force alone.

Pic related.

The Romans. The crew has to eat, sleep, take shits, etc. They can't spend all their time in the damn thing. And even if it's fuel and ammo are infinite, things still have to be maintained. Plenty of things can break or wear out.

A tank can't keep going forever and the Roman Empire's a big place.

>The Roman Empire has literally nothing that can damage it.

You don't necessarily need to penetrate the hull of an M1 Abrams - or any tank, for that matter - to still render it inoperable. For example, during Operation Desert Storm, three M1 Abrams tanks of the US 24th Infantry were left behind enemy lines on Feb. 27 near Talil Airfield (south of Nasiriyah). One had been hit by enemy fire such as to render it inoperable (without penetrating the armor), while the other two got stuck in mud. All three were destroyed by US forces to prevent their trophy-capture.

Likewise, the M1 Abrams tank that the Romans have to deal with could run into any number of problems. The Romans can't meaningfully damage the armor or probably even the treads, but they might be able to smash some of its cameras or other sensory equipment. They can't stop it from plowing through their minds, but if TWO M1s can get stuck in the mud in the same battle, then it could certainly happen to this one.

Especially seeing as it has to engage the entire Roman Empire at its height...

I give this one to the Romans. It's a massively costly battle, but eventually something's gonna go wrong for the M1 crew that will render the tank unfit for combat, even if it isn't technically "destroyed".

oy vey delet this

>plowing through their minds

*plowing through their lines, mea culpa. Though certainly the Romans will have their minds blown by the tank, so the statement is still technically correct.

A tank needs maintenance. Eventually, that engine will seize up, or the treads will fall apart. Or the driver will accidentally end up in a ditch, or even the Romans will hatch a cunning plan and make a bog that it will sink into or fall into a leaf covered ditch.

>they still shat in the streets for the most part!

The only thing that needs to keep working are the guns. The Romans aren't going to keep trying to assault a tank when each attack wipes out units.

Loses a tread. Move on.

The Roman Empire would win in the long term. Even if the tank somehow has infinite ammo, infinite fuel, an immunity to non-battle-induced maintenance needs, and a crew that doesn't need food and sleep, the Romans win. Eventually, the tank will become buried in rubble in a city, or some mook with a sword will manage to disable a track in some way. It might take a few thousand dead Romans, but it will happen eventually.

It does raise a good question though. Say Romans have had about a month to get used to the concept of a tank, and the battlefield is a Roman city. What kind of weapons would they try? I'm imagining some kind of rope-trap that hopes to entangle the tracks.

>or even the Romans will hatch a cunning plan and make a bog that it will sink into or fall into a leaf covered ditch.

This.

The catch-phrase for dealing with downtimers is "primitive, not stupid." The Roman Empire has no idea what an M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank is, but once it starts collecting data about how it operates and what it can do, they'll start thinking up solutions.

The crew will still need to reload and as others stated they will need to eat, sleep, etc. as well as perform maintenance on things such as the machine gun or the turret. Tank crews are only a handful of people and they aren't trained to take care of the tank beyond superficial things. Given enough time the Romans would figure out a way to either trap and kill the crew or somehow bring the Abrams into their fold by promising land and titles to the crew

It'll be a ditch. The Romans were, as a people, engineers. They'll look at the tank an the way it moves and realize that it has a limited ability to climb, and no ability at all to climb vertical surfaces. So they'll probably use a ditch. That, or they might reach back in time and drop giant rocks on it from over the side of a cliff, mammoth-hunting style.

Depending on how balls-to-the-wall, "fuck it, hold my wine I got this" they're feeling, I can even imagine some kind of giant lever system to try and flip the tank like a pancake.

But most likely? Ditch.

>infinite fuel and ammo

The crew starve inside

Alternatively, it just kind of roams around, a horrible monster no one can stop, so they just sort of avoid it.

But then, if you're not moving, you aren't accomplishing anything. You're just rotting in a bunker. It'd be like a boring reverse siege.

>"Don't go near there, son."
>"Why, papa?"
>"There's a bunch of angry dudes in a box that spits death."
>"...What?"
>"How your gandfather died. True story."

Abrams would be defeated by the first Roman bridge it tried to cross.

