Support legs might have been considered to stabilize the tank when the huge gun fired as the recoil would have been tremendous.

Whilst the P1000 was being worked out on the drawing board, Krupp came up with an even bigger idea, and that was to develop a 1500 ton monster tank...the P1500. It would have an armor mantle of at least 250mm thick going up to 360mm with 220mm side armor and 150mm top armor plating.

It was designed to be armed with a super heavy duty 800mm Mortar gun similar to that used on the railway gun 'Dora'.  Also two 150mm artillery cannon and an array of machine guns and anti-aircraft guns would be included into it.

The P1500 was destined to be powered by four U-Boat engines, possibly the MAN V12Z32/44 24 cylinder 8500hp design that would render a power output of 34,000hp.

Poor Function

The P1000 or indeed even the P1500 was so large that the Germans didn't call it a 'tank' they instead called it a Land Cruiser. At over 1000 tons the tank would not have been able to cross any bridges and would have ploughed up the streets as it trundled by.

It would have had to go through buildings rather than traverse around them, as the majority of streets would have been too narrow, it would have been more like trying to drive a battleship through them.

Below an artists impression of what the P1000 could have looked like driving up a main road in war torn Europe.  It looks like science fiction but it was going to be science fact.

The construction of a tank of such colossal proportions would have ruined the already strained German Industry more than the allied bombs were doing.  The P1000 would have required manufacturing equivalents of a naval shipyard with thousands upon thousands of skilled labourer's, technicians, mechanics and engineers drafted in to construct it.  The maintenance crew, needed to keep the Landcruiser running after completion would have been the size of a small army too.

The transportation of all the materials needed to construct it would have hampered the German war effort by many factors and could even have brought their industry  to a standstill.  We must remember that during the war, Germany was constructing other new tanks along with, planes, U-boats, ships, cannons, small arms etc all the time.

The Final Conclusion

In early 1943, Hitler's Chief Armaments minister, Albert Speer cancelled all the projects surrounding these monster tanks as it would cost way too much in time, resources, money and manpower,  instead he insisted that resources be applied to the already tried and tested conventional tanks currently in production.

A turret for the P1000 had already been made by this time, but ended up as a coastal defence battery near Trondheim in Norway instead.

Speer envisaged that an ultra big tank would just propose a priority target for enemy bombers and fighters and would  end up being a very vulnerable object.

The British Typhoon and the American P51 Mustang fighter aircraft were already quite adept at blowing tanks up on the ground with rockets.  Regardless of how thick you can make the steel that protects a large tank, there can always be enough explosives to destroy it.

Special purpose Landkreuzer  bombs would almost certainly have been developed by the Allies to tackle something like this, especially as knowledge on "shaped" charges was already being understood.

The British 'Tall Boy' and 'Grandslam' 10 tons bombs for example, as dropped by Avro Lancaster's, would have easily destroyed the Landkreuzer.  Pictured below is a small image of the Grandslam bomb !

Adhering to convention then, the German MKII as seen below, was agreeably the best tank that the Germans had in WWII...

...it was a fantastic tank, almost impervious to allied tank rounds, these Tiger's destroyed hundreds of US Army Sherman tanks with little or no losses to themselves, so as the adage goes "if it works why fix it ? " and luckily for the free world, Hitler obviously never heard it !

In many ways it was all too costly and totally crazy to try to develop an ultra tank, by late 1943, Hitler was losing the war on all fronts, he had sacrificed 250,000 men at Stalingrad and defeat after defeat besotted him.

Ariel bombardment of German factories, establishments and city's had been stepped up by the Allies but new prototype tanks were still being built with Germanys stretched and limited battle damaged resources. This was total madness, when Hitler should just have concentrated on the manufacture of existing tanks.

The best road to success for Hitler then, would just to have concentrated on building the Tiger MkII and roll them out by the thousand instead of all the weird and wonderful time and resource consuming inventions and innovations.

The Russians for example, only basically made three main different types of tank, the T-34, the KV-1 and KV-2, there were one or two variations and one or two other different types of tank made like the JS-1, but basically the Russians just churned out thousands of T-34's and KV-1's. 

Over 50,000 standard T-34s alone were produced in Russia and it was this mass quantity that beat quality in the end, as all wars are wars of attrition at the end of the day.  Stalin was quoted as saying " Quantity has a quality all of its own "

 Below the Russian mass produced and highly successful T-34-85 with sloped armor, this was the same as the stock T-34 but mounted with an 85mm caliber main gun instead of the usual 76mm. The particular tank below had sunk in a bog in Latvia in 1944 and was rescued in 1983.

With other vehicles at the same scale placed next to the P1000, we can envisage how big this thing was really going to be.