Landcruisers were the Race Conquest Fleet's equivalent of the Tosevite tank during the invasion. They were particularly deadly opponents of their Tosevite counterparts, equipped with 4 or 5 inch guns with an auto loader and composite armor. They also seemed to incorporate elements of self-propelled anti-air guns (SPAAGs), as they had the capacity to fire missiles at attacking aircraft.
Human armies had to expend enormous numbers of their own tanks and trained crews for each landcruiser destroyed. The Wehrmacht, which possessed Tosev 3's best tanks and tank crews, lost five or six of their state-of-the-art Panther and Tiger panzers for each landcruiser destroyed, while the United States Army suffered even greater losses: each landcruiser kill cost the Americans a dozen of their tanks. The Japanese Army fared worst against landcruisers, as their primary tank was derisively nicknamed the "One-Shot Firestarter" by the Race's fighting males.
However, the Race's landcruiser tactics were uninspired compared with their human counterparts, due to the Race's lack of combat experience and conservative nature. Combined with the fact that the Tosevite powers were producing thousands of their own tanks and the Race was unable to replace either their own landcruisers or crews, the technological advantage was considerably diminished. By the end of the war, landcruiser losses had risen to the point where, as German Colonel Heinrich Jäger noted, losing just one landcruiser was enough to halt an entire Race attack.
By the 1960s, German tanks had reached a technological par with landcruisers. This was demonstrated in the Race-German War of 1965 when German Panzers proved capable of fighting Lizard landcruisers on a one-on-one basis, whereas twenty years earlier the Race had maintained a 5:1 kill ratio in armored combat.
Literary Note[]
The landcruisers are based on the American M1 Abrams and other tanks of the early 1990s.
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