delete013

14 minutes ago, Ramlaen said:

 

The vehicle in the thread title was the 'best' German AFV of the war, this has nothing to do with white knighting a German AFV.

Also a great choice. But tiger was better I prefer tiger.

1 hour ago, Donward said:

Protip: It is OK to be wrong on the Internet. Again. It is OK to be WRONG on the Internet (like you are at this moment). Many of us had Wehraboo tendencies as well when we were young and stupid, like you are right now. Perhaps it is time to reevaluate your opinions?

You don't say..

28 minutes ago, Sten said:

Why can't you wehraboos fucks simp for actually decent G*rm stuff like the FW-190 and the FG-42? Instead you always put the hot trash in the pedestal instead as if you drinking ze-propaganda-b koolaid laced with pervitin about the wunderwaffe.

See thread title.

What should we switch to? Tiger, best tank of ww2?

52 minutes ago, Donward said:

But as has been stated multiple times, and throughout these forums, a tank is part of a weapons system that is meant to cooperate with multiple components and arms of a military. As history and multiple sourced documents have proven, the Panther performed abysmally at the task assigned to it.

Is this up in one of those 89 pages? I've yet to get through them all. We can discuss tank's role in combined arms tactics. Are any German tankers or panzergrenadiers here? I think contemporary tactics are pretty much ww2 with new vehicles.

Why are you people so bitter? Give him a break. Who cares about politics. History hobbies should be fun.

21 minutes ago, Beer said:

@delete013: The following is off topic but it shall make you understand what reliability means on an example from today. Today the common projected failure rate in automotive is 5 sigma, i.e. 233 failures per 1 milllion parts during the service life (sometimes 4, sometimes 6 is required). If you turn it upside down, it means that projected service life is what 99,98% of all parts can withstand. In other words, if taken by today's automotive standards if just 2 Panthers of all produced broke down at 150 km the service life of the vehicle would be considered to be 150 km. It doesn't matter that some parts can do more. What matters is those parts which can't do what is required.  

 

I am well aware that this example doesn't consider WW2 quality requirements - it's just an illustration of what reliability means.  

Sure, today's standards. I am pretty sure no ww2 tank passes.

33 minutes ago, Toxn said:

The other, never-considered alternative apparently being to design a tranny and final drives suitable for a 45-48 tonne tank.

 

Also, btw, the French checked the metallurgy of the drives and found it was fine. They were underbuilt, plain and simple.

Got any link to that?

You know, it is not as if there was no vehicle, even heavier that had functional final drives. The fact that neither Germans nor the French attempted to fix them in over 10 years of use and that this was the principal combat vehicle, strongly indicates that this issue is overblown.

Anw, I am not stubborn out of principle, I am simply not convinced. Also it would be much easier if there wasn't so many deliberately deceiving literature, pushing national biases around.

-- he already answered.

34 minutes ago, Beer said:

 

From a staunch Panther supporter this is somewhat funny statement.  

By 1944 the tank was a finished product. If you incalculate the issues of final drives on all German tanks in 1944 and the fact that there were plenty cases where final drives lasted beyond the alleged 150/250 km one can conclude that the critical causes were not in the design. Pull rare metals out of Allied or Soviet tanks and you have a similar mechanical mess. There is the alternative of course, a lighter tank, which brings us back to the other end of bad choices, which is fighting with a weaker vehicle. If that means dispensing with driving stunts I am still convinced that every alternative was much worse.

5 hours ago, DogDodger said:

The Pershing was labeled a heavy tank from 29 June 1944 to May 1946, mostly for morale purposes. It was begat from a program to replace the M4 medium tank, and there were actual heavy tanks being concurrently developed. The M26, though more heavily armored than its T25 sibling, still weighed over 34,000 lb less than the heavy tank M6. In September 1944, i.e., two months before the 90 mm gun, 92,000 lb T26E3 emerged from the T26E1, the Ordnance Committee recommended the development of the 105 mm gun, 141,000 lb T29 and the 155 mm gun, 142,000 lb T30. These were the US heavy tanks. Production of 1,200 T29s was requested on 1 March 1945, but of course the war ended before this could occur.

