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A tank destroyer or tank hunter is a type of armoured fighting vehicle, armed with a direct-fire artillery gun or missile launcher, with limited operational capacities and ''designed specifically'' to engage enemy armoured vehicles. Tanks are generally armoured fighting vehicles designed for front-line combat which combine operational mobility and tactical offensive and defensive capabilities and perform all primary tasks of the armoured troops on the battlefield; the tank destroyer on the other hand is specifically designed mainly for taking on enemy armour.〔von Senger and Etterlin (1960), ''The World's Armored Fighting Vehicles'', p.9.〕 Many have been based on a tracked tank chassis, while others are wheeled. Since World War II, gun-armed tank destroyers have fallen out of favor as armies have favored multirole main battle tanks. However, lightly armored anti tank guided missile (ATGM) carriers are commonly used for supplementary long-range anti-tank work. The resurgence of expeditionary warfare in the past twenty years has seen the emergence of gun-armed wheeled vehicles, sometimes called "protected gun systems", which may bear a superficial resemblance to tank destroyers, but are employed as direct fire support units typically providing support in low-intensity operations such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. == World War II == Dedicated anti-tank vehicles made their first major appearance in the Second World War as combatants developed effective armored vehicles and tactics. Some were little more than stopgap solutions, mounting an anti-tank gun on a tracked vehicle to give mobility, while others were more sophisticated designs. An example of the development of tank destroyer technology throughout the war are the Marder III and Hetzer vehicle, that were very different in spite of being based on the same chassis: Marder was straightforwardly an anti-tank gun on tracks whereas Hetzer traded some firepower (its Pak 39, designed to operate within the confines of a fully armored fighting compartment, fires the same projectiles from a reduced propellant charge compared to Marder's Pak 40) for better armor protection and ease of concealment on the battlefield. Except for most American designs, tank destroyers were all turretless and had fixed or casemate superstructures. When a tank destroyer was used against enemy tanks from a defensive position such as by ambush, the common lack of a rotating turret was not particularly critical, while the lower silhouette was highly desirable. The turretless design allowed accommodation of a more powerful gun, typically a dedicated anti-tank gun (in lieu of a regular tank's general-purpose main gun that fired both anti-tank and high explosive ammunition) that had a longer barrel than could be mounted in a turreted tank on the same chassis. The lack of a turret increased the vehicle's internal volume, allowing for increased ammunition stowage and crew comfort.〔(Perrett 1987:84)〕 Eliminating the turret allowed the vehicle to carry thicker armor than would otherwise be the case, and also allowed this armour to be concentrated in the hull. Sometimes there was no armored roof (only a weather cover) to keep the overall weight down to the limit that the chassis could bear. The absence of a turret meant that tank destroyers could be manufactured significantly cheaper, faster and more easily than the tanks on which they were based and found particular favor when production resources were lacking. After hard lessons early in the war, machine guns were mounted for use against infantry, but the limited traverse of the mounting meant that they were still less effective than those used on turreted tanks. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tank destroyer」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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