Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 415 - The Tsar Tank

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys SEE US LIVE MAY 29TH IN LONDON: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-london-29th-may-tickets-1985443952308 CAN'T MAKE IT? WE'RE STREAMING IT! GET YOUR STREAMING TICKETS: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-london-29th-may-2026-tickets-1985444086710 PRE ORDER JOE'S NEW BOOK! https://www.amazon.com/Highlands-Burn-Foundling-Brigade-Saga-ebook/dp/B0GSG5CNXX/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QWHSPAADI07D&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.uLEY0I7D6t0IC9GWsF7SH1FKEgKqsqTLmV4PQ_lLi-wVUCYgTqIv0BWd9_-x3VzP.xn7v2CqU5MjngXmmSbYvVGsY_fxkvgsz-LA2tkhHHTs&dib_tag=se&keywords=joseph+kassabian&qid=1774247705&s=digital-text&sprefix=%2Cdigital-text%2C176&sr=1-1 Once upon a time the Russian Empire funded the construction of what might be the world's dumbest tank that is arguably not a tank at all. Larger than any of its peers during WWI, the Tsar Tank goes down in history due to its strange shape, weird wheels, and the fact that developers of the Battlefield video game series thought it was too unrealistic to put it in one of their games. SOURCES: Zaloga, Steven. Grandsen, James. Soviet Tanks and Combat Vehicles of World War Two. Milsom, John. Russian Tanks, 1900-1970 https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/the-tsar-tank-is-possibly-the-strangest-tank-ever-devised https://www.rbth.com/defence/2014/09/29/the_first_russian_tanks_a_long_and_difficult_road_to_the_battlefield_40199.html https://www.thearmorylife.com/tsar-tank-russias-secret-wwi-weapon/ http://www.landships.info/landships/tank_articles/Lebedenko.html

Hey everyone, Joe here. Me, Tom, and Nate are all going to be live May 29th in London at the Rich Mix. So get your tickets and come down and see us. It's going to be a great show. We're going to have some new merch, some shirts, some pins, maybe some book stuff because it coincides the launch of my book, The Highlands Burn. And if you can't make it, that's okay. We're going to be live streaming it. Check out our show notes. Make sure you click on the right link for live show and live stream tickets, whichever one you need, and get your tickets now. The Highlands Burn. My debut fantasy novel releases May 29th and is now available for digital pre-order. You can find the link in the show notes wherever it is you're listening to this. Just like this show, this book is a

completely independent production. To the crack of rifles and the acrid stench of sorcery, a sudden invasion sweeps through the highlands of the Confederation, and Syatt's peaceful village life breaks with the dawn. A sole survivor amid the smoking ruins of all that he held dear, Sia must make a choice. Is pursuing revenge against the mercenaries that took everything from him worth becoming one himself? As an escape pushes him to the gruff embrace of the foundling brigade, he must learn to tread a path between his need to understand why his people were targeted for destruction and the new responsibilities of his soldiers life. Even as each new encounter with the horrors of battle force him to confront the terrible

cost of his oath. Before long, the shifting fog of war casts old certainties into a haze of doubt, while the stuff of legend seems as clear as day, and Syatt finds himself drawn into a much larger conflict that he could possibly imagine. Hello and welcome to the Lines Ed by Donkeys podcast, the only military history podcast in the entire known world. I'm Joe with me is Tom and Nate fellas. How are we all doing today?

I got the hantavirus. I don't have hauntavirus, thankfully. I just have a two-year-old. So I get like the Walmart diet right version of hauntipirus, basically every six weeks. So he's got Dr. Pepper and you got Mr. Pibb. Yeah, correct. Yeah, it was like, got back from Vietnam

and stupidly went to work the following day after a 12-and-a-half-hour direct flight and was like falling asleep at my desk at 3 p.m. And I was like, I need to go home, was fine for a couple of days. And then suddenly all at once is like, you know, the pig and the Simpsons or Mr. Burns, all the germs can't get through out once. It's like what if that door unclogged and they all formed an orderly queue? Yeah, it's like when you have a nice cup of coffee in the morning and your inside, say everybody out.

Yeah. But you did that to your immune system. Yeah, so I have, I yesterday spent the entire day in bed, which has convinced me that my work ethic is not like, oh, some sort of like really good productive thing and instead is mental illness because I was in bed like, I fucking hate this. I'm like, I'm lying in bed. And my screen time was like 10 hours yesterday. I am so far healthy, but we talked about this on lines of by robots, but I've been out running more often, right? So I've been spending my time on the local. trails in the park. And yesterday, within an hour, like with all within an hour of each other, mind you, we're in May, right? And I understand I live in the Netherlands. So like, I expect to be rained on. I expected to be windy, whatever. But it dropped to like seven degrees. I got like 30, 40 kilometer hour winds. I got hailed on. And I got rained on. Like, you know, to quote

for scump, that fucking fat sideways rain. Yeah. Just getting my ass absolutely kicked. Not going to lie, if I was just like in a park in the, in the Hague, just walking around and saw you running towards me, I would feel like I'm an attack on Titan. Well, if it makes you feel any better, Joe, yesterday was meltdown central from the minute that we left the apartment to take my daughter to daycare. She was in extremely no mode, said no to everything. And it was started dumping rain and she didn't want to use her umbrella. She has a rain suit. But it was getting to be a nightmare.

and we were getting close to the point where I would be technically late dropping her off. And finally, I was like, we're not having this argument. We have to go. And I would say that I'm grateful. My daughter also has red hair because 100% otherwise people would think I was abducting a child because it was basically dragging this child who didn't want to walk by her hand. But like, we have to go. We have to go. We have to go. She's just yelling, no, no, no, the entire time. And then she apparently she had a great day at daycare yesterday and everything was fine. It was all forgotten. Meanwhile, I felt like I was, I don't know, like, you'd ever want to have to be, more stern than required, but there's sometimes sort of like, we are not having this argument right

now. It is shitting rain on us. You were going to carry your fucking umbrella. Like, but, you know, the thing is, is they don't understand because they're too. So, you know, they kind of understand, but not really. It's just, it's a different kind of cognition. And so I then went to the gym, uh, to hate myself more. And, uh, I had a wonderful day. So I'm, um, you know, I'm all about the foibles of history. And I too am getting buffeted by fucked up winds and clouds that are way too dark to be real things along those lines because we had wild thunderstorms yesterday. So I guess Europe is sinking. We are doomed to be subject to the whims of nature. And in my case, I would make fun of you for also the icing on top being and you have to be around Dutch people,

but I have to be around Swiss people. So you know what? Yeah. It's a real Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man moment. But we're really three Spider-Man's because Tom has to deal with the British. Yeah, Irish guy in Britain. I have to deal with West Street. in a dark basement of Westminster writing in the death note Kirstarmer over and over again while Ryuk is looking over his shoulder. Yeah, man, really happy that

my local council did not elect a single reform candidate, which is great. I will say one thing that's relevant to I had a strange kind of passing moment realization of how much culture has changed in our lifetimes

because today, thankfully, a much better day of going to day care without a huge fight. And I noticed some kid had let some stickers fall off, like, with like little stickers had been discarded and they were just like anime stickers. And I realized anime is everywhere because little kids like it. Whereas growing up,

