Tank Goodness

The Landkreuzer P-1000 Ratte, planned by Nazi Germany in World War II but never put into production.

"Though I charge through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am driving a house-sized mass of fuck you."

— Anonymous Mammoth Tank crewman, Tiberium Wars

In large modern warfare engagements, infantry may as well be Cannon Fodder. You want something that can Hold the Line. Something with a BFG and/or More Dakka, crawler treads and (literal) tonnes of armor. You want a tank.

Real Life tanks have large cannons to take on other tanks and fortifications, and (usually) secondary weapons to deal with infantry or aircraft. In fiction and reality, other tanks may use anti-infantry or anti-aircraft weapons instead of cannons.^note These do exist in Real Life, but they're not called tanks. To make the distinction even more difficult, many of these are based on existing tank chassis, so they look like tanks that have had their turrets swapped out. Cue journalists and the general public calling them "tanks" anyway. The tank's size and mobility may also be used as a weapon to crush people, cars, and walls. The armor is thick enough to stop small arms fire, most of it in the front, with the weakest areas being the rear, bottom and top. Expect enemies to take advantage of this for massive damage.

Of course, the above paragraph refers to tanks around the size of today's main battle tanks. Sometimes that's not enough. They need to be bigger! Big enough to crush the other tanks! And carry loads of weapons! While racing donuts around them! And the armor is able to withstand Martian Death rays! And it has NBC protection! It's a FLIPPING BUNKER ON TRACKS. Oh, and the wheels on the tracks are equipped with armored gun pods.

Other armored fighting vehicles, like armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery and tank destroyers may be called tanks. They're not. Don't be fooled! Likewise, don't listen to the deranged lunatics who keep wanting to put legs on them. Ridiculously impractical, that.

Related to Cool Car, Cool Bike, Cool Train, Base on Wheels, and other vehicle/warfare tropes—this is basically Cool Tank. Has nothing to do with Shorttank, which makes you say "tank goodness" in a completely different way. Also has nothing to do with playing a damage-sponge character in an MMORPG, or with the oxygen storage unit strapped to the back of a SCUBA diver.^note Well, maybe this trope has a little to do with these things: tanks in MMORPGs are named after this kind of tank, because they are heavily armoured characters who can soak up a lot of damage while also dishing it out; as for the kind of tank that holds gas or liquid — that is actually the source of the term as used in this trope, odd as it may seem! When the first practical tanks were being developed around the time of World War I, they were so called in documentation as a code term, to confuse the enemy and throw any spies off the track; for one reason or another, the code name just stuck. They might just as easily have ended up with the admittedly cooler name of "land-ships."

For armed tank-like vehicles, which have legs instead of good ol' treads, see Walking Tank. For ones which float, see Hover Tank. For ones that can travel underground, see Drill Tank. When the military geniuses of the world finally realize there is no firepower like battleship firepower, one may witnesses the ultimate tanks: Land Battleships. For when things in video games (such as people) act like tanks when they shouldn't, see Tank Controls. Sapient Tanks can think for themselves.

When tanks are useless in media, see Tanks for Nothing. For inaccuracies with armoured vehicles, historical and otherwise, see Tanks, but No Tanks. For information on tanks and other armored vehicles, see Armored Fighting Vehicles.

If you looked up Mechanized Infantry and expected to see a giant robot with a gun, try looking up Real Robot instead. For tank engines like in Thomas & Friends, see Cool Train.

Although the "tank" class/role in video games gets its name from the role of literal tanks, they have nothing to do with this trope.

By the way, they are called "tanks" because when the British were first developing them in World War I, they were called water carriers or water "tanks", in an attempt at secrecy.

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Example subpages:

• Video Games
• Real Life

Other examples:

Anime & Manga

• Guntanks from Mobile Suit Gundam were the secret weapons of the earth forces, more or less, and bridged the gap between mobile suits and mobile armor. Guntank descendants also pop up in Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (Guntank II), Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn (Loto) and Mobile Suit Gundam F91 (Guntank R44).
  • Gundam also uses Land Battleships in many continuities.
  • Oh, and we can't forget the Magella Attack, a tank with a turret (Magella Top) that can detach and become a flying hovercraft.
  • Or wielded as an anti-armor cannon by a mobile suit.
  • Zeon also rigged together wrecked Zakus and Magella Botton chassis to form the Zaku Tank. Sometimes just used as a construction machine, sometimes as an actual fighting vehicle.
  • Don't forget the good ol' Type 61, with its double 150/155mm cannons, in MS Igloo 2, King of Ground battles.
    • In fact, despite the shows' natural focus on the titular Humongous Mecha, and their impact for the space battles, up to 80% of all land battles were won by the good ol' 61, even if that fact gets pretty seldom mentioned. This is in part because the Mobile Suit Gundam anime itself depicts about 3.5 out of the 12 months of the One Year War, and the last two months of the war were fought mostly in space. The majority of the ground combat had already happened. Even the most important land battle depicted in the anime, Operation Odessa, focuses almost entirely on the Gundam while ignoring the six thousand Type 61 tanks that were the bulk of the ground forces' firepower.
  • Speaking of Igloo, the Hidolfr pretty much epitomizes the top quote from this page. Just one of these 220 Metric ton, super-heavy-armored, semi-transforming behemoths with a top speed of 110km/hr is a match for about six Zakus and their artillery support.
  • In the Alternate Universes, we have the Tragos (Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, also a Hover Tank, though if necessary it can detach its hover skirt and transform into a humanoid mobile suit), Daughtress Tank (Gundam X), ZuOOT/GaZuOOT (which are Transforming Mecha, but their mobile suit mode has no discernible advantage over tank mode) and, Linear Tank (with its hexagonal INNER barrel; railguns don't need rifling, after all), and in a sense, the BuCUE and LaGOWE (basically Walking Tanks, aside from the fact that they have a dog-like head carrying a beam saber in its "mouth") (all from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED) and Union Realdo Hover Tank (Mobile Suit Gundam 00).
    • The Earth Alliance's Zamza-Za Mobile Armor from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny. The Gells-Ghe (the half-spider/half Strike Dagger) and one of the Destroy's forms count as well.
• The minitank Bonaparte from Masamune Shirow's Dominion Tank Police manga is a partial Aversion. The whole police force uses tanks and the Bonaparte is the smallest one, and has the lightest weaponry. But it pulls its share of the workload partially because of its small size (it can go places the others cannot), and because its driver is a little crazed.
  • Bonaparte was made from the salvaged remains of a larger tank, Squad Leader Britain's Tank Special. It was the only tank on the force made from steel instead of bioplastic.
  • The driver was a perfectly adequate fella, please-and-thank-you, it's the commander who was out of her gourd.
• Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross (a.k.a. the "Masters" arc of Robotech) had the Spartas Hovertanks, which could transform into Humongous Mecha and Walking Tank modes.
• Those Who Hunt Elves has a tank possessed by the spirit of a cat. Whole towns are devastated when it spots a mouse.
• Pumpkin Scissors has a number of tanks. Too bad none of them can stand up to one guy and his handgun...
• Space Thunder Kids shows that one can never have enough tanks. Now to destroy them to victory!
• Desert Punk features the massive tank Fire Dragon Kong. It was the most dangerous machine in the desert, but Desert Punk managed to beat it by shooting a rock structure down on it, then the Machine Gun Brothers shot it until they hit the gas tank and it exploded. Until then, it was pretty freaking deadly.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • During Mustang's coup d'etat, one of the military men, while commenting on the opposition's fighting power, remarks that it's not like they have tanks. Guess what shows up a few panels later. Turns out that the Briggs soldiers disassembled a tank, then smuggled all the parts into Central and reassembled it by hand.
  • Maj. General Armstrong used a tank to repel Sloth, driving it into a freight elevator, then down a narrow corridor, nearly crushing the Elrics in the process.
• At the beginning of Venus Wars, Ishtar invades the Aphrodian capital, Io, using parachuting Superheavy tanks.
• Future War 198X has an awesome (and fairly accurate) huge tank battles on the North German Plains.
• In later light novels of The Familiar of Zero, Saito obtains a King Tiger II tank from second world war.
• In the Ah! My Goddess manga, Skuld builds a tank for a rubber band fight.
• The Third: The Girl with the Blue Eye features Bogie, a cool tank designed for desert travel, with an onboard A.I. and More Dakka than you can shake a stick at.
  • And storage space for a Powered Armor.
• Joshiraku may be a slice of life show about rakugo performers, but in the opening credits the main characters are shown riding on top of a Type 61 tank.
• Girls und Panzer is all about high-school girls who drive tanks, in particular those made during World War II. The school team consists of a Panzer IV, a Pz.38(t), M3 Lee, a StuG-III, and Type 89 I-Go. Other schools have Churchills, Matildas, Shermans, Tigers, Panzer III, T-34/76, T-34-85, IS-2, KV-2, Elefant, JagdTiger, Panther, and Kuromorimine takes the cake with a goddamned Maus. The Improbably Female Cast is justified by the fact that in the world where the series takes place, driving tanks is considered a "womanly" martial art.

