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Nebakenezzer posted:Actually, this might be worthwhile to expand on a bit. I too thought the Panther had pretty good mobility (and an incredibly poo poo final drive/ higher weight dragging down the engine and fraging the over-stressed transmission.) Actually, this sort of dovetails with the armor as well. Here's another notion I have that if wrong you should knock it down: that the Panther from the front actually had very decent armor. It's just that this advantage doesn't equal much when the Panther can be flanked. And, uh, the cost of this good frontal protection was to badly compromise mobility and final drive durability - so not the best trade-off. I put this down not to argue with you, but to say these impressions are out there, and you may want to consider putting some effort into knocking them down if they are dumb and wrong, or at least acknowledging them as good points that were compromised. (It's also a good argument tactic to concede good points without effort; it makes you appear more objective.) The Panther's frontal armor was pretty good compared to other medium tanks of the time, such as the M4 or Pz IV. However, compared to other tanks in its weight class (~45 tons), it was terrible. For instance, the Panther had 80mm sloped at 55 degrees, while the IS-2, which weighed about the same, had 100mm sloped at 60 degrees, while also mounting a larger main gun, and better side armor. I don't think the Panther really counts as an MBT; the Germans were still building heavy tanks (Tiger II + maybe the E50/75 later), and the Panther very definitely doesn't have the armament of a heavy tank. I guess the Panther sort of combines the mobility, armor(ish), and weight of a heavy tank with the armament of medium tank?
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Dec 7, 2015 19:48
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Nenonen posted:This is getting silly. Panther is not a Heavy tank if you categorize tanks according to their tactical role. Panther was just as fast as T-34 and had a similar role. Heavy tanks don't need to be as fast because they are expected to create breakthroughs, not exploit them. All nations had different classification systems. Eg. T-28 and T-34 were both 'medium' tanks, but what does that tell us about their capabilities? Absolutely nothing, just that they weighed about the same which in the end is probably not a very useful metric. The Panther was only as fast as the T-34 in top gear (which it could only achieve on a straight flat road) and with the early engine (which had to be decreased in power to have even remotely acceptable reliability). Also the brittle drivetrain prevented it from actually exploiting a breakthrough, leaving the only thing it was actually good at to be sitting in an ambush. This is really not good for a medium tank. Also the T-28 was classified as an infantry support tank, while the T-34 came from a family of breakthrough exploitation tanks. They both got shoved into the "medium" category, but they weren't designed or used with the same purpose in mind. Incidentally, the Panther was not good at either of these roles.
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Dec 7, 2015 19:53
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LostCosmonaut posted:The Panther's frontal armor was pretty good compared to other medium tanks of the time, such as the M4 or Pz IV. However, compared to other tanks in its weight class (~45 tons), it was terrible. For instance, the Panther had 80mm sloped at 55 degrees, while the IS-2, which weighed about the same, had 100mm sloped at 60 degrees, while also mounting a larger main gun, and better side armor. Did IS-2's and Panther's guns' penetration differ much?
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Dec 7, 2015 19:54
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Hogge Wild posted:Did IS-2's and Panther's guns' penetration differ much? Significantly. In practice, the D-25T had better penetration than the 88 mm KwK 43, while also being useful against infantry and fortifications. The Panther, not so much, since it had a weaker HE shell than the T-34.
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Dec 7, 2015 19:56
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MBT is a nebulous term, it really doesn't mean all that much. I would argue that the first true MBT didn't appear until the T-64, as a tank with a medium's mobility but a heavy's gun and armor, and the shelving of the USSR heavy tank program. Panther's armour isn't terrible, even for the weight class, the Soviet designs are just particularily light. Look at a M26 for example, it has basically the same turret armour, less frontal hull, a tiny bit more side, and it weights basically the same.
