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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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Imagine a heavy tank chassis, with armor blessed by the hand of Stalin himself, so strong you needed to put the open end any self propelled direct fire gun the Nazi's had (at the time, don't bring up the panther or the later stugs) right up against it if you wanted to MAYBE get through. It is fast enough on the advance, given its weight. It has excellent clearance and doesn't sink in any mud because it's so chonky.

On top of this Chassis, put a fat boy humorously square turret, and inside this turret place a 152mm gun. Anything it hits even kinda close to is immediately rendered into its constituent molecules.

Unfortunately, this bitch is so fat that the best its engine can manage is a brisk jog, it's various sprockets exist in a state of infinite agony, screaming as the shortest but widest conscript they could jam through the hatches shifts it by putting both feet on the lever and leg pressing it into gear, all while being visible from the next country over on account of being as big as a house.

Even with all that, it's so tough that on at least one occasion it gets its tracks blown off and just sits there, getting shot at for a couple days until it finally runs out of ammunition.

It's the dumbest tank that ever actually put in good work in a real war, and lives on in fond memory.

You left out the part where they designed it with this massive steel-chunk of a turret containing a giant gun, and then neglected to procure an electric motor for rotating said turret. Some poor communist conscript fuck has to winch the thing around with a hand crank! And the turret's size and armament makes its balance worse, so if the tank is on a slope that hand crank is not only rotating the turret, but now lifting a giant off-center load uphill! Sometimes they turn out to be physically unable to work the turret around capitalist wreckers, but hey, the armor means they usually get plenty of time to work the problem.

Also, the 152mm gun is fairly low-velocity with non-fantastic performance against armor, but it turns out this doesn't matter if the HE shells are so powerful that the blast alone is sufficient to rip a German tank's turret clean off.

It's a thing of beauty!

And yet a single immobilized kv was able to stall the 6th panzer division for days. All such brilliant martial lunacy

Responding to filtered comment. The tank sounds cool though.

Fixed!