winged hearts

[b]Winged Heart of the Tank[/b]

The tank is a mobile battle unit. Therefore, its engine is no less important than the gun or armour. Every country building a tank encountered the problem of an engine that combined two important factors:. First of all, a tank engine needs to be powerful enough to move a multi-ton vehicle. Second, the engine needs to work in conditions far from ideal, it needs to be reliable and forgiving.

The optimal solution would be a special tank engine, but it was not always possible to develop one. Tanks used engines from tractors, cars, airplanes.

The talented American engineer J. Christie used airplane engines for his vehicles. The experimental M1928 used a V-shaped Liberty L-12 engine. The tank reached a speed of 120 kph in trials on wheels, and 65 kph on tracks. This engine was used on aircraft until 1927.

Liberty engines were used on British cruiser tanks, including the Crusader tank, widely used in the first parts of WWII. The later Cromwell tank used an engine derived from an aviational design, the 12-cylinder Rolls-Royve Merlin III. Famous airplanes such as the Spitfire, Hawker Hurricane and Mustang X used this engine.

The Continental W6709A engine was used on the American M5 Stuart tank, one of the country's most massively produced tanks. The M2 Medium tank, another tank from the early days of WWII, used the 9-cylinder Continental R975EC2.

The USSR developed the M-5 engine based on the Liberty L-12, which was used on BT series tanks. Later, the USSR developed another engine that was installed on planes, as well as tanks. The M-17 engine was based on the German BMW-VI. M-17 engines were installed in heavy TB-3 bombers, I-3 fighters, MDR-2 flying boats, and other vehicles. Modified M-17 engines were used on BT-7, T-35, and T-28 tanks.

It's hard to find a person that has not heard of the German super-heavy Maus tank. Many don't know that one of the potential engines that could have powered it was the Daimler-Benz DB.603 airplane engine, manufactured since 1942. This engine was used in He-219A-7 long range bombers, Me-410B heavy fighters, and other aircraft.

The eventual decline of aircraft engines used in tanks was due to the fact that airplane engines are more suited for working in the air. They were unreliable on tanks, needed high quality fuel, which was expensive to produce. Finally, airplane engine factories simply could not provide enough engines for all customers. Nevertheless, over the course of many years, tanks from many countries rode into battle with "winged hearts".