The Ansaldo Magrini Mangiapan was designed in 1916 by major
Magrini as a "mobile fort" and was one of Italy's first tank designs.
It featured multiple sets of tracks to help it traverse the crater filled
battlefields of no-man's land. To power these tracks there were four 200hp
engines in the centre of the tank which then drove two electric motors at the
front and back, propelling this massive 70t vehicle to an estimated 20 km/h. It
also unusually for that era featured two rotating turrets equipped with 76mm
(some sources state 75mm or 105mm) cannons, as well as having multiple machine
guns fitted around the hull. The design was approved by the direzione generale
del regio esercito but was cancelled soon after because of the high cost and
feasibility of such a complex design. Instead interest moved to the Fiat 2000
and purchasing tanks from France and Britain.
Scientific and technical progress has always been on the other side of the coin from war. Aiming to obtain instant superiority over the enemy, people who have never thought about the subject were as determined as those whose job was weapons design.
During The Great Martian War, the humans quickly learned that one of the
few technological advantages they had over the Martians was
aircraft.Despite crossing the huge gulf of space to reach Earth, the
Martians had no smaller aircraft. Humans were soon using aircraft for
scouting. After that they began to use aircraft to attack the invaders
directly. Despite the terrible vulnerability of wood and canvas aircraft
to the Martian heat rays, bold pilots made desperate attacks. Losses
were high and aircraft which could be built quickly and which were easy
enough for hastily-trained pilots to fly were needed. One model, the
Burgess-Dunne D8 was built in large numbers. Originally an English
design, the Burgess-Dunne was built by Curtis in the United States. It's
unusual swept-wing design proved to be surprisingly stable and was very
popular with the pilots. This kit includes 5 aircraft models.
Welcome to Paper Terrain! We produce a range of paper structures in a
variety of scales and periods. They are printed on a heavy cardstock and
are ready for immediate assembly and use. Our structures are a sturdy,
lightweight, economical and attractive alternative to resin.
World War Tesla™is a 15mm scale alternate-history
wargame by James M. Ward (author of TSR’s Gamma World, Deities &
Demigods, and Metamorphis Alpha) and Thomas A. Tullis, where Nikola
Tesla’s more radical ideas such as death rays and force fields have come
to fruition, changing the face of a world at war. Giant walking tanks,
soldiers with rocket-packs, and flying machines armed with death rays
rule the battlefield!
World War Tesla™ is the forefront of print-at-home wargaming. Say
goodbye to the days of spending massive amounts of money to even have a
small army to play a wargame, with World War Tesla™ even the largest
vehicle can be printed for less than a dollar. All 3D printer .stl files
for vehicles, troops, accessories, and even some terrain are provided,
so there is no limit on how large your armies grow. If you wish to
expand your army beyond the offerings in the Starter Set, inexpensive
expansion sets will offer even greater variety for your games.
World War Tesla Rules F.A.Q.
The World War Tesla™ official rules F.A.Q. can be found HERE.
America's first assault rifle? Well, it does
meet all the requirements: select-fire, intermediate cartridge, and
shoulder-fired. It was never actually fielded, though.
The
Burton Light Machine Rifle was developed during World War One, with the
firing model completed in 1917. It was intended as an aircraft
observer's weapon for attacking balloons—a role which required
incendiary ammunition.With this in mind, Winchester's Frank Burton
adapted the .351 WSL cartridge from his 1905 and 1907 self-loading
rifles into the .345 WSL, with a spitzer bullet. He designed an
open-bolt, select-fire shoulder rifle to fire it, which became known as
the Light Machine Rifle.
Burton's rifle was to be usable both in an aircraft
where it could be fixed to a Scarff mount for a wide field of fire or
used by an individual on the ground, fired from the shoulder. It weighed
in at just about 10 pounds (4.5kg) and had a pistol grip and
straight-line design to bring the recoil impulse directly into the
shooter's shoulder and minimize rise during automatic fire. The barrel
was finned for better cooling, and infantry barrels were equipped with
bayonet lugs.
