And this is all stuff that can happen when the tank works perfectly, which obviously isn't always the case. "One time, the mechanism that spits out the casing stopped working, so the loader had to do it manually. When you have to do that on the Leopard C2, it stops the smoke from being pushed out the barrel, so the inside of that tank was filling with cordite smoke, and the loader lost consciousness. I tried to push him out of the hatch, but my vision started to fade. Luckily, the guys pulled me out and sent in medics to give the loader oxygen."

Everyone was fine in the end, but this wasn't the only lethal gas Albert had to contend with ...

Well, it's really another layer of defense, if you think about it. If they get past the guns and the armor, they'll surely think twice when they open the hatch ...

For all their durability and, uh, metal ... muscles? ... tanks are surprisingly fragile. They need constant maintenance, or they'll basically disintegrate. "We say that one hour of driving is equal to three hours of maintaining ... Usually when you stop, it's a visual check to make sure nothing's sagging or leaking. Then you hammer in whatever needs hammering and tighten whatever needs tightening. Usually there's a fluid check, too."

Vince Little
Same rules as your grandma porking.

Imagine the Hulk undergoing a full physical after every battle, and you'll get an accurate picture of tank life.

"When you have a maintenance day, you will walk the track to check the torque on every end connector. That means rolling it forward slowly and checking all 126 nuts on each side. There are 82 track shoes [individual parts of the tank tread] a side, with two pads each. If the pads wear down, you need to pop each one off and replace it. That means driving a pin behind each one, prying it partway off with a pry bar, and hammering it the rest of the way."

US Army
"New plan: We simply carry the tanks where they need to go."

If you're anything like us and you think a Phillips head refers to some guy's skull, all that tool speak means that Albert and his friends need to be extremely thorough or their high-tech battle rover will turn into a metal pup tent. "That's why Canadian tankers get trained to fix our stuff as well as drive and gun and all that. We all know how to fix the common issues and more, and there are a lot of them."

So far, this article has been worse for the tank's reputation than that Japanese game where they're reimagined as horny high school girls. But ...

Humanity has spent more than a century trying to figure out the best way to stop a tank, and so far, the best solution is "call it fat until it gets a self-esteem problem."

"Oh yeah, modern tanks can take a beating," Albert brags. "There are three types of kills on a tank. M kill, which is a mobility kill (the tank can't move, but it can shoot); firepower kill (so it can move but not shoot); and K kill (which means everyone is dead). Mobility kill isn't too hard to do, but the others are a lot harder. There isn't much the insurgents have that can do damage to us. An RPG is nothing. Old Russian anti-tank stuff would only work if it hits us just right. As for IEDs, they would have to be huge to do any real damage."

via Gizmodo
We nuked a tank once. Its plates bent, slightly.
Seriously.

We're talking about at least two dumpsters' worth of explosives here, and the driver would probably see those dumpsters long before you pushed them into place. They tend to stand out in the desert. And that's assuming that you survive long enough to strike at the tank. Which isn't exactly the tank operator's prerogative.

"The rounds we fired from the C2 weighed about 40 lbs," Albert told us. "There are hesh (high explosive squash head), sabot (big ass anti-armor dart), white phosphorus smoke, canister (like a huge shotgun shell), and heat (high explosive rounds.) They're also accurate to about 2.5 miles."

Cpl Wes Calder RLC/MOD
Stay tuned for our follow-up article: 6 Things I Sent To Valhalla While At Work.

Yeah, you don't even need to be in the same zip code as the guy whose shit you're about to ruin. "One time, we blew up an IED factory because they figured it was too booby-trapped to try to walk into. I blew the turret off an old tank in Germany during my training, so that was pretty cool. Oh, and I shot a tree down with one round from a mile away."

Uh-oh ... we can feel the mouth explosions coming on again ...

Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is a Cracked columnist, interviewer, and editor. Contact him at c.j.strusiewicz@gmail.com.

What's The Best Fictional School To Attend? In the muggle world, we're not given the opportunity for a magical hat to tell us which school we should go to. Usually, we just have to go to the high school closest to where we live, or whatever college accepts our SAT scores and personal essay. This month, our goal is to determine what would be the best fictional school to go to. Join Jack, Daniel, and the rest of the Cracked staff, along with comedians Brandie Posey and Steven Wilber, as they figure out if it's a realistic school like Degrassi or West Beverly High, or an institution from a fantasy world like Hogwarts, with its ghosts and dementors, or Bayside High, haunted by a monster known only to humans as Screech. Get your tickets here!

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