that wasn't the case. Like, I see kids with like one piece, backpacks. I think it's one piece. There's, I can't remember the name of the, there was a bunch of these shows. And when we were young, if you saw anime stickers or anime shirts or anime posters, it was either the person was a huge dweeb or really horny or some combination of the two. Yeah, I was going to say, Nate, that's unfair. I was both. Well, I was going to say, but that's what's interesting about it now is I encounter it. And I'm sort of like, I mean, I'm obviously not an anime consumer, but I just see it everywhere. I'm sort of like, yeah, you know, it's just, it's just kind of part of the cultural, like, it's popular. Like, the stuff's made for kids and kids like it in Europe now, too. But, you know, when we were growing up,

it was more like, it's the sex cartoons with violence, you know, and so it's nice. Do you like sex cartoons with violence? Donate to the Patreon. Listen to Tom and I talk about anime. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Go it's like, it's like American cartoons or whatever they were in the 90s, we can take that one, the sort of sewer scene from Akira. And it's like you have both Topless girl being attacked by soldiers and dude getting his face shot off in like 10 seconds. It was like, that's anime right there. This is what like when I was flying to Vietnam, I took a direct flight, which I'm very happy that I did because I couldn't imagine like, I'll talk about it maybe more at the live show. The process it took me to get into Vietnam in the

first place, which involves government corruption. But, uh, yes. My personal favorite flavor is so, a frequent traveler to the caucuses. But I was sitting on the plane and I had a middle sea and I had like my iPad and I was just like I had put stuff on a hard drive to watch but I was so captivated by a guy sitting in the row in front of me in the aisle seat

who was watching like a Chinese anime with the animation style of like that Final Fantasy movie and it was a single YouTube video that was 12 hours long. Oh my dude. Now fellas the last couple weeks, we've been talking about the battle of Iwo Jima.

Shit got heavy. We talked about Goop more than is entirely reasonable. We have experienced ways to spalunk things to a comprehensive end that I feel like we need to talk about something lighter,

something dumber, something to really make a smile again. We got gathered in a room and a dude with a bull cut in a suit and a suit said spulunk him with extreme prejudice. That's what's going to happen to Kier St Arbor when he resigns.

He's going to be held out on like the rack like it's Henry the 8th Tortor dungeon. The guy who plays, what is his name, Charlie or Tommy, the dude who's like, this is supposedly the CIA agent in that scene in Apocalypse now. The only difference in the British version is played by Ibiza Final Boss.

So I figured we would do something that we love to do after a good long series and talk about a really dumb tank. Not just a dumb tank, not just any dumb tank. I argue we're going to talk about the dumb tank. And there are quite a few that come to mind when you talk about dumb tanks, but none of those have a let's call it the look, the aesthetic that we're looking for. So we have a very special tank to be crowned,

the king of dumb tanks. And it is widely known as the Tsar Tank. And just so you guys can appreciate this, I sent a picture of it to the group chat. For our listeners, it will be the episode art. So you can either look at wherever it is

you're listening to this, or my personal opinion, you should Google this while driving your car down the road at highway speeds. This looks like that slide that fucked up the cop in Boston. I have to describe it. this is, this looks like

a steampunk delusion of a penny farthing bike? That's where I land on it. Like this looks like something that would come out of a steampunk art at some point. Penny farthing technical or something. This looks like some shit.

I would have seen someone cycling down Mayor Street while smoking a cigarette outside of the TF studio. I have a photo of someone cycling a penny farthing down that street. I mean, all I can say is I I recall seeing pictures from the reconnaissance and surveillance leader, of course, how to identify the French tank or self-propelled howitzer, rather the MX30AUF1, also noticed the GCT, which

I love it, the army parlance for it was giant clown turret. Yes. Yes, it is in fact a giant clown turret. And I thought that was among the dumbest tanks, but you're telling me that that's like, looking at like the last 2,000 years of human history when you're on like the scale of the planet's age, like we're going back billions of years in terms of like the distance traveled of dumb tank. I would like to introduce a concept for when we talk about tanks now and in future that stupid tanks exist on a scale between precarity and ostentatiousness with stuff like the Bob Semple tank or even maybe the great penjandrum you could include it in being extremely precarious

inventions. And then the Schwergustov being the exact opposite end. I have a question actually, because I feel like Joe has to be the tank arbitrator here. Oh, absolutely. Would you consider, given the stupidity that sometimes goes to design, the ridiculousness of these designs, when we are judging dumb tanks, do self-propelled howitzers count as tanks? No, not entirely. I know, like, you know, for example, the U.S. military is the paladin.

People often call it a tank. It's dumb as fuck. It's really heavy. It basically collapses bridges almost as good as the Abrams does. And like the one of the reasons why people consider it a tank is it has tracks, it has a turret, has a big old gun on it. So, you know, for the un-initiated, it looks like a tank should. Which is one of the problems that we run into with the Tsar tank, right? So people understand if you're not, is that obviously we've talked about artillery pieces on this show and a Howitzer is basically a wheeled artillery piece. In the case of a self-propelled Howitzer, it's basically like what resembles.

to the untrained, a complete replica of a tank chassis with tracks and with a movably, an automated turret, but it is not firing a tank route, is not firing an anti-armor, direct fire round, it's firing an artillery piece. So now it can be used as a direct fire weapon, but the whole point of having a howitzer is it can fire high, parabolicly, really, really far. You don't use tanks for that. Yeah. You also wouldn't use a self-propelled howitzer to engage with a main battle tank. You could, but I don't think it would work very well. Yeah, that's something that you do when you already have about three caskets to fill. My artillery, parabolic, your girl, I'm my bollick. One of the things that makes a tank a tank is how it's doctrinally used, right? And they're like,

that's why the Tsar tank is called a tank. It does not look like any tank that's ever existed, which is one of the reasons why it sticks out so much and why everybody knows it. But doctrinally, the Russians, the Imperial Russian military, we're planning on. using it, if it was ever used, a little bit of a spoiler there, the same way the British would have used the Mark 5 on the Western front. So it is a tank, asterix,

because tanks were hardly a thing yet, right? But before we continue debating tankness, we have to go into a little bit of the stuttering baby steps of the concept of the tank, because that's how we end up with such a different-looking, monster in Imperial Russia than we get in the Western military. Because, I mean, we know about the Mark 5, which is the tank that we think of when they think of World War I.

The French had arguably, I also say barely even arguably, a much better tank with the Renault. I believe it's called the FT1, which had, you know, a crew of two, a movable turret. It looks much more like a modern tank in your mind, though the Mark 5 looks like the World War I tank. For good reasons, I would say. But you're probably asking just how in the fuck did we end up with what amounts to be a backwards facing tricycle tank?

You know, kind of like we already touched on a technical penny farthing. I'm looking at photos of it and it like, this looks like some sort of like rusted out infrastructure that you would see in like a derelict town in Midwest America that like used to extract coal or silver. Well, you're like halfway there at some point. To be honest with you, having spent time in what is strangely, I've improbably known as the world steampunk capital, Omeroo, New Zealand, this looks very familiar. Like, it just looks like the steampunk sculptures that you see in Omeroo.