Comic Books

• The vehicle that gives Tank Girl her name.
• Y: The Last Man. After Alter's first attempt to seize the biohazard suite is foiled due to Russian sniper Natalya, the next time she shows up her Amazon Brigade is driving stolen M1 Abrams tanks.
• Tank Vixens, although the tanks mostly served as a prop for weaponized Fanservice.
• The Silver Age DC Universe's Haunted Tank. The first version involved a World War II tank haunted by its commander's ancestor, Confederate General J.E.B Stuart, as penance for supporting slavery. This naturally causes occasional friction in the crew, since the tank's gunner is black. The Haunted Tank recently reappeared in a Vertigo series set in modern Iraq. The general's new descendant is this Abrams tank's commander, who is descended from Stuart and one of his slaves.
• Garth Ennis's War Stories and Battlefields stories featured a couple of tank stories. The very first, "Johann's Tiger", featured a German commander desperately fleeing west to surrender to the Americans while avoiding Russian and German patrols. And a couple of Battlefields stories centred on the crew of a Churchill (and later, a Firefly) tank and their Geordie commander.
• The Batmobile in The Dark Knight Returns. Batman even comments that only something not of this world could ever hope of damaging it.
• One of Calvin's daydreams has him doodle a tank on his homework and blow up his school. His rampage ends when Miss Wormwood shows up, takes away his paper and gives him detention (in the doodle she's a giant monster that is strong enough to resist the tank's cannon fire).
• The Far Side: Psycho 3; the panel shows Norman driving a tank through the bathroom door.
• In Preacher, Herr Starrr uses the resources of The Grail to commandeer a US tank battalion as part of his operation to capture Jesse Custer and simultaneously fend off the Saint of Killers. While Starr definitely approves of the tanks, declaring that the mere sight of them gives him a hard on, they're just as helpless and ineffectual as anything else that tries to fight with the Saint.
• A tank is featured on the cover of the very first issue of the very first G.I. Joe comic book series, and the MOBAT was the center of the plot of issue #5. Other iconic tanks featured include the Joes' Mauler and Cobra's HISS series; later years of the original series introduced more fanciful models.
• Judge Dredd: Justice Department tanks are friggin' huge. They're rarely used outside of military conflicts however, since the Judges are still primarily a police force.
• The Krawls from The Red Star are tanks deployed by dropships. They pack enormous fire with their heavy main cannon and sponson-mounted autocannons. Additionally, they double as artillery with their mounted multi-missile launchers.
• In DC One Million, Vandal Savage brings out his World War II-era Blitz Engines, these are giant tanks powerful enough to dominate contemporary militaries. Though the Martian Manhunter quickly brings them down.
• Continuing with DC are the War Wheels, the originals are Nazi superweapons with Nigh-Invulnerable armour and massive sponson cannons in World War 2 and were used against Blackhawk. In modern times, S.H.A.D.E uses a new type of War Wheel that have all the abilities of the originals and can be remotely controlled, have a series of extra turret cannons and can house an army of G.I. Robots.
• Tintin: In The Calculus Affair, Tintin and Captain Haddock hijack a Bordurian tank while escaping the country with Professor Calculus.

Fan Works

• Considering the page quote, it should come as no surprise that badass tanks are common in Tiberium Wars. Tanks are depicted fairly realistically, with the interior of the tanks being cramped, noisy, and hot, and realistic tank tactics being used. The interior of the Mammoth Tanks are described as being more spacious, but still loud and uncomfortable.
• Despite the rise of Mecha and Engels, tanks are still viable and effective in Aeon Entelechy Evangelion, and the tank crews joke about various disadvantages of the mecha and boast about the advantages of the tanks.
• Here We Go Again! brings the US Marines' M1A1 Abrams tanks into the story of Gate. The 2nd Tank Battalion, Charlie Company a.k.a "The Four Horsemen" often brings additional firepower to Itami's Recon Team and are major force multipliers into fights that were already a Curb-Stomp Battle for the JSDF in canon. Especially when the titular tank, 'Here We Go Again' goes up against the flame dragon, lives to tell the tale and even gets badass claw marks scarred into its hull for all to see!
• Under the Bridge has The Exterminator, a glue-shooting tank-like vehicle fashioned out of a 10" Dalek toy. Its name is somewhat ironic, considering it was built and is operated by small rodents.
• In Worldwar: War of Equals, The Race's landcruisers are not so tough facing 21st century tanks. While several models of tanks such as the Al-Khalid and the Leopard 2 work just fine against them, some tanks such as the Argentinian TAM tank requires an armor upgrade to fight them more equally.
• In Pink Alert 3, most Soviet Pony Republic Commanders place great emphasis on their many tough and highly capable armored fighting vehicles. While the Equestrian Alliance's tanks have all kinds of nifty special tricks and the Aquestrian Empire's amphibious mecha armies look plain awesome, in a traditional armoured slugging match the Soviets can be relied upon for coming out on top.
• Last Rights has a paragraph-long Infodump describing the Starfleet T-204 Hayes main battle tanks carried aboard the USS Bajor for the Kobali Prime land war. They're tracked vehicles a little bigger than an M1 Abrams or T-90, but weigh half as much and are powered by a miniature fusion reactor. Armaments are sponson-mounted Type V phasers (shuttlecraft-grade) and a phaser minigun on the turret, with the main gun being a 120mm coilgun that will put a bunker-buster through eight meters of ferrocrete. The author's notes spoke disparagingly of the Spider Tanks and Mini-Mecha used respectively by the Vaadwaur and Voth in the canon game (they're Awesome, but Impractical, as are Hover Tanks), and envisioned something looking like the bastard offpsring of a Russian T-90 and a Leman Russ.
• Drawing on the Mobile Suit Gundam example of the Type 61 above, the 61A3 that serves as the mount of the main Federation characters in A Feddie Story; the story itself is in some ways the chronicle of the last stand of conventional armor against the new Mobile Suit, and often points out that the tanks actually won.
• Beat the Drums of War has a scene where Bajoran Militia infantry are falling back under attack from Iconian Heralds, with the Harbinger leading the Heralds doing some Evil Gloating. He's abruptly Killed Mid-Sentence by a shell from a Bajoran tank that was sitting on a hilltop two kilometers away.
• Fallout: Equestria - Occupational Hazards features the main characters stumbling across and subsequently taking a ten-meter long 81-ton land battleship from the basement of a vehicle testing facility. Mounting a turreted Equestrian Royal Ordinance 76.2mm gun firing 17-pound shells and traveling at the speed of slow, it's not really sugarcoated that they'd found a TOG II, albeit with some upgrades - least of all being a compact nuclear reactor in place of the diesel engine and 20mm autocannons for coaxial and hull secondary armament.
  • Fallout: Equestria - Empty Quiver has the Tank Ghouls, a band of protectors for the town of Maple Station that all operate and own their own tanks. Of the group, there is a Churchill AVRE with a 290mm spigot mortar, a Sherman Firefly with a bulldozer attachment, a Porsche Tiger, and a Type 2 Ka-Mi, an amphibious tank.
• Wonderful (Mazinja): The tanks built by super-villain Squealer are heavily modified: they are equipped with multiple cannons which shoot fireballs and spiked cannonballs, they can turn invisible, rotate thirty-sixty degrees, deploy electrical shields... and some of them are taller than buildings.
• Davion & Davion (Deceased) includes tank forces as a component of all major military forces, ranging from fast hover tanks to the slower tracked units with heavy autocannon and missiles. Marge Pritchard and her tank crew are occasionally a viewpoint.
• Tarkin's Fist: Colonel Loi Cas of the Chinese People's Liberation Army serves as a tank commander of a brigade of T-99g tanks.