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Dec 7, 2015 19:57
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HEY GAL posted:yo ALL-PRO SEXMAN, post austrian_cannons.jpg  Yes, that's a bronze cannon. Yes, it was in front-line service in Austria-Hungary during World War One. On the other hand they had the Skoda Works, which produced world-class heavy guns. Austria-Hungary was a total loving mess.
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Dec 7, 2015 19:58
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Hogge Wild posted:Did IS-2's and Panther's guns' penetration differ much? The IS-2 gun is significantly more powerful, and the long German guns had pretty bad issues with sloped armour. The Panther gun was considered good, but not because it was some mighty god gun, it's because it had very high muzzle velocity for the day. That means you get less ballistic drop, and so you can make more of an error in range estimation and still hit your target. That actually got distorted into 'It's really accurate' but that's not actually the case, the long barrel is actually not that great for mechanical accuracy as it tends to flex too much and reacts a lot more to various changes in temperature.
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Dec 7, 2015 20:06
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Yes, that's a bronze cannon. Yes, it was in front-line service in Austria-Hungary during World War One. On the other hand they had the Skoda Works, which produced world-class heavy guns. Austria-Hungary was a total loving mess. Was the variation in quality within or between units? Like, did all the Croatian divisions have poo poo artillery and all the Austrians and Bohemians had the good stuff, or could you find individual divisions and corps where they had a full spectrum of guns from trash to treasure?
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Dec 7, 2015 20:09
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Kafouille posted:The IS-2 gun is significantly more powerful, and the long German guns had pretty bad issues with sloped armour. The Panther gun was considered good, but not because it was some mighty god gun, it's because it had very high muzzle velocity for the day. That means you get less ballistic drop, and so you can make more of an error in range estimation and still hit your target. That actually got distorted into 'It's really accurate' but that's not actually the case, the long barrel is actually not that great for mechanical accuracy as it tends to flex too much and reacts a lot more to various changes in temperature. Did somebody say long German guns? 
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Dec 7, 2015 20:14
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Alright now THAT is impressively stupid. Where they planning on making 88mm light-gas guns too ? The 88L70 was already pretty drat useless for how large it was.
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Dec 7, 2015 20:25
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LostCosmonaut posted:Did somebody say long German guns? I guess we figured out where the German naval gun designers were reassigned! 
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Dec 7, 2015 20:28
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Apparently EE wrote an article about it: http://tankarchives.blogspot.com/2015/06/88-cm-pak-l130.html
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Dec 7, 2015 20:29
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:
skoda is extremely legit
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Dec 7, 2015 20:32
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So they got drat near Sabot velocities out of AP shot, that's something. The barrel erosion must have been hideous. EE, have you considered that the barrel splices may be simply because there is no way there is a barrel boring machine that long in Germany ? Only thing that size would have been Naval barrels and they are built differently.
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Dec 7, 2015 20:36
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Kafouille posted:So they got drat near Sabot velocities out of AP shot, that's something. The barrel erosion must have been hideous. It was. The average barrel life of a Panther was only 2000 to 2400 rounds if this source is to be believed.
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Dec 7, 2015 20:44
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2000 rounds is actually pretty good, that was the interwar standard of US Ordnance and it was considered conservative. According to Nicholas Moran US Ordnance was considering having as short as 200 round gun tube life (In the quest to put a hole in Panther front armor funnily enough) http://worldoftanks.com/en/news/pc-browser/21/chieftains-hatch-us-guns-vs-german-armour-part-1/ I'd wager that 88l130 would have a tube life in the low double digits. Not to mention that at those velocities you really can't use steel shot effectively anymore, and Germany was more or less out of tungsten. Kafouille fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Dec 7, 2015 |
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Dec 7, 2015 20:55
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Kafouille posted:
If it gets to that point, I think most people in this thread would gladly stand against outright lies. That being said, the Panther just isn't impressive. It really ought to be impressive because it's so drat heavy, but all of that extra weight seemed to do nothing but stress the suspension. You admit that it's weight-inefficient, but that also implies it's cost-inefficient. One thing that really gets me is how Ensign claims that the Soviets were so completely blase about the Panther. Can anybody else back that up? The Germans only made a few thousand more PZ IVs than Panthers, so unless the Panther was a complete non-issue, I feel as if there'd be some concern over its capabilities. HEY GAL posted:skoda is extremely legit One thing I have learned from this thread and milhist in general is that Czechs are startlingly competent and some of the most dangerous people in Europe.
