Shakespeare has had several hundred years of expert analysis, with many brilliant scholars spending their careers trying to fully understand how the Bard constructed his works. Short of finding the legendary lost play, or finding some new, completely different folio of Shakespeare play transcriptions, it's difficult to imagine even the most diligent scholar today could contribute anything new. It is a similar deal when writing about the P.1000 Ratte, the preposterous "land cruiser" ultratank the Nazis briefly considered building. The history of the project is short, and most of what's worth saying about it was said in the book "My Tank is Fight" by Zach Parsons. Parsons has a chapter on the Ratte, and if you search the Internet for Ratte-tales you will find people nearly cutting and pasting what Parsons wrote.Unlike Shakespeare, the Ratte can be summed up very well by a single book chapter, as it never left paper, and serves as a damning indictment as to what kinda stupid ideas you could get Adolph Hitler to endorse.
Ratte-Faced Gits
As soon as the first tanks were deployed in the First World War, it seems engineers naturally started wondering how big they could go with the idea. The British had the paper project called the Flying Elephant: William Tritton, designer of the Mk.1 tank, had worried that the Mk. 1 was vulnerable to artillery, and designed a 100 ton design with armor thick enough to shrug off artillery hits. The Flying Elephant was never made, for among other reasons, that the Mk. 1 proved itself. The Germans, too, planned a very big tank called the Großkampfwagen. It weighed 120 tons and was in all respects a land ship, with a length of 13 m (43 ft) a beam of 6m, (20 ft) and a crew of 27. Two prototypes were under construction when the war ended. The French managed to put their big design into production: built in a shipyard, the Char 2C had a production run of ten. With a crew of twelve, the Char 2C weighed 70 tons. Too late for World War One, the 2C remained in French service for two decades and saw limited action in the Second World War.
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| Char 2C |
The Soviets in the 1930s also had a phase of experimenting with very large tanks. The rationale behind this seems fairly straightforward: the Soviets saw tank development as an essential part of developing the Red Army, and did not want to be caught flat-footed by future trends - which for all anybody knew at the time, included supertanks. A German engineer, Edwin Grotte, working under contract in the Soviet Union to improve tank designs, proposed several giganto-tanks. His first was the most insane: weighing in at 1000 tons, Grotte's landcrusier TG-5 had three to six turrets, with two turrets mounting naval guns of 304 and 150 mm, and two more turret sets of 76mm and 45mm. With a crew of 45, this people's mobile liberation palace had a theoretical speed of 60 km/h with a 24,000 hp engine, or engines. The Soviets didn't go for that, but accepted pitches for further big tank designs. Grotte was behind the design of the T-42, a comparatively modest 100 ton design with only three turrets, the largest mounting a 107mm cannon. Grotte's design, unfortunately specified a new engine, and the decision was made to build the T-42's rival, a 5 turret design called the T-35. The T-35 had a crew of 11, weighed 45 tons, and despite its size had very thin armor. These actually saw production, with 61 being built. Though these tanks dressed to impress, the T-35 proved highly unsuccessful in combat. Meanwhile, further Soviet "breakthrough" super-heavy tanks were being dreamed up by engineers, with the KV series having many prototypes, and even a replacement for the T-35 with another multi-turret tank, the T-100. These, and all super heavy tanks were abandoned by the Soviets after the start of World War 2. Experience in tank warfare emphasized the importance of speed and mobility, making lumbering supertanks a liability.
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| T-35. |
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| Some of the KV series supertank concepts. |
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| Grotte's T-42. Downright sensible compared to... |
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| Grotte's first 1000 ton idea. |
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| The T-100. Might have even been useful, if only the factory hadn't been overrun. |
Setting aside the Germans for a moment, the Western Allies also considered making super-tank sized armored fighting vehicles. Both the British and the Americans were in the later stages of World War 2 were worried about attacking fortified German positions, and produced prototypes of heavy assault guns. Britain called their prototype the Tortoise. Weighing in at 79 tons, the Tortoise managed to out-weigh the Jagdtiger, and topped it by being mechanically reliable. The American concept was even bigger. The T28 super-heavy tank / 105 mm Gun Motor Carriage T95 / Super Heavy Tank T28 (the project had a few name changes) weighed 86 metric tons and mounted a 105 mm cannon. Neither in the end was needed.