It was meant figuratively, of course. As a medium, Pershing was not a finished vehicle. I usually exercise skepticism over prototypes good on paper but never reaching service (or being half useful in the opinion of the army)

It is, imo, still better to have armoured weapon platform assaulting strong points than nothing. Jumbo likely saved many already by being a hard rock, attracting fire.

2 hours ago, heretic88 said:

REAL bane of german tanks was the KV-1.

It is quite impressive how advanced and heavy layout Soviets fielded already in 1941. German methods against them remind more of a mammoth hunt than any credible anti-tank defence.

Fortunately for them, Soviets got almost everything else wrong.

2 hours ago, heretic88 said:

The Sherman didnt suffer so serious losses, but the T-34... Maybe almost 45.000 irrecoverably lost during the war? 82% of production? These are horrible numbers for a tank on the winning side... The Sherman wasnt a death trap. But the T-34 definitely was.

Let's face it, shermans were in the same sack from 1943 onwards. It think that both tanks could have avoided their fates if they were at least paired with some long range overwatch. Both countries lacked quality ordnance institutions that allowed Germans to make a tank killer out of any carriage. I can imagine IS-2 as being big relief for t-34 crews.

2 hours ago, heretic88 said:

 

1 hour ago, heretic88 said:

Please, do not bring politics here! Until now this was a technical/historical discussion. Should remain that. 

(but if you really want to... khmmm... holodomor... great famines in 1930s... mao's china...)

You.. hm heretic!

23 hours ago, Sturgeon said:

 

Arracourt begs to differ.

What about Arracourt? There is so little info one can find and all is written from American perspective. Hardly a good example.

23 hours ago, Sturgeon said:

Oh, you mean it have beeg gun n thicc armor. Yes, so did the Char 2C, yet nobody pretends it's anything but a dead end.

You mean Char B1? It was indeed of ageing design but the armament and armour were still sufficient in 1940. It was nothing like German tanks especially not like the heavies.

23 hours ago, Sturgeon said:

Perhaps the answer lies in a difference of nationality? 🤔

What do you mean by that?

19 minutes ago, Beer said:

 

This is how good quality paper thin armor behaves. Anyway you are arguing against Guderian himself who complained about bad German steel quality already in 1941.

I honestly don't know. I can't tell with what the other tanks were hit by, you might as well be right.

On 2/24/2021 at 8:50 AM, Toxn said:

I'm struggling to understand your take here. You can't calculate armour thickness values (120mm at 60' is over 200mm btw), but the Germans would be thrilled to have the IS-2 regardless.

Also, the Tiger's turret rotation et al sucked but (per your previous) Tiger had a 'load of features' that the IS-2 was poorer without.

Yeah, excellent cannon, optics, working environment, mobility, armour + excellent doctrine and training. Tiger was an unavoidable success.

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Also LOL at "dismantling breakthroughs". Glad to see that the Germans were heroically repulsing the enemy while being pushed back to Berlin. Rather than, you know, getting pushed back and then launching local counter-attacks to provide time for the line to reform to the rear.

Charkow? Chir river? Prokhorovka?

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Man, that KwK42. So much better than 17 pounder because it gets slightly less performance out of an L70 barrel than the British got out of an L55 one. Truly a wonder of design rather than just being, you know, fine.

I said it has almost equal performance.

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Funny how other tanks of comparable weight to Panther didn't need double torsion bars and interleaved road wheels to work, no?

Really? Which one? The slow IS-2? The immobile M26? The suspension wrecking jumbo? Good luck maneuvering in those things. They were for a reason heavy and panthers medium tanks. Maybe you should consider why there is a difference in tank classes?
 

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The similarities to Panther just keep cropping up, don't they? I'll say it again: Centurion is just Panther done competently.

Yep, a good tank we agree. But I've smth for you from Munro's "Centurion tank":

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Comparative Armour Tests
The 17-pounder anti-tank gun showed that it could defeat the armour of a Tiger, but how would the Centurion, armed with the same gun have fared against a Panther, the most powerful (the Tiger excepted) of the German Panzers?
[...]A captured Panther provided an opportunity to compare, in Agust 1945, its armour against that of a Centurion and vice versa. A report from Tank Armour Research found some close similarities in their performance, although the Centurion was longer and heavier and the Panther carried more side armour above the tracks. Both featured an angled glacis plate.
The guns used for the test were the most powerful available, the British 17-pounder as fitted to the MkI Centurion, and two German guns, the 75mm fitted to the Panther and the PAK 88mm anti-tank gun. The test showed that the survivality of both tanks was very similar: at closer ranges the Centurion's armour proved superior, whilst the Panther had the edge beyond 150yd (140m).