I really wish the Russians knew that they created something so stupid it was cool. But, you know, oh well. And to understand how we get to this point, we have to jump in our time machine and go back to Imperial Russia, the birth of tanks, and World War I. And it kind of goes without saying but Imperial Russia is going through a lot of shit we don't really need to go into it here

it's the World War I era you all kind of have a rough idea at this point For anyone curious our time machine is actually in the shape of Ryan Air Flight there's very little leg room Joe finds it very uncomfortable

for us to travel back in time because he can't stretch out his legs Yeah and they keep making me pay like a euro to take a piss Leading to this they'd some pretty serious institutional rot combined with legendary ass beating

say by the Japanese, we did a series on that, go listen to it, as well as their concept of imperial prestige, but also anything to do with the military. We've done a lot of episodes about the degradation of the Russian Imperial military over the years. Go listen to any one of those. But the Russian military is collapsing in on itself. You know, horrible leadership, bad conditions for the men in the ranks, but most importantly for our episode today, totally ignoring military advances for years. This could be because of leadership fuckups, cost constraints, small thinking, all of them combined, and this did not exactly get better once World War I kicks off. One of the most infamous things that comes out of the trenches during World War I, though,

is arguably how to get around them and over them. And by that I mean tanks. Russia was hardly the only country to ignore this weapon. Long before a generation's worth of Europeans ground themselves into pace in the trenches, A few people had attempted to work on the concept of what would best be known today as a tank. Each of them were told their ideas were ridiculous or not worth anybody's time or money. I mean, who needs a giant mechanized tractor thing when you could just throw a horse into a belt-fed meat grinder? And the first of these, the one that really earns, in my opinion, the title of First Baby Tank,

was kind of sort of born in 1903, the brainchild of a French army artillery captain named Leon. Levantzure. He's an artillery captain. So it makes sense that he would be the one that comes up with this. For example, his idea kind of boiled down to what makes artillery suck having to move it around. What if the artillery simply moved itself? This is actually kind of a similar thing that Hiram Maxim really capitalized on as like heavy fire, what would be artillery that isn't necessarily stationary. Like it doesn't move that much, but you can move it if you want. which is why early machine guns fell into artillery units, which is weird and confusing,

and it took a lot of countries a long time to move past that. So he took the classic French 75 gun and decided it would be a lot better if this moved itself. He slapped it in an armored box, mounted the whole things on a set of tracks with a very small engine, and called it the automobile cannon project. Now, I know what you're thinking here

because he's an artillery commander and slapped an artillery gun on this. Doesn't this make this self-propelled artillery? No. Because he wanted to use it for direct fire operations. His idea was to use this to support infantry attacks. Therefore,

we have tank. He then submits it to the French artillery committee for consideration because it has a cannon on it. It requires the artillery committee's approval. There is no armored committee here because as a concept, it doesn't exist yet. And you're probably thinking it was discarded immediately for being crazy. After all,

Levin Seuer submitted a tank in 1903. But the French actually really like the idea and studied it for two years. The problem was not his idea, but the implementation. His car sucked. It wasn't the idea that was bad. Okay, so it had tracks, right? And you have to think, these are tracks in 1903. They suck. This is before the classic Caterpillar track system is around and available in Europe, his tracks were incredibly brittle and entirely unprotected.

So not only was the track unprotected, but the drive mechanism, like the big sprocket on the back, let's say, was entirely unprotected. So that meant as the tracks drove, tracks inherently pull up dirt and rocks, as any tanker,

anybody who's ever dealt with the tract, anything knows. And what stops them from just being sucked into the drive and ruining everything is a pretty complicated system of engineering and protection. His doesn't have any of that. Also worth noting as well as like engine design at this point was like in its super kind of preliminary stages. So it's like they don't necessarily have like a consistent design for an engine.

So it's like, oh, this thing just might explode at any point. This was an absolutely repurposed engine from a car as well. And they weren't going very fast, which is not a knock against it. No tank is going fast at this point. But the engine was more reliable than the drive system. So every time it tries to go anywhere at a blistering speed of about five miles an hour, it tracks fly off because it's just sucking up debris, fucking up the road wheels, fucking up the drive system.

And he couldn't quite figure out how to fix this, even after years of trying and spending 14,000 of his own Franks trying to do so. and the army finally rejects it in 1908. They spent years trying to make this thing work. There are other designs by other countries over the same time period. For example, we get our first, what you consider modern tank design, that I mean an armored hall with a movable turret. But it was a design on paper by an Austrian guy in 1911 and never goes further than that.

Though, a guy who pitches what should have been by all. writes the first fielded tank was an Australian with quite possibly the best name we've talked about in a very long time. Oh, it's fucking cheap out with the tank, I? Lanselot Eldon DeMole.

Yes. We are in the golden era of names where an Australian guy couldn't be called Lancelot. I hate that he went by Lance. Like, dude, you were gifted the coolest name ever. Oh, also looking at the

design for the Levasor project. Like, he kind of got it right on what a tank should look like. Yeah, like I said, great idea, terrible implementation. The band just couldn't figure out tracks. And in his defense, he's not going to be the last guy in this episode

who couldn't quite figure out tracks. Yeah, the Australian approach to designing a tank is like, what if you create the military version of a bunning snag where the person inside the tank is the snag and the tank is armored bread? actually weirdly hold that thought for just a second.

Fuck you. Okay. I don't like this. And just for some more information why people at this period are settling on tracks as being necessary are terrain mobility. Wheels back in the early 1900s sucked ass to make a very long story short. They were brittle. They were expensive. They were not good at traversing rough terrain.

Pretty much everybody accepted that in order for. for this kind of idea to work, it had to be tracks. But the science of tracks was also kind of a bit flimsy at the time. So everybody's trying to create their own thing. And then, of course, the caterpillar track system would come out eventually and just become the go-to. But we're not there yet. But also thinking as well as like the general layout of battlefields and like the type of

terrain that people are fighting on. And this is in a time where like cavalry is still like dudes on horses. all that earth is being like churned up quite quickly. So it's like, oh, we're just going to get like a tank version of the kid playing with the stick and hoop. Give that kid a handgun and you've got yourself a World War I take. Yeah, they literally did that in World War I. I have to point out, like I said, Lancelot's tank should have been the first real tank. Famously, the British would feel the first ones in combat during World War I.

But it wasn't his. Lancelot submitted his idea back in 1912, and what happened to his design is pretty strange, and admittedly still up to a fair amount of debate. So at first, the war office shot him down saying the idea wasn't needed. And then the war starts, heats up, and continues to drag on. He submits another idea in 1914 and 1916. He built his own scale model of his tank, using his own money to prove his concept. And his concept was good. But rather than being shot down, the war office quite literally ghosted him and never responded to his letters.

Score one in the column against we didn't have autism back in my day. It's like your dad's in the basement making little model tanks before Warhammer existed or miniatures existed. Your uncle Lancelot in his basement tank. Allegedly, depending on who you talk to, the war officer. and what was known as the Landship Commission, which was, Landship was the word they used for Tank. Tank was a confidential code name for what they were working on at the time. I just ended up being what was called Landship, arguably much cooler name.