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| The Tortoise. It was a solid piece of machinery to be sure. |
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| And one still exists today at the Bovington Tank Museum in the UK. |
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| The T28 also has a remaining copy, in the Patton Armor museum at Ft. Knox, Ky. |
While the Soviets were discarding the idea of super heavy tanks as impractical, the start of the War with the USSR ironically had convinced the Germans they were worth looking into. The Germans had a nasty shock when they encountered the Soviet medium T-34 and KV-1 heavy tank in combat; evidently they had been reading their own racist literature and didn't believe the untermenchen could build a tank better than them. The Tiger heavy tank was already scheduled for a redesign, but it was decided a super-heavy tank was needed to counter any super-heavies the Soviets were going to field. Planners estimated initially this tank would need to be around 100 tons. This was the start of several projects, including the famous 200-ton Maus supertank. If you are not familiar with it, imagine a railway locomotive, with caterpillar tracks, armor, and a tank turret and you have the gist.
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| I made the 1/72 Dragon kit of the Maus a few years ago, and just for fun, painted it in the colors of a box turtle. |
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| Unpainted menchen included with the kit do a good job showing its size. |
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| The V1 Maus undergoing some basic testing. |
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| One of the few authentic illustrations from the project. |
Grotte piched his tank in July 1942, and it managed to last six months 1942 as a actual Third Reich military project. The Ratte would be canceled at the start of 1943, when Albert Speer became armaments minister. Speer had eagerly collaborated with Hitler's mad fantasies for making over Berlin, but this was too much. Krupp had at the same time been preparing an even more outlandish project: the P.1500 Monster, an attempt to use the Ratte drivetrain to make the world's largest mobile artillery, using the 800mm Dora cannon that Krupp had already constructed as a railway gun. To pretty much everyone not Adolf Hitler, the idea of making an even more expensive version of the Dora cannon was horrifying, and Speer told Krupp to work on something a bit more sane.
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| This for reference is what a 800mm railway cannon looks like, being tested while Hitler looks on in 1943. You get the impression that Freud was banned in the Third Reich because otherwise the topic of "overcompensation" would come up way too often. |
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| "...and behind that, even bigger ambitions-" |
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| I have some N-scale (1/160) figures that give some rough accuracy to how big the Ratte is. |
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| "Huh, is that a loonie?" |
Rattetouille
Still, I'd be lying if I didn't find the project fascinating. The Ratte was going to be nightmarishly huge for something that moved on land. Making such a vehicle and then making it an armored fighting machine takes a huzpeth that is sort of marvelous.
First, P.1000 was reference to it's ideal weight: 1000 tons. (To put that in perspective, the Sherman and T-34 tank weighed thirty something tons, and even the Maus supertank weighed only 200.) This apparently was extremely optimistic on the part of the engineers, as the turret alone weighed some 600 tons. Parsons estimates the probable weight of the Ratte as something around 1800 tons. 35 meters long, 14 meters wide, and 11 meters high, the Ratte would have been a small building rolling around on tank treads. The tank treads were supposed to be the 1.2 meter wide treads used by the Maus supertank, except with three on each side for a total of 7.2 m of track width. That each tread was separate makes me wonder if the Ratte would have a set of inter-leaved road wheels for each: the mere tanks the Third Reich built often used interleaved road wheels to distribute weight on the treads more evenly.
The main firepower of the Ratte was naval artillery: two SK C/34 cannons. These were the same main guns used by the Scharnhorst class battleships, and they could fire their 350 kg, 280mm shells up to forty kilometers at maximum elevation. The fact that these guns were also used in coastal fortresses to defend against enemy battleships should give you some ideas as to the cannon's performance against armored targets. The armor was also pattered on the navy standard, with some armor values in excess of the comically armored Maus. While this didn't make the Ratte invincible, it did render it immune to the guns mounted on enemy tanks. Speaking of, the Ratte was so big, it would have been unable to target vehicles near it, which is why it is equipped with secondary guns, once again like a large warship. In the Takom take, this is a 128 mm anti-tank gun, set in the adorably tiny enclosure of a Jagdtiger-like castlemate. The Takom design also has twin quad turrets on the tank's rear deck mounting anti-aircraft guns. This was intelligent, as aircraft were a far bigger worry to the Ratte, and the land cruiser had an enormous amount of deck space compared to more conventional vehicles. Crew estimates vary, from as low as 24, to at least 50, and unlike the below Hayao Miyazaki drawing, I don't think sleeping quarters or a full time chef were in the offing, though wikipedia claims " a compact infirmary area, and a self-contained lavatory system" were planned. Speaking of weird options, the Ratte is sometimes described as having motorcycles or scout cars carried internally, because the whole thing was not quite GI Joe enough.