The most distinctive elements of the design, of course, are the dual
top-mounted magazines. Each one holds 20 rounds, and each has a pair of
locking catches. One position locks the magazine into a feeding
position, and the other holds it up above the cycling of the bolt. The
idea here was to keep a second loaded magazine easily accessible for an
aerial observer—so they could reload without having to find another
magazine somewhere in the aircraft. Contrary to some speculation, there
is no automatic transition between magazines. When one is empty, the
shooter must pull it back to the second locking position (or out of the
gun entirely) and then push the second magazine down into feeding
position.
Despite Burton's work—which was well ahead of its
time—the LMR had been rendered obsolete for its primary role by the time
it was ready. Synchronized, forward-mounted Vickers machine guns firing
11mm incendiary ammunition were being mounted on aircraft, and were
more effective on balloons and airplanes than Burton's weapon would have
been. Only this single example was ever made, and it was not presented
for infantry consideration as far as I can tell. It was lost for many
years before being discovered in a Winchester building, and eventually
ending up in the Cody Firearms Museum with the rest of the Winchester factory collection.
Ian McCollum is the founder of ForgottenWeapons.com, a website and YouTube channel dedicated preserving the history of rare and obscure guns from around the world.
This Japanese-made,
remote-controlled tank got tech nerds all excited in 1931. But it wasn’t
just because they saw a new toy. Tech-minded folk of the early 1930s
also saw a utopian solution to war. A solution where, ideally, fewer
humans would have to die.
Ideas about
remote-controlled warfare have been around for over a century. And here
in the 2010s we’re acutely aware that wars can be fought from halfway
around the world. If our generation is remembered for anything, it might
be for our introduction of “drone” into the international lexicon. But
the thing that we so often forget is that the people who built
remote-controlled war machines in the interwar period (between the end
of WWI and the beginning of WWII) thought they were doing humanity a
favor.
There are
countless visions of radio-controlled tanks, unmanned aerial vehicles,
and even gigantic robot fighters from the early 20th century. But the
thing that might be most shocking to readers here in the early 21st
century is that these empty vehicles were all supposed to be fighting
amongst themselves.
The gigantic robots of 1934 were explicitly envisioned to fight “our battles” and whatever robot won, that nation would be declared the victor.
You also see this in the visions of robot tanks. From the April 1931 issue of Radio-Craft magazine (emphasis mine):
Writers
of war stories, peering into the future, predict an approaching era
when fighting will be done by machinery under remote control. Guns
automatically operated will fire from deserted fortifications and from
tanks which contain no living operators. Airplanes without human pilots
will observe positions through televisors, and drop projectiles guided
from a post at headquarters, many miles away. The
casualties will be solely among robots of steel and copper, whose
orders are conveyed to them by radio, or other subtle signalling
methods. Such is the picture which is painted upon the drop
curtain which conceals the next war—if it be true that war has not been
abolished along with the dips in the business cycle.
Of
course, that bit about abolishing dips in the business cycle gives us a
hint that perhaps the authors of this article didn’t believe
wholeheartedly in the utopian promises of unmanned war.
The article
continued by explaining that the robot tank had recently been
demonstrated in Tokyo, Japan, and that it’s clearly just the start of
something much bigger.
A
picture which appeared recently in one of our English contemporaries is
reproduced here; the original, it is said, was taken at a public
demonstration in Tokio of a tank which was operated entirely by radio
from the post in the foreground. The tank went through numerous
maneuvers, under full command of its operators, to the enthusiasm of a
great crowd of spectators. While the picture does not seem to be of an
official type, it is evidently genuine; the tank itself seems rather
small and not too war-like.
When
World War II would rear its ugly head, robot tanks would indeed become a
reality. But unfortunately they were the exclusive domain of the Nazis.
The Germans designed two different remote-controlled tanks that carried
explosives: The Borgward IV and the Goliath.
Neither were wireless, so
their range was thankfully limited to however far the remote’s wire
would take them. Both were packed with large payloads and were designed
to explode on impact with their target of Allied troops.
Needless to say,
remote-controlled warfare has not led to a utopian world of robotic
fighting wherein nations simply let the machines battle it out and
declare a winner at the end. That seems about as likely as it did in
1931, along with abolishing “dips in the business cycle.”
