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Comment by Top19 | Hacker News Reader

Makes sense about the bridges and roads thing. You need to know that for tanks. Even today in Germany you’ll see tiny bridges crossing a stream, a sign right by that says “this bridge rated for 70,000 pounds” (so can hold multiple tanks at once).

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Multiple? A Main Battle Tank such as the German Leopard 2 weighs 62,300 kg (137, 347 lb). Even a puny WW2 Sherman medium tank weighed in the neighborhood of 70,000 lb.

An M4 Sherman weighed about 35 tons when including fuel, crew and ammunition. So technically, it could hold two, though it would be a risky endeavor.

35 tons is close to 70000lbs

not to be pedantic, but in America 35 tons is exactly 70,000 lbs

Oops, I misread the comment about the bridge. I would assume German bridges would use metric measures.

Is that literally true? I would have expected Germans to rate their bridges in tons, not pounds/pfund.

I live in Germany and have never seen a sign using pounds, only tons.

Read the German Wikipedia article on the subject which shows German signs in short tons (non-metric unit): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militärische_Lastenklasse

The class numbers only roughly correspond to weight, so you could just as well consider them metric tons (1000 kg).

You definitely can't consider them metric tons. If the bridge you're about to cross has a maximum advertised load of 120 sh tn and you consider it safe to drive your 120 m tn vehicle over the bridge on the basis of that you're going to be putting a 132.3 m tn load on the bridge, or roughly 10% more than it's rated for.

As I said above, these signs do not show a literal maximum weight. They show a load class.

Right, I was overly simplifying. I meant to say a 120 sh ton MLC-calculated weight, not a vehicle that's exactly 120 tons since as the article goes into the class needs to take into account axle count etc.

What I don't understand is your claim that "you could just as well consider them metric tons". These are short tons with caveats, i.e. the eventual number depends on more than just the raw weight, but the raw weight is one aspect of the calculation.

So if you were to make that calculation on the basis of metric instead of lbs how aren't you going to introduce something like a 10% error in the MLC you come up with?

You'll find lots in areas where the allied troops did their exercises. Around "Feldberg" (Wetterau) you'll find plenty of them.

That would likely be metric tons, or a little more than 2204 pounds. The US uses short tons, or exactly 2000 pounds.

A lot of bridges everywhere are marked with their capacity. I don't think it's necessarily for the purpose of tanks.

I think he relates to the bridge signs of the NATO.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Load_Classification

Interesting, never knew about this.

Those are MLC (Military Load Classification) signs.

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