Lets build a tank.

Maybe silly, maybe potentially interesting, but given the weird nature of some recent tank threads; what the hell.

Build a tank, component by component.
Pick from what was available in WW2.

Armour,
Primary armament,
Secondary armament.
Sights & stabilisers.
Engine.
Transmission/Drivetrain.
Produced by.
Hull shape,
Turret shape,
Oddball additions.
Whatever. etc.

I'm going to ban selections from 1945, so we don't just pluck Centurion, M26, JS3 bits. They're cold war machines, really.
See if you can end up with a balanced vehicle, but only from the parts bin of things that actually went into production.
Who did what best?

~A

 

Oh, this should be interesting!

 

Armour: 100mm sloped 45 degree
Primary armament: 100mm gun
Seccondary armament: coaxal 7.62mm mg and anti air 12.7mm mg.
Sights and stabilisers: the ones on a Sherman or something
Engine: the one on an is-2
Transmission: also the Sherman one
Produced by: USA I guess
Hull shape: panther type hull
Turret shape: Tiger 2 H type turret

 

Simple. E8 Sherman, with the only additions being some 76mm paint rounds, a 90mm pipe to slip over the barrel, and some loudspeakers playing the best of Hank Williams along with Battle Hymn of the Republic. But maybe I'm a bit biased.

 

Thanks for playing.
Requesting some nitty gritty, though:

Which 100mm gun? (Why 100mm, whose ammunition?)
Which MG?
Panther type? Is that really a T34 type, given the development history?

WE GET IT!
Some people...
(Have you seen Armoured Engineering's gas gun on FB? Best I've yet heard.)

 

100 mm field gun M1944 (BS-3)
MG 42
HEAT ammo for the gun
On the subject of the hull I guess you were pretty reasonable so lets give it a t-34 hull.

 

Bam! GP above nails it. The Easy Eight Sherman really was the superior tank of the war, with the Firefly a close second. You could go with a bigger gun, thicker armor, etc, but if it can't cross narrow bridges and breaks down every 100 kilometers, what good is it? The only tanks that count are the ones that arrive at the battle.

.

 

One small point, German tanks used the MG34 throughout the war because the round barrel sleeve was more amenable to a ball or coaxial mounting than the square one on the MG42.

 

I would agree with all of that, but am interested in the components of a theoretical ideal WW2 tank.
I've defended Sherman from its lazy critics for years, and may even choose the easy 8 suspension if I can't settle on a particular non-interleaved torsion bar system, but it is indeed quite hard to defend most M4 guns as the finest in the war, or say its armour is most effective. (Though you could perhaps make a case for very high quality there. Seem to recall US steel tested quite well on average).

My subcontextual point here may well end up being 'the ideal tank looks quite Sherman-y... Imagine that! Ha!', but the above-board interest is to examine who was best at what, and why.

Am trying to define mine.
Very unsure.
Gun: probably German, but strong British contender.
Engine: British, maybe Soviet.
Running gear/transmission: American or British. Probably a combo of both. With a bit of Soviet.
Armour: Complicated!
Sights: German
Radios spring to mind.

The reason I posed the question is that I think it's a lot more complex than it first seems. We have had loads of best tank threads. Not so many looking at bits and pieces.

 

The problem with the gun selection is just what do you need it for? I'd probably go with an 88 or 90mm especially if I could use one of the 90mm armed turrets that would fit on the Sherman but they are excluded I believe. The really high velocity 75's tend to be weak in the HE department and depending on when and where that could be more important that AP. Both of the above are pretty good in both areas though. Indeed if you allow for VT fuses the 90 gives you a pretty decent indirect fire capability as well.

 

Another big consideration is what army is it going to be serving in?
The US had to support it's tanks thousands of miles from the factories. The Soviets in some cases were driving from the factories to the battle without depleting a single tank of fuel. Furthermore there was the transportation and compatibility issues. Get to heavy and you need less common cranes for unloading. Make it too wide and it doesn't fit on the trains or bridges. Want diesel what do the rest of your vehicles run on ... having to supply two types of fuel creates its own issues. Are you going to be conducting long road marches if not do you have a lot of tank transports? What resources are in short supply? What do you have lots of? What other constrains affect your ability to build them (i.e will your factories have the capability of putting them together or will they need to be reworked to do so?)

 

That is indeed a key question. I think armor-piercing performance is more critical than the weight of an HE shell. A tank firing HE is likely to be shooting for a direct hit on something like an antitank gun, so the difference between a 75mm or 88mm isn't as critical as it would be for say artillery bombarding an area target.

We might consider a proportion of specialized HE shooters like the British Close Support tanks or the 105mm Sherman, but for the standard tank I would put AP performance first.

p.s. so as not to clutter the forum too much - I agree with Chewy that the turret top MG should be a 12.7mm or equivalent.