That or the crew gets lost as fuck and decide fuck it and join one of the many Roman Legions running around

Why would the crew sleeping and eating be a negative for the tank? It's already faster than anything that can follow it, all it needs to do is drive away from a threat into the middle of nowhere, set up a nice little camp next to the tank. Keep watch on the thermals. Eating from the larders of some village out in the boonies, if you're worried about the inhabitants turning on you for some sort of reward, that's what the machine guns are for.

Rinse, wash, repeat until a crew member gets cocky and is stabbed by a whore.

>Romans reverse-engineer modern computing and tanks based on the M1 Abrams
>They conquer all of Eurasia using Blitzkrieg against spearchuckers

funny,
soviets literally used "Ditch" as an AT weapon at the Battle of Kursk

i am not making this shit up.

Looks like SOMEONE forgot about the Second Punic War.

>even if it's a shit tank equal to a MkIV
i need this in my life...

>Romans reverse-engineer modern computing and tanks based on the M1 Abrams

That'd be pretty much impossible. They don't have the knowledge or tools necessary. Hell, they don't even have the knowledge or tools needed to BUILD the knowledge and tools.

At most it might get them to start thinking about vehicular warfare, but you're more likely to see a development of something like the Dongwu Che from China, then a tank; and even then it would be the Romans using the extant tech to build towards a tank-like idea, rather than actually gaining anything from the tank itself.

Oh, you also run into the problem that by the time of the Five Good Emperors, Rome didn't WANT to expand anymore. It considered itself to have reached its "natural borders".

>Blitzkrieg

You have no idea what this actually means. Protip: you need more than tanks.

>That'd be pretty much impossible. They don't have the knowledge or tools necessary. Hell, they don't even have the knowledge or tools needed to BUILD the knowledge and tools.
Howdy Turtledove, I didn't know you posted 'round these here parts.

That said, you're right but they'd probably reverse engineer *something* out of the gigantic future machine of death. They probably wouldn't figure out how to build a computer, but I think that for example from examining the steel plating of a tank they could figure out something about metallurgy (even if it's something as "unspectacular" as Toledo steel being figured out 1000 years in advance). Or just the entire concept of vehicular combat, as you mentioned. If they also somehow manage to figure out gunpowder I imagine that the vision of a tank could inspire them to have some sort of mobile artillery station. Basically something that looks like a tank from the outside but is pushed forward by a crew of maybe 10 men, who would then fire their cannons from a steel dome on top of said vehicle. Not exactly a tank, but still something that could trivialize sieges as it allows for high power projectiles to be launched from a very safe position rather close to the enemy.

>Oh, you also run into the problem that by the time of the Five Good Emperors, Rome didn't WANT to expand anymore.
True, but I doubt that technology that would make this expansion nearly risk-free wouldn't change that. Perhaps it would be enough to make them reconsider Augustus' plan to move the border to the Elbe, or launch another attempt to seize Mesopotamia. I doubt the Romans would be so fixated on their borders that they'd refuse borderline risk-free expansion of their resources.

Gee, thank you for setting us straight, Snoutband Von Dummkopf.

So, they just leave it alone and go about their lives.

>someone will get in eventually

lol no they won't. it isn't physically possible to pry open a hatch with human or animal strength. this is assuming you don't just get mowed down by one of the machine guns (you will).

I'm sure the roman empire has a few mountains/rivers/seas that the tank is gonna have trouble with, unlimited resources or not.

Even if you have infinite ammo you can't just shoot an ocean until it goes away,

They can drive off into a deserted place to shit and get food. They can come back and continue killing at their leisure.

>Howdy Turtledove, I didn't know you posted 'round these here parts.

I've actually never read any of Turtledove's crosstime stuff. Just the TL-191 series.

I got banned from Alternatehistory.com because Ian is an asshole who thinks stating "the issue with the Middle East is deeper than al-Qaeda or DAESH or whatever, it's Islamic Extremism, and solving the problems in the Middle East involves fixing the underlying causes rather than simply killing every rmember of al-Qaeda" is equal to, and I quote, "literally advocating religious genocide". Even though in the same post where I stated my case I outlined that fixing the Middle East will probably involve re-drawing the map to take into account ethnic (Kurds, natch) and religious (i.e., Shi'a and Sunni) differences, and also went out of my way to be clear that I have no issue with Islam as a religion in general. Because I don't. People are free to worship whatever they like as long as they aren't blowing up other people in the process, and 99.99% of Muslims are perfectly capable of not blowing people up.