With a two years delay the British, untouched by lack of resources or industrial interrupts, managed to match a panther. Missing the war and appearing when there were no panzers to fight anymore. How convenient. So who was the better tank designer? You operate in this bubble of panther criticism as if the rest of the world didn't exist. If panther was bad, the rest was worse. Ergo, panther was the best of the worst?

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Wrong. God's sake, man. Read up on things before you spout whatever drivel got poured into your ear by the History Channel or that one kid on YouTube. Jumbos lead columns on long road marches (you know, that thing that Shermans did that Panthers certainly didn't) specifically to soak up anti-tank fire. The only major problems with them were ground pressure and the fact that the US only saw fit to make a few hundred rather than a few thousand.

American opinion, not mine. It is a problem if tank can't climb or navigate rough terrain. Most geography in Europe is tank unfreindly.

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It's the definition of mediocre. Literally middle of the road in terms of power density.

Well, what was better?

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Again, the thing doesn't even use that advantage. It manages to be mediocre in terms of crew comfort as well. So your train of logic goes something like: use taller engine to save length -> make longer anyway for more crew comfort -> don't make the crew particularly comfortable.

What are you talking about? Panthers were perfectly fine. Or you allude to the British motion studies where they complained over misaligned gunner's seat and his pedals?

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That's the precise problem with the Panther from a design standpoint - there were all of these compromises made due to features that "had" to be put in for reasons of preference rather than design necessity (the front-mounted transmission and drives, the turret in the centre of the hull, the interleaved road wheels, the thicker front hull), the compromises then leading to further compromises which just made the whole thing worse. So the result is that you have a 47-tonne tank packing all the features of a 35-tonne one (including a 1.65m turret ring). Hell, even it's contemporaries in terms of weight (like M26) managed to have more armour, upgrade potential and mechanical reliability. And they were considered flawed beasts.

Which 35t tank has panther's features? Cent had the same stats for more weight. IS-2 perhaps? But its a heavy tank with heavy tank's mobility. Pershing is pointless to mention.

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Do you see how insane your arguments are once you step back from gormlessly defending the damn thing and look at the bigger picture?

 

Which, again, the Panther didn't manage because it's suspension setup was overloaded, prone to jamming and clogging and hard to service. Again - stupid decisions lead to design compromises that erased any theoretical advantages.

Wait what? Where is the link between overloaded suspension and clogging? The only German complaint was frozen mud and extended disassembly time. A cost for fielding highly mobile heavy tanks with good armour? Diesel engines also freeze in winter, are they "stupid" designs?

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This has been dealt with already. Again, know your history. 

Bloody hell..

2 hours ago, Beer said:

 

I gave you reports in my post which clearly speak about German early tanks and specifically Pz.III as having brittle armor and producing a lot of spalling. If you just delete it from quote of my post it won't disappear from history.  

 

So again:

 

Here you go with just a few photos of early Panzers with cracked armor 

 

Thin plates crack under larger calibers? Logical. It's not as if Soviet fared any better, or?

27 minutes ago, TokyoMorose said:

What really makes me laugh about Panther, was it wasn't even the best design the Germans cooked up. DB's incredible "I can't believe it's not a T-34!" entry into the Panther design contest was the superior vehicle in almost all regards, and lost because of corporate politics and violating sacred cows (an all-rear powerpack?! leaf springs supporting a non-interleaved running gear?!) of Wa Pruf 6.

 

It was actually reasonably sized, not over-engineered, and even had a diesel (which was an off-the-shelf powerplant to boot!). Sure the hull hatch arrangement was less than optimal (similar to Comet in this regard, lol corner hatches), and the turret may have been a wee bit cramped...

But I seriously doubt the turret would have been less cramped than the combination in MAN's proposal was.