 

As far as I know, a major consideration was the barrel change mechanism. On the MG42, the barrel change mechanism cammed the barrel out the side of a barrel shroud. On the MG34, the reciever rotated 180 degrees, exposing the chamber end of the barrel, which then came directly out the back. The MG34's mechanism was more compact and - from what I can tell - would be better suited to tight confines.

MG42:


MG34:

 

Well the 105 armed Sherman had pretty good AP performace at least in regards to penetration when it used the HEAT round for that weapon. Not as easy to hit a tank especially a moving one though and I believe they lost the stabilization with that gun.

HE could also be used as a recon by fire round or to suppress opposing infantry so not always a point target. Indeed there were times when US tanks at least fired a significant number of rounds in an indirect fire mode. There's a picture (I'm pretty sure Korean War vintage) of a Sherman pulled up on a slope with piles of spent casings around it that it had fired indirectly.

Not sayin AP performance should be shorted but if a high velocity 75 has about the same performance as the 88 or 90mm guns and the latter has a better HE round well ... Note that you do give up round storage capacity in that case.

 

If you go with a much larger gun it adds to a dozen other complexities like the size of the turret, then the size of the overall tank, a larger engine, larger trans, drive train, etc, etc. And all of those things tend to make a much less mobile tank, and likely a less dependable tank which doesn't arrive at the battle.

Anyway, from my admittedly less than optimal understanding of tanks, I tend to think less about 'wow' armor and guns, and more about what kind of motor and drive/train would carry a big whopping tank from Normandy to the Elbe engaging in a dozen battles on the way. AND that could be delivered in overwhelming numbers from US and UK factories. Such a beast really couldn't exist in enough numbers to be decisive, and every one manufactured would decrease the number of effective tanks.

.

 

Better doesn't necessarily have to be larger.

Is there any contemporary powerplant that could have reliably driven, for example, a tiger 2. Their engines being to me all about a technological envelope being pushed just that little too far. Very clever, but fragile.
Meteor with Merritt-Brown gearbox drove Centurion decades postwar and was theoretically available from 1941. The MB system even earlier.
Though I now need to look at some Soviet power/reliability inside their big buggers I suspect the meteor might have been the war's most impressive engine, certainly with immense scope for extracting further power given just how de-tuned it already was.

Meteor.
Merritt-Brown.
Not yet sure on suspension.

 

From what I recall reading of the Aberdeen reports on the Soviet tank engines they thought the design was decent enough but weren't particularly impressed with the execution. From what I recall the US engines weren't chosen because they were ideal, indeed they weren't even originally designed for tanks but they were available.

For some reason that got me thinking of the 90mm turret for the Sherman's. It was designed in time to field on one but wasn't put into production because the M-26 was thought to be close enough to production not to warrant it. Other modifications to the Sherman's were made with a close eye on not causing production slowdowns. The German's seem to have gone to the opposite extreme and almost ignored the impact of putting new vehicles into production. The fact that some of their factories couldn't handle some of the newer designs being one of the few controls on the push for the next tech marvel.

 

Ah, I just thought of one thing you could do to improve the 'big gun' Sherman without compromising a thing. Wider tracks. You'd still need a redesign of the suspension, interior and likely a beefier drive train, but you could still use (I think) the same basic layout.

.

 

OK, I'll play. I will restrict myself to what might have been possible in the real world. So, no mixing of MG34 with Soviet 100mm guns with Meteor engines, etc.

I like the low slung hull of the T23. I'd get rid of the troublesome electric transmission and the 76mm gun, put in a GM diesel engine, and arm it with a 17 Pounder. It wouldn't be perfect, mind. I believe the Armored Force Board complained of poor weight distribution and too much ground pressure on the T23 and the ammo stowage with the 17-pdr might have been problematic, but consider the positives:

1. It shares the same vertical volute suspension with the Sherman (yes, torsion bar or HVSS might be better, but that would take more time to get into production)
2. It shares the same engine with the M4A2, which was in production
3. The 17-pdr was about the best tank gun available to the western Allies and it was also in production
4 Armor maximum of 87mm, better than early Shermans
5. Pretty good speed, 30-35 mph max
6. Low hull with sloped front
7. Limited procurement of T23 was approved in May 1943, so if everything breaks right you might be able to have a 17-pdr version (call it T23/17) in service before the year was out and definitely in time for NEPTUNE. The key, I think, might have been production of the gun and the engine.

I have other ideas, will try to work them out.

 

Maybe M18 Hellcat fits my want for a torsion bar suspension without any interleaved nonsense.
Don't recall objections to it, and was certainty capable of high speed.
Maybe too light, so perhaps I might opt for panther-style double bar layout for sheer pleasing engineering, but without the interleaving.

Though, those Sovs do seem to have hammered out some robust & capable Christie-ish setups...