Films — Animation

• The animated Korean film Aachi and Ssipak starts out with a tank battle between police and a gang of mutants who drive small one-man tank, motorcycle, roller blade machines.
• In the "Cannon Fodder" segment of Memories, there's an entire city that is effectively one gigantic tank. It sports many, many turrets of all sizes built into its structure and creeps slowly through the desert on treads. The biggest turrets have entire work-crews loading and firing automobile-sized shells but only get off a few shots per day. They appear to be at war with a similar city-tank, though it's never seen on screen.

Films — Live-Action

• Israeli film Lebanon tells the story of an Israeli tank crew during the 1982 Lebanon war. What makes this movie really stand out is its perspective. You see only what the tank crew sees. That means the only window to the outside world is a gunsight. This serves as pure Paranoia Fuel, and in case the viewer is claustrophobic, Nightmare Fuel.
• In Stalingrad, the German unit assaulting the apartment building can't break the stubborn Russian defense—until a squad of panzers show up and start shelling the Russian position inside the building.
• The Russian war film, T-34 has the titular T-34 tanks, as well the German antagonists using their wide array of Panzers. The plot hinges upon a group of imprisoned Soviet tankers being forced to use a recently captured T-34-85 as live targets for a German training program, but instead figuring out a way to use it to escape.
• Star Wars has hovertanks as well as relatively real Humongous Mecha.
  • The Expanded Universe (and Episode 3) has the Juggernaut vehicle, which could be turned into a full-fledged tank just by replacing the wheels (all ten of them) with tracks. It's essentially a slab of metal with guns.
  • The AT-TE of Episode 2 is designed very similarly to a tank despite technically being a mecha, with a low profile, multiple antipersonnel weapons, no real head, and a massively powerful swivel-mounted weapon on top. If you removed the legs and added treads, it would look like a tank. (The cockpit is transparent, but it's Transparisteel.)
  • The TX-225 GAVw "Occupier" combat assault tank in Rogue One is a track-propelled tank designed to operate in tight quarters and urban environments. It has two laser cannons on each side and its powerful engine can transport heavy payloads, such as Kyber crystals in Jedha.
• James Bond himself commandeers one of these in the big chase in GoldenEye
  • The third level from the Licensed Game GoldenEye 007, where you must find a plane in a runway and escape from the dam, also lets you shoot down the heavy machineguns with a tank. (there is also the level based on the movie's chase scene, but it's just a timed level, no chasing occurs)
• When the Batmobile in Batman Begins was first revealed to the world, fan opinion was mixed. Then the movie came out. Gordon wants one.
  Gotham cop: It's a black... tank.
  • Definitely a Shout-Out to Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: The Batmobile is a mix between the armored Tumbler of The Dark Knight Trilogy and classic hot rod Batmobile designs.
  • Justice League (2017) has the "Knightcrawler", an armored Spider Tank designed to explore tunnels. It can crawl walls.
  • Zack Snyder's Justice League introduces the "War Machine" (in Zack Snyder's own words), a tank-like vehicle conceived and operated by Batman, inspired by the Batmobile from The Dark Knight Returns.
• The Beast of War is about a Soviet tank in Afghanistan that becomes separated from the rest of the army. As the lone tank battles through mujahadeen guerrilla attacks, its crew slowly tears itself apart.
• The Sgt. Bilko movie had a hover-tank which didn't work because the hovering tank has no way to stabilize itself against the recoil of its main gun, so firing the gun launched the tank uncontrollably in the opposite direction. They faked it with some fireworks.
  • Of course, the movie ends before the military figures out they've been duped. It's not clear why they can't be satisfied with a hover-APC, as it can simply fly over landmines and Czech hedgehogs.
• In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Sultan of Hatay lends support to the Nazi Grail expedition by providing them with transportation including tanks. The film shows one modified WWI tank, a Mark VIII with a turret dropped on top with the Rule of Cool.
• The Landram was used in the Pilot Movie of the original Battlestar Galactica to save some humans from the Cylon rigged Casino on planet Carolon.
• Rambo used one in Rambo III to play chicken with the Big Bad's gunship.
• Kelly's Heroes features some great tank action. The soldiers have on their side Oddball, a proto-hippie tank commander with three Shermans manned by gypsies. The Shermans provide the backbone of the group's offense along the way to the loot, which is guarded by German Tiger tanks. A big tank battle ensues, but ultimately the final Tiger is just too much to handle, so the soldiers negotiate with the German tank commander to split the loot he's guarding.
• The A-Team movie (as seen in the trailer) involves a battle between a tank and Reaper drones. The tank is is in midair, in the middle of parachuting down. And after they shoot down the aircraft, they fire the tank's cannons to adjust its course and allow for a safe landing. They are flying a tank!
• In Tank, James Garner's character uses a WWII Sherman tank he'd bought and restored to break his son out of prison, then drives it to the Tennessee border to seek a fair trial for his son and others framed by a corrupt Georgia sheriff.
• Captain America: The First Avenger has several examples. Wheeled Hydra tanks powered by Tesseract energy are everywhere, and stolen by Allied troops during the prison break scene to even the playing field. Captain America himself highlights a primary flaw in size escalation when he takes out a comically-oversized three-story tank with the classic Insert Grenade Here.
  • Oddly enough, the massive tank that the Cap blows up is just about the only tank that HYDRA is seen using: all the other armoured vehicles were either repainted FV432 APCs or a bulldozer mock-up.
• Ant-Man. When Hank and Hope are trapped in the Pym facility, Hank reveals that his tank keychain isn't actually a keychain.
• In the 1987 homage/parody Dragnet, Friday assaults the bad guys' headquarters with the police version of this; instead of a gun, the tank sports a battering ram with a smiley-face on it.
• In G.I. Joe: Retaliation Roadblock drives a tank-like dune buggy built by Coulton to battle some Cobra tanks.
• Sahara (1943) (the film with Humphrey Bogart and the remake with James Belushi, not the Clive Cussler novel and its adaptation) has the protagonists using an M-3 Lee to escape from the Nazis overtaking the Allies' battle lines in Africa. It is one of the few advantages that the heroes have on the Hold the Line Last Stand that makes the bulk of the movie.
• Shoot 'Em Up. With every freelance hitman in the city trying to kill the Badass and Baby, Smith puts the baby and his Love Interest inside an M24 Chaffee in a museum. "You'll be safe from gunfire and most explosives."
• Fury (2014) is about an entire armored unit of Sherman Tanks. While that in itself may not sound all that spectacular, this does mark the film debut of an actual Tiger Tank. Not a mockup, not a CG render. A Real Tiger Tank. ^note  The tank itself was donated by the Bovington Tank Museum, and is the only fully operational Tiger Tank in existance.
• Tank Girl. The title character has a tank with an astonishing assortment of accessories as well as a Brain in a Jar controlling it.
• In Boy & the World, the police display some really impressive tanks during a parade downtown. Later in the movie, they put them to good use when they take down a giant red bird.
• Underground: The underground refugees spend their time making weapons to fight the Nazis, believing that World War 2 is still raging above. Their biggest achievement is building a whole tank. In one of the film's iconic scenes, Natalija dances on the tank at Jovan's wedding. The refugees also use the tank as their bomb shelter.
• Becomes the Brick Joke in Life Is Beautiful.
• In Chai Lai Angels: Dangerous Flowers, the heroines have been trapped in a cage by Kong, and the Carnival of Killers and an army of Mooks are closing in. When they do a quick count of their numbers, they realise that Hibiscus is missing. At this point, Hibiscus comes round the corner commanding a tank being driven by Chen, which quickly puts the bad guys to flight.
• The 1995 film adaptation of Richard III updates the setting to an Alternate History 1930's UK, and begins with an Action Prologue of Richard assassinating King Henry VI. Said prologue begins with him ramming a tank into Henry's mansion, quickly emerging from the chaotic rubble and blasting his target in the head.
• Part of Don Camillo's Last Round revolves on Peppone, Brescello's Communist mayor and now candidate to the Parliament and also a partisan during World War II, needing to help a local sharecropper who in 1945 got his hands on an M24 Chaffee (previously captured by the Germans and stuck at a farm during their retreat in 1945) and never reported it to the authorities, and as the sharecropper is now about to be evicted he could face serious consequences. He and Don Camillo (the local priest, who decided to help to protect the sharecropper from his own stupidity) manage to move it where it can be "found"... But not without Peppone shooting the dove statue on the Monument to Peace the Communists had recently built.
  • The sequence was so iconic that when a museum to the Don Camillo movies was built in Brescello the town bought a tank and parked it in front... Though they got the wrong model (an M26 Pershing, which is a much heavier tank).
• Snow and Fire: The World War II Western Front winter battle scenes boast well-known tanks of the era, notably the German Königstiger. The (real) one used for the film belongs to the Saumur tank museum, it is the only one in the world that's still in running condition invokedand is reason enough for World War II tank enthusiasts to watch it (the museum hasn't lent it to any other production since).
• 1941 short film The Tanks Are Coming was a propaganda piece showing some recruits going through tank training at Fort Knox. The idea was to reassure the American public that our tanks are great and there was nothing to worry about—look at them ford a ditch, look at them flatten a taxi cab! This was ironic, since the M2 tanks shown in the film were wholly inadequate to combat against the Germans and had to be replaced with the M4 "Sherman" tank.

