N-L-M

2 hours ago, Collimatrix said:

If you tried to "reset" the heat treatment, that carbon could cause some problems.  Some carbides form at higher temperatures than the intermetallic precipitates

While this is true, the solution heat treat is above that temperature, and everything should dissolve.

Forming the wrong precipitates is an issue if you age wrong or if you accidentally age via heat input such as welding later in the process.

welding itself is also an issue for precipitation hardened metals if done post-age as it remelts the HAZ had effectively solutionizes it, of course. This is what causes 6061, for example, to lose so much of its strength in the HAZ.

6 minutes ago, Renegade334 said:

Is Aermet also capable of this "heat reset"?

Per The spec sheet, Aermet is a brand name for a Maraging steel. So like all* solution heat treat and age alloys, it should be capable of said reset.

*In certain alloys and geometries the reset is not possible as the solution heat treat and quench cause cracking.

Why is the image for the last,most relevant bit, cut in half? The paranoid amongst us would suspect we're being had by a bait-and-switch.

Even if we assume that weight includes a factored-in Trophy system just in case it's fitted, that's still only around 2.5-3 tons including the ballast on the turret front (which is effectively built in on the M1A2C). Where is all the extra weight coming from, if we assume this is genuine?

7 hours ago, Jeeps_Guns_Tanks said:

I wonder why they just didn't come up with a wider track pad?

I think it has to do with the drive sprockets meshing with the end connectors, which are also the guide teeth. You'd need an all new incompatible concept of track link design to fill both those functions while also being wider.

Such a concept is the track with central guide teeth used on the HVSS Shermans.

8 hours ago, DogDodger said:

If it doesn't count as spam

That entire site of yours is an absolute goldmine. I even got my profile pic from there.

3 hours ago, AssaultPlazma said:

If they want to use the Bradley chassis that bad why not just stick that 30MM Stryker turret on it? It's already been made and means ammo commonality....

Ideally, using the AMPV hull, which also has mine protection improvements and a revised internal layout among others.

But on the whole, if you're sticking with a "medium weight" IFV, you could do much worse than a Brad derivative with a RWS 30mm (especially one that's already in service!) and the improvement offered by newer options like the Lynx may not be a sufficient gain to justify their cost.

With the AMPV, latest M109s, and the like, the US Army is committed to the Bradley automotive components for the next 40 years or so. Makes sense to me to at least try and leverage that.

Maraging steels in general are low carbon, as they do not get their strength from carbon distorting the lattice but rather from metallic precipitates like Ni3Mo. Carbon is in fact not desired in Maraging steels.

For the Maraging steel to work properly you need a minimum of 19% Ni, which is very expensive, but you get what you pay for.

Also, if the old marketing material for Pantsir is to be believed, it appears that it was designed more to shoot down Tomahawk-class guided missiles at shortish ranges than MALE drones or small ATGM sized missiles. Which makes stuff like the Spike NLOS or TB-2/MAM-L combo difficult to deal with. 

Broke: The Brad is the worst IFV and can't do any mission properly.
Woke: the Brad is the best of all the IFVs of its vintage and is de facto the yardstick by which all others are measured.
Bespoke: The Brad is such an unbelievably good design that it can only be replaced by another Bradley.

A quick reverse image search does suggest the first posting is from a Korean forum on April 1st 2020.

The inclusion of the PG-7VR in the same list as PG-7V also raises an eyebrow.

On the other hand, I have never seen those particular testing pics before, and it's not like marketing can't do sloppy work too.

Does anyone have those images from another source?

It is indeed a recurring tragedy. Small turret rings and internal mantlets.

8 hours ago, TokyoMorose said:

 

By god, the British were right all along, Churchill coming in with the best MMP suspension of all time.

The Churchill did indeed have very good MMP for its time, combined with a track link design with very aggressive grousers meant a good ability to cross muddy ground. That, combined with the low low gear ratios allowed it to slowly but surely cross obstacles many other tanks couldn't.

The British didn't get everything wrong.

You can see from the MMP equation that the term for number of wheels is linear but the term for diameter is a square root.

Seeing as the tradeoff between the two is inverse linear, it evidently makes sense to maximize the linear one at the cost of the square root one, all else being equal. 

Now, where do we see this in practice? In heavy earth moving or construction equipment, primarily.

Cockerill themselves don't make ammunition, Mecar (now part of the Nexter group) does, but the Nexter ammunition catalog does not contain any 90mm for the M3 family. It does, however, contain many ammo types for various Cockerill 90mm guns, including the spicier ones, and presumably transplanting those projectiles (perhaps with driving and obturating band modifications) onto the correct case would not be a hassle.

