Toxn

You're ignoring the part where critical mass founds his argument on the Soviet losses of that entire part of the front for that day, then elides his way into the two numbers being similar and that therefore Korner's account is somehow legit.
 
Peter goes into this at length.

You're ignoring the part where critical mass founds his argument on the Soviet losses of that entire part of the front for that day, then elides his way into the two numbers being similar and that therefore Korner's account is somehow legit.
 
Peter goes into this at length.

I think my favourite Western front moment is when the Nazis pulled some Wimp Lo shit, got their noses bloodied in the battle of the bulge and then decided that it was a tactical victory which slowed down the allied advance.

Mine is when the Germans lost tanks to a Piper Cub.

More like killed a bunch of Germans. And encircled German armies. And darkened German skies with long-range aircraft. Reliability and availability (ie: numbers at the fight, on the move, pressing the advantage) are more or less the sina quo non of industrial warfare.

So another side note: this game also works really well in reverse...
 
Discussing, let's call it the A42 "Cataphract", as developed by the British in 1943:
 
Designer: "Overall its dimensions were comparable to Tiger 1, but about 60cm longer and 30cm narrower. For all that, the turret ring diameter was 160cm. The vehicle weighed around 45 tonnes, ten tonnes less than Tiger, but had a lopsided armour scheme with equivalent (or better) frontal protection and about half the armour everywhere else."
 
Wehraboo: "Typical poor British design: over-emphasising some aspects at the expense of others. This reminds one of Churchill, which paid a heavy tank's bill on weight and mobility (not to mention an over-long hull which makes turning difficult), but only has good protection from the front for the trouble."
 
D: "The tank carried a high-velocity gun in the 75-76mm class, with good armour penetration (able to knock out all but the heaviest tanks). On the other hand, it had a less powerful HE round than existing 75mm guns like KwK40 and M3."
 
W: "This is also typically British. They put can-openers on their tanks and then forgot the most common mission for them: infantry support! It is less of an issue for specialist vehicles such as Archer, but for a mass-production tank it's a crippling defect."
 
D: "The drivetrain was complex, bulky and very unreliable, but provided nice-to-have capabilities like neutral steering and good gun stability over rough terrain. The engine was underdeveloped and needed a massive amount of work (including derating) before it could be used for any length of time successfully. Overall, the time-to-failure was something like a few hundred kilometres, and they didn't foresee being able to improve this (although the lifespan of individual components could have been improved)."
 
W: "This is Covenanter all over again - a bunch of 'clever' ideas that amounted to a mess. At least then they had the good sense to keep it as a training vehicle instead of sending it into battle. They should have stuck to well-proven transmission and suspension components, and used a surplus aero-engine or something rather than bodging it."
 
D: "Due to the issues with the suspension, drivetrain, turret ring diameter and turret design, the vehicle had almost no upgrade potential. The armour could not be thickened appreciably without causing even worse reliability problems, and the gun could not be replaced by a larger-bore weapon without designing an entirely new turret (and even then it would have been a squeeze for the crew)."
 
W: "This was the problem with Cromwell too - forcing the British to make iterative new vehicles when it should have been upgrading existing ones. The Germans, Russians and Americans all realised this with PzIV, T-34 and M4. Each was able to be reworked with new weapons, turrets, armour, and even engines without stopping the whole production line to produce a completely new vehicle."
 
D: "Speaking of the turret, there were technically two hatches (a commander's hatch and an escape hatch directly in the rear), but the placement made it so that only the loader could use the rear hatch and only the commander and gunner could use the commander's hatch. The hatches were very small (around 40cm diameter), but the commander's hatch was well-appointed with periscopes, a mounting for a scissors periscope and a geared azimuth indicator to show the turret's rotation in relation to the hull. The gunner had a single coaxial sight with a single level of magnification (2.5x), but later production was slated to have a selectable 2.5/5x sight. The FoV was around 28' for the 2.5x, and 14' for the 5x."  
 
W: "Again, the British talent for wonky engineering on show. The hatch is a mix of good ideas (they cottoned on to the use of periscopes quickly, after all), dubious ones (a simple ring indicator would have worked just as well) and terrible ones (Comet hatch syndrome strikes again). The gunner's sights were good and workmanlike (3x and 21' FoV is more typical for the British), but the Americans had already introduced modern conveniences such as a second unity/fixed magnification sight mounted to the roof at that point. This tank should have had these, it would made the gunner's life much easier!"
 