Literature

• In the Ack-Ack Macaque stories from Gareth L. Powell, Land Leviathans are giant tanks that look like battleships on tractor treads. With their huge size and smokestacks, they'd appear to be an example of Awesome, but Impractical. However these Land Leviathans come from an alternate Earth that has a much higher technology level than the already very advanced Earth of 2060 AD. Besides having especially strong armour and cannons as well as missile batteries, these tanks have force fields. With all that technology, they easily storm through Earth's armies and are only held back by Dreadnoughts, giant fusion-powered zeppelin battleships that can sometimes take out a careless Land Leviathan with a missile barrage. The final undoing of the Land Leviathans came when the heroes ally with a resistance band from centuries in the future. The rebel mining ship had a uniquely powerful Plasma Cannon-Laser Cutter.
• H. G. Wells laid out the concept of armored vehicles ("landships") in his 1904 short-story "The L.and Ironclads", making this trope Older Than Television, insofar literature is concerned. However, his vehicles differ from the overall concept in that they were more like a mix between armored personnel carriers and Land Battleships.
• The Bolo series in Keith Laumer's stories, especially the Continental Siege Units (the Mark XXXIII's were called Planetary Siege Units). Their firepower is usually given in megatons per second and have an AI far above human level in both intelligence and ethics. And don't even get started on the Planetary Siege Units that are deployed in independent brigades of 24 units each and that each have armaments that let them duel starships!
• David Drake's Hammer's Slammers stories feature the titular mercenary company, whose primary offensive arm are air-cushion Hover Tanks.
• The eponymous tracked Base on Wheels in Michael Moorcock's The Land Leviathan.
• Tramp In Armour by Colin Forbes features the crew of a British Matilda tank who get trapped behind enemy lines in the last days of the Battle of France, and their journey to Dunkirk in order to escape. An excellent representation of armored warfare. The Matilda's limitations are thoroughly explored, but thanks to the way her crew fight her, she remains a thoroughly awesome weapon.
• Discworld featured a steam tank of sorts in Small Gods — notably, because its existence was enough to shift the balance of power and change history, Lu Tze of the History Monks sabotaged its construction.
• John Ringo's Legacy of the Aldenata features upgraded modern tanks by the bucketful, as well as totally new designs like the Tiger IIIs based on alien tech from Watch on the Rhine.
• Averted in the Starfist military sci-fi series, thanks to the development of highly effective and extremely light man-portable anti-armor weapons making heavily armored vehicles obsolete. This actually drives the plot of one of the novels - a megalomaniac manages to conquer a world with tanks, which nobody has seen for literally centuries, and the anti-armor weapons are now museum pieces. The military is forced to use the museum pieces to manufacture new copies, and have to have history professors instruct the Marines in their use. They do put a permanent order to maintain the anti-armor capability as well. How precisely these weapons are supposed to be effective when you're engaging a combined arms force where the tanks are firing from multiple kilometers away is not addressed.
• Robert A. Heinlein:
  • If This Goes On— has these. They are sort of "landships". To get an idea of the "landships", think of a WW2 battleship that goes overland like a tank.
  • The Puppet Masters has amphibious tanks or "mud turtles".
• The Draka Hond tank is the king of the battlefield in the Eurasian War, and the Draka produce them in Soviet Union-like numbers from their massive transcontinental empire.
• The Sovremenyy. the Russian jaggernaut (ice cruiser) rumbling across the south polar plains in Swedish dieselpunk novel Iskriget.
• Fyodor Berezin is in love with this trope. As an example, the modern Soviet tanks from an alternate reality in his Red Stars duology (where the USSR dominates the world) are four-tracked monstrocities with huge cannons. This is explained by the fact that USSR struck first in World War II, destroying Germany's military-industrial complex instead of the Soviet one, allowing factories to keep building heavier and heavier tanks, like KV-3, and KV-4 (for reference, the Real Life KV-2 was armed with a howitzer cannon and 5 of these obliterated over 20 German tanks in one battle).
  • Berezin's Huge Black Ship series. Picture a Hover Tank called a Sow (AKA Battle Mountain): powered by several nuclear reactors, four hundred meters in length, with its main guns having a 1.5 m caliber, plus a lot of smaller guns. The second book also introduces a 5-ton monstrosity with a six-barreled 152 mm rapid-fire gun. These smaller tanks are called Piglets, since they're actually carried into battle by the above-mentioned Sow.
• While this seems to be the case with the Race landcruisers in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series, they're no more (and probably less) advanced than modern-day tanks. However, they're monsters in the books' World War II setting, compared to what the human "empire and not-empires" can put out. The shells are laser— sorry, skelkwank-guided and can punch through any human armor. As mentioned by several characters on both sides, had the Race arrived only a generation later (as some of them wanted), the humans would've wiped the floor with them.
  • By the Colonization series, taking place 20 years later, the major "independent not-empires" have caught up and, in some cases, passed the Race's military technology. When the Reich invades the Race-controlled Poland, it's stated that the new German tanks are a 1-to-1 match for the Race's landcruisers, and the Germans actually know how to fight with tanks which was pointed out as the biggest weakness of the Race's tanks by Germans in the previous trilogy. To the Germans, they fought like Russians: "Their tanks are great but their tank skills are shit."
• World War Z: Averted at the Battle of Yonkers. Tanks do very little to kill the massive hoard of zombies that start flooding the bridge. It's also specified, however, that the person in command was specifically an idiot and didn't use them right: real tanks could destroy a zombie horde simply by driving over them.
  • It is mentioned that they are used again against human opponents who don't want to rejoin the United States.
• In the Honor Harrington series, they have largely been replaced by Powered Armor, but they do turn up from time to time. One plotline in Shadow of Freedom revolves around a planetary government's Praetorian Guard using tanks to put down protests and riots, and the local resistance movement's escalating efforts to counter them. The tanks prove to be vulnerable to dedicated Anti Armor weaponry, which the rebels have limited supplies of, and a substantial number of them are destroyed when a truck bomb flattens a parking garage they were staged in to provide cover from the aforementioned anti armor weaponry. Another time, in Echoes Of Honor, a large-scale POW camp breakout was made possible by the external help in the assault shuttle capturing the camp's armor park first, and handing out the available tanks to the rebels, before any Powered Armor-equipped defender ever had a chance to suit up.
  • According to the House of Steel supplement Manticore does use tanks, however we don't see them as the series focuses on the Navy and Marines, whereas tanks are only used by the Army.
• In Animorphs, Marco and Tobias acquire a tank in book 51. They steal it off a train, drive it the wrong way down a freeway, and leave it parked on top of the remains of Vice Principal Chapman's house.
• In Mailed Fist, the stars of the book are the British Churchill Tanks - mechanically reliable, surprisingly manouvrable, heavily armoured, and still only equipped with a gun that cannot put a hole in a German Tiger from a hundred yards away. As Major Foley and his crew discover to their cost.
• Zig zagged in Antti Tuuri's The Winter War. Due to the Finns' shortage of proper anti-tank weapons, Russian tanks often act at leisure, as far as they don't get too close to Finnish positions. However, their impact is rather limited until the Russians improve their tactics. It is mentioned that in another sector the Russians break the Finnish lines with proper use of tanks.
• Rebuild World: High level hunters (Private Military Contractors) in the more dangerous east from where the cast live are said to each have either one of these, or a Mini-Mecha, to help them take on Kaiju. Akira faces a number of monsters similar to tanks (including Spider Tank types). Eventually after Akira gets a price on his head, he and a few allies have to fight off entire tank platoons sent to bring him down, that have Deflector Shields and can make an Improvised Platform out of force fields to point the tank upwards. Human crewed tanks tend to shoot barrages of missiles Akira and allies have to shoot down until they can arrange concentrated Wave-Motion Gun fire. Akira ends up getting extremely expensive (and illegal) Antimatter bullets to take them down easier.

