A reason you'll hear: Lower profile, easier to hide. Yanks didn't do that - but everyone else did.



The real reason: Cheaper!



Most take a tank chassis and sacrifice the turret, leaving that off in favour of a simple casemate and fixed forward gun. They don't have a lot of side armour either, mostly just on the front end. A casemate instead of turret makes them a good deal quicker to build (and cheaper, too). This way you get more moving, armoured guns for your budget - although they are vulnerable to being out-maneuvered by tanks in close battle.

Yanks, being if nothing else adventurous, tried a different tack. They purpose built new vehicles with full turrets and went light on the armour; mobility, they figured, would be the key. High velocity gun, forget about high explosive shells, keep the front glacis stronger by leaving out the hull machine gun, that kind of thing. Sadly for the yanks, their entire doctrine regarding armoured warfare was to be found wanting in Normandy, and compensated for with numbers.


These are more or less extinct today. Various reasons for that, but a big one is they're supersceded by helicopters... and the first world is on a "peace" or "interwar" footing, so we aren't designing things around build-as-fast-as-you-can. Could change one day but i kinda doubt it; TDs are really history now.

I would argue the tank destroyer has just been pushed to its logical conclusion. By the end of WWII, as a practical matter, the only difference between tanks and tank destroyers was the latter were cheaper and simpler. With the advent of the anti-tank missile, tank-killing no longer required big, heavy guns on big, heavy vehicles. So for expensive, they still built tanks, but when they wanted to be cheap, they just slapped a missile launcher on something light, such as

BRDMs


M113s


or CRV(T)s


Of course, for purists, there is always the Swedish Stridesvagen 107, or S-tank, which is probably the only thing left that looks like a traditional tank destroyer.

Trying to get infantry to take out armor came shortly after the armor was introduced to the feild



Its easy to say, "Why bring a tank when a missile will do the job" and its a valid point
But your gonna need a lot of missiles, and tanks can shoot really fast, and their ammo is significantly cheaper, so can carry a lot of it


In modern warfare missiles got smart, but the armor evolves as well


Anti-Armor fire-power will always be answer to armor, but if you don't have any, there really isn't much you can do against a tank. And its Mobile Armor, it can roll over trenches, hills, ext. While carrying any equipment for its supporting infantry

I'm not saying tanks are the be all to end all, but you can't occupy a strategically important town/city with a helicopter

Can't do this to a tank;

Not argueing with you there William, just discussing why the tank destroyer is a thing of the past. Except in Sweden - i was wondering if someone would link that.

We've had 'em for quite a while now, and tanks have changed considerably over time...





















Tanks rose from shakey beginnings to dominate the battlefield, and though that has changed as new technologies challenged them, though they've been declared obsolete repeatedly across several generations of anti-armour weaponry, they remain an effective and sometimes vital component of modern militaries.

Hard to know what the future might be, but one thing's for sure... they're not gone yet,







And you'll always find them at the thick of the fighting!

When it comes to real life, I'd rather see 'no tanks' than 'cool tanks'. I hope we outgrow our need for them - the sooner the better.

stolen police cars turned improvise ballistics, are a legitimate threat


Back to why armor? Because its survivable. When a tank get hit and disabled what do you see?
Dudes getting Out. Unless you completely atomize the thing, killing a tank unit creates an infantry unit.

The door is in the rear, engine in the front, for better chances of crew survival


Back to the other type of tank and why the Israeli Military is so great... Completly Co-Ed

Ah, but can you show girls in tank tops AND a tank at the same time?



I'll further claim +1 points for superkid

[
The Germans dressed up a number of Panthers as M10 Wolverines during the Battle of the Bulge to go along with captured American hardware for Operation Greif. And as you can see, they are pretty convincing, especially from a distance.

actually that is a m10 it has the running ggear of shermans (on the chasis of shermans) u should look at photos of sherman chasis

I don't have a picture to post but I've got a great story. As you may or may not know, the Abrams Tank is powered by a jet engine. It's basically the only thing that can get that much metal moving at anything like combat speeds. Apparently an experiment was performed to see how fast this tank could go. They stripped the tank to it's frame, removed the armor, weapons, everything but treads and engine. The tank didn't move forward at all, it simply spun vertically and landed flat on its back like the worlds coolest, if silliest, turtle.