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Dec 7, 2015 21:19
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:One thing I have learned from this thread and milhist in general is that Czechs are startlingly competent and some of the most dangerous people in Europe. So what you're saying here is that you've Czeched your privilege
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Dec 7, 2015 21:20
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nice too, just loving good-natured as hell.of course, then they open their mouths and it's basically just a bunch of variations on the "sh" sound, but nice.
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Dec 7, 2015 21:26
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Trin Tragula posted:So what you're saying here is that you've Czeched your privilege You are toying with forces you don't understand 
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Dec 7, 2015 21:28
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:You are toying with forces you don't understand that guy's name 
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Dec 7, 2015 21:29
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LostCosmonaut posted:The Panther's frontal armor was pretty good compared to other medium tanks of the time, such as the M4 or Pz IV. However, compared to other tanks in its weight class (~45 tons), it was terrible. For instance, the Panther had 80mm sloped at 55 degrees, while the IS-2, which weighed about the same, had 100mm sloped at 60 degrees, while also mounting a larger main gun, and better side armor. What were the Soviets doing/omitting that was making their tanks so much lighter?
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Dec 7, 2015 21:32
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:
The Panther, for some reason, was never seen as a very big deal like the Tiger. In battles where both types of tanks were destroyed, the Tigers are considered a more impressive achievement. I've seen Hero of the Soviet Union titles handed out to tankers that knocked out one or two Tigers, but knocking out two Panthers isn't considered super amazing. Pegov got one like 30 years after the war, and he took down two Panthers and delayed the rest of the column in a T-70.
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Dec 7, 2015 21:33
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PittTheElder posted:What were the Soviets doing/omitting that was making their tanks so much lighter? The transmission was in the rear, so you didn't have to run a crankshaft along the floor of the tank, therefore you could make it lower. That saves a lot of metal. Then there are the ridiculous electro tanks that also had to carry huge generators with them, including two tons of (very expensive) copper.
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Dec 7, 2015 21:35
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Panther was too wasteful a tank. I don't think anybody is considering its deficiencies in strategic mobility hard enough. Whatever hill-climbing or fording ability the Panther has, the tank's unit is limited to an arbitrarily restricted area around working rail lines. That just isn't acceptable for something meant to replace the IVs and IIIs as a workhorse medium. Oh I am. It's just that after the tactical example I was done phone posting for a bit. I very seriously doubt that if Germany had been able to somehow replace all their Pz IIIs and IVs with Vs that it would've been a good deal. Barbarossa would likely have been considerably less effective. The Panther managed to be a tank design that gave up the operational and strategic initiative, and it went to an army which had highly mobile armored operations and exploitations as its strongest suit. Kafouille posted:The Panther isn't tremendously suited to the attack that's true, but it's still a more capable tank than a PzIV, tactically. It's actually a faster and more mobile tank than a PzIV (Better ground pressure, better power to weight), has equivalent crew vision (There is no gunner periscope on a PzIV either), better armor all around (Only 30mm on the side of a PzIV), and a better gun. Right, the Pz IV was outclassed and out of growth. The Panther really needed to be a total and cost-effective replacement for the Pz IV. Instead it had such pronounced tradeoffs there that the Panther wasn't able to replace a Pz IV in all cases and wasn't strong in all roles. It wasn't the worst tank design but it was definitely an unaffordable mistake for Germany and its situation.
