Jeeps_Guns_Tanks

Possibly last post dedicated to the fortification but a very long one dedicated to the heavy fortifications. I hope that a lot of those peculiar details are new for you. Most of the info comes from very knowledgeable staff of heavy infantry casemate N-S-82. If you ever want to visit some object of Czechoslovak fortification system you must not miss this one because this is the only one fully equipped as it shall have been (in fact it's a bit better equipped than in September 1938 then it was not totally finished inside). All photos are from my phone (it's allowed to take photos inside). 
 
N-S-82 is a stand alone infantry casemate located in a line on a slope upon the border crossing Náchod-Běloves. It was built in 1938 in a resistance class II. Which means that it had 2,25 m thick frontal wall (with a stones and earth cover). The roof was 2 m thick and the side and rear facing walls were 1 m thick. The border crossing is down bellow while roughly 1,5 km away on the hill there is an artillery fortress Dobrošov. It was guaranteed to withstand 240 mm artillery shells and 250 kg bombs (according to many authors Luftwaffe had no 500 kg bombs fielded at September 1938 yet) however during weapon testing on a casemate Jordán (experimental one used for fortification and weapon development) which had same resistance class even 305 mm heavy mortar hit didn't penetrate the roof (there were volunteers inside during the test fire!). It is said that there was some damage to the equipment but I don't know more details. 
 
On the same picture you can see also a combined anti-tank/infantry obstacle made of steel U-shape profiles welded together and stuck in a concrete base. Behind them there is anti-infantry barbed wire and a line of steel hedgehogs. Anti-infantry barbed wire could have been placed also in front of those rods. At certain place with high danger of tank attacks concrete anti-tank moats wete built too (sometime they can still be found). 
 
 
In 1938 you could find also these older concrete hedgehogs in the area. Those were used only earlier because they had two importnat drawbacks. The first one was that they offered better cover for the attacking infantry and the second was that their large area made them easier to move by shockwaves from artilery. 

 
A historical image showing how such line looked like in the September 1938 (where it was finished). This picture shows a heavy object K-S-35. 

 
N-S-82 was armed with one 47 mm AT gun, 5 HMG and 5-6 LMG. AT gun with coaxial HMG and a twin HMG were pointing down the valey towards the border crossing. On the opposite side (uphill) there were two single HMGs. LMG were used only in observation cupolas and for close defence of the object (normally the priority was to defend the neighbouring object with primary weapons). 
  
 
Let's go inside. There are three door covered by 2 LMG fire posts and one fire post for personal weapons directly in the entrance which alone had S-shape to prevent any direct fire into the object and on the main door. The first cage door are 200 kg heavy and on the left side behind them there is a fresh-air intake. On the right side there is armored door 600 kg heavy. Behind another corner there is third presurrized door 450 kg heavy. Both heavy door had emergency hatches in them so that the crew could get out if the door were deformed and stuck. 

 
The casemate has two floor. The top floor is combat and the bottom one is technical and living one. Every single heavy object had its own water source which must have been able to deliver at least 1,5 litres per minute. In this particular case it was around 4 litres per minute.

 
This is the electric generator which was pretty noisy. It's in fully working state. It's cooling was used for heating the interior but even in summer the inner temperature didn't get upon 17°C and the soldiers often suffered from respiratory or rheumatic issues. 

 
This is the filtering and air venting room. On the left side there is the ventilator with back-up handles for manual operation (I tried it myself and it's quite tough). On the right side there are filters which were used only in case of gas attack. The whole object had an overpressure in it which was used also for extracting the fumes from gunnery rooms. 

 
This particular object had 32 men crew (only the commander was an officer). The soldiers had one bedroom (see bellow). The sub-officers had their own room with own bed for each one and the commander had also his own room but located on the combat floor. Only Czech or Slovak nationals were allowed to serve in the permanent boarder units manning the heavy fortifications (no German, Poles or Hungarians because low loyality was expected with them). 

