In our research we have uncovered lots of really interesting experimental tanks. Some were just designs that were never completed. Others were completed as prototypes, and some even saw small-scale field testing!
These tanks were weird and wonderful, ranging from a 100-ton monster and a First World War relic, to a tank with two side-by-side main guns, an armoured car weighing more than a tank, and a machine-gun armed light tank with the armour of a heavy tank!
We wanted to try them all out to see how they might have performed if they had actually been built, so we decided to write some briefings for them, just for the fun of it!
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Soviet heavy tanks were a thorn in the side of the German Army throughout the war. Their armour was almost invulnerable to most German anti-tank weapons and their guns were more than adequate to deal with most German tanks.
GABTU (Main Directorate of Armoured Forces) was determined to maintain this state of affairs. The SKB 2 heavy tank design bureau in Chelyabinsk started the KV 13 program to build a heavy tank with both sufficient mobility and heavier armour.
N V Tseits, recently released from a Gulag concentration camp, headed the project with his old colleague K I Kuzmin working on the hull design. Using castings to get a better shaped tank, his team delivered a tank ten tons lighter than the KV, despite having better armour. Unfortunately its performance was lacking and the project was cancelled.
On Tseits’ death, N F Shamshurin took over the project. A new transmission, cooling system and lightened tracks solved many of the KV-13’s problems. Meanwhile Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, for whom the KV tank was named, was in disgrace, so the KV-13 was renamed IS-1 in honour of Iosef Stalin, the Soviet leader. One of the oddities of the new tank was a fixed-mounted machine-gun for the driver to replace the one fired by the co-driver in previous heavy tanks. While certainly an interesting concept, the practical usefulness of this machine-gun was nil.
The capture of a Tiger tank in late 1942 led to the April 1943 order to install an 85mm gun in the new IS-1 tank. This required a whole new turret and the lengthening of the hull with an additional road wheel to take the extra weight. The IS-85 as it was now known shared this turret with the KV 85 that was produced while IS-85 production got under way.
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