Incidentally, the Nexter catalog lists penetration for the M690A1 APFSDS for the high pressure Cockerill 90mm mk 8 as a NATO single heavy (150mm at 60) at 2000m.

Regardless, I am led to believe the primary use of the M48s is coast defence, in which role they are used in concert with pedestal mounted guns taken from M47s (and still used with the original mantlets!) 

In that setting, the HE round is likely the most important, and any AP flavor will be able to adequately deal with amphibious vehicles.

1 hour ago, Beer said:

Would you know what was typical for French fortification elemenets of the time?

I don't have any solid info, but I do understand the French fortification armor at the time was also on the soft and ductile side of things, which is part of what led the Maginot cloches to be 20cm thick even just for the MG or observation units.

Yeah a lack of Mo, Ni, and B limit the hardenability of the steel, particularly at the core.

Good quantity of Mn, which means impact properties should be good. More phosphorus and sulfur than would normally be recommended, but the Mn should help with that.

The Al is presumably left over from deoxidation.

A hardness of 169 BHN corresponds to around 570 MPa yield, which is indeed fairly soft and weak for armor steel, but that's somewhat typical for fortifications where weight was less of an issue than the ability to take multiple repeated hits.

4 minutes ago, Beer said:

 

You are right. Are MMP values available somewhere? 

Ask and ye shall receive.

And, like fuckin clockwork, we get the "I was just trolling" response.

It's like pottery.

5 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

 

 

I see my literary allusions do not escape your sharp eyes!

On 3/30/2021 at 7:50 PM, delete013 said:

rarely is pointed at the fact that they largely dispensed with tactical maneuver mid-war,

It's rarely pointed out because it is an absolute load of bullshit, and most self respecting people have enough of a brain to not embarrass themselves in public by making such inherently absurd claims. Clearly you either have no brain or no sense of self worth if you are willing to put your name behind such an incredibly stupid line of thought.

Let us take, as a starting date, the year 1943, as that is nicely mid-war.
At that point in the war, the Western Allies were largely engaged in the Tunisian campaign, where other than defensive actions the entire battle of the Mareth line was decided via tactical maneuver, outflanking the defenses and thus rendering the line untenable and forcing an Axis retreat.

The final battle of Tunis, in May, featured a classic tactical breakthrough on a narrow front followed by exploitation by armored and infantry forces. Following the taking of the city, roughly 240,000 Axis troops, who had been defeated by maneuver, surrendered to the Allied forces there. They had been quite firmly defeated by being outmaneuvered, cut off, rendered irrelevant to the Allies achieving their objectives, and left with the choice of either dying pointlessly or surrendering. In fact, more surrendered than were killed fighting.
 

Following the Allied victory in North Africa, the invasion of Sicily was a 6 week affair, in which the Allies continuously advanced and took critical key objectives, forcing the Axis forces there to retire or be cut off, you know, as one does in maneuver warfare. Many times tougher than expected resistance was met, and rather than turn the battles into a slogfest, effort was shifted to where it could give the best results, and the results speak for themselves. The Axis were systematically and quickly evicted from the island.


In Italy, the landscape precluded maneuver warfare to an extent, but even there, after concentrated attacks on defensive positions (which did also feature maneuver on the allied side, but on a generally smaller scale) what happened? yep, exploitation maneuver by infantry and armored units forcing the enemy to retreat or surrender. One would notice that despite being on the offensive throughout all these campaigns, the Allies suffered lower casualties on the whole than the Axis did. How did they achieve such low losses? By utilizing their combat abilities better than the Axis did, and by exploiting successes to force axis retreats and surrenders at all levels.
By mid 1944, Italy had surrendered and was in allied hands, and it wasn't a result of sitting around with thumbs in uncomfortable places.


What else happened in mid '44? The largest amphibious invasion of history. And how was this invasion used to further the Allied goal of cleansing the Continent of the Nazi menace? Though maneuver warfare, primarily. The whole reason we hear so much about the Bocage and the attempts to break out of it was that the Allies didn't  want to fight that kind of fight at all. Yes, they were better at it than the Nazis were, and yes their armored vehicles were better for such close range fighting as many big cat apologists like to point out to cover for the really sad showing the Nazi metal boxes gave in Normandy, but as far as the Allies were concerned it was a bad way of conducting war. And what happened when they broke out of the Bocage? again, again, maneuver warfare. The Falaise pocket was a result of highly effective maneuver warfare, and decisively kicked the ass of the Nazis at what they considered their own game. Even the Nazi troops who escaped the pocket did so without their heavy equipment, which was irreplaceable as Nazi production was entirely incapable of keeping up with war losses.