 
This is part of the bathroom (it's difficult to take some photos inside because it's quite cramped and I don't want to post gazillion of photos, rather only millions). The lavatories had a water filtration station used to prevent pollution of the main water source and a ventilation preventing methane acumulation). 

 
Down bellow there was also a food storage, hand granade storage (275 pieces) and a telephone room (on the picture). The bunker had several external telephone lines leading to the neighbouring objects and to the sector command post. As a backup a ground telegraph was used with cable antenas dug underground. Depending on the particular soil composition it was capable of morse communication to the range of 5-10 km. Ground radio antenas for voice communication were not installed by September 1938 (the radio was developed and tested but not fielded). 

 
Here you can see some internal communication means in the gunnery room. A simple speaking tube and a telephone. 

 
There was another way how to communicate between the observation cupolas and the gunnery rooms and that was a color code (in case of big noise from bombardning for example). 

 
With that we got onto the combat floor. This is the LMG firing post for the defence of the rear side. You can see observation insert on the left side which was interchangeable with the LMG. The LMG is vz.26 which I don't need to introduce to you for sure. There were 120 ready-to-fire magazines for each LMG in the object! 

 
Here is similar firing post with the observation insert mounted and a removable periscope to the right side of it. That was used to observe the close surroundings and the moats at the weapons. Under the periscope there is a tube for hand grenades used for close defence. 

 
A view inside the observation cupola from bellow. The very peculiar thing here is that the floor worked similarly to the office chair and the soldier could very simply adjust the floor position to his height. The middle column was also used for evacuation of spent cartridges. The cupola is made of 200 mm thick cast steel and the inner diameter is 1,35 m. 

 
This is a periscoipe which could have been errected through the cupola roof for 360° observation.

 
A simple lift was used to transport LMG mags to the cupola.

 
Some more details before we get to the main weaponry. These are JIGs for MG loading. Top is belt-loading JIG for HMG vz.37 and bellow is a one for mag loading of LMG vz.26.

 
This is the kitchen, gentelmen. Yes, for 32 people! The bunker had food reserves for 14 days but I can hardly imagine to fight 2 weeks inside without getting crazy. 

 
This is one very peculiar detail. When the bunker was bombarded by heavy weapons the ceiling could elastically deform. To prevent internal much thinner walls from collapsing they had on top of them a cork layer which worked like a spring reducing the pressure on the walls.

 
Except for the grenades all ammo was stored in the combat department close to the weapons. The capacity of this object was 600 47 mm shells and 600 thousand 7,92x57 rounds. Now imagine that 263 heavy and nearly 10000 light objects were actually built before Münich. What an insane amount of ammo stored in the fortification system!  In reality around 3/4 of the ammo was delivered at 28th September but I would say that it's still huge achievement of the army logistics. On the picture you can see AP and HE-FRAG round of the AT gun (from later war production). A third anti-infantry round was being developed but wasn't fielded. I don't know how it's called in English when the round is filled with steel balls. Can you help me?  

 
This is the right gunnery room with two single HMG vz.37 and one LMG vz.26 for close defence. Notice that all frontal and side walls and also the ceiling had metalic anti-spall and anti-vibration layer.

 
All main weapons (AT gun and the HMGs) had sights with 2x zoom (upon the gun there is a drawing of the surroundings). Unfortunately not a single original support for the single HMG was preserved and the plans shall be dug somewhere in the German archives. Therefore these are just approximate replicas. The HMG vz.37 (ZB-53) alone is basically what the Brits know as BESA (rechambered to 0.303). Each single HMG had 2 men crew, the shooter and the loader. 

 
This is one of only three preserved heavy barrels for the HMG vz.37 in Czechia. This barrel would be used exclusively in fortifications. 

 
This is a view into the left gunnery room with an AT gun with coaxial HMG and a twin HMG. Both weapons and supports are original. 

 
Both the HMGs and the AT gun could have been quickly aimed by the body force alone without using elevation and traverse screws (that was also a possibility). The twin HMG vz.37 on the picture had a crew of three (one shooter and two loaders). 

