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Beer

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Everything posted by Beer

  1. Beer
    IMHO this is an interesting phenomenon. Due to the fact that there were quite many German weapons which indeed were a generation ahead of the opponents people tend to generalize to an entire German war industry seeing everything German as wonder weapons. We can agree that things like Me-262, Fritz-X, StG-44, Hs-293, V1, V2 and some others really were sort of ahead of the time but that doesn't mean everything German was.
  2. Beer
    The big radars infront of the turret frontal armour are the first thing to be hit by whatever shoots on the tank. Even the turret rotation among bushes or in any tight environment can damage them because they move at very wide circle. Don't know if it can be solved in a different way with Leo II, but I feel like in a real combat environment they will be damaged or destroyed pretty quickly just like similarly placed IR searchlights usually were.
  3. Beer
    A weak property doesn't count if everyone knows about it or what did you try to say? Really? Please note that both tanks have the same weight. Besides that nobody claims that M48 was the best tank of its time (not even the Americans) while there is pretty widespread opinion that Panther was some sort of wunderkampfwagen which was killing legions of T-34 and Shermans like flies.
  4. Beer
    That sounds pretty crazy. I'm no aircraft designer but IMHO you need different shapes for subsonic and supersonic planes (not only for the wings). Im also not sure if trainers use relaxed aerodynamic stability as the fighters do. Every such module you change will move the center of gravity and hence change the stability. Such plane would probably need to be inherently unstable and only mimic the stable behavior if needed.
  5. Beer
    I think you wrote about different vehicle than Panther. Panther was a huge overweight vehicle with subpar armor protection for its weight (it had rather good frontal armor but really weak side armor). Even the frontal armor wasn't that great because of the large cast gun mantlet - it's confirmed by post-Kursk Soviet tests that the mantlet, lower sides and turret sides were penetrable from close distance even by M1932 45 mm gun when HVAP round was used (tests from December 1943). The roof armor (both hull and turret) were worse than of T-34/85 and at least in theory could have been penetrated even by .50" Brownings of Allied fighter planes. That is for a vehicle of IS-2 weight. The assault Jumbo Sherman had much better armor and it was still nearly 7 tons lighter... Its gun was great for a tank destroyer but in the life of a tank the most common target is not other tanks even for a late-war German. The HE filler was similar to Soviet 76 mm F-34 or US 75 mm M3 - but that is comparison with vehicles of 16-19 tons less. Even if we leave all issues with reliability, fuel consumption, production, logistics etc. aside we still have a vehicle which is much bigger and much heavier than what its performance suggests. It was a hugely ineffective design in terms of basically everything except tank-to-tank combat (even the fact that there was never enough of them had a lot to do with its design). The Panther was the best vehicle which went out of the late-German WW2 tank design quagmire but that doesn't make it some supertank as it is ofen portrayed. If it was a supertank everybody would copy it, but that never happend for a good reason.
  6. Beer
    WTF?
  7. Beer
    DITA on IDEX
  8. Beer
    How is the development of armoured solar panels going? https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/europe/nato-chief-suggests-battle-tanks-with-solar-panels-as-militaries-go-green-1.1160313
  9. Beer
    British and US evaluation of KV by Peter Samsonov. https://warspot.net/300-voroshilov-abroad
  10. Beer
    Source: https://www.valka.cz/SOV-VTS-Ladoga-t212695
  11. Beer
    Not speaking about the fact that most of the so called Kurdish territory isn't inhabited by Kurds. It's just about denying Syrian state access to the oil wells, i.e. having someting in hand for negotiations and that's it.
  12. Beer
    Page 14-15 (slide 15-16) contains quite an interesting article about the L-39NG training system. https://www.arabianaerospace.aero/publications/128/issue1/volume1/
  13. Beer
    Some more details about the Vietnamese contract. There were some douts about it due to the fact that not a long time ago Vietnam also announced to buy 12 Yak-130. Per an article in armadninoviny.cz magazin the L-39NG contract is complementary to the acquisition of Yaks. The Vietnamese training pyramide shall therefore be four-level and be very diversified. The first level is represented by American T-6 Texan II turboprops. The second level will be taken by Czech L-39NG. Third level is taken by Russian twin engine combat-trainers Yak-130 and the last one is the heavy multirole fighters Su-30MK2V. Fun fact is that the Czech NGs will go to a 910th training regiment "Julius Fučík" (second oldest Vietnamese airforce unit). Julius Fučík was Czech communist writer and journalist who was executed by Germans in 1943. https://www.armadninoviny.cz/l39ng-pro-vietnam-910.html
  14. Beer
    Vietnam ordered 12 L-39NG trainers. https://www.czdefence.cz/clanek/omnipol-doda-vietnamu-12-kusu-proudovych-letounu-l-39ng
  15. Beer
    First Czech Titus command & control vehicle on real-life photos. https://www.armadninoviny.cz/v-koprivnici-pracuji-na-prvnich-prototypech-vozidel-titus-pro-ceskou-armadu.html Source of the photos is the link above (there are more of them).