The following high speed chase to the German border was, again, brought about by maneuver warfare of the highest order, capturing several more Nazi units in various pockets, such as the Mons pocket and the Colmar pocket.

In addition to the maneuver battles, there were also some battles, such as Hurtgen, which were not battles of maneuver, but those were A. not as common, B. not preferred, and C. Occasionally unavoidable, as previously discussed. They were, however, followed by an exploitation, as a rule, where at this point in the war the main limits on the Allies rate of advance wasn't the German resistance, as much as it was the logistical hurdles of supplying fast armies across a country where most of the transportation infrastructure had been wrecked.

Following the Nazi winter offensive, which failed to achieve any of its primary goals, the Allies proceeded to, you guessed it, maneuver their way into the low countries and the Rhine. Including taking cutting off pockets of Axis troops at many locations.

To conclude, the idea that the Western Allies didn't use tactical maneuver as a tool is not only wrong, it is farcical, and paints you, personally, the person bringing this up as an idea, as an absolute idiot without a shred of common sense nor the brainpower to think before you open your mouth.
 

On 3/30/2021 at 7:50 PM, delete013 said:

do no need for fancy drive trains. Infantry tanks suddenly didn't need speed or agility, cruiser tanks no armour. Sounds perfect for that doctrine, too bad Germans didn't abide to it

The hilarious thing here is that the Cletrac controlled differential on the Sherman, or the Merrit-Brown gearbox on what really is a wide range of British tanks, were hands down superior to what the Nazis were using in the vast majority of armored vehicles (Pz 3 and 4 and variants) they produced. And they had the reliability to go halfway across the continent on their own power, not break down after a measly few hundred km and need rail transport for any real movement.
Likewise, your other point is wrong on not one but two counts.
The first is that the idea of cruiser tanks and infantry tanks was confined to the British, not all or even most of the Western Allies.
The second is that by the mid war even the British were mostly out of that line of thinking, what with them operating very large numbers of American medium tanks (M3s and M4s in various variants) and effectively abandoning the development of infantry tanks in favor of ever better protected and armed cruiser tanks - with the introduction of the Cromwell, they had a tank which was a medium in all but name, with sufficient armor and firepower to go up against the common Nazi vehicles and win, while also being much more mobile.

On 3/30/2021 at 7:50 PM, delete013 said:

But they still offered that needed weight distribution, across the chassis but also on individual wheel. This reduced strain on roadwheel arms and individual torsion bars when hitting several bumps on uneven terrain.

dividing up the weight of the vehicle by adding roadwheel stations reduces MMP at the cost of more weight, which is an issue all Nazi vehicles suffered from extensively. As for taking bumps, the greater unsprung mass resulting from having more mass of wheels is a net detriment, and beyond 4 or so roadwheel stations per side there's damn near no extra ride smoothness to be achieved by adding roadwheel stations, the springs, whether torsion or something else, do that work.
Also, as has been previously noted in this thread, words have meanings and you are misusing them.

On 3/30/2021 at 7:50 PM, delete013 said:

Hence, faster off-road speeds for Germans, better maneuvering, more flanking surprises, better combat performance. And it is pretty clear what the Allies were the worst at, maneuver warfare. There is no reason to think that the design wasn't the best around. Everyone else ran about with lighter or slower vehicles.

Faster off road speeds which never seemed to materialize owing to drivetrain unreliability, maneuverability which was forbidden in the manuals for fear of breaking the transmission, a general failure to use these theoretical abilities to do anything much, a repeated set of losses to allied maneuver operations, losing more vehicles than they could afford despite being on the defensive, all the way back to the Rhine. AKA, a piss poor combat record.

There are several good reasons to believe the solution was not the best, for example the entire rest of the world examining it and deciding it wasn't a good idea. The French even went the extra step of building a few of them, before discarding the idea into the dustbin of history, where it rightly belongs.

Everyone else was clearly capable of making tanks which weren't absurdly heavy for their combat ability and which could actually get to the battlefields and do their jobs. The extreme weight of the big cats is a detriment, not a positive. Also, by dint of not being excessively heavy, most Allied tanks had a much better power to weight ratio and could go faster, in addition to being much more reliable.