Live-Action TV

• Soviet Storm: World War II in the East features several prominent German and Soviet tanks, namely the T-34, IS-2, Tiger I, and Panther in all their wartime glory. This is especially true with the episode focusing on the Battle of Kursk, where tanks are the deciding factor in the outcome of the battle.
• Hogan's Heroes: Carter infiltrates a German unit to recover confiscated TNT so they can blow up a bridge. However, rather than just getting the TNT and leaving, he requisitions and drives off with a German tank and they use that to blow the bridge.
• In series one of Ashes to Ashes (2008) Alex commandeers a hot pink gay pride tank so that she can total a car.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The original Megazord has a tank mode, although this is used sparingly. Titanus' attack mode is tank-like and was even branded as such in Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger. The original Ultrazord is also basically a tank, guaranteed to obliterate the Monster of the Week by rapid-fire shelling it to dust. The only being to survive a barrage fron Ultrazord was Lokar, and he was badly scarred when next he showed up.
• A staple of the Metal Heroes shows, typically used by the hero; often, their tank can split into a Cool Plane and/or a drill tank. Jikuu Senshi Spielban had the villains using massive fleets of tanks, with the lead general, Deathzero, in an Evil Counterpart to Spielban's own tank, also capable of splitting into a jet and a ground vehicle (with a big spinning sawblade instead of a drill); this carried over into VR Troopers, with the added caveat that General Ivar's Ravage Tank is the only thing keeping the other tanks operating, so the Troopers often target Ivar's tank to end the assault. Season 2 of VRT also gives Ryan his own tank (courtesy of Space Sheriff Shaider).
• Pearly, from the Space: Above and Beyond episode "Pearly". Who is most definitely NOT an APC, thank you very much.
• In Chou Sei Shin Gransazer, when the Japanese military decides to build their own Humongous Mecha someone thought that its support vehicle should be a conventional tank- only a hundred times bigger.
• Ultraseven gives us one of the most ridiculous yet awesome monsters ever in Dinosaur-Tank. It looks like Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Yeah.
• Ineffectual Marxist Citizen Smith gets a hold of a Scorpion AFV and uses it storm Westminster : while the Government is on its Summer Holidays.
• The Japanese cop show Seibu Keisatsu features one in its first two episodes. The vehicle, a massive armored car named the TU-355 Lady Bird, is hijacked by a trio of mercenaries hired by a Right-Wing Militia Fanatic.
• Mitch Dolgen uses an old Patton tank against the prison but it's destroyed during the fight.
• In one episode of M*A*S*H, after a commander of an army tank unit has to have a rather embarrassing problem treated at the 4077th ("carnal flu," as Hawkeye calls it), the camp is plagued by snipers, and Hawkeye "convinces" him to park one of his tanks in the center of the camp to scare the snipers away in return for "losing" the record of the treatment. It works, but then Frank Burns gets the idea to impress Margaret by telling her he can drive a tank, and proceeding to take the controls to prove it. Long story short, he can't. (Ultimately, Hawkeye and BJ agree to cover for him in exchange for Frank signing a form they'd been trying to get him sign for the entire episode.)
• In the Batman (1966) episode, "Penguin's Disastrous End," the Dynamic Duo and the police have the Penguin and Zelda trapped in a gold vault waiting for them to surrender for lack of food and/or air. However, the Penguin has a completely unexpected plan to escape: using his gold loot to have it fashioned into a fully functional tank and smash his way out. Although it is a shock at first, Batman and Robin give chase and easily stop it with their Batzooka.
• Midsomer Murders: In a murder that is unusual even by Midsomer standards, the first Victim of the Week in "The Town That Rose from the Dead" is run over by a tank.

Music

• The Swedish Power Metal band Sabaton, given their fondness for singing about militaria in general and World War II in particular, naturally feature this trope quite heavily throughout their oeuvre. Special props to "Panzerkampf" (about the Battle of Kursk), "Panzer Battalion" (about the 2003 invasion of Iraq), "Ghost Division" (about Erwin Rommel's "ghost" tank division), and more recently, "Steel Commanders" (about the history of tank warfare).
  Armored tanks of mass destruction
  Killers in the east
  Rats who dares to stand before us
  Feel our guns go live
  Death in the shape of a panzer battalion!
• The anthem of the WWII German tank korps, Panzerlied, which is so good the tune and lyrics have been adapted by the Chilean, Italian, and even French militaries, and (unofficially), by modern German Army. Famously featured in Battle of the Bulge.
  If it storms or snows, or the sun smiles on us,
  The day burning hot, or the icy cold of night.
  Dusty are our faces, but happy is our mind, yes, our mind.
  Then roar our tanks in the storm's wind.
• The Soviet tank forces had several fight songs that all sound pretty awesome and glorify their vehicles: "Three Tankmen" and "March of the Soviet Tankists" are the most famous. (Badly) translated from Russian:
  With their fire, and their strong steeling,
  The tanks will win future battlefields,
  We'll be ordered into battle by Comrade Stalin
  And the Grand Marshal will be our leader.
• The earliest song to feature tanks is the British WWI propaganda song "The Tanks that Broke the Ranks Out in Picardy", written after the first operational use of tanks at Cambrai:
  And the tanks went on, and they strolled along with an independent air,
  And their guns began to blare, and the Huns began to swear,
  For they pulled the trees up by the roots, and they made the Huns look like galoots,
  Did the tanks that broke the ranks out in Picardy!
• Pink Floyd's song "When the Tigers broke free" relates a tank attack during the Battle of Anzio, where Roger Waters' father was killed.

