This is the Ford Model 1918 3-Ton tank.

Designed in 1918 by the Ford Motor Company, it was one of the first American tanks ever produced.

The M1918 weighed only 3 tons, as the full name suggests. It was an incredibly small tank, measuring 4.3 metres (14 ft) long, 1.8 metres (6 ft) wide, and 1.8 metres tall, and having just two crew members (one driver, one gunner) in its extremely cramped hull.

Despite its engines having been pulled right out of a Ford Model T and getting discribed as anemic, the M1918 had a fairly quick top speed for the time at 12.8 km/h (8 miles/h)

Those silly arms on the back of the tank help it avoid getting stuck in ditches!

Despite being intended as a light tank, the first two prototypes didn't even have a gun. They were effectively just lightly armoured boxes that you could sit a person in.

The idea behind the M1918 was that it would be used to safely transport soldiers and weaponry onto a battlefield, though it didn't end up being very good at that.

This thing was a death box :D

It was based off of the French Renault FT-17, but is worse in almost every way possible.

When the final design of the M1918 eventually got to have a machine gun, it would still be incredibly limited in its use due to an extremely small range of motion. And although the tank does have angled armoured plating unlike SOME early tanks (looking at you, Sturmpanzerwagen A7V), the armour thickness was only a maximum of half an inch thick, leaving it vulnerable to anti-tank weaponry and concentrated machine gun fire.

On both the FT-17 and the M1918, the engines are located directly behind the crew compartment. The FT-17 has a metal divider between the engines and crew to give them time to escape in case of an engine fire.

The M1918 doesn't!

If you are operating this tank and the engines catch fire, you are dead!

Isn't that wonderful? :D

The US Army had a contract with Ford to produce 15 thousand M1918s, though testing proved the use of the tank to be quite limited compared to the readily available FT-17s. Production was halted after WW1 ended, with only 15 tanks being fully complete, and not one of them ever saw combat.

The two surviving M1918s are located in the National Armor and Cavalry Museum in Fort Benning, Georgia and the Ordnance Collection in Fort Lee, Virginia.

Sources: X , X

This thing.

This is the Tsar Tank, also reffered to as the Lebedenko Tank. It's probably the strangest tank to ever be built.

Admittedly, I couldn't find too much information on the Tsar Tank. Only one was ever made and the project was quickly abandoned after the Russian revolution.

It was invented around 1914 by Nikolai Lebendenko (hence, the Tsar Tank's alternate name) and Alexander Mikulin. As you may have noticed, the tank was quite oddly shaped, looking more like a tricycle than a weapon of war.

It was also quite large, with the wheels having a diameter of 8.2 metres (27 feet).

The massive wheels were independently powered as well, with each wheel having its own engine. (The smaller wheel on the back was unpowered).

The main goal of the Tsar Tank, and the reason it was designed to look so strange, was to be capable of traversing any kind of terrain. The theory was that the large wheels would be able to go over uneven ground no problem, and the back wheel would provide it with stability.

In practice however, the theory did not pan out. Too much of the tank's estimated 60 ton weight was resting on the back wheel causing the tank to sink into the ground during testing.

The issues with artilery on this thing weren't doing it any favours either. The large turret located in the short tower on top of the tank had much of its firing range blocked by the wheels, and the cannons on either side had limited range as well.

The Tsar Tank was declared a failure after testing, left to rust in a forest, then eventually scrapped in 1923.

Sources: X, X

Starting this off with my favourite tank, the German Sturmpanzerwagen A7V!!

Why on earth is this chunky monstrosity my favourite tank out of every tank ever made? Because it is absolutely awful at everything and I think that's very funny.

The A7V was the first tank ever made by the Germans, it was invented in 1917 and used in the later stages of WW1. This thing was massive, measuring at about 8 metres long (26 feet), 3 metres wide (almost 10 feet), and 3.3 metres tall (almost 11 feet). It also weighed about 36 tons when in combat which caused a lot of problems, namely for its speed and traversal capabilities. Soldiers could outpace this thing ON FOOT. The A7V had a top speed of only 14 km/h (9 miles/h), which is already pretty slow, but that speed was drastically reduced if the terrain was even a little bumpy, going down to only 6 km/h (4 miles/h). And that was if this thing managed to not break down or get stuck in a shallow ditch. The Sturmpanzerwagen A7V was highly prone to suddenly failing due to the fact that the tank's track base was literally pulled out of a tractor. It was not a suitable base for a tank at all and made the whole thing unsafe in certain conditions, leading to frequent breakdowns. The A7V also had only a few inches of ground clearance. This meant that it had issues going over even a slight bump in the ground. It would also fall into ditches constantly. The overhanging and heavy front end meant that if it went over an edge even a little too far, there was no stopping it. Judging by the number of pictures of this thing getting stuck, this was a fairly common occurence.

Let's not forget to mention that the driver of the A7V had a 10 meter long blindspot at all times. They were sat in that little box on top of the tank and had the front end of the tank blocking their view!! How anyone thought this was a good idea absolutely baffles me.

That's a lot of soldiers just to man one tank. This thing required a crew of 18 or more to operate, but due to its absolutely awful armour, none of them were safe!! The Sturmpanzerwagen A7V had near vertical armour plating, which made it highly susceptible to direct hits. Many tanks nowadays have angled plating for this exact reason, because vertical armour does not deflect bullets properly! Interestingly, the Sturmpanzerwagen A7V was one of the tanks involved in the first ever recorded tank on tank duel! On the 24th of April in 1918, three A7Vs went up against three Brittish Mk. IVs. The A7Vs lost of course. Brittish tanks, while still clunky, were much better than German tanks at this time.

Only twenty A7Vs were produced before WW1 ended. Many of them were either destroyed during the war, or scrapped afterwards due to their flawed design. Today only one Sturmpanzerwagen A7V remains, the 506 Mephisto, and it's in Australia of all places. The Mephisto was abandoned on the battlefield by its crew and later taken as a trophy by Australian soldiers. It now resides in the Queensland museum in Brisbane.

Sources: X , and my brain, I have this thing's history memorized.