(list of special-purpose tanks)

What, no bobbin? No fascine? No embridgement vehicle of any kind? And where, I ask you, is the Grand Panjandrum?

>I don't know how many tanks per team you can operate, but frankly the
>idea of an overconfident team in overpowered tanks coming utterly
>unstuck against non-standard opposition feels very Eyrie to me.

Funnily enough, that's basically the premise of the original show. The protagonists, the sensha-dō team of Ōarai Girls' Academy, are configured from the start to be the ultimate underdogs. The school didn't even have a sensha-dō team at the beginning of the school year concerned, only two of its members have any idea what they're doing, and one of them is participating under duress. Compounding this, their equipment is a mismatched ragbag of mostly joke tanks. They start out with:

- A Panzer IV Ausf. D, which was one of the models with the stubby 75mm gun that was only of any real use against infantry and machine-gun nests (two things notable for their absence from Tankery battlefields);

- A Panzer 38(t), which is a Czechoslovakian tank that was obsolescent when the Germans captured a bunch of them and found that they were marginally effective against older Polish tanks, but not much else;

- A Type 89 I-Go, possibly the least formidable of Japan's not-very-formidable tanks;

- A StuG III Ausf. F, which is a pretty decent tank destroyer, but is unfortunately crewed by a group of people whose conception of stealth and tactics is akin to the sports savvy of that Chinese kid from Better Off Dead who learned to speak English from watching Howard Cosell on TV; and

- A Char B1 bis, France's slowest, least mechanically reliable tank, although it does have the undeniable virtues of having a huge gun and being practically indestructible.

Later, in need of reinforcements, they scrape up a Type 3 Chi-Nu, Japan's last-minute answer to the Sherman, and--of all things--a VK 45.01 (P), Ferdinand Porsche's failed entry in the development process that led to the Tiger I. The Porsche Tiger (or Tiger-P as it is known in World of Tanks) was particularly noted for its ability to catch fire without the aid of the enemy.

So yeah, on paper this is a team that is obviously not going places. They do anyway, of course, mostly because none of their more orthodox opponents can ever have any idea what the hell they're thinking at any time. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.