But it is still the idea of being large Leland so no different. French or not.
Alas for the St. Chamond, Joe, it wasn't anywhere near as successful a design as the British rhomboids (not even close). Further, the excessive hull overhangs on either end stretched so far beyond the too short track base that any time a St. Chamond tried to cross a significant terrain irregularity or wide trench, the end result was always the same, an immobilized St. Chamond stuck fast until it could be dug out.
Further, the St. Chamond was grossly underpowered, so oft times when a St. Chamond became stuck in a terrain irregularity, the drivers had a tendency to race the engine in an effort to become unstuck, only to wind up burning out the technically innovative, but utterly impractical and frankly gutless hybrid electric drive train:
The St. Chamonds persisted in use until the end of WW1 simply because of shortfalls in FT-17 production; the French needed tanks desperately by 1918, and thus they persisted in operating the St. Chamond in its various iterations (the one in the photo is of the first production batch IIRC) along with the older Char Schneider CA1. They didn't have any British made Rhomboids available to support their infantry, and the French could never produce enough of the FT-17s to meet demand, so the underpowered, excruciatingly vulnerable CA1 and St. Chamonds persisted until the end of the war (and in the case of the CA1, into the Spanish Civil War, but that's another story).
Another significant difference between the St. Chamond and its British contemporaries was its finish. While the British rhomboids were by 1918 completed in a practical overall drab khaki green, the French tanks persisted in garish multi-color camouflage paint schemes inspired by the cubist school of artistic thought:
So really, Joe, these are some pretty unique if a bit problematic AFVs actually used in combat in earnest during WW1. If you play the French for 1917-18, you wouldn't necessarily be unhappy with having one supporting your poilus, especially because it packed a full sized 75mm field gun as opposed to a measly pair of 6-pounder guns, along with four M1914 Hotchkiss machine guns, so as long as you can keep the silly thing mobile, you can potentially put some nasty fire on any machine gun nests or such your poilus happen to run into.
Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net
is back from Council of Five Nations.
