PZ4+Panther turret=victory tank

I ask why (german ,russian --etc) dont do this

IS2 + 100mm gun
M4 + M26 turret
Panther + kingtiger turret
t34 +100mm gun
Pz4 +Panther turret +angled front armor =victory tank for german it is

cheap for produce,very good Panther gun,reliable,and will be ready for kursk battle before Panther and Tiger
did u agree with me

 

IS2 + 100mm gun

The Russians placed more value on the HE capacity of the 122mm

M4 + M26 turret

no idea, prob overweight and turret diameter

Panther + kingtiger turret

No idea, seems very overloaded (the panther was not that reliable already as it was ats it original weight) to me and there is probably a huge difference in turret ring.


t34 +100mm gun

This was tried by the Russians (and later yugoslavians) but found impossible to do and keep a mimimum of crew fighting efficiency in the original turret. And the chassis was severly overweight with a larger turret: T-34-100 Experimental Tank - THE RUSSIAN BATTLEFIELD

Pz4 +Panther turret +angled front armor =victory tank for german it is

+Panther turret was actually proposed late in the war but for reasons i don't know (have the book not at hand and no time now to search for it) dropped, prob chassis and overload. (the Jgdpzr IV with the L70 in a fixed structure had already overweight problems)

+sloping armour. The inability for the Pzkw IV to take sloped armour in front had to do with the placing of the transmission.


So Some quick answers from my head without refrence material, so don't shoot me for errorors i made


Many greetings,

Aglooka

 

IS2+100mm, original Russian idea however, the lack of ammunition and spare barrels for the 100mm coupled with the fact that the 122mm had only a tad less penetrating power and a greater HE capacity deemed this project to failure.

M4+M26 turret - not the whole turret but, the weapon was feasable I think this owned more to the lack of will by the US army due to the whole "tanks don't face tanks" doctrine.

Panther+KT turret - actually there were plans to implement the long 88 on the Panther with the Schmallturm However, there were some serious issues regarding crew space and loading space. The 88 HE round was big as hell... Plus a whole lot of changes were needed for the Panther to be able to take the new weapon - bigger turret ring and reinforced suspention spring to mind.

Pz4 + Panther turret - didn't work. The Pz4 turret ring was not big enough to take the Panther gun plus, with the ausf H and J the suspension (the whole design actually) was pushed to it's limits. And you couldn't slope the front armour of the tank without a major redesign of the whole vehicle leading to some dificulties in production.




Cheers...

 

Actually there were plans to marry the turret from the experimental T25 tank to the Shermans hull (Both tanks had 90 inch turret rings), and even a working prototype. Unfortunently the Army Service Board failed to put in any call for 90mm armed tanks in 43 and thus by the time in 1944 when there was interest in this tank (as a result of the tank crisis in Normandy), the amount of time required to put this tank into production (six months Eisenhower was told), the US would already have Pershings coming off the production line, and since it was felt to be the superior tank, the 90mm Sherman was not allowed to go into production. I always did like the look of the 90mm Sherman though:

 

Why not just make a tank with 500-mm of armor, a 250-mm high velocity anti-tank gun and a top speed of 75-mph?

You can't just simply throw pieces of different tanks together to make an ultamite tank. Most all of the things you are suggesting would lead to a tank with overstressed tracks and extremely offset distribution of wieght, destined to be ubreliable.

Some of the things you ate suggesting might be possible with extreme modifications to the armor on the turret, the length of the gun, or the chasis.

 

V with a IV turret:

The above vehicle is most likely a lashup of IV & V carried out by SchPzAbt 653, fixed turret, some were seemingly knocked up as proper marriages but info is sketchy.

On mounting a V turret on a IV chassis, if I recall rightly Krupp found it impossible with the standard Panther turret, but did hold out higher hopes when the Schmalturm emerged that there might be more scope for that combination. Not entirely sure I see the point though as the Long HV 75s the four was carrying were about equal to the Panther's 75, certainly perfectly adequate, and as late IVs were suffering from excessive front end weight then the lumpier Panther top would exacerbate that.
Mark IVs had pretty much reached their design limits as far as I can see, despite some grubbing about to extend their useful lifespan or increase lethality.

~A

 

Like W-man already pointed out, there was a 90mm Sherman which was not produced. Except that it was, almost unchanged, except for the gun.
What the hell am I talking about? Why the 76mm Sherman of course! The 76mm turret is the same as the 90mm turret.