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| Taken from the *still* sadly untranslated 'Daydream Note.' |
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| The rear deck on the Takom take has a bunch of rectangular vents like the Pz. III. |
Driving Leviathan
The drivetrain for the Ratte almost certainly would have been a series of diesel engines generating electricity, which would then be used to drive the actual tracks. The combustion part of the drivetrain was tentatively either two MAN Marine 24 cylinder diesel engines as used on U-boats, producing a net 17,000 horsepower, or eight Mercedes-Benz marine 501s producing net 16,000 horsepower. The MB marine 501 displaced 134.40 L and had twenty cylinders - these engines were used on German torpedo boats, the E-boats. Parsons figured the "dual-quad" engine setup would have been more likely on the prototype at least, as the Marine DB 501 was a more common and reliable power plant. Diesel was a smart choice for fuel, as it has a greater energy density than gasoline, was much less volatile, and was more efficient at higher engine RPMs. One important caveat here is that I've no idea if the cited power numbers are gross (IE the shaft power output of the engine without mufflers under ideal conditions) or something closer to the net realized power. For simplicity's sake, I'm treating them as net.
Doing some digging, very large vehicles today often use this arrangement. Diesel-electric trains are the most common example, but there are some similarly massive tracked vehicles out there using generated electric. The prime mover that NASA uses to move rockets and the Space Shuttle has a series of gas-fired generators making electricity to move the treads, and many large mining earth-movers have a similar setup. Very large vehicles use this setup as it neatly solves a few problems when dealing with very heavy vehicles, especially tracked heavy vehicles.
Y'see, most tanks are very automotive in their drivetrains. They have a engine generating mechanical power, which is sent to a transmission, which is what is physically hooked into the driving sprockets that move the treads. The transmission is an essential bit: it keeps the engine from exceeding its redline, and with its reducer gears deploy that power most effectively with different velocities. (If that's too vague, imagine the gears on a bike; some allow you to climb hills easily or start easily, while others are better at putting down power when you are moving fast. Same thing.) Anyway, when you start dreaming of really big tanks, this arrangement starts developing problems. Transmissions grow along with power requirements, driving your weight up, and sapping usable power. What's more, if you have only one place to add power, IE the drive sprocket, the there's going to be a upper limit of force you can apply before the track can't take anymore and it flies apart. These problems have to be solved if you want giganto tanks.
In the Third Reich, it was Dr. Fendinand Porsche who untangled the solution. Porsche had a bizarre, but now understandable, engineer's obsession with driving tanks with electricity. Using your engine to generate electricity, and use that to apply force to your treads solves all your problems: it allows you to mostly dispose of a conventional transmission complexities and weight, and allows you to have many smaller electrical motors to distribute force along the treads.The Maus supertank prototype used this drivetrain. Porsche also used a similar drivetrain in the Ferdinand / Elefant tank destroyer, but with an electrical motor driving a conventional rear sprocket. The tank had excellent firepower and armor - but was unreliable and maintenance intensive. It also apparently used two tons of copper for each tank destroyer, something Porsche was allowed to do only because he got Hitler himself to sign off on it. God only knows how many tons of copper a Ratte would require; this would likely be the point the project died in the hypothetical world where Speer let it go ahead.
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| Ratte LEADS! Fuel trucks follow. |
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| A proper scale comparison. Aircraft are also 1/144. |
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| "...and the untermenchen will pay for it." |
Oh Rattebrain, will you ever learn?
It was hoped the Ratte would weigh 1000 tons, and get a 40 km/h top speed. Both of these are unlikely, but I poked at my calculator for a bit to see if I could figure anything out. We have a power output, and a estimated weight, so we can get a horsepower/ton figure. Assuming 16,000 hp and assuming that's the net output, rather than the gross, is 16,000 / 1800 = 8.8 hp per ton. That's about the same as a Tiger II heavy tank which could manage 32 km/h on a road, according to American and Soviet tests. Cross country (and when there are no roads physically able to take you, that's everywhere) the top speed of the Tiger II was 20 km/h. This seems a reasonable top speed for the Ratte. The bad news here is that 20 km/h is flat out - if you assume the tank's power train works like a ship, then the cruising speed of the land cruiser would be much lower - maybe 12 km/h. This is the speed that the Ratte would typically travel, which would be a mobility problem in of itself. I'd also be worried about this as far as fording rivers went - and you're gonna ford a lot of rivers when literally no bridges can handle your weight - as you have to both get in there and haul yourself out the other side.
