What the Hell is the Point of Interleaved Road Wheels?

[delete013]

4 hours ago, Beer said:

 

What my source? Vehicle you posted is second Auto-Union prototype. The hull has nothing to do with Pz.38(t) aside of the externally mounted 38(t) suspension for comparison testing. This vehicle was built before ČKD even knew that it was being developed. Picture I posted is different vehicle designed later by ČKD and only that one is based on 38(t). Period. 

 

> this is the final vehicle (https://www.valka.cz/Kaetzchen-38t-t12141)

"Napriek podpore Heeres Waffenamtu a WaPrüf 6 projektu obrneného transportéru firmy Auto Union známeho pod krycím názvom Kätzchen, existovala ešte i snaha využiť podvozok tanku Pz.Kpfw.38(t)"

 

Here is the answer to your mistery. Germans wanted to use the BMM production capacity and the 38(t) platform.

 

Quote

 

 

That's only your and all wrong interpretation and ignorance. There are countless examples that interleaved wheels are not needed for heavy vehicles and it was like that in WW2 just like it is today. Two examples of many many more. 

 

1945, 86 tons, single torsion bars

 

1945, 68 tons, single torsion bars

Count the road wheels and check the length of the hulls. Then think why Soviets (at least mediums) and Germans both wanted very short vehicles. Turning radius of these things has to be half of Texas. Some "theory" for you:

The image shows the forces that have to be overcome to turn the vehicle. Each hull extension increases them and extends the possible turn radius, decreasing the agility of the vehicle. Sure, for heavy tanks that might not be essential but it requires more powerful engine at already increased weight.

 

Now a question for mio $. Do these two vehicles enable neutral steering, as could Tiger 2?

 

Quote

I'm not interpreting anything. I'm telling what the October 1944 decision stated. There is nothing ambiguous about that. 

They stated that the Kniepkamp's designes will be dropped?

Quote

 You interpret the article wrong.  The use of double torsion bars was not a measure to overcome material issues but a measure to achieve double travel with existing materials.

What can be wrongly interpreted in that simple statement? It wasn't either-or. It was the combination of both.

Quote

You can clearly see that on Königstiger which didn't have double torsion bars (by your logic it would absolutely had to have them). 510 mm is insane value for the time, nearly double to the other vehicles of the period and it was possible only through double length of the springs. Double travel over double length means that twisting of the spring is same.

Tiger 2 was a heavy tank. This distinction makes to majority here problems. Then Pershing becomes medium when discussing armour and suddenly heavy tank when mobility. IS-2 has torsion bars, hence the same mobility as panther?

Quote

And this crazy suspension travel is the reason why Panther was good in terrain and absolutely not the fact it had interleaved wheels. 

Read my answer to collimatrix. It is the combination that works, not separate parts.

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No. If you knew something about the subject you would have known that it is impossible to build springs without certain alloying elements. Even for somewhat worse spring steel you still need them.

Of course. But different alloys can achieve that and at different levels.

[Beer]

4 minutes ago, delete013 said:

Count the road wheels and check the length of the hulls. Then think why Soviets (at least mediums) and Germans both wanted very short vehicles. Turning radius of these things has to be half of Texas. Some "theory" for you:

The image shows the forces that have to be overcome to turn the vehicle. Each hull extension increases them and extends the possible turn radius, decreasing the agility of the vehicle. Sure, for heavy tanks that might not be essential but it requires more powerful engine at already increased weight.

 

IS-7 hull is shorter than Königstiger. T30 hull is only 23 cm longer. How about if you checked that first yourself before writing? 

  

4 minutes ago, delete013 said:

They stated that the Kniepkamp's designes will be dropped?

 

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. 

  

8 minutes ago, delete013 said:

What can be wrongly interpreted in that simple statement? It wasn't either-or. It was the combination of both.

 

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). 

  

8 minutes ago, delete013 said:

Tiger 2 was a heavy tank. This distinction makes to majority here problems.

 

That changes nothing. 

  

8 minutes ago, delete013 said:

Then Pershing becomes medium when discussing armour and suddenly heavy tank when mobility. IS-2 has torsion bars, hence the same mobility as panther?

 

You don't make sense at all. 

  

8 minutes ago, delete013 said:

Read my answer to collimatrix. It is the combination that works, not separate parts.

 

He knows. You believe. 

