The T30 was also developed into a revised variant under the designation of T30E1. This model added another hatch at the rear of the turret to help facilitate the ejecting of the large spent 155mm shell casings after firing. There was also another lesser-detailed development falling under the prototype designation of T30E2. Still another variant, the T57, was developed with an oscillating turret housing an automatic loader for the main gun - an interesting development in that automatic loaders eventually proved more popular with modern Soviet tank systems; the Americans choosing instead to keep the reliable and less-complicated manual loading process as a part of their future tank designs for decades to come.
The validity of "super heavy tank" designs was never wholly proven in World War 2. The Germans continued development of several such designs up to the end of the war but no prototypes ever reached the production stage. Similarly, the British only reached trials with their "Tortoise" Assault Tank while the T28, T29 and T30 designs for the Americans were all abandoned in time after the war. Many of these mammoth designs ultimately proved either too unreliable, too unwieldy or simply too heavy to traverse the landscapes of Europe with any normalcy, not to mention the rather tight confines of the roads and bridges to be encountered across France and Germany. Transportation by railways was always an option - albeit a complicated, time consuming one. Even top speeds along roads would have proved equally limiting, with many of these heavy tank designs failing to match that of their more mobile medium tank counterparts, in a way making them oversized liabilities in the new era of flexible mechanized warfare.
If anything, such heavy tank designs served to push the envelope for future tank developments, serving as testbeds for new armor configurations and optimized track-and-wheel arrangements as well as proving useful for the testing of various armament layouts. For example, the T30 ultimately served to evaluate the Continental AV1790 engine which ended up being used in upgraded M26 Pershings during the Korean War (1950-1953) and ultimately proved the powerplant effective for the upcoming M46 Patton, M47 (Patton II) and M48 Patton main battle tank series. In a converted diesel form, the engine went on to serve in the Cold War-era M60 (Patton) main battle tank.
As of this writing, the T30 Heavy Tank can be seen at outside of Marshall Hall at Fort Knox, Kentucky.
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