Thanks to my new favorite blog oldmachinepress.com, I found the statistic for the specific fuel consumption of the MB 501: .397 lb/hp/hr (241 g/kW/hr). This means that we can actually calculate the mileage of leviathan. I'll leave my workings at the bottom of the page, but at cruising speed (1200 hp, or about 12 km/h) the Ratte would consume 1726 kg (or 3811 lbs) of fuel per hour. At max throttle, the Ratte consumes 2875 kg of diesel (6352 lbs/hr). Reading around on German trucks, it seems their largest trucks could take about 3 metric tons of weight. So a Ratte could consume one fuel truck per hour at max power, while still taking more than half a truck at cruising speed. 24 hours at cruse would consume (ahem) 41,424 kg (41 metric tons) of diesel, or nearly 14 fuel trucks worth. 24 hours at max throttle (like say trying to make through difficult terrain of hilly country or a river crossing) would consume 69 metric tons of diesel. I think you get the idea. Keeping the Ratte's engines powered would have taken immense amounts of fuel, and similarly, a dedicated convoy of fuel trucks going to and from the nearest rail line.
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| Old man walks by an ultratank ready to shell a target (2017) |
RATTE SCRATCH FEVER
Parsons' criticism centered mostly on how dumb the Ratte was in the context of the German Military situation in 1942 or later. Long story short: almost inconceivably dumb. So we'll consider that whole aspect as read. I was thinking about it as I built my model, and I'm pretty sure I can add to those criticisms:
- I'm pretty sure the whole "tank" aspect of the Ratte ultratank is
useless. The Ratte was going to be very valuable, so letting a swarm of
enemy tanks within weapons range is a fuckup in of itself. Planning for the unexpected is sensible in war, but the main advantage of the Ratte is its enormously long range naval artillery; at its most effective, it doesn't need to be anyway near the front line. That, and
let's assume for a moment that the armor made the Ratte invulnerable to
pretty much any tank weapon the Soviets had. It's still vulnerable to aircraft and heavy
artillery, which are how the enemy are going to engage it once they realize conventional tanks don't work. So the armor is there at staggering cost, but it can't
protect against the likely attacks it would be most likely targeted by - the stuff it
**can** protect against is a secondary threat.
- Mobility. Let's assume for a moment that a Ratte is constructed in the Polish shipyard of Gdansk. For the Ratte to get from there to Leningrad (modern St. Petersberg), assuming a completely artificial "as the crow flies" straight line, it's 1000 km. Given the figures above, and a similarly magical constant speed of 12 km/h, it will take 83 hours for the Ratte to show up at the siege. Fuel consumed: 143,833 kg. A good chunk of that time will have the Ratte in range of Soviet fighter-bombers, so factor in constant air cover in these costs - that could still fail.
- This leads me to my next point: fuel consumption. I'm guessing even a optimistically light Ratte is going to need so much diesel it will be risky to ever go farther than a certain distance from railways. I know from reading around, that fuel consumption by itself restricted later German armor operations for precisely that reason: the Germans were so dependent on rail for moving tanks and supplies (not to mention the shortage of gasoline compared to coal) they couldn't operate away from their rail lines. This creates an extra mobility restriction, as the Ratte needing to stay close to rail lines might deny it nice straight lines and easy terrain it would prefer to use. I can't imagine the Ratte would move with anything less than an entire entourage of anti-aircraft units, scouts, escorting infantry, some normal sized tanks for dealing with enemy armor, and all the maintenance and supply companies needed for all of those, so the supply train by itself is going to all the supplies for all those guys, plus the supplies the Ratte.
- One nice thing about ships, even whole naval fleets, is that they don't leave an extremely visible trail behind them. Unless the Ratte was in a desert, it would leave a muddy swath of destruction everywhere it went, unless it moved slowly and had gangs of work crews trying to hide this trail.
- Another mobility problem is what happens when something breaks. One advantage to ships (and its not often you get to write this) - aside from their vastly better fuel consumption - is that if they take serious damage, there are fleet tugs to tow them. The Ratte doesn't have this. A lucky hit on its drivetrain renders it immobile, and then it has to be fixed wherever that happens, if it is getting fixed at all. Considering how much it weighs, I'd think the "best" solution would be for the Ratte to have its own internal jacking system so it could lift itself up. About the only plus here is that the Ratte has many engines and a very simple transmission, which would make repairs on these two components relatively modular and easy. Replacing tracks, on the other hand, would be nightmarish.