 
I believe the most interesting thing is the AT gun Škoda vz.36. This particular gun was moved to Atlantic Wall in Norway and in 2002 returned back into N-S-82 and moreover with a spare barrel. There are only around ten of such guns preserved worldwide and very few spare barrels (only one or two in Czechia) and these two have matching serial numbers (173 + 2173; 2173 means second barrel for 173) and moreover they originally belonged to this particular bunker!
 
The gun was capable of very rapid fire. Normally 20-30 aimed shots per mimute (depending on the skill of the crew) or up to 40 rounds per minute in autofire mode. That meant that it fired automatically once it was loaded (this was possible max. for 3 minutes and after a water cooling up to 6 minutes long was needed). The shooter could fire both the AT gun and the HMG by the same hand and he could use his second hand and his body to aim like with a gigantic rifle in a ball joint without using traverse and elevation screws. The gun had three loaders - two for the AT gun and one for the HMG. The gun penetration values vary in sources I saw but it shall be around 50 mm of cemented steel at 500 meters and 30°, i.e. more than enough for 1938. Later in the war special ammo with claimed double penetration values was developed by Škoda but I don't know if ever used anywhere.  

 
 
Well, that was N-S-82. Now some more peculiar things from other objects. This is a 15 cm Röchling shell still being stuck in a frontal wall of N-S-91. This object was built in class III therefore the wall on the picture is 2,75 meters thick and if the object was fully completed it would be covered by stones and earth (those would have likely little effect against the Röchling anyway). The wall was not penetrated. Czech fortifications were used for Röchling development just like later also the Belgian ones. However there is an important difference. I believe there is no Röchling hit in the roof in any Czech object while in Belgium the Germans tried the indirect fire and they achieved some very spectacular penetrations. The direct fire used against Czech fortifications was much less effective in terms of penetration but with the indirect fire it was close to impossible to actually hit something. 

 
I believe that this is another Röchling hit in the wall of N-S-49. Maybe a larger calibre for 21 cm guns, honestly I can't recognize. This is an object of an unfinished artilery fortress Skutina and the wall is 3,5 meters thick. It was too high to actually see inside and the object is not accesible from inside for public but it looked like it's not a penetration. Fun fact about this unfinished fortress. The guys who take care of it plan to connect the underground corridor betwen the existing objects where 27 meters were missing by the time when it was abandoned. 

 
Last thing is a replica of .380 ACP SMG vz.38 which was never fielded (on display in the object N-S-84). The SMG was basically developed in one month! It had two magazines, straight for 24 and drum for 96 rounds. 3500 pieces were ordered by the fortification command to be used to protect the entry door or in some light objects which were close to each other in difficult terrain instead of the LMG. The SMG was roughly 4x cheaper than the LMG. Only 15 were made before the order was canceled after Münich. Strangely Czechoslovakia which was very successful in small arms development never fielded an SMG in the interwar period. When the army realised it would be good to actually have one it was too late and moreover it had no money for it (at least the cavalery and artilery wanted it). 
 
Under the SMG You can also see Czechoslovak handgrenades from 1930'. 

 
  
 
 
 
 
 

It amuses me to know that you actually see yourself as dangerous in this way, like you're some kind of master swordsman deftly parrying and counterattacking multiple foes at once as they surround you.
 

 
It's a cute image. But in reality:



Everybody's at the park, watching the fat retarded kid go!

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.

I created my account only some time ago as I did not feel the need to really engage in discussions here but, I absolutely adore how our beloved friend Delete stated he was only "trolling" and about 2 posts later went back to being completely serious about everything he says.
 
This is pure gold, a flawless comedy, i'm on the verge of tears from reading and laughing at every piece of turd his mouth shits out and i'm sure there's more to come.

Oh this whole thing has been just delightful. Let's do a quick mid-season recap, shall we?