D: "The tank used almost no components common to other models besides the engine (which, again, needed massive reworking), and was difficult to service in almost every respect due to the complexities and placement of the drivetrain and suspension components. This, along with a chronic shortage of spare parts (because production of vehicles was prioritised over the production of spares) meant that commanders in the field would have to rely heavily on rail to move the tanks up to the front. There were no road transporters large enough to carry them, and next to no engineering vehicles able to unditch them."
 
W: "This is madness from the perspective of fighting a mobile war - something that the Germans excelled at but the allies had to painfully learn. A tank is only useful when it's moving under its own power. More than that - when winning an industrial war, it is rational production that counts. Look at the effort the Germans made under Speer to rationalise production of aircraft and tanks. This rationalisation probably prolonged the war by a year, giving the Wehrmacht the material to push back against the hordes of Russian vehicles being thrown at it."
 
D: "It was made by Germans."
 
W: "Oh its amazing! A wonder weapon! The ancestor of all modern tanks!"
 

I occasionally play this mental game where I imagine describing, let's call it the Schwer-mittel panzerkampfwagen 44 "Cougar", to the typical wehraboo.
 
"It had a low profile, only 10cm taller than the PzIV. But the vehicle is much more heavily armed and armoured (equivalent or better to a Tiger frontally, only a little thinner on the side)."
"Fantastic. Really good, compact design. The Germans were known to be good at efficient layouts."
 
"The drivetrain was extremely compact and reliable, with a better power-to-weight ratio than PzIV, as well as a slick automatic gearbox that reduced workload on the driver and improved offroad mobility."
"Wonderful, truly a vehicle for mobile warfare. Didn't Guderian say, after all, that the principle weapon of the tank was its engine and radio?"
 
"The vehicle had lots of vision devices, a large, roomy interior and nice-to-haves like panoramic gunner's sights and an azimuth indicator in the commander's cupola."
"Brilliant. We know that the crew which sees the target and fires first usually wins. This all adds up to an improvement in firepower!"
 
"Over 2000 were produced in less than a year, making it a relatively common sight on the battlefield when compared to older heavies such as Tiger."
"That's great! Wars are won by industrial production as much as by feats of arms - look at the miracles that Speer accomplished."
 
"It had lots of upgrade potential. Prototypes were produced with guns and armour equivalent to Tiger II, but without completely sacrificing either mobility or reliability."
"This is what made the Germans so formidable during the second world war - their ingenuity and ability to improve on existing designs. If only it had been fielded for longer, it would have had the potential to turn the tide of the war."
 
"It was made by Americans."
"Oh, it's absolute shit then."

My three cents. 
 
Things are much more complicated than what can be conculed by looking at non-scaled pictures. 
 
Panther has higher engine output than Pershing. Panther has 4 tons higher weight than Pershing. Panther's transmission is subject to more shocks than that of Pershing (the torque converter combined with the planetary geabox must have eased the shocks in the transmission a lot). All points worse for panther but that's only the base factors. 
 
The main point IMHO is that Panther's final drive housing was designed very opened and thus weak (there is very little material mainly from the inner side due to the space taken by the double gears and their bearings) while Pershing assembly is basically a fully enclosed massive box which means it must be much more rigid. It is well known that one of the major problems with Panther's final drive was its weak housing and its fixation to the hull which deformed and caused oil leaks damaging the gears. Another result of such deformation was the gear misalignments further worsening the situation. In my understanding the resulting defects were also very often related to the breaking of the screws from the resulting shear stress. The September 1944 modification is not related to the gears but instead to the housing strength and its fixation. You are searching for the wrong thing. Anyway it looks like it never solved the problems completely which seems logical because there is no way to add material from the inner side or in the return roler area. 
 
As for the gears alone inside the final drive assembly there is one gear more in Panther while the completele assembly isn't larger. I dare to say it looks even smaller especially in gear depth (considering there is a space used for the return roller on it as well) which logically means that the two gears in Pershing are larger than those three in Panther but without being able to determine torque on each gear it may be misleading (but I doubt the torque processed by Panther final drive was smaller especially considering the shock peaks which must have been flatten a lot by Pershing's torque converter). Straight-cut gears didn't help too. The herringbone gears like on Sherman would help for sure. Centurion final drive assembly is clearly much larger even judging just by the naked eye.  
 