The 76mm turret started in a lighter version of the Pershing, which was itself armed with the 76mm. This turret was used in three different T-25 type tanks, which differed in propulsion, one being electric, one being standard, and one that I cant remember.
The original T-25 was no more armored than the Sherman, but looked just like the Pershing would look like. All these people who think the Pershing could have been earlier are right, except it would have been a total piece of crap with no armor and a 75/76mm gun.

So could the 90mm Sherman have been produced? Not just yes, but absolutely yes! The 90mm gun itself was built to fit in the existing 76mm mount, so the 90mm Sherman is just a 76mm with a new gun bolted on it. If they had stocks of the guns, they could have absolutely send them over and installed them on 76mm Shermans.
There is one issue though, that not many 76 Shermans even existed in Normandy. They really only had a very small number of them in the month after D-day.

There is also a reason why it seemed acceptable that there was no 90mm Sherman introduced, and that was the m36. People tend to forget that there were as many 90mm armed TD in theater than all German heavy tanks in existence at the time.

So, in the big picture, the 90mm wasnt really that rare, and it would not have made sense to have 15k 90mm armed Shermans instead of Sherman 76, as they really didnt need that many to overcome all the German tanks.

 

Germany didn't loose due to a lack of a "victory tank." Germany lost for a lot of reasons, one being a lack of tanks generally. Instead of dicking around with up-gunning the Panther (the 7.5 cm KwK 42 L/70 was more than capable of defeating the chief threats on the battlefield, namely the Sherman and the T-34) what they needed was to rationalize tank production -- scrap the Tiger and the Tiger II and produce more G model Panzer IVs. The Four was a good tank, and well-suited to the battle environment in Western Europe. The Tigers were expensive and time-consuming to build, and they gobbled fuel at a prodigious rate. The Germans could have built and operated seven or eight Panzer IVs for every Tiger or Tiger II built. Of course even a ten-fold increase in tank production wouldn't win the war for Hitler, but it would have prolonged the conflict.

 

That is a popular myth, but in reality it was much different. When you look at the cost of the Tiger, it is not even twice that of the Stug, let alone the Panzer IV. The Panther was almost exactly the same cost as the IV, while the KT was almost exactly the same cost as the Tiger I. When you convert the Reichmark to dollars, which is somewhere between 4-4.5 RM per dollar (according to the US treasury department), you see that the Panther was actually the same cost as the Sherman, while the KT was about 50% more.

There is this myth that the Germans did not produce enough tanks, which is total garbage. They outproduced everyone else on an individual basis except for the Russians, who only outproduced the Germans 1.3 times from the beginning of 1942 until the end of 1944. This excludes tanks which cannot harm medium tanks of the other side, but includes assault guns which were used as tank killers, while excluding those which were not.
Overall, the Germans were outproduced 2.5 to 1. They lost 6 tanks to fuel or parts shortage for every tank which was lost to combat, so their production numbers had very little to do with the effectiveness of their tank force. In fact, they brought down crew quality by producing too many tanks and crews while supplying none of them correctly. Even famous Tiger units usually only had 25% of their tanks operational at a given time, at least according to Otto Carius.

Germany would have been far better off by producing fewer tanks, using the difference to produce more spare parts, which would have also had the side effect of giving each unit way more fuel.
When it comes to what kind of tank should have been produced, the Panther was economically the best, while also being equal in reliability. It is a myth that the Panther was unreliable, it was just as reliable as the IV or better.
The Germans would have actually been served very well by producing more KT. If all the resources which were given to the Panther and IV during the production time of the KT had actually gone to KT production, they would have been able to make roughly 8000 of them.
Dont give me any of that KT not be suitable in certain terrain, because it was as fast as the Sherman and actually surpassed it in many ways. It was anything but sluggish.

When it comes to statistics, a KT and Stug force would have allowed for deployment of armor in almost all areas, while being much more effective per tank. Even without resources, the Stug and KT had kill ratios far in excess of any other tanks. In fact, the Stug is the most successful "tank" of all time, having killed more enemy tanks than all other tanks combined (somewhere between 12-15k)

If the Germans had kept all their Stugs, chosen to keep only the KT or Panther production, and doubled the fuel and parts supply by not having to spread it out so much, then the losses from fuel shortage would have been almost reduced to nothing, while the tanks would have had up to six times more time in the field, while having four times as many working tanks themselves.
Its a good thing that they didnt figure this out, because it would have technically allowed the Germans up to 24 times the effective tanks.