It started with Beer making an observation (which he's actually rather well qualified to support, not that you'd know because you don't actually pay any attention at all to who you're talking to), and you claimed his observation was conjecture, and packaged this with an amusingly ignorant oversight (which any eleven year old tank game enthusiast would know, let alone someone who preens and struts about as if he were a german tank expert) about the Pz.38(t) n.A. Specifically, you didn't know it existed, and I really couldn't ask for a better symbolic prelude to this entire escapade. This pattern repeats with virtually every post you make, and it's frankly this remarkable consistency of complete ignorance that is the whole reason we keep you around rather than banning you out of contempt.
 

 
Make no mistake, although it's pathetic and perverse to see a human being act like a cornered beast, it remains a lot of fun to corner beasts, all the same.

A couple of posts are exchanged in which Beer continues to act extremely sober and measured in his engagement with, if not the nitwit of the century, then perhaps the nitwit of the decade (sadly, you're a couple years too early to escape being in a bracket with Brock, but I admire your tenacity), and then in very short order you drop the absolute bombshell of the thread when you claim that the Allies were worse at maneuver warfare. All of the back and forth about flotation and suspension systems pales in comparison to the magnitude of the stupidity of this statement. To focus on anything else in the thread at the expense of this would be like, well, autistically focusing on engreebled tank suspension systems at the expense of the greater maneuver war of World War II. Which, coincidentally, is an error both you and the Nazis committed.

Down the rabbit hole we go! The rabbit smirks, seeing how readily everyone follows! If he zags left, they zag left; if he goes under the branch, they go under the branch. He self-satisfies with how easily he can manipulate everyone else. Truly, a master of manipulation is he! A nice enough sounding theory. One problem: He's not being chased by other rabbits, but by terriers. What happens when they catch him?

It is unimportant to recount every dart of the rabbit, every puff of dust. It's unimportant to list off every idiotic thing you said, but it must be noted that there were a lot. You demonstrated an absolutely impressive ignorance of just about every topic from mechanical engineering, to history, to basic logic. But, idiots are a dime a dozen, and you, my dear rabbit, are special. You are not only ignorant, but you use it offensively, often throwing out comments about how you don't know and that makes you better somehow. A boar fights with his tusks. A bear with his claws and teeth. An idiot...
 
Indeed, you are a rare and endangered rabbit, which can run and kick and fight for hours, and give a tremendous amount of joy to any terrier. Especially when they finally shake you to death. Or until they lose interest and you are simply shot and buried, whichever comes first.

And, like fuckin clockwork, we get the "I was just trolling" response.

It's like pottery.

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.

Holy fuck this guy is short bus level retarded  

IS-7 hull is shorter than Königstiger. T30 hull is only 23 cm longer. How about if you checked that first yourself before writing? 
  
 
It states that all future light vehicles shall be built with Surin's suspension. What you don't understand? I won't repeat the same sentence for the fifth time. 
  
 
The double torsion bars were used to fulfill the required suspension travel because there was no other chance to achieve it regardless of material available at the time (anywhere). 
  
 
That changes nothing. 
  
 
You don't make sense at all. 
  
 
He knows. You believe. 

First you have to bring some. 

Where do you get the arrogance to argue about things you have no clue about? 

Sadly that puppet is smarter than our pal Delete. 
 
 

You see yourself the way you see your beloved Nazi tankers, as a knight in zimmerited armor, bravely and honorably engaging in the ritual of combat.
 
You do not see yourself for what you actually are:
 

This is Kätzchen K2. The second Auto-Union test vehicle used for comparison of suspension variants (K1 had Kniepkamp suspension). It has nothing to do with he final vehicle which was ordered from ČKD/BMM. The hull has zero common with Pz.38(t). 
 
I have never implied that leaf springs were a thing of the future. I have claimed interleaved wheels were absolutely not (I can't see how you still can't understand it even when next 80 years showed clearly the truth). And that is a big difference. Simple sturdy leaf suspension of 38(t)/(d) simply worked, it was cheap, reliable and easy to produce. Those are very important criteria for mass produced vehicles especially when you are in deep shit. 
  