On 3/30/2021 at 7:50 PM, delete013 said:

There is however another reason. Germans had to include the limitations of their steel into calculations.

As did literally everyone else, yes. Shitty German steel would be a reasonable excuse for accepting reduced performance, not for creating horrible monsters which were entirely unsuited for fighting the war they were in the middle of. That anyone can make excuses for a """medium tank""" with the size and weight of a heavy but none of the performance thereof is absurd.

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

I'm going into the void on this topic, I have no knowledge about those vehicles, so I'll make negative assumptions about what doesn't fit in the narrative

Usually, when one is guessing blindly, one shouldn't brag about being an absolute idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about, and listen to those who do.

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

If they could, they would use overlapping wheels simply because they offer better driving.

This statement is entirely false. The overlapping wheels offer reduced ground pressure, at the cost of a whole host of other deficiencies, which are the reason nobody uses them any more.

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

A most logical and probable direction should the war continue.

Various napkin drawings of for the most part imaginary tanks do not imply they would ever have seen production. Especially not when such a change would require refitting entire factories to produce tanks which are only slightly different to ones already in production, and the need for said vehicles is acute.

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

Sure, per individual vehicle. With greater carrying capacity you can put battle relevant items on the vehicle. Better vehicle means less of them needed.

In general, the square cube law favors larger tanks, but that doesn't apply when your tanks are made needlessly huge and heavy for no good reason. The overlapped suspensions, especially that of the Panther, came at a net weight penalty compared to other simpler suspension types, which means they come at a detriment to payload capacity, not an improvement.

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

And a single panther against two shermans goes in the former's favour. At least this is what history tells.

lol. None of the operational analysis we have from WW2 supports this claim of yours. This is just pure fantasy on your part, which appears to be aimed at convincing yourself the Nazi tanks were superior... for some reason? One does wonder why you'd have such a fanatical devotion to the creations of the regime whose sole truly groundbreaking invention was the industrialization of mass murder.

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

Or you reduce the strain on each component by splitting the rotation of a wheel arm between two torsion bars and reducing the distance between wheels, as was the case of a panther.

you really have no clue how torsion bars work, do you?
Here's a hint: double length torsion bars and overlapping roadwheels are entirely independent design choices. Both of them are bad choices.

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

It does. It is of secondary consideration though. I believe having that 8.8 and 100mm of steel justifies some freezing mud problems. Allies got these priorities all wrong and paid the high price.

The 8.8 was quite a good gun as ww2 tank guns go, 100mm vertical is approximately equivalent to the armor of most medium tanks of the time, nothing to write home about when your tank weighs twice as much as a medium and that's all you get for your troubles.
Freezing mud and the like led to many big cats being flat out abandoned and not seeing combat, which means the combat effectiveness of those vehicles was a net negative. Again, hardly anything worth white knighting over.

The Allies, I would remind you, won the war. And they did so, on the whole, with lower casualties than the Axis suffered (in the West at least), and the general consensus among all of them was that there was very little to be learned from the Nazis about tanks. Before you go crying "victors", remember that the Allies were not above Operation Paperclip'ing any and all scientists they thought would be useful, and the Nazi tank designers didn't make the cut. The Allies didn't think they were worth stealing.

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

This just confirms the need for tiger 1's arrangement. Or was there an alternative?

With overlapping wheels, you either get horrible track torsion loads or the maintenance nightmare of interleaving wheels. The only alternative is this:

The above also applies, in general, to the entire Nazi war effort.

8 hours ago, delete013 said:

Panther was likely to get the right pair?

A balanced arrangement without track twisting and roughly three layers only.

For a Panther aficionado, you are extremely poorly informed about it. All Panthers had that 4 row interleaved roadwheel setup, with the outer wheels and inner wheels on opposing swing arms. While this layout is slightly better than that of the Tiger, it still requires the removal of an awful lot of roadwheels to get to any inner one, and still allows freezing mud to immobilize the vehicle.
 

8 hours ago, delete013 said:

That is not how it works. The concept of interleaved wheels was a solution for the limitations of the time. The only other suspension able to carry such weight were compound solutions with limited suspension travel. Today's arrangement would never work with ww2 tech.

wrong again. Even today, interleaved roadwheels would help reduce ground pressure, which for MBTs is reaching rather extreme values. But unlike then, nowadays everyone has the good sense to not mess around with unworkable ideas like that. Single torsion bars with dampers and bump stops gave a very good accounting for themselves in WW2, so your second point is also wrong.