- A similar logistic problem would be getting cut off from your supply lines. Unless you got extremely lucky, your wunder-waffen is now a static fort. Given its prodigious appetite for fuel, supply line fuckery would be the quickest way to render the Ratte immobile.
- The only conditions you can use the Ratte without
risking its very expensive loss is 1) complete air superiority, and 2) inviolate supply
lines, which implies to me you've already won and didn't need the Ratte.
- I mean c'mon Germany, you've given up on surface ships on the ocean, why in the name of fuck do you think a ship on land isn't going to have to deal with the same issues
- I suspect that if you really wanted to use the most useful bit of
the Ratte (the enormous naval artillery) the best, most energy efficient
way to do it would be to make a vehicle that can be transported by rail,
and built/broken down at the site. If you want to give it mobility,
sure, give it tracks.
- Similarly, if you wanted a really giant siege tank, making it
water/rail transportable, and then assembling it near where you want it is
probably the best way to do it. This will put a size limit on how big
the tank can be, but at least you don't have to deal with the comical mobility issues of the Ratte.
- If you got to go Ratte, you should really make a ship/deployment craft for it. The Ratte could use it's electric drivetrain to power the ship's propulsion, and then it could travel with Naval escort. I think either way you are going to be closely tied to your transport device. But a formation of Rattes would be a scary invasion weapon. Maybe we found a practical use for Pykrete additions: you could refrigerate yourself a new bow on the landing craft once the Ratte is loaded, and discard it when landing amphibiously.
- Pykrete is that ice that the allies briefly considered making a giant aircraft carrier out of?
- Another fun possibility would be to design the Ratte to make it
buoyant and capable of modest water movement on its own. Then it could
approch a contested invasion beach while "shedding" its ship-carrier,
and then land, guns ablazing!
- Since we're far away from where we started, can I suggest
nuclear power as the ideal way to drive a Ratte. The immensely superior energy density of a nuclear reactor would solve most of the issues of something so energy intensive. In an invasion type
scenario, the enemy might hesitate to crack that nut just due the
radiation risk! [Which is why they are likely to try and crack it when it remains on your territory.]
- Also if we're modern, building it lighter, with active point defenses and a modern naval approch to damage (IE redundancy and damage control over armor)and the Ratte-M would make it ideal for future operation useless dirts. No IEDs gonna take out this mobile oppression palace! LockMart! Hire me!
- Since thick pykrete would be good armor, how about we build this thing to have engineering spaces that we can fill with pykrete at need? We'd need refrigeration for this, but we already have a nuclear reactor. By making the armor on site, we could just let it melt once it is no longer needed, making the armor grow-able in-theater, as long as fresh water is available.
My particular take had me using Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe colors in a splinter camouflage. With the splintering, I tried to work against the actual shape of the Ratte. I also tried to have splinters appear to "cast shadows", as I figure that shadows would be an important part of anything that big camouflaged. I used oil paint to create color variation with the ol' dots and thinner technique, and powder pastels to create mud. I didn't want to overdo the mud for such a big tank, so I tried to keep it subtle. I also added chip marks in what I thought would be "high traffic" areas. The Takom kit also came with two tiny 1/144 Maus tanks, part of the super-heavy tank escort for the Ratte. The Ratte lacks exhaust pipes, and while I imagine many builders might want them, I decided the Krupp engineers had come up with a better solution. Most ships have stacks for keeping the many oxides of carbon away from the crew; in classic German fashion, the overengineered solution to this problem was to have two vast fans operating. Not only would this draw air through the tank, it would expel the exhaust above the top of the turret. This is also necessary if you want the crew manning the AA turrets to live. The antenna are old guitar strings. The kit includes four of these little turrets, which you can add where you like. Definitely a good kit of something I've always wanted to build.
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| This version of Ratte Patrol was weird |
Fuel Calculations
1200 hp = 895 kW
2000 hp = 1491.4 kW
Metric:
895 kW * 241 g/kW/h = 215695 g/h
* 8 = 1725560 g/h, or
= 1725.56 kg of diesel per hour.
If diesel has a specific density of 0.835, then that's 2067 L.
1491.4 kW * 241 g/kW/h = 359427.4 g/h
* 8 = 2875419.2,
or 2875.42 kg of diesel per hour, or 3443 L.
Imperial:
1200 hp * 0.397 lb/hp/hr = 476.4 lbs/hr
* 8 = 3811.2 lbs/hr, or 459 gallons.
2000 hp * 0.397 lb/hp/hr = 794 lbs/hr
* 8 = 6352 lbs/hr, or 765 gallons.