Pinballs

• The "Tank Chase" mode from Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure.
• "Tank Multiball" in Sega Pinball's GoldenEye, which also has a model tank on the play field.
• Mr. Game's Mac Attack has the Mac Mobile, a rocket-powered tank with two massive cannons on top. During gameplay, the player must move it into position to expose a ball lock for one of the game's Video Modes.

Roleplay

• Shadowhunter Peril has Veronica, who can telescope a tank out of her purse. She uses it for the most mundane tasks, such as transportation down the street, or killing a single demon. There are times when it comes in handy, though. Like the Final Battle.

Tabletop Games

• In AT-43, armoured might is usually through Walkers, Spider Tank and high-flying Hover Tank. But for the zombie-using corporation O.N.I., they decided to go back to the drawing board and bring back "traditional" tanks that are updated for current times. Their crowning achievement is the O.N.I heavy tank which is not only cheaper than any other factions' top tier vehicle, it boasts a resident mechanic for field repair and has the heavy maser cannon, the heaviest vehicle weapon commisioned from alien Cog faction. Interestingly, in reality the heavy tank and other O.N.I vehicles aren't tanks, with its 6 large wheels the heavy tank looks strongly like the Kodiak/Stryker LAVs in real life.
• While BattleTech unabashedly assigns the 'king of the battlefield' role to its Humongous Mecha, conventional combat vehicles are still very much in evidence and frequently use the very same engines, armor, and weapons that BattleMechs do. Well-designed tanks in particular (available in hover, tracked, and occasionally wheeled, though the last seriously suffers in terms of terrain restrictions) can readily match 'Mechs of comparable weight in terms of firepower; the 'Mechs' primary advantages are superior terrain handling and toughness (due mainly to having more hit locations to soak up damage and even being able to lose some and still walk off the battlefield), not arbitrarily bigger and better guns. Tanks, meanwhile, are canonically cheaper and easier to produce...
  • Epitomized by the Demolisher series of tanks. Massive tanks ranging from 80 to 100 tons carrying dual Autocannon-20s, some of the largest ballistic weapons in the game, and with enough armor to weather assaults. In the canon, it was specifically designed to hunt and kill BattleMechs, which it could do readily—few units, even in the assault weight class like the Demolisher, can carry two AC/20s, and even fewer can shake off a hit from just one of those cannons.
  • The Demolisher has two newer cousins—the Rommel and the Patton, armed with a single AC/20 and a AC/10 respectively. The Rommel also comes in a few variants, one of which has a gauss rifle. Aside from the gauss rifle variant, they are less well armed then the Demolisher, but both have better armor and speed.
• Another miniatures game: Brigade Models makes a game called Land Ironclads, which takes ground combat to a World War I as foreseen by H. G. Wells and friends. They explore a world where tank combat did as these futurists expected, and followed the same model as their present-day naval combat, with scout tanks, cruiser tanks, and dreadnought-tanks.
• Broken Gears has the USRA's (unification of Communist China and the Soviet Union after the War of Broken Gears) Iron Tiger Land Fortress, a forty yards long and twenty yards high behemoth with 3'' thick armour plates powered with uranium that can crush anything on its path, its one turret can hurl half-ton shells at a mile and enough anti-armour guns and small arms to tackle any enemy. And if it is surrounded, it can vent incredibly hot radioactive steam to blanket the vehicle.
• In the future warzones of Dropzone Commander, the 4 main factions all have their tank variations. The most traditional are the United Colonies of Mankind (UCM). Their tanks are noted for often having a telescopic arm rather than a standard turret and with the exception of some of the Post-Human Republic (PHR), their ultra-thick composite alloy armour is the most protective of any faction. And like all vehicles, they carry a powerful point defense system for dealing with missiles and the occasional heavy shell. Most iconic of the UCM tanks are the Gladius and Scimitar heavy battle tanks. The Gladius has two rail guns to keep a constant pressure on enemy vehicles, while the Scimitar's battlefield laser, while rather weak for an energy weapon, allows it to ignore the point defense systems of other vehicles.
• Dust more emphasizes Walkers and Heavy Walkers than traditional tanks. But set in an alternate World War 2 where the discovery of alien technology has led to an Lensman Arms Race, the Sino-Soviet Union (SSU), continues to use tanks as their Walker technology is just developing. The mightiest of their tanks are the superheavy tanks "Karl Marx" (heavy Tesla cannon and 3 12.7mm machine guns) and its variant "Lavrentiy Beria" which uses a 152mm cannon, a flame cannon and a pair of 12.7mm machine guns.
• Dystopian Wars has a large number of War Machines. For scale, a Small Tank base is the size of a Modern Tank. A Land Ship in game is so large they can mount Saint Paul's Catherdral on its chassis.
• Gear Krieg is an alternate World War 2 game where certain events had led to Soviet Super Science, Stupid Jetpack Hitler and other anachronistic Mad Scientist tech. So there are many examples of amazing tanks, though the game is moving more to Walkers. Among them is the Maus superheavy tank with its two cannons and several machine guns (yeah it went to production and spawned several variants) and the dreaded Manticore Hover Tank with its heavy laser. Soviet Russia loves their superheavy tanks and their early T-44 Lenin superheavy and its variants already outgun the Maus, but the Soviets double-down and made the KV-300 which has 5 turret cannons and 5 machine guns plus new generation sloped armour. With Allies and Axis also modifying existing tanks with experimental weapons like thermal rays, Tesla projectors and magnetic cannons, plus more nations creating a new wave of superheavy tanks - the Lensman Arms Race is strong in the Gear Krieg world and that's just the tanks...
• The Tank form in Mekton gets you a 2pt bonus to your armour and lets you appoint either the 'head' or the 'torso' to have a 360 degree arc of fire as the turret. Of course, you can also build a mecha that turns INTO a tank, thereby getting Humongous Mecha and Tank Goodness bonuses at the same time.
• Mutant Chronicles was an attempted rival to Warhammer 40,000, so it has its fair share. Among them are Cybertronic's twin-cannon Armadillo hovertank and Capitol's Leviathan which is a tank built around the biggest cannon fielded on a land vehicle. The most famous tank in the game though, is Bauhaus's Grizzly which is more of a mobile fortress than a tank and has enough guns and turrets to wipe out small armies. The Dark Legion has a unique tank which is so dangerous that after it had its treads destroyed, it continues to bombard the human factions and has since become a permanent land hazard out on the Dark Legion borders.
• In Necropolis 2035 a Savage Worlds game somewhat reminiscent of Mutant Chronicles, there a number of powerful tanks backed by future technology. The 3 most notable are the heavy tanks: Golgotha, Calvary and Thor. All 3 tanks are armed with a rail gun, a coaxial autocannon and coaxial flechette machine gun as well as pintle-mounted flechette machine gun. They also have a number of ball-bearing firing Anti-Personnel point defense packs. The Sacre Ordines have the Golgotha which is the heaviest of the 3 and has the largest rail gun and autocannon, the Sacre Ordines are moving to the new Calvary which has lighter armour and weaponry but greatly increase mobility due to having an anti-gravity generator. The Thor is a corporate vehicle designed by the Asgard company, it's a slightly inferior answer to the Golgotha but it's still mighty and available to any buyer.
• In Numenera one artifact is the Crawler Tank. This is a hybrid of conventional "nuts and bolts" tech and Biotech, it's a treaded armored vehicle that also has a tentacled organism which allows the tank to go up surfaces impossible for treads alone. The Crawler Tank packs quite a punch with a pair of energy cannons and a vent for pumping out poison gas.
• In the supernatural, post-apocalypse game Obsidian: Age of Judgement the powerful LAW corporation has 2 types of Base on Wheels tanks which protect the remainder of humanity in the former USA. They're the Precinct and the even larger Enforcer. Besides heavy armour and even heavier firepower, these two vehicles are big enough that they carry a small fleet of Weaponized Car, labs, prison and troop bunkers. The Enforcer is so mighty there's only 4 of them, they've never been defeated and in almost a century of service only 2 had to be replaced.
• The OGRE in Steve Jackson Games' wargame of the same name is a computer-controlled mobile fortress with a size measured in acres. It was heavily influenced by the first Bolo book, which came out in 1976, one year before Ogre.
  • The main and secondary guns of an Ogre fire SATNUC rounds. That's SATuration NUclear Cluster; a round splits into submunitions over the target, each of which takes a split second to aim, and then detonate, producing a shaped charge of nuclear plasma.
  • The Biphase Carbide armor of the Ogre is several meters thick. It cannot be breached even by nuclear weapons. The only hope a defense force might have of stopping one is to destroy its exposed tractor-treads — and even these require nukes to put a dent in them. Of course, good luck getting your forces in close enough to do damage to its treads; the Ogre's arsenal can vaporize a whole battalion of futuristic "conventional" tanks without even blinking.