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Dec 7, 2015 21:40
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:If it gets to that point, I think most people in this thread would gladly stand against outright lies. It's not really the people in this thread I'm concerned about. Yeah the Panther is weight inefficient, but weight of steel is not what is going to drive the cost of a tank. The real cost is the tooling and the time it spends in said tooling, steel is comparatively cheap. According to this thing that as far as i can tell is pulled straight from German archives : http://www.scribd.com/doc/230234125/Dokumentation-W-127-Datenblatter-Fur-Heeres-Waffen-Fahrzeuge-Gerat#scribd the Panther is less than half the cost of a Tiger, and barely more expensive than a PzIV F1. It's still expensive, but a lot of it is due to the way Germans build tanks, anything they could have produced would have been. I don't really know what the Russian thought of the Panther since i can't read the original sources, but it was considered a fairly significant problem by the US. xthetenth posted:Oh I am. It's just that after the tactical example I was done phone posting for a bit. I very seriously doubt that if Germany had been able to somehow replace all their Pz IIIs and IVs with Vs that it would've been a good deal. Barbarossa would likely have been considerably less effective. The Panther managed to be a tank design that gave up the operational and strategic initiative, and it went to an army which had highly mobile armored operations and exploitations as its strongest suit. The issue with the Panther is that they never were able to iron out the problems with the transmission. That is really the extant of what was WRONG with the tank. Could they have made a better tank ? Probably yeah. Was it a good, or even passable tank with the transmission issues it had ? No not really. Was it an old fashioned and inefficient design ? Yes, like pretty much any tank the Germans churned out, they were not very imaginative. Was it a fundamentally BAD tank ? I'd say no. Hell knows most of WWII tanks had automotive troubles, the main issue was that the Germans were never able so satisfyingly fix them. It's not like making a reliable transmission for a 45 ton tank was an impossible task or that it was lacking in space, but this poo poo takes time in the best of conditions and late war Germany didn't have those. Kafouille fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Dec 7, 2015 |
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Dec 7, 2015 21:46
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Kafouille posted:It's not really the people in this thread I'm concerned about. I'm pretty sure part of the reason the Panther is roughly the same price as a Pz IV is because there were differences in its design and construction. It would be interesting to consider what a hypothetical 30 ton Pz V with similar optimizations could have costed. 45 tons isn't just armor weight, it's engine weight and complexity and other things that drive cost up.
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Dec 7, 2015 21:58
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xthetenth posted:I'm pretty sure part of the reason the Panther is roughly the same price as a Pz IV is because there were differences in its design and construction. It would be interesting to consider what a hypothetical 30 ton Pz V with similar optimizations could have costed. 45 tons isn't just armor weight, it's engine weight and complexity and other things that drive cost up. It would certainly have been cheaper, but at that point it's a whole new tank and you're taking the very same development risks you had with the Panther, with the same risks one of the cost-engineered components is going to be flawed in a way you didn't anticipate and bring down the thing. The reason something like a Sherman was reliable was not that it was 30 tons, the reason it's reliable is that by 1944 US Ordnance had spent years testing and refining the components that got into it in relative peace and quiet. Kafouille fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Dec 7, 2015 |
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Dec 7, 2015 22:01
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Kafouille posted:MBT is a nebulous term, it really doesn't mean all that much. I would argue that the first true MBT didn't appear until the T-64, as a tank with a medium's mobility but a heavy's gun and armor, and the shelving of the USSR heavy tank program. The M26 has more armor protection in general. The sides are about 50% thicker and the frontal aspect is mostly same or better. The M26's main deficiency was in the engine.
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Dec 7, 2015 22:09
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This thread is kind of going backwards because I thought we all concluded a long time ago that the things that make a tank good have little to do with the fine intricacies of armour/tracks/gun and more to do with how many you can make, how dependable they are and how useful they are in a general sense on the strategic level. All of these are things that most german tanks sucked balls at.
