A landship is a large vehicle that travels on land. Its name distinguishes it from those which travel on or through other mediums such as conventional ships, airships, and spaceships.
Military
Tanks
Origins The British Landship Committee formed during World War I to develop armored vehicles for use in trench warfare. The British proposed building "landships," super-heavy tanks capable of crossing the trench systems of the Western Front. The committee originated from the armored car division of the Royal Naval Air Service. It gained the notable support of Winston Churchill.
The tank was originally referred to as the landship, owing to the continuous development from the Landship Committee. The concept of a 1,000-ton armored, fighting machine on land quickly became too impractical and too costly for it to be realistically conceived. As such, the landship project proposed a smaller vehicle. The first conceptual tank prototype was for a 300-ton vehicle that would be made by suspending a "sort of Crystal Palace body" between three enormous wheels, allegedly inspired by the Great Wheel at Earls Court in London. Six of these 'Big Wheel' landships were eventually commissioned. However, even at a revised weight, 300 tons was considered impractical given the technology present, but the influence of the big wheel would persist in the "creeping grip" tracks of the first tanks, which were wrapped around the entire body of the machine.
Mark I tank The constant revision eventually led to the creation of the first tank. The Mark I and later variations were smaller than the initial behemoths engineers envisioned but still used naval guns, including the QF 6-pounder Hotchkiss, later shortened to the QF 6-pounder guns.
Super-heavy tank Super-heavy tanks are massive tanks, concepts of which led to gargantuan vehicles akin to naval warships. Super-heavy tanks such as the British TOG 2 and the Soviet T-42 were designed with a similar layout as naval battleships, albeit on a smaller scale.
T-35
The T-35 was a Soviet multi-turreted heavy tank. Nicknamed the "Land Battleship," it continues to be one of few armored historical vehicles named as such. Most of them were captured in late June 1941 by the Germans.
Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus The Maus was a German super-heavy tank from the 2nd World War, weighing in at 188 tons. It was the heaviest tank ever built. Although 141 were ordered, only one finished prototype and one partially finished prototype were in working order by the end of the war due to the Allies bombing the only factory capable of producing the tank.
Landkreuzer P.1000 The Landkreuzer P.1000 was a super-heavy tank designed by Edward Grote for Nazi Germany in 1942. If completed, the P.1000 would have been 35 meters (115 feet) long and 14 meters (46 feet) wide, with a weight of ranging from 800 to 1,000 tons depending on the variant. The latest variant would have been armed with twin 28 cm guns housed in a central turret and two turrets with twin 12.8 cm cannons mounted towards the front of the hull.
Other
Siege towers
Siege towers were ancient forms of superheavy ground vehicles and siege engines that grew in prominence during the ancient world right up to the Renaissance. They required dozens of men or beasts of burden to move their bulk. They were exceptionally tall, had multiple decks, staircases and ladders, and some were armed internally with emplaced weapons such as ballistas, catapults or onagers and cannons. The largest of them all was the ancient Helepolis, a superheavy siege tower from ancient Greece that was 40 meters tall, 20 meters wide, 160 tons in weight and required a crew of 3,400 men. By definition, siege towers were effectively the medieval equivalent of a ground-based attack transport troopship.
Armoured trains Even though they are technically a conglomeration of individual vehicles, armoured trains are often the closest one would get to a modern landship design. Armoured trains are often extraordinarily fast for their size and commonly measure over a hundred meters long carrying hundreds of passengers. Likewise, armoured trains are incredibly variable and often used as a mobile headquarters on rails. They are powerful enough to mount naval weapons, with many railroad guns being comparable to actual naval calibers. Like ships, the majority of armoured trains were often christened with a name. Currently, the only country utilizing armoured trains in the modern era is Russia, where it is used more akin to a land-base landing ship on rails as of December 2023.
Schwerer Gustav
Schwerer Gustav was a German super-heavy railway gun developed in the late 1930s. It was the largest caliber rifled weapon ever used in combat and, in terms of overall weight, the heaviest mobile artillery piece ever built. With a length of 47.3 meters (155 feet, 2 inches), a width of 7.1 meters (23 feet, 4 inches) and a height of 11.6 meters (38 feet, 1 inch), the Schwerer Gustav weighed 1,350 tonnes. The gun's massive size required its own diesel-powered generator, a special railway track and an oversized crew of 2,750 (250 to assemble and fire the gun in 3 days and 2,500 to lay the tracks). By definition, the Schwerer Gustav would have qualified as a landship, albeit one limited to rails.
Zubr-class LCAC Extremely large hovercraft such as the Zubr-class LCAC used by both the Russian Navy and the PLAN could also technically cover some aspect of landship design by factor of it being also capable of traversing overland as a partial-terrestrial vehicle. At over 50 meters long with a max tonnage weight of 555 tons, it is the closest one could get to a modern military landcraft, although it is more of an amphibious hovership than anything else.
Civilian The vast majority of the world's largest terrestrial vehicles come from the engineering and mining sector. As their role involves the collection of vast underground resources in large bulk, their physical dimensions dramatically increased to accommodate the transferral of those materials and easily dwarf any other ground vehicles by several orders of magnitude. These vehicles listed are:
Antarctic Snow Cruiser An unsuccessful vehicle designed to explore Antarctica.
Bucket-wheel excavators
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