Armor vs Firepower

where did this 3 yard thing come from?? did I miss a post??

 

Post #66

 

ty, sorry, there are so many

 

He starts with a certain number of troops the number left after an artillery strike is the initial number minus the casualties. They are different sides of the same coin.

 

Of course there were Panthers. That was and is well known, and has often (and rightly) been emphasized. I was simply trying to point out that the German armored force, like the Anglo-American, was a mix of vehicles and weapons (and units, too) of varying effectiveness and differing capabilities. From everything I have read the Panzer IV was the most numerous German tank even in 1944. Its 75mm L/48 gun was a better AT weapon than the 75 on the Sherman, Churchill, and Cromwell, but the Allied tanks could cope with the Panzer IV much of the time--cerainly more easily than a Panzer V.

 

The 3" shell was over twice the weight, ~14lb, but the lethal radius is only 19% greater and the lethal area 41%.

 

sounds like something the politicians say, about finances

 

The overpressure due to a blast is going to be an inverse square or greater function 41% is exactly what one would expect from an inverse square function for twice the weight. In fact it's so close it makes me wonder just where the lethal area numbers came from.

 

You need to think in terms of lethal area cubed not squared. The battlefield is in 3 dimensions and the blast reflects this.

 

If you are talking volume it's indeed the linear dimension cubed. However the blast wave is essentially an impulse whose magnitude decrease as the square (actually I suspect a bit higher order function than that but square is close enough).

Does anyone know what the weights of the bursting charge were in these two rounds? That's going to be the main determinant of the blast I expect. The shelldesign and mass are likely to have a much bigger impact on fragments than on blast. At least that's my guess.

 

I just think that the major problem with Germany's armor was that to German industry it was more quality over quantity. They put too much emphasis on armor and weaponry which slowed the number of tanks coming out of the production line. Despite the fact that they probably had better armor and weaponry compared to the mass produced American and Russian tanks, there just wasn't enough German tanks to make much of an impact on the war. You want good armor, good weaponry and plenty of tanks. The Germans had the first two but did not have much of the last.

 

I wouldn't say it was "quality over quantity" by any means. IMO the Germans suboptimized. The Tiger is a great example of this. Heavy armor, big gun, and engineered to perform very well when it worked. On the other hand maitenance was a real bear things like the overlapping road wheels may have helped a lot in evening out ground pressure but it meant a lot more time and effort had to go into many repairs of that system. Perhaps the problem was that to a large extent the latter weapons in particular were designed to impress Hitler and the like rather than maximize the combat performance of the German armored units. As it was they seem to have ignored many of the "ilities" (repairability, maintainablility, transportability, etc)

 

I do agree with you on the maintenance issue, especially with it being a gas guzzler and a lot of them being lost due to abandonment.

 

Carronade - that's basically the point I was trying to make. That a simple increase in size does not mean an "equal" increase in effectiveness - this being influenced by a range of different factors....

...including burster charge, wall thickness of the shell, and the shell material itself I suspect (grade of steel vs.... is it friability or frangibility, the tendency/readiness to fragment/break up? Brittleness doesn't sound right LOL) That won't just influence the size and spread of fragments...but also the duration of the tamping effect of the shell before rupture.

The actual explosive used in the burster charges would have an influence too, in relation to the propagation of the blast wave; the burn speed vs, gas volume created etc. before rupture.



If anyone has any idea of the size and type of burster charge in the 3" shell I would indeed be interested too - Carronade's comment regarding the weight of the shell has just about doubled what's known about the round....it's one of those items that seems to be incredibly transparent to history so far! As I and others discovered in all the work and various threads on CS tanks...

 

The interesting thing here, though; is that they quite likely had limited choice.
Many of the wunderwaffe actually make a certain sort of sense in the context of a system increasingly on the back foot, and while it's often stated that Germany should have produced eg. 2xPz.IV for the price of 1xTigger, the real-world prospect of doing so within a comparatively immature automotive base lacking in many special materials is far more complex. The technical has a certain allure when other physical factors are being squeezed.

Previous thread that went into this somewhat:
WW2F - Germans favour Mark IV as main battle tank?


(I do sometimes wonder if it's worth building a list of previous Tiger/Panzer threads, as similar issues do tend to crop up, but hey - forums is forums, nothing wrong with a fresh attack sometimes, but it might be nice to have a reference list.)

 

That is an interesting point you bring up Von Poop.

 

I don't think that the Germans had much of a choice, they wouldn't have enough crews for their tanks, while the allies had large enough populations to. Second, the quality of their tank crews were what made the panzers divisions so legendary, they were able to defeat enemy tanks that were much more stronger and powerful(the French and Russians) with their skill. Sending in green tank crews against a enemy with much more powerful artillery and air support outnumbered would be suicide.

 

I have to say the training/discipline/culture does have an effect....I always believed the ''quality'' [discipline] was a big factor for all the German units

 

I find this interesting. I will never understand, why in France or Africa soviet captured weapons were used. Why not use all the stuff where it originated from, means eastern front. There you have also the support for the things cause there was more captured stuff already. As well the Germans did produce some Soviet shells themselfes, they all could be send to the east instead of west and Afrcia, too. Much less logistic problems. Or am I missing something?

 

I have a feeling the Germans did not have a choice. They had to use all the equipment they could get wherever they were needed. I cannot say that starting proper production figures already 1940-41 would have helped but actually Hitler was downgrading production figures in autumn 1941 as well as sending soldiers home, because the war was over. So they were pretty late compared to other countries to start mass production again as the war just kept on lingering on.