 
There is no "most logical direction" in the E-series study. There are three completely different variants which never were built, tested against each other, evaluated or selected as final. 
 
  
 
No. The later overlapping versions added track twisting and their very low service life. They were not better. 
 
You claim that technology and threads changed... than you shall explain why most of the tanks 80 years later still use in principle the same suspension as Pz.III and KV-1 from 1930'. 
 
I have not claimed the Germans did 180° turn. I have only told you that by the decision from October 1944 they abandoned the interleaved wheels for light tracked vehicles. It's not my opinion. 
 
  
 
You take absolutely wrong historical lesson. Weapons are being developed and built to win wars. The heavy monsters lost the war. It was the light and highly mobile forces of the early campaigns which brought success to the Germans and it was again highly mobile forces which brought even greater success to the Red Army later in the war. A Schw.Abt. placed in any point is irrelevant when your enemy is able to do 150 km a day and simply bypasses you and catches you in a pocket where you run out of fuel, ammo and food sooner or later. You know that only the eatern front was around 2-3 thousand kilometers wide? Do you want to claim that you can place your few immobile heavy units to cover such front? Of course you can not, nobody can and history clearly showed that. Quantity matters. Believe it or not but you can be sure as hell that every single German field commander would tell you that they never had enough of their vehicles. In the end the Germans ended moving their armoured units by rail from place to place while the enemy was usually attacking elsewhere. They may have been able to achieve some local success but that was perfectly irrelevant for the course of war, just like that single Char-B tank which knocked out 15 or so German light tanks or the single KV-2 holding an entire German regiment for a day when the enemy's other forces were already hundred kilometers farther. The great irony is that none of the most spectacular German victories would be possible with their late war forces due to the lack of mobility and inability to cross rivers without heavy bridges. 
 
  
 
10 cm of height is something like 1 ton of extra hull weight on a vehicle of Panther size. 
 
  
 
Man, you know nothing about the subject. No, it doesn't work like that and no it was not the case of Panther. You are arguing here in favor of Panther, yet you don't even know what was the purpose of the double torsion bars... It was double suspension travel, i.e. the torsion bars were twisting just like usual, they were only effectively longer to allow bigger travel. But if you insist feel free to build a torsion bar from a steel used for rails or for reinforcing concrete because that is what doesn't need any special alloying elements. 
 
  
 
What priorities and what price? They won the war and especially on western front with very low casualties. 
 
  
 
Of course. Not using interleaved wheels at all as everyone else to this very day. Can you explain why Leopard II or Abrams work without having interleaved wheels and with having basically Pz.III suspension? 
 
  
 
You believe wrong. 
 
 
 
 
 

You categorically do not understand what you're talking about.

 

That's not the theory at all.  I'm slightly curious if you read this nonsense somewhere or came up with it on your own, but only slightly curious, so please don't belabor me with a large amount of detail.  Having more points of articulation on a suspension does not affect the force experienced by the chassis or crew.  When the tank is at rest the road wheels will exert the tank's weight against the ground via the suspension springs.  When the tank is going over an obstacle, the vertical component of the acceleration will be buffered by the travel of the independent suspension stations.  If there are more of these stations, then they will have lower K values of their springs, otherwise the suspension would just get stiffer from having more stations.  There will be a very slight difference in response from having more unsprung mass.  Having more points of articulation does increase the tendency for the tank to pitch in response to acceleration and deceleration, but for the number of roadwheels typical for tanks this distinction is immaterial.

 

Interleaved roadwheels are equivalent to overlapped ones in terms of ground pressure reduction.  Point me to any serious engineering analysis that says otherwise.

 


You need to learn that words mean things.  "Strain" has a very specific, mathematical meaning, and you are badly abusing the word here.

