I aquired this 1987 CCCP book online. It's a little floppy paper book a good 100 or so pages long. The fabrication of the book is quite simple, no glossy pages, thin paper. http://s1.simpload.com/12074397df873565b.jpg It is mostly about the usual stuff. T-26s, T-34s, the same stuff you read in any book. But, it does seem to have a fair bit on Russian WWI Tanks. The only new pic, is this pic of the Vezdekhod, aswell as a small portrait of the designer. If you look, the portrait of the designer, is simply a closeup of him in the black & white image on the Vezdekhod article! I guess that implies the original photograph was quite large, and pretty good quality, for it to be able to be blown up that far.
Also, every single image in the entire book, looks like it was hand edited for some reason. With dark lines drawn along the edges of the vehicles, and stuff like that. Very odd... And This Vezdekhod image looks like it was edited in more ways than one... But even so, it is a more complete image of the vehicle.
I scanned all the pages (not that many) that seemed to have anything to do with early armor. As in, all the pages that said "1915" to "1919". I do not read Russian, so I really have no idea if any of the text is interesting or not.
Anyone that reads Russian well, and is interested, email me: destroidsrage@hotmail.com
I will attach all the pages, and email them to you. It will be a fairly large attachment, about 900K, but that is still manageable.
Also, we were wondering if the 'armored turtle shell' was of welded steel construction, or simply wooden mockup. I still can't tell... But those lines you see do look suspiciously like weld lines.
What do you think? Had you seen this image before?
The Vezdekhod image with designer is in Steve Zaloga's book for A&AP on Soviet tanks IIRC. I don't remember it being a particularly good reproduction there either. Retouching like that is very common in early photgraphs, specially when they've been reproduced in newspapers or whatever. Slow films and long exposure times guaranteed a certain amount of blurring of images, and this is very obvious in any pictures involving movement.
That's the problem with that image - the untouched version is so poor that it's hard to judge what the shell is made from and what those lines are. But the touched up one is no more reliable either - how do we know the touch up artist got it right? I certainly wouldn't assume that those lines are weld lines on the strength of the touched up version. I mean, he's basically just gone over it with a pencil!
In that picture, is the Vezdekhod running on it's wheels?? I know the designer wanted it to be able to run on wheels, or tracks, but I never knew he implemented that idea! I wonder how it was steered using the wheels....?
On firm ground it was supposed to run on, and be steered by, the two front wheels (being propelled by the rear of the powered track) but on soft ground it would sink up to the main part of the track, and the wheels were supposed to act like rudders, guiding it around...
I think the reason the steering completely failed on the Vezdekhod, was because the rudder wheels were not far enough away from the tank, and they were wheels. Ideally, they would have been spaced further away, and been more of just a skid ram, that would get slammed into the dirt on either side, forceing the tank to turn in that direction. Crude, but I bet it would have worked. But then again, what do I know about tank design