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Toxn

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Everything posted by Toxn

  1. Toxn
    Oxyacetaline torch, apparently.
  2. Toxn
    ^ This
  3. Toxn
    We must live in different worlds The T-34 and British tanks get (rightly) bashed for these same faults. But then I agree with you - the Panther wasn't perfect, but it wasn't total shit either. Rather, it should be seen in context as a product of the conditions surrounding its design and production.
  4. Toxn
    Developmentally it had good ergonomics, great upgrade potential (witness jumbo, easy 8s, M50 ishermans, crazy yugo shermans with 122mm guns in them et al), good armour when it entered service, a good gun when it entered service, monumental mechanical reliability, good servicing characteristics, good logistical characteristics. On the downside it was, what, a bit tall? Petrol engined? Not upgunned a month earlier than it could have been? 'Only' 400 or so jumbos produced? Sherman is far and away the top contender for 'best tank of WW2', and ahead of T-34 in my opinion due to better soft factors (ergonomics, serviceability). As for 'onwards': M10 (perfectly fine), M36 (very good), M18 (very good), M24 (amazing), M41 (good), the entire Patton series beyond M26 (very good to good). Even M3 and M5 light were good for their class. Look, I'm no burgerphile. But the Americans were on a raging technological hot streak in the 1940s and 1950s that I don't think any other nation has equalled: literally shitting out world-beating technologies at scale while single-handedly building up the world's biggest navy and air force. Even their failures were unusually good - the USSR loved the P39 even though the US considered it a hot mess, and how many Wehraboos would be creaming themselves over the M26 or M7 if they had been produced with a balkenkreuz painted on the side of their hulls? Hell, how much would German aircraft designs have liked to get their hands on the R-2800 while the Americans were slapping them into anything with wings?
  5. Toxn
    Ya, making the requirements too onerous or technical can drive people off. It's a difficult dance. ITO judging the turret, I assume it would be on the basis of how well it packs in the gun, turret crew layout and ergonomics, vision device type and placement, armour layout and any other clever ideas that the contestant may have had. Despite my fondness for the idea, I fully accept that a staged competition might work very well (ie: allows people with varying skill levels and interests a shot at competing, makes interesting and emergent constraints to the design process occur, allows multiple winners so everyone gets their shot etc) or it might fail dismally. A variation that might ease things is to have "mediocre" backup options as alternates for each stage - ie: the contestants can use the winning gun or a historical 47mm, can use a winning turret or an APX2-alike etc. It might also be prudent to allow a bit of leeway in letting the contestants 'tinker' with the selected entries from previous rounds.
  6. Toxn
    I really like the second suggestion, as it's something I've wanted to do a competition about for a long time. I think it does, however, need to be fleshed out to take more account of the historical circumstances. This most likely includes a list of available historical components, but might perhaps also include something like the standardised APX turrets that contributed to hobbling historical French tanks. Or a requirement for the winner of one round to feed into the other (say, perhaps, a round to design the gun, which must then be used in the round to design the turret, which must then be used on the hull) to simulate the cross-production model that allowed the industrial concerns to all feed off of the same contracts.
  7. Toxn
    Yet another victim of the "everything is NERA/ERA issue"
  8. Toxn
    Iunno, man - much as I agree that the pendulum has probably swung a bit too far in the "hurr durr, is shit" direction, the Panther is still pretty dire. The drivetrain issues are well attested as far as I know, to the extent that the Germans themselves shipped them in by rail whenever possible. So I don't think you can just wave your hand and say the French report was a clerical error. And the ergonomics were certainly not perfect beyond just the gunner's sights. A few lowlights: - The commander's hatch is bulky yet tiny. - The commander's position is cramped overall. - The turret crew has very few vision devices overall (one fixed for the loader and that's your lot). - Everyone in the turret beyond the commander would burn in the event of a fire thanks to tiny and few hatches. - The gun is awkward to load. - The radio operator's position is remarkably cramped and uncomfortable. - Driving is a fiddly and requires a well-trained crewman (without also considering the need to baby the transmission). - The transmission is completely inaccessible short of pulling the turret. - The suspension and wheels are generally a pain in the ass to clean, repair or service. All in all the Panther was the inverse of the (successful) early and mid-war German designs - great when looking at the hard stats (gun penetration, armour, engine power etc) but lacking on many of the soft factors. Which is just the worst possible thing from the T-34 to have copied. I think the final, most damning thing I could say about the Panther is that it accomplishes more or less exactly what the T-44 does... all while being bigger, 10 tonnes heavier and less reliable. Edit: something I forgot to mention in my previous posts that I think contributed to the Panther's woes: the engine. The Maybach V12s that power the Panther are bulky beasts and remarkably tall (nearly 1.2m). Add in the extra height from the torsion bars and drive shaft going to the front, and I think that the 1.35m hull height is about as compact as you can make it. Just to give an idea of how much the engine alone added to the weight - if you replace the HL230 with the HL120 TRM from the Pz IV but keep everything else the same ITO other component sizes, armour thickness, armour angles etc, the calculated weight of the bare hull drops by 3.4mt (or ~27%). Again, the mix of decisions that constrained the design more or less doomed it to be very big and very heavy.
