Even if it wasn’t really a tank, it made a grand illusion.

Everything the strategist Karl von Clausewitz intended when he defined war as “a collision of two living forces” is being packaged into closet-sized boxes by a Warner Center firm.

Perceptronics, as its name nicely implies, is a high-tech establishment that works in the realm of illusions made by computer. It sells the illusions primarily to the Department of Defense.

That becomes immediately evident just beyond the front door.

You walk past stone planters full of cheerful snapdragons and pansies, into an outwardly indistinguishable concrete building on Erwin Street. Then, in a reception room almost void of decor, you are confronted by a wall of painted rows of gray tanks, lined up nose to tail like ducks in a shooting gallery.

A blonde woman with a nice smile sitting behind the counter showed no personal interest in weaponry last week when dozens of reporters and television camera crews arrived.

But the executive corps of Perceptronics were ebullient about tanks.

The occasion was the shipment of the company’s first four M-1 tank simulators, built at a cost of about $250,000 apiece, to bases in the United States and Europe to train GIs for battle.

There being no military secrets involved, the company invited the news media to see the trainers in action, step inside them, stalk the enemy in the periscope, squeeze the trigger and feel the recoil of an armor piercing dart leaving the muzzle of a 120-millimeter gun.

Considering their customary attitude of detachment, the reporters showed surprising excitement.

It isn’t every day you get to command a tank in battle. Even if it wasn’t really a tank, it made a grand illusion.

Each simulator consisted of two fiberglass boxes with four-inch-thick walls to create the feeling of massive armor.

A crew of four men, Perceptronics technicians in white suits, manned the vehicle, blowing up dozens of enemy vehicles put in their path by the computer.

In a real M-1, the driver and crew are separated by steel, so, for ease and economy, Perceptronics merely put them in different boxes.

The driver sat in the forward box, supine and alone, feet forward, periscope screen in front of his eyes, steering handle with accelerator grip just above his stomach. The commander, gunner and ammunition loader worked in the rear box in a space the size of a small bathroom.

Once on the move, the technicians--and the reporters in their turn--felt the sensations of a real tank, down to the rumble and screech of the tracks, the clanking of the magazine door and the “boom, boom” of incoming artillery.

“We’re hyping the sound a little so it’s better than real life,” said Chairman of the Board Gershon Weltman.

He said the design team ruled out adding the smell of gunpowder but may reconsider.

“I’ve always been a smell enthusiast,” Weltman said. “But probably the fact that four people will be working and sweating in there for six hours will produce a smell of its own.”

The computer-fed view through the periscope was only a kind of low-grade patchwork of squares. Its virtue is the ability of programmers to give it every mappable detail of any real battlefield and make it reflect every movement of the tank, even sliding into a gully if the driver errs.

“The theory behind this is not to create the full tank environment, but everything to make the tank feel real,” said project director Richard Taylor.

Taylor was conversant with the gritty details of war. In the field, he said, key decisions often revolve around such simple questions as:

“Where am I? Have I fired a shot? Are we dead?”

Research has shown, he said, that “if you can get past the first 10 shot-ats, you will generally be a successful soldier and live for a long time. So if they have to be in an actual war, they will be more seasoned. They will be able to deal with the confusion.”

That points up the relevence of Clausewitz, who criticized his contemporaries for planning a strategy of preset movement against a predictable enemy.

Consistent with Clausewitzian thinking, the simulator offers more than a one-dimensional computer game like Dragon’s Lair, in which the player goes over the same set of moves until they’re mastered.

In this game, enemy tanks on the screen will be maneuvered and fired by other teams in other simulators at military bases around the world, all connected by satellite system called SIMNET.

With a few strokes of programming, the tanks can be made to look and act like Soviet T-72s. Once Perceptronics has fielded a force of several hundred tanks, it may move on to simulators for aircraft, helicopters, even dismounted infantry, Weltman said.

Then thousands of soldiers, tank crews and pilots--sweat on their backs, fear and confusion in their hearts--will fight integrated battles of tactics and strategy as they sit in boxes scattered across the continents.

And maybe, when the military has had its fill, board presidents will hire programmers to put Shermans in place of M-1s and Tigers in place of T-72s and then fight the Battle of the Bulge again.