The Christie was a convertible tank.
The rear set of road wheels were powered from the drive sprocket using a simple chain drive, so that the trackcould be removed and the vehicle run on its wheels.
This was done not only because of the higher speeds possible on wheels, but also because track design at this time was not very advanced and track breakdown after very short drives was a very serious problem.
The BT could be used in the wheeled mode while on road marches approaching the battlefield, but for cross country travel, the tracks had to be used.
It took the crew about 30 minutes to change from the tracked to wheel mode. Road speed on wheels was about 110 km/h at maximum, or 62 km/h on roads or hard terrain using tracks.
In 1932 KhPZ began quantity production of the BT-2.
There were two standard production models: The gun armed version used the Model 30 37mm tank gun together with a ball mounted turret machine gun to the right of the main gun. The machine-gun armed version usedthe same manlet as the gun armed type, but had two DT tank machine-guns instead, adding up to three machine-guns in the turret.