  9. Toxn
    UK got it right just in time for the war to end (Centurion). US got it right from 1942 (Sherman onwards). USSR got it more or less right all the way through (lots of caveats but still).
  10. Toxn
    Another interesting thing to note about Panther: the KwK 43 runs at the same pressure as KwK 40, which is fairly mediocre by mid-WW2 standards. If it ran at the same pressure as the long 88 on Tiger 2, you could eke put the same performance on an L/60 barrel. And if it ran on the same pressure as the 17 pounder you could do it with an L/55. Anyway, for those people wondering how the French supposedly copied the long 75 post-war for the AMX-13, but then got the same performance out of a much shorter barrel, there's your answer. Also of note: the casings for all German guns are also remarkably long and skinny - the 77mm managed startlingly better performance than the KwK 40 out of a much shorter case (420mm vs 495mm). I'd love people who know more about cannon design to explain why.
  11. Toxn
    Thanks for the correction - I struggle to keep track of my German industrial conglomerates sometimes. I'm aware of the DB design's issues (most damning of which was probably the transmission, which broke down as soon as testing started). Ironically, if they'd implemented things more to 6th dept's liking the result would have been a twin of the MAN design.
  12. Toxn
    Anecdote: As a sort of test run of my "fix a tank" competition series idea, I had a go at fixing the Panther (ie: the most talked-about problem child of the war). The rules here were to make the fix as historically realistic as possible - ie: no blowing a smoking crater in the Reichstag or 6th Department, no ignoring the large industrial concerns etc. I also tried to take into account the stated requirements and preferences that drove the project and got MAN the nod over DB: sloped armour, mid-mounted Krupp turret, front drive, torsion-bar suspension, Kniepkamp's interleaved suspension, the use of a Maybach engine of some variety, honking big gun courtesy of Rheinmetall, and 60-100mm of armour thickness up front. And funnily enough, once I'd gotten my head around the dumpster fire that was German AFV procurement in the 1930s to the end of WWII, I came to realise that Panther was about as good as it was going to get for the Germans. Really, the most that could have been hoped for in the real world was that more attention got paid to managing the weight of the beast, that the ergonomics were given more priority, and that some of the really dumb mechanical innovations that the Germans seemed to cram into everything (ie: mechanical turret drive) were left out. All of which would have lead to a 35-tonne monster instead of a 38-tonne one. German AFV development just really sucked that badly.
  13. Toxn
    I'm not sure why you'd bother rolling it - it would severely limit the amount of hardness you could give the high-hardness plate at the centre of the whole mess. That or you'd be very limited in terms of how thick your overall plate could be in order to achieve proper through-hardness by quenching. Something like 50mm max.
  14. Toxn
    From memory, it's just three layers of steel explosively welded together, with a HHS plate (~550 BHN) sandwiched between two ordinary armour (300-400 BHN) plates. Explosive welding is needed to retain the temper on all the plates.
  15. Toxn
    @Collimatrix can add more to this, but my understanding is that the Jumos are just a bad design, period. The use of counter-rotating "stators" and the design of the burner cans all but garuantee low lifespans and engine flameout issues.
  16. Toxn
    I've been hearing rumours that WT might split up the ground and air tech trees in the fashion of coastal/deepwater naval. This is something I'd love to see, as it instantly decompresses the tech trees and give me a reason to actually play cold war and modern tanks. For extra points, I'd implement such that, say, the top tier of the WWII tree is the reserve of the cold war/modern tree. This gives you something to look forward to as you grind to the T-44 or whatever from the bottom, while also having said T-44 get beaten like a rented mule when it goes up against more modern vehicles.
  17. Toxn
    This definitely counts
  18. Toxn
    I think it says something about how African history is dealt with that I'm at least relatively conversant with it but didn't know about this until today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djenné-Djenno https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-0465-2_986 Preindustrial heterarchical corporatism. That's wild.
  19. Toxn
    kwêvoël Some champ named the thing after the grey loerie.
  20. Toxn
    The name is iconic as well. Those birds are all over the shop around here, and look like little pteradactyls.
  21. Toxn
  22. Toxn
    Landmines. And bush warfare. And the fumes of late colonialism. And whatever (probably radioactive) drug the cold war was. And, you know, industrial-strength racism. Honestly, given the above, us making 6x6 mad max vehicles in the 70s and 80s seems positively sane.
  23. Toxn
    The hull and turret is still out there in Bloem, slowly rusting away under an awning.
  24. Toxn
    So after dicking around a bit in arcade, I found a reliable formula for fun(tm): - Play British, queue up the Cromwell IV (the lowest-tier one with the 75mm). - Load up a few rounds of smoke, with one in the tube to start. - Rush to the nearest cap and throw smoke at the enemy as you get there. - Switch to AP and start going to town on sides and rears. - Keep throwing smoke from your mortar as you doodle around knife-fighting everyone. - If the cap stops being fun, run off somewhere else and repeat. Copious smoke makes for a wealth of fun tactics: my favourite right now is to throw smoke around a corner and then go around the other way while my opponents are obsessively firing into it.
  25. Toxn
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