In this episode, we’re going to look at the mighty Conqueror, a super-heavy design from the ‘50s. Now, the Conqueror saw service around about 1955 to 1966.
The reason the Conqueror came about, or evolved was as a direct response to the IS-3. The British War Office saw a need for a tank to actually cope with the new
Russian armour, and therefore they deemed that something like a minimum of 120 mm was needed for this.
The Conqueror has a crew of four and an armour of 135 mm, and weighs a mighty 65 tonnes. It was the heaviest tank ever to serve with the British Army.
Okay, next I’ll have a look at the front of the mighty Conqueror. The first thing that’s very apparent are the two very large headlights. Directly beneath the headlights
you can see the registration plate. And directly beneath the registration plate – the towing eye.
Moving back on top, it is very clutter-free on top of the Conqueror. We’ve got two fire extinguishers, one left and right. And finally, you can see, just to the right of the
turret, we have the driver’s cab. The driver’s cab is surrounded by a number of vision blocks, or periscopes. The main armament on the Conqueror is incredibly
simple by design. Designed by the Americans, very, very streamlined. You’ll notice midway down you’ve also got a very large fume extractor. Going up on the turret,
we have an incredibly strengthened and armoured bellows, or gun-trunions, and then we go onto the rear of the absolutely monstrous turret. An incredible design
feature about the Conqueror was that the turret alone weighed 18.5 tonnes. One of the main design features was the very large commander’s cupola, which the
commander could actually rotate.
The Conqueror’s turret was very simple but very functional by design, and really clutter-free. A couple of main things to point out are obviously the hatches.
You’ve got two hatches to the front of the commander’s hatch, left and right. Notice the sheer size of the rotational commander’s hatch. I’ll also point out the armoured hood
for the gunner’s sight, and also you can see quite clearly – the machine gun. You’ll also notice that on the left and the right of the turret, there are also two banks of
multi-barrelled smoke-grenade charges, and the means for firing these were located inside the turret. Two antenna bases for the radios, and then you cannot help
but notice the monstrous commander’s cupola that we’ve got on here. As I said before, it was rotational, which was quite a good design feature at the time. Also a
huge thing, key thing about the Conqueror was that the commander also had a range-finder, which enabled him to identify and find the range to another target
whilst the gunner was dealing with the previous one.
We’re now on the back decks and unfortunately, we can’t access the transmission, but it does give you a good idea of the sheer size and scale of it. The engine
was a fuel-injected version of the Meteor engine, driving through a regular Merritt-Brown transmission. You can see the fuel-filler caps located to the left and right.
The suspension on the Conqueror employed the horseman-like suspension system. This actually involved having eight row-wheels either side. You’ll notice very
distinctive row-wheels and the sheer fact that they are still rimmed. Although it made them quite resilient and hard-wearing, it also meant that it was incredibly noisy.
Here we are then in the commander’s station of the Conqueror. The first thing that’s very apparent is obviously a) the room, the angle I’m sat in at the moment,
but the fact that the commander’s station is completely cut off from the other crew members. There’s no ability for the commander to get across to the other
stations. Some of the key things that we’ve got in the commander’s station: Just to the left there was the ability to operate i.e. elevate and depress the machine
gun, the roof-mounted machine gun, and obviously again, the good old Bakelite firing switches. Located directly in front of the commander was the commander’s
sight, again a binocular type sight, and also just to the left of that was also an ancillary sight. Across to the right-hand side, we’ve got a duplex controller. Very,
very simple to use – left for left and right for right. Really, the final thing to mention about the commander’ station was there was a gun-position indicator just to
the right of where the commander would sit.