• Paranoia has the Mark IV Warbot, designed by R&D in hopes of replacing the entire Armed Forces. While Nigh-Invulnerable to conventional firepower, it can be disabled by attacking its bot brain (including an overzealous scrubot with a steel scrub brush, and an inferiority complex due to a barometer falling off), or flat-out destroyed by firing into a thermal exhaust port. At one point, another Alpha Complex captures one and renames it the OGREbot (a Shout-Out to the Steve Jackson game).
• Rifts first introduced tanks to the game in the Traix and the NGR sourcebook, and has pretty much made a point in outfitting nearly every country on the planet since with outrageous tanks to go along with their Powered Armor and Humongous Mecha. The standout examples include the Karthum-Terek, a massive tank with guns capable of harming starships and enough redundancy built in that it literally has to be blown to pieces in order to destroy it, and the Neo-Abrams, which manages to combine both realistic practicality (by real-world standards, no less!) and overwhelming munchkinism in the same package.
• Twilight: 2000 lets you come out of character creation with your squad having an M1 or a Challenger II (mentioned above); unfortunately in the context of the game this is likely to prove Awesome, but Impractical.
• Vor The Maelstrom: Despite having multiple species with advanced alien technology, only 3 factions have tanks and of these two of them are future humans. The Union are advanced enough to use Hover Tank technology on both their tanks. They have the Wendigo battle tank which uses a rail gun and Plasma Cannon plus it can add chain guns as an option. The Union also has the quicker but smaller and less armored Fenris main battle tank which uses a traditional cannon that actually hits harder than the guns on a Wendigo as well as a pair of chain guns that can be swapped out for a rocket launcher or multi-missile system. The Neo-Soviets don't have the technology to make anything other than traditional tanks with treads but they make up for it by being more heavily armored. The Tundra battle tank carries a massive cannon and a pair of heavy chain guns and a machine gun for the driver. The Neo-Soviets also use the smaller Blizzard assault tank which trades firepower and armor for quicker speed and besides the cannon it only as a single heavy chain gun.
  • The only alien species to use a tank are the Pharon and their dreaded Wrath of Ammit tank. It's only weakness is its thin armor as it's a very fast Hover Tank that starts off with powerful energy weapons and can swap all these out for even stronger ones. Finally it can supplement its armor with a magical rune that will greatly improve its surival. There were plans for the heavily armored aliens, the Golems to get tanks but due to the failure of Vor to sell well, the Golem rulebook and the accompanying tank miniatures never happened.
• Warhammer 40,000 takes this Trope and makes sweet, sweet love to it. All races have access to some form of armoured death machine, with the exception of the Tyranids, who instead get hulking chitinous nightmares capable of tossing said armored death machines around like toys. From the core game's model kits to Forge World's specialized tank variants or hull types, there's a lot for a tread head to enjoy.
  • The Imperial Guard have pretty lackluster infantry, but to make up for it not only do they get some of the best tanks in the game, they get to take them in squadrons, meaning they'll usually outnumber and outgun enemy armor. The basic Leman Russ has a battle cannon that can smash vehicles or reduce Space Marines to Ludicrous Gibs on top of additional anti-infantry or anti-armor weapon options, but it also comes in a staggering number of specialized variants. The Leman Russ Vanquisher has a long-barrel anti-tank cannon, the Demolisher has a short-ranged cannon that pulverizes even the hardest targets, the Punisher has a gatling cannon that can fire twenty shots in one shooting phase, and so forth. As if that wasn't enough, the Imperial Guard can also field super-heavy tanks like the Baneblade, with its "eleven barrels of hell."^detailsBaneblade battle cannon mounted in the turret with a co-axial autocannon, Demolisher cannon mounted in the hull, two sponsons mounting twin-linked heavy bolters with two lascannons mounted on top of those, and a further twin-linked heavy bolter mounted in the hull The Baneblade chassis in turn forms the basis for another array of tank variants, such as the Shadowsword titan-hunter or Stormlord transport/infantry mulcher. The scary thing is that, during the glory days of the Imperium's founding, such monsters were designated medium tanks.
  • The Space Marines' Predator battle tank actually feels lackluster compared to the Leman Russ, but overlapping with Awesome Personnel Carrier is the Land Raider, a vehicle with the highest possible armor rating on all its facings, weapon options that can kill enemy armor or infantry alike, a "machine spirit" smart enough to assist the driver (and in some cases operate the vehicle by itself), and it's still capable of carrying a squad of Terminators into the enemy line. The 7th edition "vanilla Marines" codex made Astartes tanks even more powerful by giving them bonus abilities if you have three of a particular variant on the table at once. For instance, if you have three Vindicators (which sport the aforementioned Demolisher cannon) and all are operational, you can choose to fire one shot from one of them with a 10" Apocalyptic Blast marker and the Ignores Cover special rule instead of firing all three with their normal 5" Large Blast marker.
  • Chaos Space Marines get the same tanks as the above, just covered with Spikes of Villainy and with upgrade options such as Demonic Possession.
  • One Rhino APC variant used by the Sisters of Battle stands out for being an artillery platform that is a combination multiple missile launcher and pipe organ.
  • The Orks slap together ramshackle Battlewagons that can carry anything from unreasonably large cannons to mobs of Boyz, but just as often simply looted Imperial tanks. The only good news for their opponents is that looted tanks suffer from Orks' terrible accuracy and have a chance to go careening off when the driver pushes the wrong button. But Emperor help you if they manage to get their hands on a Baneblade and Orkify it...
  • The Eldar use stately grav-tanks that lack the heavy armor of Imperial vehicles, but function more like a helicopter gunship than a conventional tank. Between the firepower of the Falcon or Fire Prism, their extreme speed and mobility, and upgrades such as holo-fields, they're harder to kill than their armor would suggest. The Eldar have super-heavy vehicles too, armed with devastating laser or distortion weapons, but theirs are fast-moving, skimming super-heavy tanks.
  • The Tau's mainline armored vehicle, the Hammerhead hover tank, isn't as fast or flashy as Eldar vehicles, but does sport an enormous railgun as its main weapon that can annihilate entire squads of enemy infantry with an explosive submunition, or fire an anti-tank solid round that can punch clean through an enemy vehicle and reduce its crew to a twenty-meter red stain extending from the exit hole.
  • The Necrons don't have tanks that other species would recognize, instead their heavy vehicle is the Monolith. It's more or less a floating bunker bristling with Gauss weapons, its hull of living metal is exceptionally hard to damage, and it contains a teleporter nexus that allows Necron reinforcements to pour from it. In later editions they acquired an additional selection of heavy skimmers similar to the Eldar's, although not as fast and using Deflector Shields rather than evasion.
  • The Dark Eldar stand out for being a mechanized force that averts this trope - they're pirates and raiders, and so make good use of exceedingly fast but fragile skimmers on the battlefield.
  • The Horus Heresy shows us the Tanks that existed when the Imperium actually had the concept of "development" and "scientific research"; the utterly terrifying Fellblade tank is the Baneblade with twice the amount of guns, while its variants can mount a variety of other titan-specific weapons, including a massive Volkite Cannon. Then there's the Sicarans, which can best be described as the unholy lovechild of a Predator and a Land Raider. Speaking of Land Raiders, it is during these times that the Spartan Assault Tank, what can only be described as a super heavy land raider existed; it could transport entire contingent of space marines and had enough firepower to back them up. Perturabo, not being satisfied with these, decided to one-up everything by taking the hull of a Spartan and marrying it with the Tremor Cannon; A weapon that can be compared to the Vindicator's Demolisher cannon as the Baneblade's Battlecannon can be compared to a grenade launcher. Appropriately, few people dared making compensation jokes around him specifically because of said cannon.
  • Speaking of Perturabo, He also had his own ride; the Tormentor. It is a Shadowsword Superheavy tank (a variant of the Baneblade) modified to be able to carry him and his retinue of Iron Guard robots into battle. If you thought a casemate tank destroyer armed with a Titan Killer Weapon was scary it's nothing compared to one that can also spew out a demigod and his five pissed off robot bodyguards.
• Even Warhammer gets a slice of the action with the Empire's Steam Tanks. They're temperamental and barely-understood contraptions, but you can imagine their effectiveness in an otherwise late Medieval/Renaissance setting.
• In Weird War Two, a dice and paper WWII RPG which basically mixes myth, horror, and WWII, there are demonically possessed Nazi tanks from hell. There are also super haunted ghost tank hunters for the Allies. These tanks can have special abilities and Special Ammo. Tanks in this game are downright deadly to anyone not sporting big guns or lots of infantry with AT weapons. So having a tank on your side is this.
• The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game has a few tanks, such as Oni Tank T-34

