User:Lither/Sandbox

A little place for my musings on the world of 40k.

The Leman Russ
This strikes me as the sort of tank designed by someone who had no prior knowledge of tanks, the history of tanks, or indeed basic mathematics. I, personally, would call it an infantry support tank over any other kind; designed with the same badly wrong doctrinal thought, and most likely almost useless in actual combat.

Armour
This is where it first begins to unravel. The technical specifications from the fluff aren't very consistent, for the first.

In the fluff, it has 150mm of frontal armour (180mm on the superstructure), "much thinner" side armour, abysmally poor rear armour, and 200mm of armour on the mantle. Unfortunately, I can't comment on the exact effectiveness of the armour as no RHA equivalent was ever given. This is a big issue for a number of reasons.
 * There is almost no sloping. Though I can't give an accurate estimation of the angle of sloping that does exist, I can't think of it being less than 75 degrees sloping on the front, the part which traditionally has the most extreme angles. Sloping would allow it to mount thinner armour, or else get far greater protection from its existing armour.
 * The thickest portion of armour is located where, in actuality, some of the fewest hits occur. A significant portion of strikes (<50%, sources debate the exact number) occur against the side armour . Excessively strengthening the frontal and turret armour to the detriment of the side armour is an extremely bad idea mostly imagined by people who treat tanks as cavalry.

Armaments
The basic Leman Russ far too many guns. Two sponsons, one hull-mounted gun, one pintle-mounted machine gun, one main cannon. This is far too much gun, not enough tank.