[delete013]

33 minutes ago, Lord_James said:

They are, you’re just not accepting it. 
 

 

 

I gave you several American and British examples, mate... 

Arracourt: not yet corroborated by non-American sources. I don't believe in "official" US army fairy tales.

Ruweisat ridge (part of first battle of El Alamein): What about Ruweisat?

the Falaise: No noteworthy maneuver. Germans deliberately exposed their flanks for an all out attack and got bombed and shelled to dust. Then Allies failed to bag Germans again.

Mons / Colmar pockets: You mean against those depleted static units? What exactly was maneuvered there? Driving behind some mg nests?

33 minutes ago, Lord_James said:

Lol wut? Is that why the Nazi’s increasingly used poorly trained conscripts with minimum equipment as the war went on, or how they continued to make cheap vehicles like Hetzer and Stug as materials and time grew thin? 
 

Not all were suddenly poorly trained conscripts.

 

33 minutes ago, Lord_James said:

The Normandy campaign was not particularly hampered by the Germans efforts more than any other front. Normandy was difficult to cross because of the environment being: 

A) full of dense hedge rows (bocage), that were difficult to pass through and provided AT gun crews and panzershreck / panzerfaust teams with easy targets at close range. It took so long because each of these guns / teams had to be meticulously cleared before armor could move forward.

Around Caen there aren't many bocages. Also, bocages were a great opportunity to show  the skills of American soldiers. It didn't work too well.

33 minutes ago, Lord_James said:

B) the roads were so thoroughly damaged by the allied bombardment that it was difficult to drive anywhere without coming across a 2 meter deep crater or heavy debris blocking your path.

This is no excuse. Roads are fixed in a few days, especially with the amount of resources Allies had. Besides, why destroy entire north of France for an enemy that only has tanks, infantry and mortars?

33 minutes ago, Lord_James said:

 

After the allies had broken out of this terrain, they saw much faster and further advances.

Not at all, they were stuck around Caen due to splendid German tigers & some panzergrenadiers. They had to grind them with the help of strategic weapons that Germans neither had, nor had any answer against.

33 minutes ago, Lord_James said:

 

Also, outside of Caen is where the falaise pocket was fought, and the allies made huge advances securing land from the Nazi’s, and destroying a large amount of men and material via a large pincer movement, which requires out maneuvering the enemy. Kinda hard to do that if your vehicles are “less maneuverable”. 

Allies were 1 month behind schedule before Falaise debacle. They were likely very happy that Germans exposed themselves, especially because they knew exact plans 3 days before the attack. That "pincer" was merely clearing up the dust after massive artillery shelling and air attacks already wrecked the entire army. And yet they failed, half of German personnel escaped. They could have finished the thing right there. They could have also drove right into Germany but they failed due to logistical problems. Even at full motorisation they were at a quite shorter distance than semi-motorised German army managed during Barbarossa. Here are Soviets definitely more commendable.

[Sturgeon]

2 hours ago, Toxn said:

"Obstinate or unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction; in particular, prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group."

 

So what group are you part of, that I'm unreasonably or obstinately prejudiced against you?

 

Isn't it obvious? Ignoramuses.

[Sturgeon]

7 minutes ago, delete013 said:

Arracourt: not yet corroborated by non-American sources. I don't believe in "official" US army fairy tales.

 

LMAO I bet you're a holocaust denier.

[Toxn]

23 minutes ago, delete013 said:

Arracourt: not yet corroborated by non-American sources. I don't believe in "official" US army fairy tales.

[Belesarius]

Holy fuck this guy is short bus level retarded  

[N-L-M]

  

  

On 3/30/2021 at 7:50 PM, delete013 said:

rarely is pointed at the fact that they largely dispensed with tactical maneuver mid-war,

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.
 

 

On 3/30/2021 at 7:50 PM, delete013 said:

do no need for fancy drive trains. Infantry tanks suddenly didn't need speed or agility, cruiser tanks no armour. Sounds perfect for that doctrine, too bad Germans didn't abide to it

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.

 

On 3/30/2021 at 7:50 PM, delete013 said:

But they still offered that needed weight distribution, across the chassis but also on individual wheel. This reduced strain on roadwheel arms and individual torsion bars when hitting several bumps on uneven terrain.

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.