The Landship Commission that would eventually design and build the first fieldable tanks, just stole his idea and wrote him out of it. Allegedly, the British government insisted this is not what happened, and his design had no impact on their final design, even though his design looks almost exactly like the British Mark I thought for a second when you were saying that you know tank was a code word that you were about to tell me that tank is actually like a really cool acronym for something there's no such thing as a cool military acronym Tom totally accurate non-killable the government never admitted to any wrongdoing but did

apologize claiming that a paperwork filing error had led to them just losing all of his submissions without ever looking at them. He lost the game of office politics. He definitely like reheated fish in the canteen and like pissed off some sort of clerical worker. Yeah, microwaving fish in the break room is a huge Lancelot moved. If you have a man at your job named Lancelot, you can expect him to do something like that. They paid him about 900 pounds as a reimbursement for the cost of his work that he did on his own dime, which according to him did even cover half of the money he spent on it. But my favorite part of the Lancelot saga is one of the awards that he was given for his work

on this project, the British government insists they never saw was an honorary promotion to the rank of corporal. So basically you outrank him. Yes. It's kind of like being honored by being named the honorary assistant manager of a Taco Bell. You got hang healed? he was also given some medals and whatnot but like normally would you get an honorary promotion

it's to a rink that actually fucking matters I'm a system manager Lanselon I sell tanks and tank accessories for Russia over the same time period none of this is really happening they have no tanks nor any plans for them instead once the war starts their manufacturing plants were churning out

British copies of what was known as the Austin armored car It's as shitty as an armored car in the early 1900s would be. It's good for its time, but it is of its time. One of the men who worked in the factory was 23-year-old Alexander Poker of Chica, and working on ways that he might improve upon this simple armored car and make it into something more substantial. Alex's design on the surface looked like all the others.

Tracks instead of wheels, it looked like an armored box, crewed by two men who would be armed with machine guns. His design, like many others, did not use Caterpillar Tracks, which had become something of the standard for tracks and then tanks, but he didn't have any to work with, you know, so he had to come up with a secret third option. Arguably, the dumbest track system I've ever heard of in my entire life. So he was planning on something in the middle of a war.

He had to use things that the war effort would have, you know, laying around still. So he came up with the idea of rubberizing fabric strips and running them in a continuous loop instead of having metal tracks. Wait, so like the endless towel and the gross bathrooms? Exactly, yeah, yeah. It's like putting a gun on that. And I think we already know from that sentence

why this tank does not end up working out. But arguably its armor is the interesting point here. It was truly revolutionary. It was layered with gaps in the middle, giving better protection compared to other designs that arguably seen throughout the entire First World War. Though my personal favorite, isn't the fact he came up with spaced steel armor, except what would fill those spaces in between? Oh no.

Is this going to be some highly toxic chemical-based compound that's going to give you turbo cancer? That would arguably be better. Uh-huh. So he knew that this tank would be getting slammed with explosives. For people who are unaware, the biggest problem with being in an armored vehicle isn't necessarily having the armored be penetrated. Because if that happens, congratulations, you have nothing to worry about. You're dead.

But spalling. That is when something big and heavy slams into a metal plate and pieces of that metal plate fly off into the crew. To this day, armored crewmen wear protection for that alone. because anything beyond that you can't protect yourself from. So the idea to get around that and the concussive blast of absorbing them would be to fill the gaps in the armor plate with hair. Oh, no. No.

No. All you don't want to die in the David Kronenberg time. Everybody get in my hair monster. This tank is effectively Armenian. I mean, look, the Russian Empire's looking around the Caucasus and be like, what are we going to do with all the shoulder hair? Fuck, that is so disgusting. Like, that is, if you hit that tank with like any sort of artillery, I don't you just see hair, singed hair flowing out. It's the worst smelling take ever.

You're right. That is way worse than like cancer-inducing compound. Though I will say after packing the gaps in his test armor with hair, he decided that hair didn't have. the feel that he thought would work. So he turned it into a mixture, horse hair and algae to create a paste. Oh, that's gross. All aboard the goop train.

I love that we found the first tank engineer that's arguably more disgusting than a tank crewman. I just got to say, I know it smelled crazy in there. Like, imagine like any sign of rain. Oh, the whole tank just smells like wet dog. It smells like a stables beside a pond. My tank smells like an unfiltered fish tank. A test model went into production and his fabric-tracked hair monster was admittedly pretty fucking awesome.

It could go 26 miles per hour, which is blisteringly fast for a tank of its era. But of course, there was the major issue of the fabric tracks. The second it left a hardball road, it just, completely came apart. The fabric loop, the paper towel dispenser asht tracks, fly off their guides immediately. And when I say 26 miles per hour,

I mean like at a straight line, one of the problems with rubberized fabric tracks is they have no grip at all. So the second he tries to turn, he's just skating everywhere. He creates an incredibly fast tank full of

hair and goop that flies out of control the second you try to turn. Do you know specifically what fabric he used for the tracks? I do not. I do not. Unfortunately, I believe it was like a composite. I mean, like at the time, it more than likely would have been maybe canvas. I believe it was canvas impregnated with like wood pulp.

Like, this tank would have smelled in the same way whenever you go to a weird drug dealer's house and he has like a terrarium with turtles in it. Yeah. And he hasn't cleaned it out in a while. Yeah. Like Joe, you intimately like know that. that smell in your mind. Yeah, it smells like my weed guy's house.

Now, this idea after going through testing is quickly shot down, but it did open up the Russian military mine to further tank pitches, though it didn't stop Alexander and later the Soviet Union to contend after news of the deployment of British tanks got out, because remember at first they were kept pretty hush-hush, that actually it was the Russians who invented, designed, and deploy the first tank. Look, I'm Armenian. Nobody understands claiming random historical bullshit

that you had nothing to do with better than, I don't know, the Azaries and the Albanians. But you can't claim you built the world's first tank if it was never completed, never deployed, failed all of its trials

and was rejected. That's not how anything works. They built the entire tank out of Kinex. We've invented the first tank bionicle. We will seize Rappanui. It's called Crimea now.

Around the same time Alex is working, a different engineer, Vasily and Mandelieve, drew up a 170-ton monster tank that carried a naval gun and pitched it to the army. It was so big it would have required rail transport to get anywhere, which kind of defeats the purpose of a tank at all. It gets shit-canned for being ridiculous. And there were other fits and starts, tests and engineers, but each and every time they were shot down owing to costs, senior leadership, who didn't see the point of such a weapon, you know, normal stuff. Zar Nicholas probably had no idea about any of these designs. That was until one man, Lieutenant Nikolai Lebedenko came up with an idea.

Lebanenko is a fun guy from history because this is that period of history where a guy can be born and die and we legitimately have no idea when that happened. Really not a lot is known about him when you realize he's connected to something as well-known, as the Tsar tank. And Labanco is working in a private laboratory of some renown owing to the fact that he had been given the prestige of a commission within the army, which was just how things worked back then, especially in Imperial Russia. They gave out commissions as a prize. And then you got to wear them as a social peacocking thing. Yeah, this is a good solid decade before you would have the birth of the phenomenon of like tank laboratory 15 outside of Magnita Gorsk.

And hey, say what you will, but none of those tanks got packed full of hair and algae. Yeah, no, they just got packed full of like irradiated Russians who they tried to turn into the X-Men. Yeah, hard to say which one's better or worse. He was also working on a tank in 1915, kind of. Other people have been working on tanks at this time period, especially the British. But those were considered state secrets and yet to be deployed. So Nikolai's design ignores any concept that we have of tanks. anything that you, listener, would consider a tank because none of those existed yet.

