It makes no difference whether the sounds you collect actually have anything to do with tanks, samurai blades, or growling animals. The essential emotional quality of the sounds is virtually ALL that matters. When you find the sounds that make you believe a screaming mechanical beast is about to rip you to shreds with enormous spinning blades, then, and only then, do you bring in actual recordings of a tank and blend them with the nightmare elements. Using the nightmare approach, an apple being bitten is a useful element in the sound of a spear piercing flesh, chalk squeaking across a blackboard becomes part of a rocket engine screaming through the air, and the muzzle blast of a howitzer is slightly modified to become the muzzle blast of a 9mm pistol. It's theoretically possible to synthesize them, starting from scratch with nothing but oscillators, but it isn't an efficient way to work.
Real sounds are really complex.
It is by far the most versatile in terms of allowing you to alter the pitch, equalization, dynamics, and reverberation of any given sound, as well as more exotic processing like ring modulation. When 20 or 24 bits comes it'll be noticeably, but not enormously, better . . . Others prefer hard disk based workstations. ProTools, which was designed around hard disk storage, can be integrated with a sampler as well. Whenever you hear more than three or four sounds at once they become noise, which, by definition, is meaningless.