Toxn

I'm not absolutely sure but from the description it looks like total time. 

I think you're stretching massively if you're going to claim that the T-34 had "just as many" reliability problems as Panther.
 
Here's a quick sanity check: during the early part of Barbarossa, parts of the German front moved around 1500km (around 16km per day) against heavy resistance during a three-month campaign season. Similarly, during the last phases of the war parts of the Soviet army were moving around 1000km (around 11km per day) during a similar time period against organised German opposition. In both cases the factors limiting operational tempo were opposition and supply rather than the mechanical limits of the equipment involved.
 
During Kursk, however, the Germans moved barely 100km over the course of twenty days (around 5km per day). During this time, the units operating Panthers were losing something like 8% of their vehicles a day due to mechanical breakdowns. At the end of some of the fiercest fighting of the war the ratio of combat-damaged tanks needing repairs to broken-down tanks was still 50/50, and only 10 out of the original 200 vehicles were actually operational.
 
Even granting that this was the debut of a type which is often stated as being "rushed into service" (despite a more than 5-year development cycle), there is just no way that the German army could have sustained the operational tempo that they achieved at the beginning of the war with a tank force made up of Panthers. The Soviets, meanwhile, seem to have kept up more or less fine with their T-34s.

That is not true, sorry. ČSLA used Pz.IV till 1954, StuG.III till 1960 and Hetzer till 1963 (even 12 Marder III and 38 LT-38 Pz.38(t) were used). Also the Panthers and Bergepanthers were officially addopted and withdrawn in 1955 but the issue is that the standard tanks just sit in the depots. Nobody used them for anything more than few occasional drives and a movie production. The Bergepnathers were used and even several standard tanks were rebuilt to them because the army lacked heavy ARV (it had also 8 Cromwell ARV and later many Cromwells were rebuilt to makeshift ARVs). Some of the ex-German weapons were uven used in combat in Slovakia against Bandera units in 1945-47 (AFAIK mainly LT-38). 
 
It will probably surprise you but the most numerous tanks of our army after the war were British ones and it stayed like that well into 50'. It was 190 Cromwells/Centaurs, 20 Challengers and 30 Stuart VI. The second most numerous were German and only the third were Soviet ones. In numbers it was 42% British, 36% German and only 22% Soviet (we had more StuG than T-34 well into fiftees). The transition to Soviet machinery didn't even start until after 1950. Prior there was still ongoing domestic tank program which was later killed (largely for political reasons) and replaced by Soviet vehicles (pity because the domestic designs were a very curious mix of all AFV schools taking something from every side of the conflict).  
 
The argument that heavy tanks were not fit into the military structure doesn't hold water too. We had a heavy self-propelled regiment till 1956 which had officially a Panther batallion - but the Panthers were just stored. AFAIK the actually used machinery was a batallion of ISU-152 and a batallion of StuG.III. The plan was to rearm the unit with IS-3 but that never happened because of (wise) decision to concentrate on MBT only.  
 
PS Sorry for slightly different years than in previous post. It comes from the fact that the service of StuG.III didn't end with their sale to Syria. Only 12 were sold and the rest (95 pieces) continued serving in ČSLA till 1960.  
 

1941: clutch lifetime is shocking and lasts... around 2000km
1942: new gearbox is asked to be put into production - 3700km with no issues
 
More on reliability.
 

1941: clutch lifetime is shocking and lasts... around 2000km
1942: new gearbox is asked to be put into production - 3700km with no issues
 
More on reliability.
 

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?

I have quickly searched for the use of Panthers in Czechoslovak army after WW2. There were 72 tanks considered usable (of that 16 Bergepanzers). In the end some 40 were repaired but only in 1951/52 but only 14 Bergepanzers were actually used by the army till 1959, the standard tanks were mostly just stored and there was not even any training conducted with them. There were attempts to sell them to Syria in 1955 but unsuccessful (they bought our Pz.IV and StuG.III though). The Bergepanzers were used as heavy recovery vehicles for various jobs often non-military ones thanks to their very powerful winch (180 tons). Some of the tanks were used in movies (one Bergepanzer even played a sort of US nuclear cannon  ). They were replaced by domestically designed VT-34 ARV based on T-34. 
 
They were moved around the country near exclusively on trains. The engines were serviced by an engineer who spent part of the war as a slave worker in Maybach but they run quite little, mainly due to an enormous fuel consumption. The very same engineer even rebulit one Bergepanzer to use Soviet V-2 engine. This one was later rebuilt to a bulldozer. Aside of that I don't know about any reliability report but I did  only a quick online search. 
 
One particularly interesting point is that after WW2 Czechoslovakia had a major lack of tanks. It used whatever it could in a very wild mix. Aside of T-34-76, T-34-85, Cromwells, Centaurs, few Challengers and several IS-2 and IS-3 (just 2) we had quite a lot of Pz.IV, even old LT-38/Pz.38(t) in use but Panthers were just stored after a very long period of preparations and hesitations. Also their sale to Syria was unsuccessful unlike with the Pz.IV which were generally much more worn. To me it tells that the tanks were not considered worth the effort to run them.   
 
Most of the info is from this link (including serial numbers): https://www.valka.cz/Pz-Kpfw-V-Panther-ve-sluzbach-cizich-armad-t40205

We’ve finally lured all the Wehraboo beasts into the trap. Have at them boys!
We feast on Wehraboo flesh tonight!
*Drums pound*

Sloping apparently is also effective against laser weapons according to some.   That is 'Hard Sci Fi Realism' (tm).
 

The really funny part, again, is where a highly-sloped whipple shield somehow allows a ship to shrug off battleship shells.

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?

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.

A lot of the criticism has nothing to do with docrine or today's point of view. Panther was a typical product of a one big mess in which the German AFV design turned during the war. There were people even at that time in Germany who were perfectly aware of that but not strong enough to change the course. I dare to say there were many more problems related to the non-combat properties (missing unification, non-optimized production, high cost, low serviceability, difficult mainteanance, totally overloaded logistics, fragmented training, sabotages coming from slave labour or outright waste of resources on stupid projects and small-series of countles vehicle types) than tactical issues. Panther is an excelent example of all the problems German AFV development program had. 
 
It can't be said that this is a judgement from today's point of view when others understood it. See both USA and USSR who mastered the unification and serviceability. Tanks taken out of action were quickly recovered, repaired and taken back to action. Both states managed to resist introducing every new vehicle they developed for the sake of unification, rapid production, easy service and logistics despite them having seemingly better vehicles available and despite them having larger industrial capacities. That's complete opposite to what Germany with its limited capacities started doing during the war. In the end thank God for that. 

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

Bunch of archive footage, which for most I never saw before, on synthwave music
 
 

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.