 

Well, it was more cramped, had shorter range, poor suspension and the new turret didn't fit on it. Spielberger explains pretty well the circumstances and no, the party politics played little role beyond Hitler's hard limits of that 80mm front plate. It actually had interleaved road wheels. Leaf springs were considered cheap but bad in German opinion. They prefered MAN's suspension. When they were deciding over the prototypes Germany was not yet going downhill and plenty of feats remained in final model in an effort not to interrupt the production.

 

1 hour ago, Toxn said:

 

There were attempts to simplify the panther. Panther 2 with Schmalturm and paired interleaved wheels. But Germans were either too desperate by then or not bothered enough by the first panther.

10 hours ago, Beer said:

 

Tests of early German (and Czechoslovak) vehicles shown a lot of brittleness, spalling. For example:

Source: http://www.tankarchives.ca/2014/05/german-steel-vs-soviet-steel.html

 

This is easy to see on photos as well. You can find plenty of photos of early Panzers with cracked armor plates. 

I don't know about the Czech steel but early pz3 and 4 had good quality face hardened steel that offered more protection than their thickness would suggest. Germans knew that such surface can crack monobloc shots, which kept Allies and Soviets fairly confused until 1942. But the face hardened plates were thin and could logically crack. This is fairly different from late war thicker German plates that cracked due to lack of ductility enhancing metals, such as molybden.

10 hours ago, Beer said:

 

Chemical, structure, hardness properties, heat treatment evaluation of Panther ausf.A, Tiger ausf.H, both built definitely prior 1944. Big variety in samples. Often two same armor plates from different sample vehicles on the opposite end of the results. Nearly all plates not meeting German own requirements in chemical composition. 

http://www.tankarchives.ca/2020/02/thick-skin-of-german-beasts.html

 

 

And finally one quote from Guderian himself. 

 

That is true, Germans had to reduce rare metal content fairly soon. This however does not hold for tiger 1's frontal plate which remained top quality, not sure if until the end of production. Someone on axishistory had more detailed info with exact plate name and specifications.
Panther's plates were prone to inconsistencies due to mass production and electricity outages, resulting in improper tempering and quenching procedures.
https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=118212

Later on Germans appear to have decided for high carbon, high hardness and brittleness plates that were better at deflecting shots but also prone to cracking.

1 hour ago, DogDodger said:

Depends on what military leaders and which doctrinal publications one reads...

Excellent reply!

17 hours ago, BaronTibere said:

 

Franz Halder would like a word.

I assume you mean his role in being an unofficial editor of the Historical Division?

8 hours ago, Beer said:

 

Dear God... You are in a wrong place if you want to use arguments like this. 

It's a taboo? Or people don't believe in them?

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What horrendous losses? 

Sorry to break it to you, but these numbers are proven wrong.

Besides that, I meant losses in equipment. The about 10k (or for the sake of politeness, over 7k) written off shermans and the god-awful five digit for t-34s.

EDIT: don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to shit on those two tanks. The numbers were a consequence of good German and bad Allied decisions. T-34 was the best medium in 1941, Sherman at its introduction in 1942.

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"Tad better". I think you mean "200+mm LoS at the thickest, 138mm on the driver's step initially, 240 on the 1944 version".

And the sides are "only" 95mm.

Perhaps IS-2 was just, you know, rationally designed with an eye towards production (nearly 4000 made vs Tiger's ~1300) rather than hoovering up scarce materials and manpower?

100mm front hull under 60deg angle. That is no effective 200mm, especially not against German caped shells. The rest of the vehicle is 90 at negligent angles, compared to 80mm on tiger 1. Hence a tad more. The best about it are rounded angles and few flat surfaces, smth Soviets were good at. But anw, for Soviets was that enough to give trouble to panther's and tiger 1's and they finally solved their acute problem of being constantly outgunned at long ranges. Finally they could counter fire brigades that so easily dismantled Soviet breakthroughs before. But for that IS-2 had no spectacular performance, no double digit tank aces. Germans would be exhilarated if they could live with such a tank, they couldn't. 20-30 seconds reload. But what if facing 10 tanks? Not ideal.

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As for the load of features dispensed with - the insane turret traverse system, perhaps?

Perhaps the insane interleaved wheel suspension that literally nobody found worth the time after Kniepkamp wasn't in a position to profit off of it?

Engine powered turret rotation was unavoidable, not a wanted feature. I think anyone can see that. J version of Pz4 had none, just tells what Germans had to cope with.