Still unspeakably pissed off about my banning. I don't mind being called an asshole for my beliefs as long as what's being called out are ACTUALLY my beliefs. I wouldn't even have minded if I had been banned on the grounds of "your views are too extreme and I'm in charge, so I'm kicking you out."

But by saying I was "literally advocating religious genocide", Ian put words in my mouth and attacked my character. Like, I am still FURIOUS. To the point where if this was 200 years ago, I'd be demanding pistols at dawn. Not that I want such today, of course, just that's the kind of level of anger I'm at concerning Alternatehistory.com in general, and Ian the Admin in particular.

...

...but anyway, yeah, I'm not Harry Turtledove. Sorry. Need to rant on occasion. Makes me feel better. I had previously really liked that site.

>Need to rant on occasion.
I get it. Being silenced for opinions that are double plus ungood can get pretty frustrating. Society at large, the entire google complex and even Veeky Forums are moving more and more into that direction. Look forward to a society where anything more complex than a cute kitten video will have to be strictly moderated lest it contains the "wrong kind" of opinions.

Again, I wouldn't even mind if it was something I actually DID. I actually had a sock puppet account for unrelated reasons that escaped the ban. I used it to lay out a case as to why Ian was wrong to ban me by the posted rules of the site (namely, that a) I did not in any reasonably way advocate any sort of genocide, and b) the site's own rules require that accusing someone of doing such requires both immediate and substantive proof, which he did not provide, and c) I used examples of people in the past who had advocated that it was okay to drop the a-bombs on Japan as being the best of a multitude of bad options NOT being banned, even when they were threads Ian had personally participated in, as proof that merely calling for something that would cause death on a large scale - which I wasn't even doing - wasn't grounds for banning).

He banned that one, too. Which is fine - using a sock puppet to get around a ban, is stated as a bannable offense (although interestingly enough merely having a sock-puppet account in general is not). I knew there was some very, very slim chance that an appeal to reason would work, but if it didn't then at least the sock-puppet would have been banned for something I actually did.

I'd previously on that site argued vehemently AGAINST genocide in other threads. Fuck, I friggin' remember seeing 9/11 happen in school in 8th grade and being one of the only kids who DIDN'T want to nuke Afghanistan, on the grounds of not wanting to target innocent civilians. And now whenever anyone stumbles across my profile on that site, it's going to have "banned for advocating religious genocide" next to it.

Seriously. 200 years ago. Pistols at dawn.

This all went down in the wake of the 2015 Paris attacks, by the way.

The Romans.
The tank can't go underwater to get to Britain.

>flip a 60 ton tank
Goddamn, I want to see Romans hatching Wie E. Coyote plans to take down an Abrams.

Alternatehistory.com seems like it's run by a bunch of faggots. You're okay, rantman.

>Air filter glogs us / tank stops working
>Tank gets set on fire and over heats / it stops working

I think a big enough rock could bend the cannon as well

>Deserted Place
>Food

Really?

I don't mean to rant. I just haven't had much in the way of an outlet for this for two years...my IRL friends aren't into alternate history and so I don't want to bother them with it, and I don't want to be some whiny bitch on a blog. But things can only stay bottled up for so long, right?

And it really doesn't help that I consider myself to be generally center-left in terms of politics. I'm probably closer to Ian politically than the average Veeky Forums user. And yet I got banned anyway, from again a site that I had really liked since I've always loved history and, consequently, alternate history.

I think the sheer volume of ranged attacks from an army focusing on a single tank would be enough to eventually break it down

one arrow does fuck all to a tank

1000 arrows and a couple balista shots may stop it

Better question: could all the current worlds militaries working together beat a single Mark XXXIII Bolo?

Not without wasting precious nukes.

It happens. Some people, from whichever political affiliation or view, are just intolerant of any divergence going as far as to create imaginary opposition where there is none.

