The French Are Coming: How G1R Started


Hello everyone,

this is the stock configuration of the French tier 5 tank G1R, coming up in 9.7. It’s a part of the G1 program – at this point (in 1936). It was also called Char de 20 t Renault, but the G1R designation was better known. A wooden mockup was made (as you can see) – at this point, the vehicle was supposed to be armed with a 47mm Schneider gun with the muzzle velocity of 800 m/s

25 thoughts on “The French Are Coming: How G1R Started

  1. i mean it looks cool as fuck , if only WG would implement chrome camos for the shitty tanks that only bling can improve.

  2. I don’t get why they put such a puny-ass gun into such a big tank god dammit. The chassis is enormous, and at least the B1 had the howitzer in it, but NOOO, here they make a big chassis, and a flat turret so nothing fits in it.

    Basically what they had was an oversized, heavy, cumbersome and slow tank that couldn’t compensate for that with it’s gun, they could have just made more S35s then.

    • First, the turret is quite small.
      Second, the amount of higher caliber guns was limited, especially in 1936. Basically, you had high penetration guns up to cca 50mm and then you had usually howitzers of around 75-76mm caliber – even if firing solid shots, those were low MV guns with limited recoil.
      Third, for 1936, a 800 m/s gun penetrating around 60-70mm of armor was complete overkill, it could deal with literally anything anyone could show up on a battlefield with, even the massive French behemoths had thin armor and those were also considered prohibitely expensive.

      • Fair enough, and I know about the guns, but my point was exactly what you said: the behemoths that were supposed to use these guns were completely impractical, they didn’t have enough armour to justify the size, and since the turret is so small the gun could be easily mounted into something smaller, cheaper, more manoeuvrable and therefore more tactically effective.

        • You benefit from hindsight that they didn’t have.

          Then again…
          Tanks were often the size they were because of the engines and drive-trains that had to fit inside them. Small, efficient, powerful engines didn’t exist. Drive trains that were strong, were not compact. Tanks designed in 1936 had to be BUILT with 1936 technology.

          “Wouldn’t it be keen if these radios were smaller?”
          Before transistors, they were huge. So were the pre-WWII tanks.

          What AMAZES me is how sleek and futuristic some of the French tanks were. I’m sure the drive-trains looked like something off of a tractor (literally), but even the “Jetsons” would have been hard pressed for a cooler looking tank.

          Just pretend that’s not a ballistic gun. It’s a laser. “Brack!” (that’s my laser noise). :D

          • Also: A lot of times designers still thaught about tanks as breaking through in the WW1 trench warfare, therefore if they were huge (mainly long) they could cross trenches more easily and were therefore more suitable for the situations the designers imagined they would be used in.

            • Exactly. As a matter of fact, french tank design was quite a noticable step ahead of almost everyone else. You wouldn’t know that from general historical bias, as german and soviet tanks get all the praise and french tank development get effectively stopped at 1940 (actually a bit before that, because of a number of problems in the frenchy’s socio-economic order), but if there’s one part of the french army that actually handed the germans their asses over and over again, it was almost always the tank groups. Superior or sufficent armor, superior or sufficient armament superior or sufficent mobility. Had the leadership of France stopped thinking in 1914-1918 patterns of warfare tactics (and were the moral situation of the ground troops in France not FUBAR’d like it was), World War II would have grinded to a halt in 1940, just where it grinded to a halt in 1914.

              • Actually, this tank come from a project for the replacement of the B1 tank. The specification was to have a 47mm in the turret and a 75mm in the hull (like on th B1) but Renault come up with a 75mm in turret (an actually strange one as the gun is not fixed to the turret but it’s the movement of the gun that move the turret)

                The 47mm version would have been the AT version and the 75mm the all purpose version (a little like the pzIII / pzIV couple at the begining of the war)

  3. its fellow G1 colleague the BDR G1B is already impressively potent, I hope the French continued to experiment the living shit out of it to rival the G1B.

    • Well, the G1R only has a 105 mm howitzer and the G1B gets a 90 mm HV gun that is comparable to that of the tiger.
      But remember, the G1R will be like the AMX 40:

      The fact that it tells it is a medium, does mean it has a medium tank gun choice, but not that it has medium tank speed and armor.

  4. Something in the first and second pictures dawned on me:

    There’s a noticeable bulge in the front left of the tank. This is because of the steering transmission / differential that has to fit there.

    But there ISN’T one. It’s a wooden mock-up!

    This means they took their mock-ups very seriously, and this is – to the level of detail the engineers could think of – EXACTLY what the real tank would have looked like.

    I’m anxious to see it in game! :)

    • It seems only Soviet designers kept World of Tanks in mind when designing commander’s hatches on well-armoured turrets. Too bad they forgot about overmatching with the roof thickness (with the exception of Obj. 430 II, T-62A and IS-7).

  5. I keep trying to figure out the tracks.

    My first thought were that they are multi-pin coupled tracks, but there’s just no advantage to that.

    Then looking closely at the third picture, we can see an inside row of teeth – at about close enough for a double complete set.

    I believe it’s a complete double set of narrow tracks on each side. This DOES have one advantage. Harder to completely destroy the tracks off one side.

    A similar benefit to large trucks that have duel wheels on the back (among a few other benefits).

    The game doesn’t treat duel tracks individually (T95), but does (I think) make the tracks much more difficult to destroy.