T-60 tank

The T-60 scout tank was a light tank produced by the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1942. During this period, 6,292 units were built. The tank was designed to replace the obsolete T-38 amphibious scout tank and saw action during World War II. The Kingdom of Romania used the T-60 chassis to build some locally-designed tank destroyers. Nicholas Astrov's design team at Moscow Factory No. 37 was assigned the task of designing amphibious and non-amphibious scout tanks in 1938. They produced the T-30A and T-30B prototypes. The former was to be manufactured as the T-40 amphibious tank starting in 1940. The T-30B prototype, sharing the T-40's chassis but simpler in construction and with heavier armour, was accepted as the tank that is often known as T-60 scout tank, but it was very different from actual T-60 (often referred as "T-40" T-60/T-30). Development of the T-60 began in the first days of the German invasion. The new tank was to be a stopgap measure to restock the heavy losses suffered by the tank corps while production lines of the heavier tanks like the T-34 or the KV-1 could not provide tanks of desired reliability in desired quantities. Unlike its heavier siblings, the T-60 was designed to be produced on factories that did not have the machinery for dedicated tank production, such as the GAZ truck plant in Gorky, or the shipbuilding factory No264 in Stalingrad. Based on the T-40 chassis already in production, the T-60 traded its predecessor's amphibious ability for heavier armour. Furthermore, to make the tank easier to produce, while reconnaissance was still intended as one of the new tank's possible applications, it became the only Soviet tank after the MS-1 never to receive a radio station (despite having a niche for it). The tank was originally meant to be armed with a 12.7 mm machine gun like the T-40, but on the People's Commissar for Tank Industry Vyacheslav Malyshev's suggestion, it was up-armed by an automatic 20 mm TNSh cannon, a tank version of the ShVAK used on Soviet aircraft, since the weapon was in production in massive quantities easily to rival these of the DShK.