8 hours ago, delete013 said:

Germans identified the need for greater suspension travel as a precondition for fast and smooth off road driving. The steel in their torsion bars couldn't enable it, so they bound two together and achieved it "trotz schlechterer Werkstoffgüte" - despite poor material quality. (Merhof, Hackbarth: Fahrmechanik der Kettenfahrzeuge)

Or, in other words: The Nazis correctly identified that vertical travel is important for high cross country speed, but instead of being sensible about how much vertical travel they needed they went with a value far in excess of what was actually useful at the time, and paid a horrendous price in design terms in order to achieve it.
There is a reason that even the postwar fast MBTs didn't have a vertical travel as large as that of the Panther, which was only done on the later NATO box tanks with much more powerful engines - below that point, it's just not very relevant.

8 hours ago, delete013 said:

Germans had material limitations and had to improvise

Improvising by creating the most overcomplicated and resource intensive solution is not a very sensible answer when your problem is lack of resources.

8 hours ago, delete013 said:

Because they were designed 30 years later. If vehicles needed to exceed 70 tonnes then interleaved wheels would likely come back into play.

Funny how even with very heavy tanks being used nowadays, many of which exceed 60 tons by a wide margin and have since they were designed, and in a wide range of extremely heavy engineering equipment, not only does nobody use overlapped or interleaved wheels, but literally nobody is even considering it as an option. perhaps, just perhaps, it is because the whole world knows it is a terrible idea?

5 hours ago, delete013 said:

nor am I a mechanical engineer.

Fortunately, this forum has an abundance of mechanical engineers, at least some of whom have experience with automotive systems.
Perhaps you should cease being so aggressively wrong when you yourself admit you have no clue what you're talking about.

4 hours ago, delete013 said:

Then I am sure you will be able to dismantle my arguments on a scientific level

If you made any, sure. For a start, you must first read the relevant literature, because as of now your arguments from ignorance only serve to accentuate your stupidity.

2 hours ago, delete013 said:

Now a question for mio $. Do these two vehicles enable neutral steering, as could Tiger 2?

The T30 heavy tank features the CD-850 crossdrive transmission, which is a triple differential unit capable of both pivot turns and neutral turns. It also features a fuckoff huge torque converter, which allows a much easier driving experience as one only needs 2 gears forwards and one reverse to cover the entire range, and is in fact still in service today on a variety of vehicles. Which is more than I can say for any Nazi WW2 equipment.
I would like my million bucks, along with a punitive extra 1 mil for you shifting the goalposts from suspensions to transmissions yet still being horribly wrong.
and yes longer vehicles are harder to steer, but the magic number for tread-to-length is 1.5-1.8, and all Allied tanks of the late war period were perfectly fine in that regard. As Beer rightly notes.

1 hour ago, delete013 said:

Arracourt: not yet corroborated by non-American sources. I don't believe in "official" US army fairy tales

You've gone straight into denialism. Tell me, do you also not believe the Allied reports on what they found in certain camps in Poland?
Regardless of what you choose or do not choose to believe, the Allies pretty much plowed through the Nazis in Europe, with the Nazis not achieving any great successes for all the divisions of brand spanking new tanks they threw into the grinder.

In conclusion, you are a total idiot blindly "defending" the products of a tyrannical regime despite lacking some very basic knowledge on the subject in general and of your specific favorites in particular. I diagnose you with a extremely bad case of Dunning-Kruger, the only known cure to which is this:

Your SNR is a net negative and the only reason you haven't yet been kicked off the forum for being a waste of electrons is that some people here still find your brand of idiocy amusing.

Presumably many of those capabilities (though not the range, as that depends on aperture) could also be fit into gunner or commander optics for armored vehicles. Which is quite a step up from the low res thermals of the 1980s.

2 minutes ago, TokyoMorose said:

and I cannot comprehend any reason to do so if they were merely doing a sales demonstration for the Trophy system.

Well, if the system is being demonstated, presumably it must be on some platform. And for a demonstration, going to all the effort to integrate the system into a new platform seems excessive. So perhaps, a case of "ignore the tank focus on the system on the tank".

I would expect much the same to be the case with fire control demonstrations.

Doesn't seem to have anything on the sensor in question. Presumably it's the optical sensor discussed here previously.

About bloody time too, as the saying goes

There were a few reasons why heavy tanks were considered to be more difficult to deal with, but none of those were strictly speaking enough to disqualify the concept; more so, the inability of the heavy tank projects to bring a product considered sufficiently better than a medium tank (or indeed uparmored mediums like the Jumbo) to justify all the hassle.