But what did exist was the need for the idea of what a tank could accomplish. That being a heavy piece of machinery that could breach a trench. How can you bring a big armored weapon across chewed-up terrain of the front line and use those big guns that would be mounted on it to break through enemy lines? Where almost everyone else settled on tracks for the job, Nikolai said, nope. And that brings us to, let's say, the Tsar Tank's unique design. Most people and most things written about the Tsar Tank settle on the idea that he must have designed the tank

based on an artillery carriage. And that would make sense. He's a weapons designer in the early 1900s. He would have been familiar with the concept of an artillery carriage. But according to Nik Lai himself, that was not what happened. Instead, he got the idea of these giant spoked wheels from an Ottoman horse carriage called an Arabah that was well known for being able to travel

over some pretty horrible terrain thanks to its large diameter wide set wheels. Yeah, everything, every single weapons innovation at the kind of early to mid period of World War I is just orcship. Yeah, for sure. I mean, what if we just took carriage and made it bigger?

Yeah. Painted it red, so it go faster. The Russian, Imperial Army is like giving sacrifices to Gork and Mork. This horse carriage needs more DACA. Though I should point out here, he kind of forgot that this carriage is helped by having four big-ass wheels. Not only two, like the Tsar Tank would,

which also kind of brings into doubt whether this is where he got the idea from or not. Some sources say that he did pick up the idea for his weird-ass tank from a cart, but it was a different cart, the Pavasky, cart, which has two big ass wheels, but no third wheel. So what I'm getting at here is nobody's really sure how the fuck he came up with this other than his own sketches. Yeah, it's the difference between a fucking wheelbarrow and a cart. His weird design was probably doomed to be written off from the very beginning,

but Nikolai had a pretty good idea of how the Russian court worked. He knew if his brilliant idea was left in the hands of those idiots on the general staff, they would never understand his pure genius. So instead he went to his friend Nikolai Zhukovsky, widely considered the father of Russian aviation. Because of his position, he had an inn with the court. Zhukovsky then managed to get a meeting between the designer and the Tsar. So that's what he did. Labanenko is going to have a one-on-one with the emperor of Russia.

I think Tsar Nicholas II has kind of bigger things to worry about that. can we make a tank? Well, that's like the interesting part about Nicholas is that like he was like a micromanager, but also bad at it. So people tried their hardest to keep him out of it because they knew he was bad at it. But, you know, ironically, they were also bad at it. Yeah, very, very famously so for the inner workings of the Russian imperial court in the 1910s. Lebanenko knew that going to meet the Tsar with just some sketches on a piece of paper

was hardly the winning pitch in the realm of this weird Russian imperial version of Shark Tank. He needed some pop. He needed some pizzazz. So he built a toy. He constructed a tiny baby Tsar tank, which he was now officially calling the bat. The Tsar tank was never the name of this tank. It's just what it's known as.

And the bat would be powered by a little bitty clockwork and a spring from a gramophone. Did he also say that he's sold similar tanks to Ogdenville and North Haverbrook? Yeah, this is really more of a Shelbyville tank. This kind of is, I mean, is the Simpsons references, aside, this is definitely

charging to enter into steampunk territory. Yeah, you got a clockwork tank. Yeah, exactly. My kitchen timer powered tank, a little mini tank. It's got weird optics glasses on it for some reason. It's wearing a top hat with feathers. I don't know how you fit a monocle onto a tank, but Leibonenko found a way. It was a call it Tsar tank because pronouncing Johnny

five aces in Russian is really difficult. If they scaled it down, it could have ended up being the most popular form of personal transport in Estonia. Well, no, I mean, the wheelbarrow side of things is probably that. You know what I'm saying? Quite frankly, we're looking at weird hauntology here where all tank warfare could have been effectively bigger and more powerful armored wheelbarrows. But there has to be a guy behind it at all times.

Yeah, one big lad carrying the wheelboats. See, I like this timeline because it still ends up with me being a tank crewman, except now I'm just the guy carrying the wheelbarrow. Yeah, exactly. You joined the armor to basically be tactical Fred Flintstone. but yeah, but still once again, converging timelines, whether you piloted the steampunk tank

or stayed as you are, you were both still the person who probably would have went to Pax in like 2011. I don't know what that is, Tom. Help me out. Penny Arcade. Oh, oh.

Didn't go in 2011. I'll have you know. I went before then. I'm still right. Yeah, so what you're basically saying is that there's a form of loss that is illustrated as a tank manual. that was control,

I'll delete, but I like what you do with that. Oh, is control all delete by bad. I don't remember any shitty web comics. The only ones I remember are for really niche reasons

like Faith Mouse. You guys ever hear encounter Faith Mouse? No. Faith Mouse was by a really very, very strange Catholic American guy that was kind of

wrestling with whatever morality of Catholicism. He was, I don't know, he had some problems. But I do very clearly recall seeing a Faith Mouse illustration in which the titular character

is saying her prayers before bed. and she's got a gun by her bed and also a framed picture of 9-11 happening and I don't know why it's not meant to be a joke. This is my everyday carry. I have my revolvered my frame picture of a plane going into the North Tower. There was a panel of faith mouse

that I am unable to find now. I wish I could find, which I could have been a very knowing parody by people who made fun of it on web forums or could also have been a genuine article in which the titular character is basically making like a pleading face and it says, if you keep putting things up your ass,

what room does that leave for God? Look, with enough lube, there's room enough for everybody. But, you know, if we're doing our live show in the United States, I could bring my everyday carry of a gun and a frame picture of 9-11. If people ask me,

over the 2000s, like, that saying your prayers next to your gun and 9-11, but framed like it's a portrait of your spouse or something. Yeah. It's all good. World War I control alt delete really said 1915 really is the year of the tanker Now Zarr Nicholas got one look at this little toy and

fucking loved it And Lebedenko pitched the toy as a model that when built to his full specifications which he didn't actually have all the way yet It would be able to cross any terrain and punch straight through German lines But obviously the Tsar wanted to see how this would work With the little toy So he began setting up a a tiny little obstacle course of the throne room

while Lebanenko's toy crossed them. This included stacking several copies of like Russian law books, which the tank then climbed, which, you know, there's something there that that's the only thing that the Tsar used Russian law books for. So he basically built like a primitive, like early version of an RC car,

but a tank. And it had it. Yeah, just powered with a gramophone spring. Yeah. It had it whipping ass over like law textbooks. And the czar was like, This is going to be the thing that it lets us win against the Hans and Huma. I don't know what the Russian, the Russian, you know, slang term for the Germans would have been.

But yeah, all right. So he's basically doing RC caring. This whole scene is a lot more entertaining for me. If you picture the big stupid czar clapping and jumping up and down like a child, way watches the wind up pink putt put around his carpet. Yeah. Yeah, I imagine. Yeah.

Everyone is wearing a sailor suit, not just his son. I don't know why. Everybody to include Resputin. After watching the sick toy whip shitties around the carpet, the Tsar immediately approved the design without asking or speaking to anybody else and cut Labanenko a check for 210,000 rubles for development. Now, the conversion rate for imperial rubles to moderate rubles is pretty much impossible for a one for one due to, you know,

everything that happens for the next several decades. But it's thought it could have been tens of billions. of dollars all because of a wind-up toy. I love it. I can't imagine why this empire fell. One trillion dollars to Lebedenko. This left Lebedenko to get an engineering team on board and finalize his plans for what he saw the bat tank would be at scale. And admittedly, he was able to put together one hell of a team of engineers to include Zhikovsky, the father of Russian aviation, as well as several other people that worked with Zhukovsky. The The problem though is all these guys work in aircrafts and aircraft engine design.

