Yes, but a pretty impractical solution. Firstly, it makes the turret/pod very much more massive and complex to maintain than a conventional turret. Secondly, you are pretty much guaranteeing you *have* to use dry ammo storage, which it turns out is a catastrophically bad (almost literally) design choice. By the time you've overdesigned everything to make your gun pod usable, you probably might have just as well designed a mech, which gets the capability for free as a consequence of its' chassis design.
Surely you're joking. Even if we did essentially mount the entire turret as it exists now on jacks, it wouldn't approach the complexity of a mech's legs and other control systems. The chassis design costs so much that 'free' benefits like being able to crouch are fairly pointless.
But we don't have to do that. Instead, we remove the men from the turret, and leave them in the body of the tank. The gun (with autoloader) is on its own, and much smaller. Also, the M1 doesn't use wet storage, and I know of several cases where the ammo cooked off and the crew were fine. There have been moderately serious plans to do pretty much what I'm describing here.
I do know what you are getting at, but here it just adds design constraints to an already pretty constrained design, and parasitic weight penalties quickly make the whole concept unworkable, compared to a new design which gets the capability just because it is what it is
This is very amusing. Do you have any idea how much mechanical complexity is involved in making a flexible walking machine? Now, instead of being a few hundred pounds, make it tens of tons. Oh, and it has to work on the battlefield, with mud, and dirt, and small amounts of damage. Suggesting that adding a jack-mounted turret to a tank is going to be much, much worse is completely absurd. 'Before you remove the speck from your brother's eye' and all.
A mech chassis doesn't have a hull bottom. Ground pressure is much less of an issue than it is for wheeled or tracked vehicles, because it won't get grounded.
I don't think you understand how ground pressure works.
A walking device can just use a high-stepping gait (up to a point - eventually you'll get stuck), and doesn't rely so much on friction.
Conservation of momentum. You have to push on the ground somehow to go forward, and I can't see any reason why you'd do better with shoes than with wheels/tracks before starting to slip. Unless you can think of another way to generate said force, you're stuck with friction and close cousins.
Mud and the like is MUCH less of a hindrance than it is for conventional designs. Similarly in heavy forest, or very rugged terrain, a walking gait can let you traverse ground that tracked or wheeled vehicles just can't cope with at all. It might not be very fast or efficient, but it's better than just considering the terrain impassable
And yet, on moderately good terrain, the wheeled/tracked vehicles will be much faster. Assuming, of course, that you haven't gotten stuck in the mud they went straight through.
Strongly disagree here. Shock effect is the basis of pretty much all armoured warfare doctrine, and has been since the French got rekt in 3 weeks. It is the entire point of any armoured force.
That particular doctrine worked exactly twice. In Poland, because the Poles were horribly outgunned, and in France due to insane luck. Every other armored campaign of the war was decided by combined arms and slower movement.
We don't because of politics, national and international, ad economics, not because we can't, or think they wouldn't work.
That's not what you were talking about earlier:
2) Tactically, Titans would be like the proposed WW2 German super-super-heavies (P.1000 / P.1500).
Attempting to bamboozle me with tales of conventional heavy tanks won't work. I know armored history better than that.
Super heavies are only useful for breaking very strong fortifications, or fighting "standard" armour. The world has seen precisely zero "real" wars since the end of WW2, so there has been no imperative to design or build Supers since.
Right. The 45 years we spent staring at the Russians in Central Europe produced no imperative to plan for serious armored combat.
Even so, the US did design and build both the Super Pershing and the T28/T95. The T28/T95 only got as far as the prototype stage when the Siegfried Line fell (it's intended job).
The T28 was an assault gun, not a tank. And its job got taken by better tank guns and things like ATGMs.
The T26 Super Pershings did see a little combat in WW2, and a little more in Korea, where they utterly outclassed the T34-85s of the Koreans - the tanks that had been the largely undisputed kings of the WW2 battlefield.
I'm beginning to wonder if you're actually getting this many errors in on accident. There was no 'Super Pershing'. The T26 was a prototype of the M26 Pershing, a conventional heavy tank. Of course it beat the T-34, which was a pretty good medium tank with a vastly overinflated reputation. It was not 'the undisputed king of the battlefield'. Version-for-version, the Sherman was better (this is true, look up actual numbers, not to mention what Soviet guards units were using), to say nothing of actual heavy tanks (or the Panther).
If we did enter another large-scale, protracted war (taking years, not weeks or months) that somehow became a battle of fixed positions and attrition, you would see exactly the same sorts of designs re-emerge, updated for the then-current situation.
Now you're just being obtuse. The MBT has replaced those as tanks, for a lot of reasons, which I'm not going to bother going into. Other weapons have rendered them pointless in other roles. And tank development takes longer than you think.
Actually I'm pretty sure the air force breaks fortifications much better than super heavy tanks could these days.
There are a lot of reasons that heavy tanks went away, and only the Germans ever built proper superheavies (Maus). The problem with titan-scale things is that they're too vulnerable to air forces.