And yes, things do work that way. A few small changes can make a massive difference, just read up on Albert Speer. He increased U-boat production by 15 times, tanks and planes by about 5 times. Its the small things that really add up.

 

A Tiger tank fanboi, are we Jadgermeister? May I suggest some reading?

Amazon.com: Sledgehammers: Strengths and Flaws of Tiger Tank Battalions in World War II (9780971765023): Christopher W. Wilbeck, Otto Carius, Viktor Iskrov, Ray Holt: Books

$15 bucks, cheap at twice the price.

 

AFAIK the JS2/100 and M4/90 were perfectly viable, and prototypes were built but discarded as "not enough of an improvement to justify production issues".

The KT turret (which one?) was probably too much for the Panther that didn't need a few additional tonns, but the Schmalturm 88/71 was developed, though handling the ammo would hard, IMO not a big improvement though the big rangefinder was nice.

AFAIK T34/100 conversions were tried but were probably beyond the limit of the chassis, using the SU-100 that shared a lot of parts to support the T34/85 against the "big cats" until the T-44 that could better carry the 100mm would be widely available, made more sense. Similar decision to the US "wait for the M26".

IMO the 75/70 on the PzIV was not viable, the Germans had a 20t class tank (PzIV) and a 40t class one (PzV) expecting a 20t pre-war design to match/best in all cathegories the allied 30 tonners (M4 and T34) is optimistic, German engineers were good but not that good. Redesigning the PzIV into a true 30 tonner, as the sloped armour redesigns that were proposed, made little sense the Panther was not that much more expensive and it's only disadvantage over a "still to debug" 30tonner was fuel consumption.

 

CPL Punishment,

Save the $15. Mr. Wilbeck's thesis paper is available free online; http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA415948
I don't think the book adds to much "new" material to it.

 

A couple of problems/questions.

RM costs per unit: On what basis are the per-unit price determined? Did not the use of slave labor skew the production costs of certain types of German vehicles, like the Panther?

What do you mean by "individual basis?" I don't think I understood you there.

On Panther dependability: I am familiar with the claims that the Panther tank being more dependable than Mark IVs, a claim Jentz made based on Mark IV operational readiness rate in a cited example. However, that statement does not seem to square with the observed service life of Panther final drives or readiness rates in sustained operations.

In the views of most the Germans should have focused on Mark IVs, Panthers, and StuGs, while dropping excessively big designs like the Tiger which consumed more man/hours and material.

 

That was the entire point, they didnt need more tanks, they needed more tanks which were operational. Fewer heavy tanks with more spare parts would have produced more tanks which could actually be used on the front. Only about 1/4th of tanks were running at any time, so even if you had half as many tanks which were running most of the time, you would have had a massive increase in presence of active armor in the field. You would have also used a fraction of the fuel getting them their, and even less because you wouldnt be constantly towing them around. That would have also freed up a lot of transports to other duties, although the trains would have been tied up for a relatively small amount of time.

Oh, and what I meant by "individual basis" was how Germany compared in tank production when compared only with one country at a time. Russia was the only country to outproduce them in what we would consider a tank. Obsolete tanks are not counted, neither are assault guns not generally suited to tank combat, such as the Su-76, Priest, or Hummel. The Stug is included, as it is the most prolific tank killer in history, while the Su-76 was two magnitudes less effective, it was about as effective as self propelled arty.
You wouldnt count the tens of thousands of Russian biplanes as fighters if you were having that conversation, so we dont count the Su-76 either.

 

Just as an aside, we should maybe bear in mind that 'pound for pound' production or statistical comparisons are tricksy things when inserted into the real world.
Further ramblings on how X tanks cancelled, doesn't necessarily equate to X other tanks produced, here:
http://www.ww2f.com/what-if-other/20263-german-favour-mark-iv-main-battle-tank.html

I can see some sense in the parts suggestion by the way, perhaps mostly because I seem to be reading about the German repair systems at the mo.
Shortages thereof and conflicts with the demands of production being a constant theme. But fuel perhaps trumps all other considerations on the purely technical side.

Whatever; it's all what-iffery really, so no proper answer can really be found and only the actual history can ever be confirmed. And even then; often subjectively or in fragments... but I'm quite enjoying the argument - circular though such things inevitably become.

