The officers at the Bureau of Military Research waited anxiously for Piłsudski to arrive. The Prime Minister was still, at his core, a military man deeply concerned with the readiness of Poland's armies. Many of the officers present remembered the desperate days of 1920, and the miracle of the Battle of Warsaw. A cloud of cigarette and pipe smoke filled the room as the marshal entered.

"Gentlemen." Piłsudski laid a folder of diplomatic reports on the central table. "Central Europe is heating up again. The Soviets crush Finland without a word of strong protest from the west, Hungary and Czechoslovakia are at each other's throats with greater and greater plans for increases in their forces, and our so called friends in Paris and London have abandoned their desire to help us maintain strong forces by refusing to even acknowledge our requests to purchase new vehicles."

"We must face a sobering fact, Poland is on its own. We cannot count on England or France, they gave us no aid when the Soviets were within sight of Warsaw and they now turn us away in times of peace. They care not for the people they helped free. We alone now face the monster to the east. I would rather die a thousand times than see Poland fall and become again a province of some foreign empire, especially the godless communists in Moscow. Poland must be strong, or it will not survive."

The silence in the room was tense, and all the men there knew that he was right.

"Our armies were once the terror of the great peoples of Europe. We smashed the Russian, the Protestant Swede, the Teutonic German, the Turk. What was our strength? The husaria, the winged hussar, was an indomitable force. We need a shock unit for the 20th century, a swift and decisive unit to change the tide of a battle, an armored spearhead to break the enemy lines ahead of our troops. If these American designs are as innovative as you report, I think we have our weapon."

PZ-33

Polish military engineers will be working with engineers at Państwowe Zakłady Inżynierii to produce a new tank design based on the Christie blueprints. It will take advantage of the Christie suspension and the capability of the tank to travel both on road and off, as the Christie design allowed tanks to remove their treads and run on wheels on good roads. (While I can't find a lot of information about the specs of the Christie design itself, it was produced in Russia as the BT-2 in a functionally unchanged manner and I have used the BT-2 as the source of my technical information.) Prototypes by 1933.

• Weight: 10-11 tons

• Length: 5-6 m

• Width: no more than 2.5 m

• Height: no more than 2.5 m

• Crew Size & Complement: 3 men. Driver, Gunner, Tank commander/radio operator

• Armament, Primary & Secondary: 37mm cannon, 7.92 mm km wz.25 (Hotchkiss) machine gun

• Armour: 6–13 mm

• Operational Range: 400 l diesel tank

• Engine: Diesel engine, requires a power/weight ratio of 40 hp/tonne

• Suspension: Christie suspension

• Other Equipment: Each tank will be fitted with a radio. Each tank will be fitted with heating for the diesel engine and fuel tank to allow for operation at low temperatures.

[m] Mods: If I missed anything in this post please let me know