As for the material IMHO the situation with it is relatively the easiest to establish. Even if you have bad material you know what you use for the design or at least you shall have some quality control which guarantees that you get material which is equally bad every time. In short it means that with worse material you simply end having things larger and heavier but having worse material does not prevent design of a reliable machine unless the issue is non-existent material quality control and the defects coming from quality differences in material supplies. Nothing seems to point in that direction though. Of course designing a complex shape of a final drive housing without simulation SW is difficult but they had experience and were able to do that with proper and in-time given inputs. 
 
Having things larger isn't always easy. In case of Panther it simply looks like the tank weight grew so much that a larger final drive simply couldn't fit on the vehicle without a radical redesign. How that could have been prevented is also rather easy to establish - the most obvious way is to stick with the design specifications and not to throw tons of additional armor on it late in the development phase. The other option is to start the design anew with new specifications but that takes time. Then there is the third option and that is to pray...  
 
 
Pershing final drive: 
http://afvdb.50megs.com/usa/pics/m26pershingfinaldrive1.jpg
http://afvdb.50megs.com/usa/pics/m26pershingfinaldrive2.jpg
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

If only any of their vehicles had had a turret ring worth talking about, something decent could have emerged before war's end.

https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/1975/8020/ECO031.pdf;jsessionid=1D4F492F19FEAAE2F3ECAA7A5A2BEF66?sequence=3
 
A paper outlining a bunch of methods for calculating tire/track pressure on soil. This includes the original MMP formulas.

If only any of their vehicles had had a turret ring worth talking about, something decent could have emerged before war's end.

So here's a question: is it better, without using interleaving or whatever, to have a few big road wheels or lots of little ones in terms of MMP? Here I'm going to ignore things like travel and have no spacing between the roadwheels.
 
For a 5m track contact length, 40t vehicle with the other specs kept the same (track width 0.6m, track pitch 0.15m), you find that ground pressure rises quickly and then tails off as the size of the road wheels decreases. This rapidly leads into diminishing returns: 25 axles with 20cm roadwheels gets you an MMP of 95KPa, 50 and 10cm road wheels gets you 67, and 100 axles with 5cm road wheels gets you 48.

If you restrict things further to sane territory (12-4 axles), on the other hand, you get the following:
12 axles/0.42m roadwheels: 137 KPa 11 axles/0.45m roadwheels: 143 KPa 10 axles/0.5m roadwheels:  150 KPa 9 axles/0.56m roadwheels:  159 KPa 8 axles/0.63m roadwheels: 168 KPa 7 axles/0.71m roadwheels: 180 KPa 6 axles/0.83m roadwheels: 194 KPa 5 axles/1.00m roadwheels: 213 KPa 4 axles/1.25m roadwheels: 238 KPa So in this part of the range the relationship is more or less linear. It's also clear that the easiest way to improve ground pressure, mutatis mutandis, is to pack as many wheels as possible onto a given length of track.
 
 

https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/1975/8020/ECO031.pdf;jsessionid=1D4F492F19FEAAE2F3ECAA7A5A2BEF66?sequence=3
 
A paper outlining a bunch of methods for calculating tire/track pressure on soil. This includes the original MMP formulas.

There's a reason we have this emoji:

So, since I finally found a good document for MMP calculations: the one thing that interleaved roadwheels are amazing for is to allow you to cheat MMP calculations.
 
The other ways being pneumatic roadwheels and long-pitch track links.

https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/1975/8020/ECO031.pdf;jsessionid=1D4F492F19FEAAE2F3ECAA7A5A2BEF66?sequence=3
 
A paper outlining a bunch of methods for calculating tire/track pressure on soil. This includes the original MMP formulas.

https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/1975/8020/ECO031.pdf;jsessionid=1D4F492F19FEAAE2F3ECAA7A5A2BEF66?sequence=3
 
A paper outlining a bunch of methods for calculating tire/track pressure on soil. This includes the original MMP formulas.

In our time, us old salts have seen dumber things come crawling out of the muck and mire that is German tank discourse. But this one is still all kinds of stupid. It's sort of endearing, really: the inbred, brachycephalic version of an intellectual swamp creature.

In our time, us old salts have seen dumber things come crawling out of the muck and mire that is German tank discourse. But this one is still all kinds of stupid. It's sort of endearing, really: the inbred, brachycephalic version of an intellectual swamp creature.

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.
 
 

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

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?
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.