Charge 7 brought this up in the other thread and it got me interested. I don't know anything about these pre-1941 soviet designs. Would someone care to educate me?

Whispering Death
The T-35 was a multi turrent concept that the Russians put into use in the mid 30s and early 40s. I'm providing the link for you. It will give you all you would like to know. Hope this helps.

Note: Notice the incredibly high profile the T-35 had.

http://www.battlefield.ru/t35.html

the t35 would make a nice target, and i wonder how many crew members it would take to aim, reload and fire two turrets. it also must be incredibly slow and heavy.

Outwardly, the T-35 was visually stunning with its huge dimensions, however its internal space was very cramped. When I visited Kubinka I was unable to get inside the T-35 (I'm 192 cm). The separate combat compartments were not connected with each other. Visibility from the vehicle was very bad, especially from the driver's position (he could see straight ahead and left only). However, the greatest problem was egress from a knocked out tank because the crew could escape only from roof hatches, and the crew from the main turret had to expose themselves at a 4-metre height under enemy fire.

The driver was in an even worse situation: his hatch could not been opened until the machine-gun turret rotated out of the way. If this turret was jammed, the driver couldn't escape at all. Escape from the rear turrets was also difficult due to the rounded antenna on the main turret. The tank crew could become "prisoners" of their own tank.

Sounds wonderful don't they.

So I get the layout of the tank after reading that link but I've got 2 questions.

1) How was the tank supposed to fight? Was it supposed to run parallell to the enmy lines and shoot "broadsides" like a battleship or what?

2) What's the combat history of the T-35?

We have to consider that the whole industry was just taking its first steps. T-35 had so many weapons that the commander could rarely coordinate all of them effectively. This design as ridiculous as it is doesn't surprise me that they actually started producing the tank itself, the whole idea is from the early 1930's so what do you expect
If memory serves me correctly the Allied forces too had this type of tank with two turrets, one mounting a low velocity large caliber gun and the other had an anti tank gun.

Originally Posted by Armyjaeger

We have to consider that the whole industry was just taking its first steps. T-35 had so many weapons that the commander could rarely coordinate all of them effectively. This design as ridiculous as it is doesn't surprise me that they actually started producing the tank itself, the whole idea is from the early 1930's so what do you expect
If memory serves me correctly the Allied forces too had this type of tank with two turrets, one mounting a low velocity large caliber gun and the other had an anti tank gun.

You may be thinking of the M-3 "Grant" (AKA "Lee") medium tank. Built by the US it was also fielded by the British who named the tank after Grant if it had a cast turret or after Lee if it had a welded turret, but it only had one turret. It mounted a 37mm gun in it's single turret. Your confusion probably arises from the fact that it also mounted a 75mm gun in a sponson in the hull. While this gave it a second gun, it was not a turret and had a very limited angle of fire. It did perform quite well early in the war and the British used them to good effect against Rommel as few tanks at the time could withstand it's 75mm main gun. You can't really compare it to the T-35 with it's many design flaws. The M-3 served as the basis for the later M-4 Sherman which, while also having flaws of its own, was even more successful in it's implementation.

Anything more modern?

The design of the multi-turret tank comes from WWI. It was an idea that the Russians revived when everybody had discarded. I found a good site with data and photos. If you check British designs you'll see many of their tanks were multi-turreted.


http://mailer.fsu.edu/~akirk/tanks/

As for the T-28, it actually did OK in the Spanish Civil War, it was superior to the German Pz.I and the Italian Tanks the Nationalists had. By 1941, it was clearly obsolete.

This is all really interesting to read. I never knew that there was a tank with two turrets..