Maybe? Aren't its main guns super rail-guns that shoot relativistic fusion blasts or something?

I'd imagine that it's armor is fairly resilient to nukes, possibly even at point blank.

How nuke-proof is it?

It's alright user, it's normal and healthy to express your anger and fury from time to time; to indulge in it momentarily.
Almost makes you want to turn that passion and fury into a drive and purpose, doesn't it?

Holy shit nobody cares.

>Almost makes you want to turn that passion and fury into a drive and purpose, doesn't it?

I wish. Mostly it left me depressed. I've noticed that my creative ability took a Hell of a swan dive after that, and it's only recently started to recover.

Your mom cared.

Its 32,000 tons of armor and weapons and power plants and ai and other smaller tanks and drones

Its metal hide can survive a few megaton hits alone and its battle screens can absorb/block multiple multi-megaton strikes

Its main weapon is the hellbore. A directed energy weapon with megatons per second output.

The Mark XXXIV had two Hellrails. Each one could fire a 90 megaton shot into space to take out ships before they made orbit

About some whiney toddler throwing a hissy fit online? Not likely.

Tank crew has to come out and forage for food sometime.

>M1 engine has a MTBF of 250 hours
Yeah nah. Engine fails, can't kill all romans. 11 days of hell for the Romans, though.

>they might be able to smash some of its cameras or other sensory equipment.
The drivers view block on an Abrams is rated to withstand 30mm autocannon fire. The designers knew losing optics was a mission kill and compensated for the possibility.

Its gears would get stuck with all the bodies. Some guy would get luck eventually and jam a rock in there. Somebody might take a metal rod and jam it in the gears.

>main guns measured in megatons/sec
>pretty sure has spaceflight capability
Flies to moon, shoots everything on Earth.

You people are retarded

Tens of Thousands of people swarming the tank at once would have it completely overwhelmned. They'd pry the doors open eventually and kill the cry inside

TESTOCOLES!!!
JAM YOUR GLADIUS INTO THE WHEELED PORTCULLIS!!!

AS HERCULES SLAYETH THE HYDRA SO TOO SHALL WE SLAY YOU BEAST!!!

If there's tens of thousands of people swarming the tank, the only retards involved are the crew. They can drive far faster than any army of the day can run, if they got surrounded it's because they fucked up.

>romans yelling about a greek mythological figure

This. Trap him to fall and then try to get a few guys to enter the tank and kill the crew with their swords.

This plan involves more casualties than it is worth for but I think it might be possible.

Ah yes, as we all know the Romans were the Tyranids, completely okay with spending thousands of lives against what they could think is a giant metal monster that spits metal and breathes fire.

>He doesn't know about the Jovians and Herculians

Hercules is a roman mythic figure, you're thinking of Heracles. Idiot.

They're the goddamn Romans, they could surround it completely with impassable trenches.

Also, tank crews need to eat and sleep sometime..

What if the crew are all undead?

Sorry we don't know your OC DONUT STEEL names for our god's barbarian scum.

THE ROMAN EMPIRE wants to get off Mr. Bones' Wild Ride

>they still shat in the streets for the most part!
romans were actually incredibly interested in cleanliness. They had running water pipes connecting everything, sewers, baths.
They did not shit in the streets.

Watch this if you're interested:
youtube.com/watch?v=bVbG-yAlW9g

>Gunpowder
While the Romans likely could have figured out black powder (likely in the process jump starting chemistry or at least alchemy)

I have serious doubts that they could understand modern smokeless "powder" mixes without knowledge of chemistry.

The funny thing is, even with all that plumbing the Romans still by and large got the same parasites and diseases that people without sewage systems got.

The main theory is it was because they used human faeces to fertilize fields without proper composting.

Expanding on the "Romans jumping ahead in tech" idea, let's pose a different question.

Suppose you are sent back in time to the height of the Roman Empire, with nothing on you save for simple, functional clothes, and a SINGLE book of your choice.

You do not know how to speak Latin (unless you already do), and the book remains in its authored language; you have to translate it for them, if the Romans can't do it themselves.

The book must be a singular, physical book; no anthologies or multi-volume compendiums unless they were physically printed inside a single pair of covers. It has to be an actual book, printed with ink on paper.