 

On 3/30/2021 at 7:50 PM, delete013 said:

Hence, faster off-road speeds for Germans, better maneuvering, more flanking surprises, better combat performance. And it is pretty clear what the Allies were the worst at, maneuver warfare. There is no reason to think that the design wasn't the best around. Everyone else ran about with lighter or slower vehicles.

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.

On 3/30/2021 at 7:50 PM, delete013 said:

There is however another reason. Germans had to include the limitations of their steel into calculations.

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.

 

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

I'm going into the void on this topic, I have no knowledge about those vehicles, so I'll make negative assumptions about what doesn't fit in the narrative

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.

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

If they could, they would use overlapping wheels simply because they offer better driving.

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.

 

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

A most logical and probable direction should the war continue.

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.

 

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

Sure, per individual vehicle. With greater carrying capacity you can put battle relevant items on the vehicle. Better vehicle means less of them needed.

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.

 

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

And a single panther against two shermans goes in the former's favour. At least this is what history tells.

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.

 

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

Or you reduce the strain on each component by splitting the rotation of a wheel arm between two torsion bars and reducing the distance between wheels, as was the case of a panther.

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.

 

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

It does. It is of secondary consideration though. I believe having that 8.8 and 100mm of steel justifies some freezing mud problems. Allies got these priorities all wrong and paid the high price.

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.

 

On 3/31/2021 at 2:47 PM, delete013 said:

This just confirms the need for tiger 1's arrangement. Or was there an alternative?

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.

8 hours ago, delete013 said:

Panther was likely to get the right pair?

A balanced arrangement without track twisting and roughly three layers only.

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.
 

 

8 hours ago, delete013 said:

That is not how it works. The concept of interleaved wheels was a solution for the limitations of the time. The only other suspension able to carry such weight were compound solutions with limited suspension travel. Today's arrangement would never work with ww2 tech.

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.

 

8 hours ago, delete013 said:

Germans identified the need for greater suspension travel as a precondition for fast and smooth off road driving. The steel in their torsion bars couldn't enable it, so they bound two together and achieved it "trotz schlechterer Werkstoffgüte" - despite poor material quality. (Merhof, Hackbarth: Fahrmechanik der Kettenfahrzeuge)

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.

 

8 hours ago, delete013 said:

Germans had material limitations and had to improvise

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

8 hours ago, delete013 said:

Because they were designed 30 years later. If vehicles needed to exceed 70 tonnes then interleaved wheels would likely come back into play.

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?

 

5 hours ago, delete013 said:

nor am I a mechanical engineer.

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.

 

4 hours ago, delete013 said:

Then I am sure you will be able to dismantle my arguments on a scientific level

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.

 

2 hours ago, delete013 said:

Now a question for mio $. Do these two vehicles enable neutral steering, as could Tiger 2?

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.

 

1 hour ago, delete013 said:

Arracourt: not yet corroborated by non-American sources. I don't believe in "official" US army fairy tales

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.

[Sturgeon]

13 minutes ago, N-L-M said:

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?

 

 

[N-L-M]

5 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

 

 

I see my literary allusions do not escape your sharp eyes!

[delete013]

1 hour ago, N-L-M said:

  

  

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.

 

Spaßvogel you.

 

"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."

...aaaaaand they were in Berlin. Six weeks.

 

We need another thread for this, I shouldn't have replied to Lord James. You people are too easy to provoke.

[N-L-M]

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

It's like pottery.

[Sturgeon]

8 minutes ago, delete013 said:

 

Spaßvogel you.

 

"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."

...aaaaaand they were in Berlin. Six weeks.

 

We need another thread for this, I shouldn't have replied to Lord James. You people are too easy to provoke.

 

Another wehraboo skull claimed for the pile. This seasons hunts have been bountiful.

[Toxn]

27 minutes ago, delete013 said:

 

Spaßvogel you.

 

"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."

...aaaaaand they were in Berlin. Six weeks.

 

We need another thread for this, I shouldn't have replied to Lord James. You people are too easy to provoke.

 

[Lord_James]

21 minutes ago, delete013 said:

We need another thread for this, I shouldn't have replied to Lord James. You people are too easy to provoke.

You overextended with your heavy and immovable arguments, right into a classic bull-horn formation, where the faster and more maneuverable allied facts can attack from the weaker sides, causing higher casualties for your facts and severely disrupting your arguments. 