Nobody involved with the engineering and design of the Bat Tank had ever constructed any ground-based vehicles of any kind whatsoever. So of course the idea that they would all eventually have in mind would become the largest armored ground vehicle ever constructed. A lot of this has to do with the very idea behind it. It had to be something so large, so powerful that it would be able to smash through the seemingly impenetrable trenches of the eastern front. So it would need to be big, bigger than anything had ever been before

or arguably since. It would be 30 feet tall, 30 feet wide, and 60 feet long. Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah, the picture really doesn't do it justice. That's insane. Okay. Yeah.

And with its two massive forward wheels being the main cause for its height. For comparison's sake, the most famous tank of the era, the British Mark 5, was nine feet tall and 15 feet wide. For further comparison, for a better, more well-known dumb super tank, the Nazi Panzer 8 mouse, a tank known for being cartoonishly oversized, among other things, was only 11 feet tall and 12 feet wide. So this basically sounds like if you're roughly converting to meters, that it would be close to 200 square meters of footprint if it's basically 10 meters by 20 meters. Yeah, it's huge. For more modern comparison,

the modern M1 A2 Abrams, only eight feet tall and 12 feet wide. For comparison, people understand that if you're not on metric, 200 square meters is slightly more than, let's say that because it's not quite 200 square meters, it's basically bang on 2,000 square feet. Yeah, it'd be a really nice sized house. That's like a good sized home. Yeah, that's like twice the size of my childhood home. Yeah, definitely bigger than anywhere I've ever lived before. What I'm getting at, years, this tank is historically insane. There would be two weapons sponsors on either sides of

the wheels, but also one large central turret, that despite being 26 feet tall, still sat below the giant spoked monster wheels, with an armored T-shaped carriage making up the main body of the vehicle. I have a question.

So, the engine, is it, you know, forward wheel driver? Oh boy. Okay, okay. Because I'm like, how the fuck you turn this thing? I gotta say the engine system, the power plant is so convoluted and stupid, we'll get to it. Okay. The whole thing was projected away 40 tons, which would have made it 10 tons heavier than any other

tank of the era. You would probably assume it'd be heavier given the dimensions I just gave you in the picture that I sent to you. And to that, I say, just wait a second. Because of the shape of the thing, there is no haul. Not in the traditional sense of a tank anyway. no real way to mount an engine in any way that you'd think

that you'd mount an engine. And because they knew whatever they were going to use to power the thing would need to be more powerful than anything Russia had to offer, that led them to a problem that was not originally in the works. They didn't have an engine for it.

Okay. Yes. That's when a gift landed directly in their hands from the sky itself. And by that I mean, they shot down a German zeppelin and on board were two Mayback 250 horsepower engines. So yeah, we've officially accidentally crashed directly into Rick Ross's Mayback music, baby.

That's what I was going to say is Mayback music in the original form. God, if only it could have been a British engine. We could have had Aston Martin music. You know, it could have been a lot of things. But, uh, all right. I don't think anybody on board is pretending to be a drug dealer when they're actually a prison guard though. Uh, thankfully,

the team of mostly aircraft engineers, able to take these captured engines and adopt them for ground use. But still, the Bat Tank was going to need both engines to hit the projected 11 miles per hour. They thought they would need in order to be successful. The team put their heads together and came up with a design that gave an individual engine to each of the giant forward wheels. I'm looking at the photo of that you sent in. And this is, this thing is just completely inscrutable. Like, I cannot figure out how the fuck it works.

MCSher's first and only tank design. Yeah, I mean, looking at it, the best way I could describe this is, we'll include this as episode art so people can also have an opportunity to examine it. But it effectively looks like there is a very, very primitive machine gun turret that is a cylinder on top of what I can only describe as like a repurposed watering mechanism for a farm field. You know, the ones that run in circles. I don't know exactly what you call those, but like the sort of irrigation wheel thing that one uses to much more easily kind of like transport the irrigator around a field. It looks like that.

It looks like, and the wheel looks incredibly flimsy. Everything about it looks definitely like very, very thin metal. The best way I could describe this is this looks like a highly conceptual sculpture to evoke the concept of tank warfare. in a really like figurative and fantastical way, but not something that would actually, like, if you saw this thing coming over the horizon, you would absolutely be like, okay,

someone got a little too wild on the Leonardo da Vinci sketchbook. Like, it doesn't look like an actual combat vehicle. It looks like to me, not like something from the First World War, but like the world's first tank invented during the U.S. Civil War. Like it looks like the tank version of an ironcloth.

Yeah. If you saw this drawn, you would imagine it could be from the 15th century. If you saw it in person made a metal, you would think mid-19th century. You know that meme? It's just like the person's sticking the stick into the spoke of their own bike and falling over?

It's just that, but it's the Tsar tank falling over. It's like this is a statue called the horrors of war, which is a departure because normally the statues involve, you know, humans, most of whom are nude, looking very sad, dead bodies, etc.

To be fair, the guys inside are almost certainly naked because how hot it gets in that. I was going to say, it's like, no, if this was made out of wood, I think I could convince someone that like, oh, this is like one of those ancient Greek technologies that was used during the Peloponnesian war that was like powered solely by Albanian slaves. Yeah, we can fit so many naked Greek men in the thing. You have to have a bunch of nude conscripts in here due to the heat operating this doomsday device in the sense of like,

not that it's going to cause doomsday, but rather that like, it looks as though it's meant to be an artistic representation of what doomsday would be. It's doomsday for everyone inside and nobody Exactly. The only thing I can possibly, like, that keeps coming to mind is the Schwarzgerate from Gravity's rainbow. Like, this is the perfect V2 rocket, but its guidance system doesn't work, so it has to be piloted by the, by the gorgeous sex slave of the German commanders. Why do you think that they enlisted me as a tank criminal? I had no choice. Or I would say is like in the way that, you know, Picasso's Gernica is like a representation of the horrors of the bombing of Gernica. This is like a representation of the horrors of millions of guys called Igor.

dying in Slovenia. Basically, this is like, yeah, to replicate the Garneka experience, instead of it being the Gustapo, it would have to be a sort of steampunk militia arrests the sculptor who made them, and they'll say, did you make this? And he'll respond, no, you did. It's a little Picasso history for you, you know, just writ for non-sum Picasso. I'm Pabloing it up here. Like I was saying, there was one engine per giant wheel, and they would be powered separately.

And the way this is rigged together is impressive, but also has so many failure points. So the engines weren't directly connected to the giant wheels. Instead, each engine turned a rail car wheel, which was then pushed down by a railway carriage spring until it touched the wooden cover of the big wheel. The car wheel then transferred the power from the engine to the big running wheel by turning in the opposite direction. Instead of having like a ground vehicle for war, we have a strange, confused love child between a train and an airship.