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Their armour quality was variable-to-shit, though.

Because you read somewhere that in the second half of the war Germans lacked rare metals?

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German guns weren't bad for the era. Bulky and running at rather conservative pressures, but not bad. They could have learned from whoever came up with the casings for the long 50mm ammunition though - all the other German stuff was hilariously long for some reason.

If you want the real secret to the success of German guns though - their shells. Just good, well-designed shells with careful attention being paid to alloying and tempering.

Nope. 17 pounder was a monster. It ran at monumental pressures and spat out a very heavy shell (7.7kg vs 6.8 for the German 75mm) very fast, from a very short barrel. All British guns were like this, actually - high-pressure beasts which performed well above what their contemporaries could given the same barrel real-estate. There's a reason the 17-pounder spawned the 20-pounder and, eventually, the 105mm. While the German stuff spawned nothing much.

Check the penetration tables? KwK42 is almost identical to 17pdr, with a lighter shell, less gunpower and higher speed. So far as I know this is exactly what one wants for higher reload, flatter shooting trajectory, less fumes and more ammo in a tank. That is all thanks to better gun powder, manufacturing and shell design. All belligerent countries featured similar caliber categories but German guns were almost by the rule always at least slightly better.

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Yes, the successful French program of noodling around with German ideas for a while before discarding them completely. And then eventually copying/reinventing (depends on who's telling it) what the West Germans were doing by making a less successful Leopard 1 clone.

Maybe they just didn't succeed? Maybe they lacked German skill? Leopard 1 came much late in time when solid steel armour had no effect anymore. The engine and transmission evolution also allowed for longer hulls. Since armour was irrelevant there was no need for overlapping wheels and by the 70ies, alloys in torsion bars allowed for 60tonne tanks without the complex arrangement. But heavy tanks were needed in 40s, not later and Germans could field them whereas Allies were stuck with obsolete infantry tanks and moving bunkers.

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easy-to-maintain suspension system with generous weight margins. And it's still in service!

That suspension was an interwar design. Ask yourself why all but the British bothered with torsion bars during or after war. As I understand it, British tanks just aren't maneuver vehicles. They are to occupy a good spot (hence good climb) and shoot at a distance (armour and firepower over mobility), then relocate. But good luck running away from Soviet "hordes".

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Jumbo Sherman begs to differ with you.

A mere moving bunker with overstressed drive train. That thing barely moved.

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Nope, I re-ran the numbers using the dimensions provided by Heretic and got the same result: 0.28W/cc.

Correct, I admit.

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That this "compact, powerful" petrol engine is mediocre?

It isn't mediocre lol, the numbers are still in its favour. There are a number of other technical advantages which I don't understand, so I will focus on it being shorter (less long), which allowed precisely what you mentioned later, centered turret and also more space for the crew. That is I believe, quite important for crew performance. Engine in a panther is pushed in one third while it is almost half of a t-34. This isn't my observation but that of German designers, all nicely explained in Spielberger's "Panther and its variants". Btw, Russians are until today obsessed with short drive train which reduces power loss when turning. This is perhaps the most ignored popular fact of tank design. Western tanks have quite some issues cooling the heat in transmission due to this fact.

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And then, even more galling: if you actually lay out the components in Panther you'd notice that they squandered any space they may have saved by making the hull longer than it needed to be so that the turret could sit in the centre of the hull.

More stable, better weapon platform (in any direction), less suspension failures.

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Because M4 and T-34 did the latter while still being perfectly capable of criticism for their shortcomings.

Should I mention how horrendous losses t-34 and sherman incurred after 1942? I better not.

6 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

 

You've never talked to an actual tanker in your life, have you?

no.

Where did I screw it up?

7 hours ago, Toxn said:

 

-in the same class as British, Italian and Japanese tanks design-wise.

 

You just can't say that and expect to be taken seriously. Not with knowing the history and the numbers of equipment that Allies lost to kill two and a half countries.

45 minutes ago, Beer said:

 

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. 

Isn't the fact that so many consider German weapons better and indication of truth? Many countries try to shovel some bias into their histories but Nazi-Germany has no advocates. Even in Germany is the interest for ww2 technology a semi-obscure hobby.