(Though I don't really follow those production comparisons either .)

~A

 

I definitely agree that fuel was the biggest issue, especially seeing how it caused the vast majority of losses. Thats really one of the reasons I like to say they produced too many, not too few. With the superior training and tactics, any given units would have been far more valuable if it had the ability to use that training and tactics without fuel constraints.

 

And yet, you don't exactly hear any contemporary German General (or any other General for that matter) or logistician, bemoaning that they have too many tanks.
Quite the opposite in fact.

~A

 

German tank production figures, heavy tanks (approximate)

Panzer Mark IV: 8,000
Tiger 1: 1,015
Tiger 2: 450
Panther: 5,000

USA AND RUSSIA (Main tanks - i dont know the British figures)

USA - Sherman: 40,000
USSR: T-34 and T-34/85: 80,000

So the figures are telling in that the Germans obviously placed a lot of faith in the Panther. More of them were produced then all tiger variants combined. The tiger was indeed very costly in resources, it was said that producing one tiger was the equivalent of making 3 fighter planes.

The short answer to your question is because every tank is a compromise. Mobility, firepower and protection are the 3 factors and often the reason for tank success or failure in every conflict they have been used since WW1. It is very difficult to add to one of the three without detracting from the others, relative to enemy tanks it will be facing on the battlefield. Add more firepower and you cut mobility by increasing weight. Add more armor and you have to go to a smaller gun if you want the tank to move any reasonable speed. A fast tank is usually too light to sustain anti tank weapons used against it but can make up for it by speed, in some situations.

Once the Germans discovered the Russians had the T-34 (late in 1941) there was immediate and serious talk among the German high command, including Guderian, that it simply be copied. This idea was considered but rejected, not due to Teutonic snobbery as some suggest, but for practical reasons. While the Germans had access to plenty of steel (via Sweden) the supply of aluminum for a T-34 type motor was limited, and what there was, was ear-marked mainly for aircraft construction.

Also the Germans realized they lacked the industrial capacity to turn out large numbers of tanks, no matter how simple the design. (This also was the reason why the luftwaffe, pre-war, made the decision not to construct a large fleet of heavy bombers). Since quantity was out of the question, the Germans chose the only path open to them which was to build fewer tanks then their enemies, but much better ones, and to train their crews to a very high standard. This, combined with superior tactical skill, was hoped would make up for lack of numbers on the battlefield.

Probably the best compromise tank ever built, so far (and every tank design is a compromise) is the modern American M1. It is fast, well protected and heavily gunned. The cost for this is fuel consumption - the turbine engine on the M1 uses much more fuel then a comparable diesel tank (almost double) and increases logistics requirements to an immense degree due to the huge amount of fuel needed to keep large numbers going in battle.

 

To stay at the modern tanks, don´t forget about the Merkava and the Challenger II which are good developed tanks and the Challenger is a safe one too.

 

The Germans didnt "realize" they couldnt make many tanks. When Albert Speer visited the factories his first time, he saw that they ran only one 8 hour shift, and that they didnt mass produce anything. They took their sweet time.
If they had been producing at full levels before Speer took over, they would have actually outproduced the Russians by several thousand tanks. They would have produced over 60k tanks if they had been produced as quickly as after Speer took over, as they produced about 38k in only three years, they would have produced over 60% more tanks if they had been working at full levels since 1939.
Saying Germany could not have kept up is purely a myth. There is no substance to it.

Also, what is all the talk about the Germans deciding ANYTHING about how tanks would be made after they saw the T-34? The KT itself was ordered several months before the invasion of Russia, while the Tiger and Panther had been under development for several years. The KT actually had a prototype number before the Invasion began, and in the first mentions of its prototype, they also mention the already existing development programs for the prototypes of the Panther and Tiger.
The Germans did not decide anything about tank quality after they saw the T-34, in fact, it was the French and Polish that pushed them to create the Tiger and Panther. The 88mm had proven itself in both countries, and so a tank using the full size 88mm L/71 was ordered. The Tiger was ordered as an interim tank to use the shorter L/56 gun while the KT was put into production. That is a fact, and can be read in the scripts of official meetings with Hitler.
There is a book on the development of the KT, and it has all the evidence. I have a digital copy around here somewhere, but someone may know which book Im refering to. Its titled something like "VK.4502 to the Tiger Auf. B"