Quoted By:
There's a lot to be said about the Ratte. First thing to note is that the pictures are all made by later artists, Krupp himself made no known drawings, and it only went as far as specifications. The drawings are, in my opinion, mostly wrong.
The design philosophy behind those specifications is enlightened and poorly understood. To begin with the most important dimension on a tank is it's width, all other dimensions are set a ratio of the width. And the width of the Ratte is four standard lanes of traffic (it's actually a little bit smaller possibly to allow for growth).
The ideal length of a tank's tracks is ~2.5 times it's width, going shorter makes the tank easier to steer but harder to move in a straight line, going longer has the opposite effect. A track length of 21 meters indicates two things, the first is it the tracks would have been placed relatively closer to the centerline of the vehicle than on a one lane heavy tank (the first mistake the artists make), the second is it was designed to be a fairly maneuverable vehicle.
This highlights the reason for the six track system, and also the reason why Krupp was engaging with submarine designers. The tracks would have almost certainly been electrically driven and each track would have it's own motor to allow them to move at different speeds, the inside track moving at a slower speed than the outside track when steering.
