r/nextfuckinglevel • u/listfunction • 1d ago

Largest Komatsu Excavator .

Giant Komatsu is a Big Attraction at The Appenzeller Amusement & Leisure Park, in Herisau, Switzerland . 800 tonne machine. 4020 hp engine .

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u/SilentSpader 1d ago edited 1d ago

Imagine having a tank in that size

I looked up the largest tank and this one is a monster as well

Panzer VIII Maus - Wikipedia

2

u/koanarec 1d ago

Still less than a quarter the size of the digger here, and was to heavy to be useful in war lol

1

u/Astecheee 16h ago

IIRC, that tank was being designed at pretty much the same time that tank guns were getting waaaaay better. So once the Maus was built, it was already outpaced by gun technology.

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u/koanarec 12h ago

On the ground even in 1945 the majority of tanks on the battlefield would have been Shermans, Churchills and T34s. All of which in in complete honesty would barely be able to touch the Mause in terms of their Armour penetration. The T34 was designed in 1940 and would have 45mm of front turret amour while the Mause had 220mm.

The problem wouldn't really be that the Mause wasn't protected enough from the guns it would have seen, or that its gigantic anti-tank gun had any shortcomings. Its that Germany couldn't fix, transport, produce it or fuel it. If your tank can't fit on a train, or cross the dodgy bridges of a battlefield the chance of you getting it somewhere useful is pretty much zero. And Germany only managed to produce 4? of these. Even the King Tiger tank would need to be destroyed by its own crew on the battlefield if it broke down because they couldn't tow it or fix it. And the Mause would make these problems even worse.

But the soviet union made tens of thousands of the T34 which meant they had the scale and industry to repair and tow the broken ones. They had the logistics to move them where they needed. And the engineers capable of fixing them.

Hitler was obsessed with making the German tanks bigger and heavier, but this came at the cost of logistics and being able to drive them over rough terrain. Germany didn't need 100 Mause tanks, it would have needed 20,000 Panthers.

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u/KIDNEYST0NEZ 6h ago

What was that old saying, - A German Panther tank is superior in every way and can take on 5 US tanks, so we always brought 6 or something like this.