This is basically like a massively lifted Toyota Tersel. I would say that Toyota's probably more reliable. Part of this weird design was actually safety. The repurpose Zeppelin engines constantly overheated, which isn't surprising is they're clearly not meant to do this new job. So the idea was that if the engine began overheating, the drive wheels would pop off. of it, stopping the engines and making sure they wouldn't seize up and break themselves when

they overheated. I hate being selected to pilot the Imperial Russian Warfare homonculus. Also, it's like, yeah, it makes sense that the Zeppelin engine wouldn't be up to this house because the Zeppelin engine was meant to power the dainty little fan on the back of the huge balloon, as opposed to something that actually requires enough torque to drive by having wheels on the ground. That brings us to wheels on the ground, because that, we have not addressed the tiny baby wheel at the back of the thing yet. We haven't, no. That was how it was steered.

So it's like a rudder? Yes, it was a catch-all rotor, stabilizer, the lone movable piece in the entire Bat Tank drive system. Obviously, this is really going to bite them in the ass, but on paper, the team's idea made a little sense, at least within the context of wanting to build something that has cartoonishly huge wheels. They knew that the forward wheels, due to their size and weight and armor, having all the weapons all around them and holding up that huge central turret, would never be able

to move without breaking. Building a pivot point on something so large would create a failure point that had a failure rate of about 100%. So they're like, okay, baby wheel does all the turning and stabilizing. It's really low to the ground. It should be fine. With that, let's get to the weapons it was supposed to carry. Before we move on to the weapons,

I, you know, Lennon did a lot of things, but the Bolshevik Revolution really stole from us the idea of Zarniglas II whipping shitties in this to like, with sipping on some syrup by 36 Mafia, edit over it. You try to whip precisely one shitty,

you just fall over and explode. You think it's annoying to back up a truck with a trailer attached to it. Can you imagine trying to back this thing up? Can you imagine trying to ground guide this thing? I think there's a song about that. Oh, what's the song, Joe? Back that thing up.

Except, you know, don't repeat the lyrics. I feel as though there's other points of comparison we could make here that don't require us to cite juvenile lyrics given all of our vulnerabilities to sunburn. Probably not a good idea. Our calcacity. Well, I mean, you built the pyramids, but still. But that, let's talk about the weapons it was supposed to carry. It would carry repurposed four-pounder naval cannons.

one on each side of the outside wheel sponsens, a pile of machine guns sticking out from just about everywhere else, including its top turret, its bottom turret, and I assume it's switch turret. And it would require a crew of 10 men to operate and drive everything, which, admittedly, is not the dumbest crew size in World War I. So that's one thing that other people have gotten much worse than the Russians. Though, because of the way that the tank was shaped,

in order to just get inside of the thing, The crew would have to walk up the back of the tank and crawl inside when they're already 25 feet off the ground. So, hypothetically, if this thing was to see combat and it doesn't, and you would have to like get out real fast, you just jump off and die. Like, you just immediately jump off and die. I like that in proud Russian tradition,

they don't give a single fuck about the crew, but of their vehicles. By August of 1915, the best. That tank was officially ready for testing and was brought out to some nearby woods outside of where it was birthed. Its first and arguably only obstacle was known as a corduroy road, which rather than just a road full of shitty pants, it was a road made out of logs, right? It does really well at this, actually. It blasts right over them. No problem.

It doesn't get going as fast as it should. Like, it's supposed to go like 11 miles per hour. It goes like six. But okay, that can be worked on, right? We can try to work on our strange, cobbled together power plant. Afterwards, it's time to leave the corduroy road and prove it could cross the dirt and sticks and terrain of the woods. It's also slightly muddy.

Nothing that should really cause any concern, especially when you think of how it's planned to be used, right? About that. This is where the fatal flaw of the tank rears its ugly three-wheeled head, weight distribution. So as the tank gunned it, its two engines only go, you know, so fast. Its first two wheels did exactly what they were supposed to. Clear the terrain without a problem. And then the third wheel leaves the road, hits the mud, and immediately gets stuck.

Now, we don't know the actual weight distribution for the bat tank. None of those details remain. But someone much smarter than me kind of did what math they could with the weights and dimensions and everything and came up with the number. of at least 30% of the vehicle's total weight was loaded only on the lone rear wheel, which, remember, look how small it is. This is why I asked about the engine earlier on. Are the two engines mounted within that shaft that connects the two wheels?

Each engine is mounted directly next to one of the big outside wheels. Okay, so pretty much if this gets stuck and you can't stop the engine in time, the whole thing will just rotate over. That would be funnier than what happens, admittedly. That would be really cool. Like if you're riding a bicycle really fast and only jack on the front brake. Defeating the Tsar tyke with the tactical stick in the spokes. If it ever sees the battlefield, I could seriously see that that being something someone tries.

I mean, it does kind of work later on. Like in World War II and whatnot, people jam logs into tracks to stop tanks. This just makes it a giant glowing red target. Now, this would have been a problem, this weight distribution, would have been a problem no matter what. But the engineers were also operating under the idea that the vehicles and all of its abilities, its power ratio, and all that was just fine for a tank that weighed 40 tons and a combined horsepower of 500.

Small problem, though, tank didn't weigh 40 tons by the time it was completed. It weighed 60. 60 tons is not that far off from the weight of, I mean, Abrams is what, 70 tons? 75. Combat loaded. Modern battle tanks are like in the 30 to 40 ton range. Well, I mean, a modern main battle tank,

normally they're smaller than Abrams, of course, but they're anywhere from 40 to 50. Nowadays, with electronics and combat loads and everything, they creep up a little bit more. But rather than total weight being the problem here, It was the weight distribution that killed the bat tank because that tiny rear wheel all on its own is carrying 30% of the vehicle's total weight. And that rear wheel has no propulsion of its own given to the fact that the two engines are both attached directly to the big ass front wheels. This means as soon as the rear wheel hit soft ground, it stopped acting like a wheel and acted a whole lot more like a fucking tent steak.

So it gets stuck in the mud, and despite all of the power of the two front wheels generating, if they could go faster, they'd be spinning in the mud or whatever, but they can't pull out its ass. The tank is totally and completely stuck in the mud, and since it's the biggest goddamn thing anybody had ever built on land, they had no way to get it unstuck. The engineers who built the monstrosity tried to free it, but after digging around and trying to work it free for several hours. They just kind of gave up. They left some guards watching over it and would decide to come back later. And Lebedenko would come back multiple times trying to get the thing free. But they just kept failing. And then, of course, Russia collapses in on itself. Money going to this

project immediately dries up. And there's no real official end to the Bat Tank project. There's just more of an official end to the government in general. So everybody just kind of goes their separate ways. The tank was left in the mud completely stuck and forgotten. At least for several years until the Russian Revolution. And some dudes saw the 60-ton freak machine sitting in the woods like it was a real-life loot box and scrapped it out. I feel like if I found this in the woods, I would assume it was something from like Michael Crichton's sphere that is actually 500,000 years old that came from a different dimension. What is this profane machination? We can't take it apart. will upset the machine guns.

I'm really tired of, like, all I wanted to do is cut firewood, and these motherfuckers are dropping magical realism into my life. But not like Murakami magical realism, because the tank does have any sexual hangups. No, no, no, it's, it's, it's a Spanish gallion preserved in the jungle, and there's also some sexual hangups. Lebedenko escapes Russia, moves to the United States, and just kind of vanishes from history. The rest of the guys stick around in Russia for a while, but nobody's thinking about this tank anymore. And then it dies. The Tsar tank has remained a curiosity and for good reason.

