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Subjunctive posted:I take back 10% of the bad things I’ve said about the UK. I'm in the UK and i regret nothing i’ve said about them (especially the Tories). 
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May 3, 2024 21:59
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Murgos posted:There is already a 30 cal so it would be a lot of effort to go through to bore out the steel of the front of the tank and the glacis to mount a larger barrel and then there is the logistics of the internals of the turret and the M2 receiver is a big loving bitch and then slap in an ammo can and like, whatever there's no room? I went back to Armored Thunderbolt by Steven Zaloga, and got this: quote:The Third Army's modernization effort included other improvements as well. The tankers wanted a more powerful coaxial gun than the usual .30-cal machine gun, so some .50-caliber aircraft machine guns were "liberated" and fitted to many tanks." In the next page, he shows off a picture of an M4A3E8 .50-cal coaxial, and the barrel sticks out noticeably further (wherein the normal .30 cal coaxial doesn't stick out at all). Many of these upgrades were performed at "factories in Belgium." Apparently the .50 that was mounted was the AN/M2 aircraft model, which fit the mounting better than the ground forces' M2. I have to imagine they had cooling issues. I mostly checked myself on this to make sure I wasn't spewing half-remembered bullshit as fact.
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May 4, 2024 03:43
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Pennsylvanian posted:I went back to Armored Thunderbolt by Steven Zaloga, and got this: Okay, so they found some large metal working facility and then did the rework? Still seems difficult, like how do you bore through all that steel while it’s all still mounted to the chassis? Or, did they partially disassemble the turret to get access with the big tools? Does it say how many tanks were modded like this? “Third army” was a LOT of tanks.
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May 4, 2024 15:24
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Not in that book, no, and no details on how it was done. It could be in one of Zaloga's more tank-specific books. The most well-known unit to use the .50 cal co-axials was the 37th Armored Regiment, as many of their M4A3E2s, including the famous "Cobra King" had the .50-cal co-ax. The unit that apparently did the modification was the 126th Armored Ordnance Maintenance Battatlion. There were a lot of unofficial field modifications to the Sherman in the ETO in '44-'45. In the same section, he talks about an applique armor program that cut armor plating off of decommissioned Shermans and welded them onto working Shermans that apparently was also effective. This was only practiced by certain units of the Third Army. These types of programs were more official in the Third Army since Patton himself famously ordered his tankers to not make ad-hoc armor from sandbags/rocks/trees (for fear of wearing down the drive trains for no advantage), and instead opted for more uniform programs. Meanwhile, most units just sort of let tankers do what they wanted as long as their fighting capabilities weren't hindered. It was common practice for individual tanks to rip off their default M2HB's as they were mounted behind the turret (Supposedly as they would get caught on low-hanging obstacles), and either ditched them or re-mounted them on the commander's hatch. That, or they'd mount a .30-cal for the commander. M18 Hellcats typically re-mounted their .50s to a more comfortable position for the commander, though those were both obviously easier programs. Again, it's mostly that Third Army regiments had more documentation and uniformity to these types of programs than others.
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May 4, 2024 16:16
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Boring through the turret might not have been necessary. If they were using AN/M2s for their .50 coaxes then the opening for the M1919 may have been sufficient as it was. A quick Google image search shows me there was a decent amount of extra space around the M1919 cooling jacket, which was roughly half an inch smaller than the AN/M2 barrel (based on a half-assed search of barrel dimensions).
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May 4, 2024 16:23
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I feel somewhere on SA we had this exact discussion and McNally came in with the same explanation.
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May 4, 2024 17:04
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I’d assume they were overrunning plenty of German armor repair depots too so the forward units would Have the occasional access to equipment to help with these infield jobs.
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May 4, 2024 17:07
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Flikken posted:I feel somewhere on SA we had this exact discussion and McNally came in with the same explanation. It was here. Last week.
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May 4, 2024 17:08
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Ukraine: unofficial field modifications to Russian materiel
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May 4, 2024 17:35
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Crab Dad posted:I’d assume they were overrunning plenty of German armor repair depots too so the forward units would Have the occasional access to equipment to help with these infield jobs. I'd be surprised if American maintenance units didn't have access to a lot of that kind of machinery organically.
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May 4, 2024 18:05
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Fearless posted:I'd be surprised if American maintenance units didn't have access to a lot of that kind of machinery organically. Central depots were extremely well equipped indeed but a lot of the heavy work would have been done further behind the rapidly moving lines and our supply of road vehicles that could transport our “medium” tanks was vast so there wasn’t a need be close to the lines like the German depots. So why not both?
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May 4, 2024 18:22
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Crab Dad posted:I’d assume they were overrunning plenty of German armor repair depots too so the forward units would Have the occasional access to equipment to help with these infield jobs. Most German repair depots were the factory the made the tanks. Nazi logistics and sustainment was horrendous.
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May 4, 2024 21:22
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