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Concept
Vickers 6-ton
Summary
The Vickers 6-ton tank or Vickers Mark E, also known as the "Six-tonner" was a British light tank designed as a private project at Vickers. It was not adopted by the British Army, but was picked up by many foreign armed forces. It was licensed by the Soviet Union as the T-26. It was also the direct predecessor of the Polish 7TP tank.
The first Mark E was built in 1928 by a design team that included the famed tank designers John Valentine Carden and Vivian Loyd. The hull was made of riveted steel plates, thick at the front and over most of the turrets, and about thick on the rear of the hull. The power was provided by an Armstrong Siddeley engine of (depending on the version), which gave it a top speed of on roads.
Its suspension used two axles, each of which carried a two-wheel bogie to which a second set of bogies was connected with a leaf spring. It was patented by Carden in 1929 and apparently derived from a similar but simpler suspension on Light Tank Mk I which he patented a year earlier. Upward movement of either set of bogies would force the other down through the spring. This was considered to be a fairly good system for the time and offered better than normal cross-country performance although it could not compare with the contemporary Christie suspension. High strength steel tracks gave over of life which was considerably better than most designs of the era.
The tank was built in two versions:
Type A with two turrets, each mounting a Vickers machine gun.
Type B with a single two-man turret mounting a single machine gun and a short-barreled 47 mm OQF 3-pdr gun.
The Type B proved to be a real innovation: it was found that the two-man turret dramatically increased the rate of fire of either weapon, while still allowing both to be fired at the same time. This design, which they referred to as a duplex mounting, became common on almost all tanks designed after the Mark E.
The British Army evaluated the Mark E, but rejected it, because it didn't envision a tactical niche for such a vehicle, preferring a combination of medium tanks and tankettes.
Official source
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