  16. Beer
    Unreliable vehicle and badly serviced vehicle are two different things. When you issue a tank without spares and training for the crews and mechanics you won't get it work reliably no matter what tank it is. At worst you don't even issue the units with the right fuel. God, basically everything in the world worked more reliably than 1941 Soviet mess. Can't you see that you just nicely shot yourself in the leg?
  17. Beer
    As for the lever force, per CAMD RF 38-11355-2884 and CAMD RF 38-11355-2890 published by Peter Samsonov on tankarchives.ca the steering effort of T-34-85 is roughly equivalent to Sherman and Pershing (around 30 kg depending on the gear and /or steering radius). Panther requires much less steering force, that is true.
  18. Beer
    I'm not absolutely sure but from the description it looks like total time.
  19. Beer
    Four speed gearbox was replaced since 1943 T-34-76, i.e. any tank with the old gearbox was a worn-out machine, which was produced in a critical phase of the war and which spent at least two years in combat. It's normal that such tank is not as reliable as post-war newly built machines. T-54 being better in every aspect is natural thing. That's why it was created in first place. That comparison makes no sense at all. I can aslo say that T-34 was in every aspect better than T-26 and I would be just as right.
  20. Beer
    Česká Zbrojovka Group (CZG) just announed to buy 100% of Colt Holding Company, Colt confirmed the news. https://www.e15.cz/byznys/prumysl-a-energetika/ceska-zbrojovka-plne-ovladne-americky-colt-zaplati-220-milionu-dolaru-1377888
  21. Beer
    OMG, let's agree to disagree and move on.
  22. Beer
    When I made the post about anti-tank guns I omitted anti-tank rifles. Well, there was no anti-tank rifle fielded before the Münich treaty however there was a lot of experiemental work done and the development got to a rifle which was basically intended for production despite having some known issues (but the historical events were faster). For some reason the central Europe countries made their own development and got to a very similar result (different than others in the world) - small calibre extreme high velocity guns. The Germans had 7,92x94, the Poles 7,92x107 and our design lead to even more extreme 7,92x145 mm with a muzzle velocity of 1320 m/s! The experiemental work was done with rifles chambered 15x104 (known later to the Brits as BESA and used also by Yugoslavia), 12x165 up to 15x185. The two rifles ZK-382 (7,92x145) and ZK-384 (12x165) designed by Koucký brothers from Zbrojovka Brno are preserved till today and can be seen in Prague Žižkov military muzeum (when it will be reopened). Exhibits: ZK-382, ZK-384 ZK-382, as you can see it's bullpup, the weight was 12,5 kg In the end the ZK-382 was intended for production despite some unsolved issues (the war was too close), the particular issues were what you would probably expect - high barrel wear, relatively low accuracy and big bullet drop over longer distances. What is particularly curious about this rifle is that four pieces were (at least per official documents) delivered to Israel in 1948, likely as samples. What happened to them there is not known to me. The development slowly continues under German occupation and in the end there was a serial production of Zbrojovka Brno rifle called Pz. B. M. SS41 of which some 2000 pieces were taken by Waffen SS. This extremely peculiar weapon designed by famous Václav Holek (ZB-26/BREN, ZB-53/BESA) chambered in standard German 7,92x94 mm is nicely shown in one of Ian's videos on Forgotten Weapons. This weapon is also owned by Prague ŽIžkov military museum (exhibit).
  23. Beer
    Well, per our historical records there were plenty of problems and manufacturing defects with our own built T-34 and large percentage of tanks was not even accepted by the army at first. It took a long time to get the production working well. Per the records of our tank brigade in USSR (and previous smaller units) operating tanks between 1943-45 there were no major complains about T-34 except having not enough of them (they got table numbers of tanks only before Odra-Vistula offensive) however most of the reports about reliability and mainteanance issues turn around BA-64B and T-70M. After the war we had major issues with our semi-officially handed* IS-2 due to having no spare parts train established (we kept running them solely by canibalizing battlefield wrecks for nearly 15 years) but not with T-34 from wartime production. The tank brigade during combat used a lot of tanks which were simply put together from wrecks on the battlefield and one of such tanks (originally Soviet tank brigade vehicle destroyed near Ostrava) was in service till 1959 obtaining a new serial number only more than five years after the war. Another one which made it to Prague in May 1945 was an ex-Soviet, ex-German T-34 captured near Čáslav in May 1945. * When the fighting was over the whole Czechoslovak armed corps in USSR was able to show only around 20 badly battered T-34 in a victory parade in Prague therefore the Soviets borrowed us 8 IS-2/IS-122 for the parade where the drivers were Soviet and the rest of the crews was "Czechoslovak". Since nobody ever asked the vehicles to be returned back, they stayed. Three tanks somewhere disappeared in the history and nobody knows what happened to them. The rest shall be preserved till today (at least four for sure, fifth probably as well).
  24. Beer
    It certainly looks like AMX-30.
  25. Beer
    I believe most of the Soviet tanks in WW2 had electric traverse and it was pretty fast.
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