The seventh roadwheel set is interesting, awful close together though, won’t do well in thick mud.
Ah, that’s an easy one!
Yeah, sorry 'bout that, I’m afraid that at this point we pretty much exhausted all the “medium” enigmas.
Also, we ended up knowing a lot of reeeealy obscure vehicles simply by trawling the deepest reaches of the internet for something suitable to post, so we now know most of them by sight and the quiz is no longer challenging.
So it was either make it a bit harder, or start going for misdirection, such as posting a picture of a perfectly ordinary KV1, for example, then stand back and let everybody go through all the KV variants to find what is so unusual about it, all while completely missing the obvious…
Which is probably why one of the proposed variants for the next incarnation of this vehicle would have only had six roadwheels of a larger diameter, while the others had a lengthened chassis. Sadly, development of this little machine was cut short due to financial reasons, so that never happened.
Hi.
Romanian TR-125 tank developed from the T-72.
Yours
tom! 
Golly! all the old hands are showing up for this quiz… Good to have you drop by Tom.
It’s a fair cop, Guv’nah!
Nice to see you again, Mr. Tom, the next enigma is yours!
It is indeed the TR125, a completely indigenous machine loosely based on the T-72 and fitted with a power plant reverse engineered from that of a Leopard 1. The gun was a locally produced smooth bore 125mm, an upgrade over the TR85’s rifled 100mm.
Interestingly, an autoloader was also considered.
Unfortunately, although the machine showed promise, the development was cut short by the 1989 Romanian Revolution, after about 5 prototypes were manufactured. The end of the Cold War also meant defence funds were slashed, and thus the project was abandoned for good.
In the early 2000, instead of continuing development of the TR125 with the proposed TR2000 program (see attachment), the Army High Command decided instead it would be cheaper retrofit the existing fleet of several hundred TR85 (itself derived from the T55) with a new turret and electronics developed in collaboration with the Israelis (Elbit System) to bring it to the TR85M1 standard, all while sticking with the 100mm gun, which makes the current Romanian Army MBT severely undergunned when compared with similar AFVs from other countries.
Of course, as was shown by the recent “Combined Resolve II” exercise which took place in early 2014 at Grafenwoehr, Germany, the TR85M1 is far from useless, being able to occasionally get the drop even on the much vaunted M1A2, but the fact of the matter is the TR125 would have made a much better starting point for a contemporary MBT than the venerable TR580/TR85 series.
Well, such is life.
Onwards with the quiz! I do expect a suitably obscure machine from you, Mr.Tom! I am positively rubbing my hands in anticipation.
.
“Ground control to Major Tom…”
Been awful quiet in here,
Just to grease the wheels, may I be permitted to break protocol and enter a nice easy one ? Happy Christmas ! JR.
Merry Christmas, fellow tank lovers!
Heh. That is indeed an easy one. In fact, I once drew the vehicle pictured, so I will abstain from replying to this just yet.
Suffice to say that the name of this vehicle is incredibly descriptive and that the picture is exactly the one that appears on it’s wikipedia entry…
Ah, that thing. I feel like we’ve had it before but I can’t remember for certain. I’ll give that a shot tomorrow, if its still unsolved by then.
We probably had it - I’m certainly not going to try and check through 94 pages of this quiz.
Anyway, what I find really amusing about this thing is how the four men who had to steer the thing were located in different parts of the tank - the driver and the brakesman each had their own armoured cab at the front, on each side of the gun, while the gearsman and engineer resided in the back superstructure, so they had to shout to each other over the sound of the treads and engine, because, obviously, there was no intercom… I bet it must have been an absolute nightmare to drive.
The next incarnation of this vehicle had a more… rational… seating plan, but, alas, as it happens, the war ended and the government lost interest.
True.
Is it the Gun Carrier Mark I?
Yep, Gun Carrier Mk I, this one mounting a 60mm British howitzer. I think about 24 of these early take on a self-propelled gun (more or less) were manufactured but, as far as I know, none made the WW1 battlefield. Best regards, JR.
It is actually, since I have a few friends in the Czech army and I’ve seen one of these in real life - it’s a Czechoslovak 152mm SpGH DANA vz.77 self propelled artillery piece, pictured here in Libyan livery, probably during a parade of the Gaddafi era.
It’s a pretty nifty piece of kit - a 152mm howitzer on a 8x8 Tatra T815 truck chassis and featuring an innovative autoloader able to load a shell and a cartridge in any elevation of the barrel. In fact, when it was first introduced in 1977 it was one of the world’s best SPGs and still remains a very capable system.
Yup! Good job WoW.
ah,. so we have run out WW2 armors? i thought after world of tanks, there are event more bizarre tanks appear during, before and just after WW2 
Just to keep things lively, and moving, I’ll put this up for your delectation, and amazement. Sorry for the less than great image.
Christie T4E2 combat car