Just look at the goddamn thing. It fully crosses into the so stupid it rules zone. And it's lived on in video games like World of Tanks and Toy Soldiers, though it's very funny that the monster was never added to the game Battlefield 1. Battlefield's one attempt to make a World War I game. Because it was so large and unrealistic to be used, Game Debs believed it would break the game entirely. which is fun when you remember that

this is the Battlefield franchise where nothing has ever been realistic for generations and they made a World War I game chock full of experimental machine guns. Even they looked at this fucking thing and we're like, nope. One of my favorite genres of online entertainment is when they use

3D software to basically model the physics of improbable things. For example, what would happen dropping a pallet of like a pallet of plywood on a car in different gravity, moon gravity, Earth, gravity, Mars, gravity, Jupiter gravity, keeps getting funnier, the gravity keeps getting stronger and stronger.

And when it finally gets to sun gravity, by the time the simulation starts before anything can drop, the car just crushes itself. And you always laugh. It's like Tom Walker playing GTA with the cars all set to 9-999. Like, it's always funny. And to me, in the spirit of that, being able to recreate, like, with accurate sort of materials and physics, what it would be like to have this thing at scale trying to attack a World War I trench line with all.

of the attendant fortifications, barbed wire, no man's land, minefields, etc. I think seeing that, even if it wasn't a playable game, even it was just a visual simulation, would be insanely funny. It would be one of the funniest things you could ever do. Now, I'm not a 3D artist or a game dev,

but it would be very funny. The only two groups of people who could have created this machine were the Imperial Russians in 1915 or a father-son duo from Iowa on Robot Wars? for sure, robot wars, except it would just have like a giant wedge as a weapon. No, it's like, no, it would be this and then there would be a potato gun on top.

Obviously, it's got to be a potato gun, which means a person has to be up there with a lighter and a can of hairspray. Fuck, yeah. I'm happy to see that Tom's people are having representation. Yeah, exactly. On the top of the apex of the pyramid with a potato, it doesn't get more Irish supremacist than that. That's why the nose fell off the sphinx.

You all were shooting at it with potato guns. Yeah. No, because the Irish hate Armenians. No. The nose fell off the Swiss because it got glassed by the Irish. They had to build an enormous fine glass and a catapult to hit it in the face. As we know, obviously from the wonderful Ridley Scott film is because Napoleon shot at it with a cannon. Yep.

Well, he was aiming for the feet because he needed to stop being horny and focus on his dog. What a fucking terrible movie that was. Anyway, the end. That has been the saga. of the Tsar tank. But fellas, we do a thing on this show questions from the Legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question, you can support us on Patreon at any level. You'll have access to our Patreon. You can ask us through Patreon messages or the Discord, which you'll also have access to

and there's a dedicated channel in it. Today's question is, what prehistoric animal do you think would taste the best? Oh, yes. Okay, I'm going to add some caveats to this. You have to give me the preparation of which you would prepare.

this animal. Are we limited to specifically like Jurassic and Triassic era or can it be just an animal that is extinct? I'll open the floor up here. I will say extinct animal, but nothing that's gone extinct in like the last 100 years. Okay. So for those

who don't know, during the age of exploration, a lot of the royal zoological or biological society required two living specimens to be brought back to the UK, to be classified, to be given a name, and to be entered essentially into the registry of animals.

There was a small problem when ships started to go around the Horn of Africa and get to Madagascar. They kept capturing turtles and they realized they tasted so good that they kept eating them. And it literally took years for them to classify these animals because they kept fucking eating them. Did they taste good or were these just sailors who were sick of eating like bread, like stale bread. Apparently it tasted like incredible. The Ambrosia turtle. But I'm like,

I would spatchcock and bro the dodo. I think that would be cool. I mean, yeah, dodo's obviously famously tasted so good. They all got eaten. So, you know, also their eggs got eaten by rats, but. I'm going to open up and I'm going to say the obvious one here. I'm going to fry a Velociraptor. Like they're close enough to chicken. You know, you might just have like the forbidden fried chicken.

Any predator, any carnivore tends to taste pretty bad, no matter what you do with the meat. You want herbivores. You want things like that. To that effect, I don't know if you're familiar with the lead sickness. It is a prehistoric fish. It is fucking gigantic. It basically looks like, it looks like a fat sardine, but it's 20 meters long. That, I bet that would taste.

That's probably got the perfect marbling. I bet that would taste so good. Yeah, absolutely. how did this conversation make me hungry? Maybe like a woolly mammoth. That'd be interesting. I found an image of the lead sichter's compared to a human and just take a look at how gigantic this goddamn fish. Normally when you see something like that, it's a whale.

You know, it's a mediating fish. It's a shark, whatever. But no, this is just, it's just they had everything was bigger back then. Give me the monster mommy tuna. A huge, huge, huge halib. Imagine a halibut the size of a blue whale, basically. And that was a normal day in the Jurassic. Okay, but how do you catch it in this situation?

Like catching a dodo, catching a turtle, catching a, I guess I have to explain how I'm going to catch a philosopher after two. I don't know. I assume I challenge it to one-on-one combat. My prehistoric coastal community is really good at tug of war, and we've developed a huge net. And so we're just going to get this thing caught in the net,

and then everyone's going to pull it to land, and then we're going to feast and build our homes out of its bones, apparently. Hell yeah. Well, now that I'm hungry, fellas, I believe that we've done a podcast. If you like podcasts and you like this podcast, it's the only one that I host and you can see us live on May 29th at the Rich Mix in London.

Tickets are available. We're going to have merch there. We're going to have shirts, books, pins. If you can't make it, that's great, unfortunate. But you can still stream it with video on demand so you can watch it whenever is, you know, good for you. And the links will be in the show notes. have been for about the last two months. I am the co-host and producer of Trash Future,

a podcast about the tech industry being wonderful and not bad in any way. I'm also involved with the production as the executive producer of Kill James Bond and No Gods No Mayors. Also, my friend Hussein Kisvani does a show called 10K Post. He should listen to that as well. And I am in a band called Second Homes. Our first album, Find a Way to Hate It is available on band camp for not just pre-sale, but sale now you can purchase it. And you can also stream it for free if you want to just listen to it. Bloodwork show about the economy of violence. If you want to learn how everything became a mall, listen to that. Neat Skin Show about the history of everything told you, the history of tattooing.

I have some books available on Beneatskinshop.com. And if you are London-based and need a podcast studio or a creative studio to use, send me a message or email. I have my own studio. Like I said, this is the only show that I host. You can support us on Patreon. you can get our entire bat catalog and everything in it for $5 as well as every regular episode a week early. First dibs on live show tickets and merch and one succulent slice of gigantic monster tuna that Nate and his sea community has pulled ashore.

Have you ever heard of fish leather? We're going to make it. That's right. Only here on this podcast. I was creating prehistoric Hetty Slimon jeans. out of face leather. Yeah, unfortunately, our community, they're all genetically related to me,

so none of us have the body profile of what you need to wear Eddie Slaman jeans. And until next time, if you don't have tracks, don't let that stop you from building a tank in the woods. Insulated with hair. Why not?