Little Willie, Mother and their gun arrangement?

[Skua]

Little Willie was at first constructed with a turret, usually covered up on photographs. I know Little Willie never got its guns, and that the turret was later removed, but does anyone know if it was a revolving turret?

Now, moving on to Mother. I've got the impression that Wilson and Tritton gave mobility full priority, hence the resulting logenze shaped tank with the tracks running all the way around the body. Did they give much thought to armament when they designed Mother? The design made a top mounted turret impractical, and I get the impression the side mounted casemates were a less than ideal but only way of arming the design with guns.

[aglooka]

From memory:

1. The Roof on Little Willy had a circular steel plate covering the cut-out for the turret, this would indicate that it was a rotatig turret. Armament according to some sources would have been a 2pdr pom pom.

2. Placing the armament in the side sponsons had more to do with the stability of the machine than the lay-out of the tracks. Remeber, LW's turret was removed for these reasons.

3. The sponsons were also much roomier allowing a 6dpr + machine gun on each side in stead of a pom-pom.

4. One of the tactics forseen for the tanks was that they would place themselves over an enemy trench and fire from the sponsons into the trench to clear that section and keep the ennemy out of it until the following infantery could occupy that section of trench. It is not clear of course that this tactic was also a reason to go to sponson lay-out, or was adopted because of the possibilities the sponson lay-out offered?

greetings,

Aglooka

[Ricky]

Making this up as I go along, I would say that the decision to go turretless was made early on in the 'lozenge' design, backing up aglooka's second point. My reasoning is based on the location of the engine - slap-bang in the middle of the vehicle and right under where the turret would be placed. If it had been designed from the outset with a turret (later deleted) then the engine would more likely be mounted rather more conveniently.

This makes sense in my head. I know that early tanks were not totally geared to crew comfort, but making your gunner (and all his spare ammo...) sit on top of the engine seems a little unlikely.