The Hydra tank

The closest real world counterpart to the Hydra tank, designed by Daniel Simon for the film Captain America: The First Avenger, is the Ratte Land Cruiser. Designed in 1942 by Krupp, it was never built because Albert Speer deemed it totally unfit after he’d become Reichsminister for armaments in 1943.

He was probably right. At one thousand metric tones, the Ratte would have been five times heavier than the Panzer VIII Maus which was the largest tank ever built.

The Landkreuzer was to be armed with naval artillery and armored with nine inches of hardened steel, so heavily that only similar weapons could hope to affect it. To compensate for its immense weight, the craft would have been equipped with three 1.2 meter wide treads on each side with a total tread width of 7.2 meters. The vehicle’s sheer mass would still have destroyed roads however and rendered bridge crossings completely impractical.


The "Schwerer Gustav" railway siege gun was supposed to be mounted on a Land Cruiser

An even larger tank would have been the Monster at fifteen hundred tonnes. This vehicle was supposed to carry the eight hundred millimeter Schwerer Gustav artillery piece also made by Krupp, the largest artillery gun ever fired for effect. It was otherwise mounted on a train.

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