The T-46 was a Soviet fast light tank developed in 1935, as an improvement to the earlier

T-26 The T-26 tank was a Soviet light tank used during many conflicts of the Interwar period and in World War II. It was a development of the British Vickers 6-Ton tank and was one of the most successful tank designs of the 1930s until its light ...

. The design was later discarded by the government, after the prototypes were built and tested. The project ended up being too expensive and a poor design. The thin armor, bulky hull and small main gun put the crew in great danger, which made the tank unsuitable for use in combat.

History

The Soviet T-46, began as an improvement to the

. The T46 served the same purpose as the T26, but it was quite different. It was a fast and lightly armored tank. It could reach speeds of up to 50 km/h with relative ease. The

suspension consisted of eight small road wheels carried in pairs on small bogies. The bogies were supported in pairs by leaf springs. This was a much less effective system than the

Christie suspension The Christie suspension is a suspension system developed by American engineer J. Walter Christie for his tank designs. It allowed considerably longer movement than conventional leaf spring systems then in common use, which allowed his tanks to h ...

, which had a more advanced, yet more expensive system to maintain and produce. This is the reason why the OKMO team at Zavod No.185 was ordered by the Government of

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

to produce an improved version of the fast light-tank,

. Yet the design of the T-46 proved too expensive, compared to the final performance of the vehicle, to mass-produce it. Its thin armor, small main armament and the bulky, big design of tank, made the government of

cancel the project, and rather create the T-26S and later T-46S, as the improved, mass-production capable tanks. Yet some legacy left over by the T-46S, a later improved version of the T-46 lived on to see the battles in

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of B ...

References

* * * Light tanks of the Soviet Union Experimental and prototype tanks {{mil-vehicle-stub