What book do you bring? Either in general, or a specific book.

The goal is to help the Roman Empire jumpstart political, social, and technological advancement towards something similar of the modern era.

I'm going to be dead inside of 6 months from disease that I lack immunity to. So I bring back Treasure Island. If I'm gonna die, I might as well at least have my favorite book on me.

The more I imagine this in my head the funnier it gets.
Commander: "Fabius! The beast approaches! Prepare the lever device!"
Tank: "Honk Honk!"
*Lever device activates underneath the tank*
*Lever reverses and launches the unwitting legion over the horizon*
Tank: "Honk Honk!"

I fucking lost it, god damn it user.

I want Roadrunner Abrams now.

yeah this was still ancient times, before knowledge of bacteria or proper hand washing. Having running water was probably mostly for drinking and rinsing the hands and butt a bit every now and then.

Filthy times, but slightly cleaner than people without running water

eventually the tank breaks down while the romans just avoid it.
also, there are probably zero bridges in the empire that would support a tank

M1 Abrams wipes out one or two legions.

Then, whilst it's crew are indulging in a bit of celebratory clapping, they drive it into a fucking ditch and immobilise themselves because tankies can't drive for shit.

t. gruntpleb

It really won't do shit against chobham. Ballista might be capable of damaging a track section but good luck scoring a hit.

Look sometimes your tank just needs to roll on his side and have a nap and they find ditches so comfortable.

Roman legions used to break step when marching over bridges so you're probably right. And good luck to them trying to perform a fording with no maps or local knowledge.

>This looks shallow enough, let's just slowly creep forward and see how...
>*Mission Kill*

eventually it breaks down or gets stuck in the mud, or falls off the road, or trapped in rubble, or falls in a river, or throws a track, or gets stuck in sand, or falls off a bridge.

dozens of tanks in iraq were fucked up by stupid random shit like that. i guess the romans could get like 20,000 guys with a bucket of oil. find a place that the tank cant run away. cover it it oil and set it on fire. at least the optics and such would be fucked. then you could fuck up the barrel by throwing rocks into it.

They'd probably just dig a massive ditch around it whilst the crew was sleeping. Roman's didn't fuck about with military engineering, at the siege of Masada they build a five kilometre wall around the fortress in four days.

Probably some compressed book on mathematics, I already have common knowledge of a ton of shit that will be useful to jumpstart progress (germ theory, atomic theory, optics, history, ect) but to understand the underlying theories and lay formal ground work maths is desperately needed. It's also one of the best languages we know of to describe the world*, and I ain't too good at that stuff so it would be best to bring a book. Maybe the first volume of Principia Mathematica if I can't find a thin page 3 vols in one version, that or some sort of "Undergraduate maths for dummies" book.

*To paraphrase an old Chinese story "A man asked his sifu whether he should study language or maths, his tutor replied that he should study both, but if he had to choose one than he should study maths, 'For numbers can speak, but speech cannot number"

yeah, thats probably the best strategy for actively trying to beat it. lure it into a 1 mile radius circle shaped anti tank ditch. it drives in. workers close the opening to the circle.
tank is fucked

On a related note; how much would the ancient Greeks REEEE once someone explained Godel's incompleteness theorem to them?

>Yeah, guys, sorry to say, but it turns out that math literally can't prove all truth

I'd just take an Atlas. Doesn't need translating, they'll recognise what it is and the quality of the printing/binding will be enough to impress them.

Ultra-precise detailing of geography would help massively with military campaigns and general administration of the empire, plus I can probably grunt my way in Latin to explaining what the Americas are and how badly they'll be able to rek the natives if they can get there.

I could probably invent something like a matchlock or flintlock too, I can make gunpowder fairly easily if Roman metallurgy can produce a half-decent gun barrel.

You'd be politely invited to drink poison.

Romans win because that thing needs maintenance.

However if the tank is completely self-sustaining, it could go either way. Fear is a big factor here, because the Romans could absolutely use the environment to kill the tank if they wanted to. But a huge seemingly-invincible metal monster racing around at high speeds and instantly punching holes through city walls from miles away is not good for morale.