This is a thread to flytip all of the weird-and-sometimes-wonderful ways that human ingenuity has birthed inspirational means to murder our fellow men - and sometimes to try to protect them.
This OP concerns the latter:
This is the Minenräumer: it Räums Minen -
More-specifically it was the Alkett VsKfz 617 Schwerer Minenräumer - a project of Krupps and Daimler-Benz conceived in 1942 in order to just fucking sashay out into a defended minefield and make a safe route through it by driving over the mines and having them 'splode all over its belly like an inexperienced youth’s first visit to a knocking-shop…
Its tracks were solid lumps of steel attached to more solid lumps of steel, and despite weighing around 50 tonnes fully armed and loaded, it had just 10mm to 40mm of armour - making it vulnerable to anti-tank fire and to the mines it was meant to be popping like zits…
It was also woefully underpowerd - 200hp meant it barely moved at walking pace off-road - it was steered by chains, and tended to sink into anything but well-compacted gravel…
It was such a catastrophic failure, that they made a MUCH bigger, easier to hit one along similar principles, but with thinner armour…
Or rather, they made the Krupp Räumer S - a giant, armoured, articulated, push-me-pull-you with so many flaws evident (130 tonne weight, vulnerable articulating mid-section, high centre-of-gravity, enormous expense, horribly complicated, two-underpowered engines, blissfully easy to hit, &c, &c…), that the US forces who captured it speculated it was intended for some other purpose, because it’s hard to imagine a more shit minesweeper…
All this to achieve the same effect that the Russians accomplished by sending gangs of political prisoners out at gunpoint to do unprotected by any namby-pamby vehicles! … 
