The Mendeleev Tank.(Landslips WI Forum)

The Mendeleev Tank.
According to John Milsom in Russian Tanks 1900-1970, Mendeleev's first Tank project (the 170-ton machine with 120mm gun)  was designed between 1911 and 1915. It had a pneumatic suspension system and caterpillar tracks of some kind. The question is: how did he come to know about caterpillar tracks? They had been virtually forgotten in Britain after the patent was sold to America, and I'm not aware that any tracked vehicles were operating in Russia. Mendeleev was a marine engineer, so it's not as if he would have come across them in the course of his work, and Russian industry was in such a primitive state that they could hardly produce any tractors or lorries, let alone tracked vehicles. He must, though, have encountered the idea somewhere. Attachments

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