We literally know the name of the guy, as well as the fact that he a) had a patent on interleaved road wheels and b) was part of 6th Department, which functioned as a procurement office during the pre-war and early war period.
 
Shockingly, almost every project which passed through 6th Department ended up with requirements for interleaved suspension. And the second that Kniepkamp (and later 6th Department itself) got sidelined these requirements faded away.
 
This is one of the more obvious cases of industrial favouritism in the second world war, with engineering considerations being very much a secondary concern.

This has been dealt with already, but dude. It was literally Red Army doctrine later in the war to do successive pincer movements (as part of the revival of deep operations thinking). That's literally the entire story of the Eastern front in 1944 and 1945.
 
You are so fucking ignorant.

As far as I understand it, the rather key reason that the Luchs won over the n.A. (and the Luchs actually *failed* to meet requirements, the program required a 50mm gun and the best MAN could weasel out was they would have a new 50mm turret 'sometime' in the future for it) - was quite simple. MAN was both German and had lots of friends in the brass making decisions. The great irony is that they would basically have to beg for something to replace the nonexistent Luchs (as MAN was so overloaded with higher priority work, they never made more than the LRIP 100 tanks, and it was an epic feat for them to do that - more than a year at WW2 build pace!)... which resulted in the Sd.Kfz 140/1 being churned out for a few months before all Czech production was ordered to change to JgPz 38(t).
 
Always recommend the translated Pasholok piece here: https://www.tankarchives.ca/2018/07/reconnaissance-cats.html
 
It covers the sordid tale of Luchs and Leopard, and ends up discussing the 140/1 (Aufklärungspanzer 38(t)) at the end.

Yes, I read this article. I read also the book of Francev about Czechoslovak vehicles but neither source gives a definitive answer. Sure Luchs failed. That's the only thing we know for sure. 

I just find it very amusing that MAN was able to submit a vehicle that did not meet the hard requirements (the 5cm gun), and still managed to win. That is some grade A favoritism.

No. Only the very first prototype Kätzchen K1 had interleaved wheels. Read please again my post. Second prototype had Surin's suspension and the final vehicle which was never finihed was supposed to be this (yes, only wooden mockup but this is the final vehicle). 

 
  
 
Never ever was taken any final decision about anything related to E-series. In fact they were canceled before they even got to any final design. Still there were three suspension options and none of them was of Kniekamp style interleaved wheels á la Panther, Sd.Kfz-251 or Tiger. I have already once gave you this link. Please read it finally.
 
The theory is nice but it was proven to be just a theory. People told you that million times alrerady - nobody else ever used that suspension for plenty of very good reasons. Pz.III suspesnion is used by tanks till today, more than 80 years after it was designed. Kniekamp's suspension was dead and burried by May 1945. In next nearly 80 years nobody used it again. Think about why. 
 
1) It adds several tons of weight itself (and therefore also fuel consumption which is kinda bad when you don't have fuel). 
2) it takes more space inside and makes the internal volume of the vehicle larger and therefore even heavier (and often also prevents having floor emergency hatch (Panther)
3) It needs twice more manhours, twice more material and therefore most likely costs about twice more than standard torsion bar suspension. 
4) You know which steel absolutely needs all those chemical elements which Germany lacked? Spring steel. Think about how good idea is to have twice more springs on every fucking vehicle than what is needed.
5) It is terrible for mainteanance. 
6) It likes to collect several hundreds of kilos of mud which adds more weight to the whole thing and tends to freeze in winter 
 
The zig-zag variant used on Königstiger was not better because it added fast track destruction by twisting (this would happen to most of considered E-series suspension too). 
 
Is-2 has lower ground pressure than Panther. IS-2 0,0785 MPa, Panther 0,09 MPa. The reason why Panther was faster in terrain was not interleaved wheels but the double torsion bars (which added another quantum of issues). Geez... 
 
 

You must be taking-the-piss, the allies out maneuvered the Germans far more than the reverse, as demonstrated by the great many, successful pincer movements used by the allies during the war.