Hello Everyone,

So my story goes like this,

I love fighting tank and they always fascinated me since childhood. when I was a child, Leonardo da Vinci inspires me because he was very inventive. He made drawing for his inventions in the notebooks. Then I decided to design this model.

I always found this particular idea of Da Vinci to be fascinating. As a history buff, the implications on how history may have changed drastically had he decided to perfect his original design. Even more fun is actually trying to imagine just how that perfected renaissance era tank would look like.

In 1482, Da Vinci wrote a letter to Ludovico Il Moro Sforza, Duke of Milan, making a number of claims about innovative weapons of war, also outlining a rough design for an ‘armoured vehicle’. With a conical shape to deflect enemy fire, interior wheels for movement and holes for an array of cannons, Da Vinci’s armoured vehicle certainly bears similarities to the modern tank. But Da Vinci’s ‘tank’ wasn’t without its flaws. Modern experts predict it would have been largely immovable due to its weight and that the cannon would have been wildly impractical to use in conflict. Here’s the history of Da Vinci’s armoured vehicle.

The design features a metal reinforced wooden conical cover, reminiscent of a turtle shell, with slanting angles designed to deflect enemy fire. An array of 16 light cannons would protrude around the perimeter and the vehicle would be propelled by a crank, to be operated by four men.

There are numerous flaws in Leonardo’s design. Most fundamentally, the gears are located in a reversed order so that any movement on one crank would cancel out the other, thus immobilising the vehicle. Some scholars believe that such a basic mechanical error must have been intentional – an act of sabotage that might reflect either Leonardo’s pacifism or an attempt to protect his design. Additionally, the armoured car’s wheels are insufficient to support the weight of its heavy armoured enclosure, while the radial array of cannons, though intimidating, would have likely proved imprecise in targeting enemy troops. Even the innovative conical cover has been deemed functionally problematic and difficult to manufacture en masse.

Ultimately, Leonardo’s armoured car design is just as fanciful as some of the claims he made to Sforza, but perhaps this was the point. The design was never destined to be realised and used on the battlefield, but it did succeed in presenting an intimidating fantasy that would have served Sforza’s political ambitions. Even if it’s a functional non-starter, Leonardo’s proto-tank is an ingenious concept and would have worked as a symbol of unprecedented military potency in 15th-century Italy.

Check out the video showing the mechanism animation and assembling of the video : https://youtu.be/2_FLjVyql78

 

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