Theme Parks

• One ride at Action Park was the aptly-named "Tank Ride", where visitors would ride around in giant tank and shoot each others' weak points, stopping them for 15 seconds. It was also known for being the worst place to be an employee, since the riders would shoot them with no mercy when they had to get in the area.

Toys

• Tamiya is famous for creating military model kits, a huge varieties of tanks is among them.
• Kaiyodo has a series of chibi tank capsule toys known as World Tank Museum, those tanks happen to be cute.
• Takara Tomy, of Tomica fame is no exception, they created a pull back BB tank series known as WAR2 (now discontinued), as well as JSDF Type 90 tank for Tomica Premium.
• Common in Transformers. Blitzwing and Brawl always turn into tanks, and Megatron has had tank alt modes several times. Most tank Transformers are Decepticons, with the Autobot Warpath being a notable exception.

Visual Novels

• In Hatoful Boyfriend, the Christmas Thieves somehow have a tank which they hop into for their heist. It can stand up to the fists and uprooted mailboxes wielded by the main character - not actually a small feat, since she seems to have Super-Strength — and is stopped only briefly by an anti-materiel rifle.

Web Animation

• Sheila of Red vs. Blue is a tank, in addition to being a major character.
  Church: Why would I surrender to you?
  Grif: We outnumber you.
  Church: Bullshit, dude, I got a tank! People with tanks are never outnumbered!

Webcomics

• Katusha: Girl Soldier of the Great Patriotic War: Katusha and her sister Milla are members of the crew of a T-34 fighting on the Eastern Front in World War II.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent gives us the slightly downplayed Danish tanks viewed while our Ragtag Bunch of Misfits pauses to get their last members and their final tool-up before hitting the Silent World. They're not the biggest examples of Tank Goodness you'll meet on this page, but they're designed to be robust enough to go out and kill Trolls and Giants strong enough to rip their way through solid steel — as demonstrated when an armoured, Swedish train hit very big trouble. As a result, they have to be chunkier than your average tank.
• 6-Commando features hulking supertanks known as Autonomous Armored Vehicles (AAVs or "Rumblers"). They have Artificial Intelligence built in, making them a fully autonomous Sapient Tank. The Echo-class is about six times the size of an M-1 Abrams, and weighs about 500 tons. The planned Victor-class would be even larger, bringing them into Land Battleship territory.

Web Original

• Associated Space has an opening scene involving "Mobile Siege Fortresses", gigantic hovertanks the size and shape of ancient Egyptian pyramids. Which Fatebane sabotages for comic effect.
  Fatebane: Pyramids don't roll.
• The Onion: The sadly axed Dragon Tank.
• In The Salvation War, tanks turn out to be HIGHLY effective against the demon hordes. Not only do the main gun blast through demonic flesh like tissue paper, but many demons are crushed under the tank treads and just the sight of the "iron chariots" made one demon army route.

Western Animation

• Transformers:
  • Decepticons, while they started out as being primarily aerial combatants (to contrast with the ground-pounding Autobots), like to take tank alt-forms when they're on the ground. Megatron himself has taken particularly awesome ones, in "Generation 2" and Armada.
  • Warpath, Brawl, Guzzle, Quake, and others also had tank altmodes. RiD!Armorhide also has a tank alt mode. The triple-changer Blitzwing usually has a tank as one of his alt modes. Even Shockwave has one in Transformers Prime, probably to drive home how this version is much more combat-capable than most.
  • Megatron's toy has a tank form in Revenge of the Fallen, but the movie itself, rather than make him a jet/tank triple-changer that was theorized by some fans, made him a jet/tank hybrid—i.e., a flying tank.
    • In general, because toy laws no longer allow realistic looking guns, for any non-collector's toy of Megatron made since the early 2000s that's meant to represent his Generation 1 self, his alt mode has since become a tank due to being the closest vehicle in spirit to his original pistol mode, as seen with the Transformers: War for Cybertron Trilogy toyline starting in 2018, which focused on making "definitive" G1-accurate toys of the cast. Moreso when they actually start using Earth vehicles than Cybertronian approximations; while everyone gets their classic alt modes, Megatron remains a tank. One could argue that this has precedence from before his gun mode was excised; his upgrade Galvatron has treads on the struts of his "space cannon" mode, making it tank-like, and Megatron was already a tank as early as Generation 2. The only times he would ever be a gun besides his original and Masterpiece releases are the Nerf-like Classics figure and its repaints. It also addresses an admittedly silly and thus often-mocked aspect of his original gun mode, as he mass shifts and requires to be wielded by another of his troops to be used just for the stronger firepower, not to mention being immobile. A tank altmode means he doesn't sacrifice his mobility or self-functionality for the sake of terrifying firepower.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender has Steampunk tanks with Firebenders instead of turrets (or rather Firebenders inside their turrets), as well as crawler tanks used against the Fire Nation.
• SWAT Kats has several cool tanks, including the infamous Metallikat Express - a high-speed hovertank loaded to the brim with weaponry and missiles.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Brother's Little Helper", Bart hijacks one when he gets addicted to ADD meds, to shoot down a satellite that was spying on people and gathering massive amounts of marketing data for Major League Baseball.
  • Mr. Burns uses one to lay siege to the Simpson home when he finds out that Mona Simpson is back in town.
• Family Guy: Peter buys Meg a tank instead of a car. Brian and Stewie use it to destroy Superstore USA.
• In Batman: The Animated Series, Harley Quinn ended up being chased by one driven by General Vreeland after accidentally kidnapping his daughter Veronica.
  [while driving away]
  Veronica: Wait, what are you doing? That's my father.
  Harley Quinn: No, that's your father IN A TANK!
• ReBoot had two games where the User character was a tank. Unfortunately one of the games crashed and a dinosaur game was loaded on top of the crashed game, merging the games. The result was a User character that was a t-rex with a tank turret for a head.
• Panthro's Dynamic Entry in Thunder Cats 2011 involves Gunship Rescue by surprise tank attack.
• In the Young Justice (2010) episode "Bereft", the Bialyan Army uses tanks effectively against the Team and manage to get them on the run until Superboy arrives.
• The Army Surplus Special on Wacky Races is really a tricked out tank. With all its tonnage, it's a wonder it could get out of the blocks at the start, let alone win a race.

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