[delete013]

4 hours ago, Beer said:

 

IS-7 hull is shorter than Königstiger. T30 hull is only 23 cm longer. How about if you checked that first yourself before writing? 

Hm is this realistic?

http://www.armor.kiev.ua/Tanks/Modern/is7/IS7vsKening.jpg

You might well be right about IS-7. It is however not 1945 vehicle.

 

What really matters at hull is the length of the track contact with the floor. This would make 4120cm for tiger 2 and 5182cm for T30 from (i took 204 inch for T30, can't read it well on the photo)

4 hours ago, Beer said:

 

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. 

 

Leave it then, if I haven't conviced you until not, I never will.

4 hours ago, Beer said:

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). 

Exactly, where do we disagree?

4 hours ago, Beer said:

That changes nothing. 

 

You don't make sense at all.

 

He knows. You believe. 

[Sturgeon]

4 minutes ago, delete013 said:

Hm is this realistic?

http://www.armor.kiev.ua/Tanks/Modern/is7/IS7vsKening.jpg

You might well be right about IS-7. It is however not 1945 vehicle.

 

What really matters at hull is the length of the track contact with the floor. This would make 4120cm for tiger 2 and 5182cm for T30 from (i took 204 inch for T30, can't read it well on the photo)

Leave it then, if I haven't conviced you until not, I never will.

Exactly, where do we disagree?

 

You know that going after Beer won't save you, right?

 

 

 

[Beer]

2 hours ago, N-L-M said:

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.

 

A quick search gives us these ground pressure values. 

 

Panther 0,09 MPa

Königstiger 0,102 MPa with combat tracks and 0,123 MPa with transport tracks

Tiger 0,104 MPa with combat tracks and 0,142 MPa with transport tracks (the need to use different tracks for move via rail is another retarded feature btw.)

 

To compare 

 

KV-1 0,77 MPa 

IS-2 0,0785 MPa

T-34/85 0,0824 MPa

T-44 0,083

IS-3 0,0853 MPa

 

A41 Centurion Mk.I 0,07 MPa

T30 Heavy 0,08 MPa

M26 0,09 MPa

Sherman VC Firefly 0,09 MPa

M4A2 (76W) 0,1 MPa

A22F Churchill VII 0,094 MPa

A34 Comet 0,095 MPa

A27 Cromwell IV 0,101 MPa

 

In my list of main late war tanks (and some early post war) the interleaved wheels helped Königstiger and Tiger to achieve the last two places in terms of the ground pressure which further underlines how crazy overweight the vehicles were. Panther with its interleaved wheels has same ground pressure as M26, ended behind all soviet vehicles in the list and faaaaaar behind Centurion which happened to be the best in my list (a surprise for me). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[SH_MM]

4 minutes ago, Beer said:

A quick search gives us these ground pressure values. 

NGP vs MMP

[delete013]

57 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

 

Another wehraboo skull claimed for the pile. This seasons hunts have been bountiful.

I think in all of the discussions on this forum a track might have broken on my tiger.

[Beer]

6 minutes ago, SH_MM said:

NGP vs MMP

 

You are right. Are MMP values available somewhere? 

[N-L-M]

4 minutes ago, Beer said:

 

You are right. Are MMP values available somewhere? 

 

Ask and ye shall receive.

[delete013]

17 minutes ago, SH_MM said:

NGP vs MMP

You're fast.

MMD (mittlerer maximaler Druck) as MMP here.

[TokyoMorose]

12 hours ago, delete013 said:

Because they were designed 30 years later. If vehicles needed to exceed 70 tonnes then interleaved wheels would likely come back into play.

 

Neither Merkava IV or Challenger 2 have interleaved wheels and at their heaviest substantially exceed 70 tonnes.

 

Merkava IV doesn't even use torsion bars. It uses an advanced, high tech solution of...  big springs.

[Beer]

7 hours ago, delete013 said:

> this is the final vehicle (https://www.valka.cz/Kaetzchen-38t-t12141)

"Napriek podpore Heeres Waffenamtu a WaPrüf 6 projektu obrneného transportéru firmy Auto Union známeho pod krycím názvom Kätzchen, existovala ešte i snaha využiť podvozok tanku Pz.Kpfw.38(t)"

 

Here is the answer to your mistery. Germans wanted to use the BMM production capacity and the 38(t) platform.

 

My source is book of Vladimír Francev and Charles Ch. Kliment.