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Dec 7, 2015 22:12
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Since today is Dec 7 I was wondering, what if the Americans did know the attack on Pearl Harbor was happening? Since I keep on hearing about the advance knowledge conspiracy. Would the Americans have sent a diplomatic note saying "We know", or would they just put the whole fleet to sea and have the base ready for war, or would they have aggressively scouted out the Japanese fleet with patrol aircraft to try and force them back? Like what would the prevailing American action at that time would have been?
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Dec 7, 2015 22:13
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The main difference would have been there would have been planes in the air and AAA batteries on standby.
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Dec 7, 2015 22:15
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Slavvy posted:This thread is kind of going backwards because I thought we all concluded a long time ago that the things that make a tank good have little to do with the fine intricacies of armour/tracks/gun and more to do with how many you can make, how dependable they are and how useful they are in a general sense on the strategic level. All of these are things that most german tanks sucked balls at. That kinda why I'm arguing, the Germans were decidedly terrible at producing tanks, and the big cats are overhyped as gently caress but it doesn't mean everything they made was a flaming shitbox. The fine detail on how much they sucked rear end has in the end little influence on how the war went, but still. The fact of the matter is the Germans had little opportunity to really fix their industrial process once the war was on, the only thing I'm arguing is that the Panther, considering those limitations, was a fairly reasonable design. Pretty much the only somewhat reasonable design they made after 1940 really.
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Dec 7, 2015 22:30
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Ensign Expendable posted:Significantly. In practice, the D-25T had better penetration than the 88 mm KwK 43, while also being useful against infantry and fortifications. The Panther, not so much, since it had a weaker HE shell than the T-34. Panthers mostly had 75mm (long-rear end ones, though). I think there was a design for an 88 panther, but it probably never happened. Kafouille posted:The IS-2 gun is significantly more powerful, and the long German guns had pretty bad issues with sloped armour. The Panther gun was considered good, but not because it was some mighty god gun, it's because it had very high muzzle velocity for the day. That means you get less ballistic drop, and so you can make more of an error in range estimation and still hit your target. That actually got distorted into 'It's really accurate' but that's not actually the case, the long barrel is actually not that great for mechanical accuracy as it tends to flex too much and reacts a lot more to various changes in temperature. This was also the same for the 88mm the Tigers had, I believe. But yeah, Panther was a bad tank. It didn't really match other heavy tanks in it's weight class, but if it did that wouldn't matter, because it was a heavy tank that was being brought in to replace a medium.
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Dec 7, 2015 22:32
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The 88 on the Tiger I is not really all that long or high velocity. It's a really mediocre gun in pretty much every respect. The L70 on the Tiger II was the kwk43 EE is talking about, and it's like the Panthers 75l70 a high velocity gun, but it's pretty underwhelming in performance when you see the size of the gun breech.spectralent posted:But yeah, Panther was a bad tank. It didn't really match other heavy tanks in it's weight class, but if it did that wouldn't matter, because it was a heavy tank that was being brought in to replace a medium. Alright, I give up, nobody cares anyway.
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Dec 7, 2015 22:42
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spectralent posted:Panthers mostly had 75mm (long-rear end ones, though). I think there was a design for an 88 panther, but it probably never happened. Yeah, no Panther with an 88 mm gun was ever built. The Panther had higher muzzle velocity than the Tiger, the Tiger's gun wasn't actually that exceptional.
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Dec 7, 2015 22:42
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Taerkar posted:The main difference would have been there would have been planes in the air and AAA batteries on standby. So I guess they would be thinking that the Japanese were basically going to go through no matter what, and they would have just turned the base into war footing? Good enough answer I don't want to derail too much.
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Dec 7, 2015 22:55
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Chillyrabbit posted:So I guess they would be thinking that the Japanese were basically going to go through no matter what, and they would have just turned the base into war footing? Good enough answer I don't want to derail too much. Well, allowing the Japanese to walk into heavily prepared defenses would have... A: Torn a pretty big chunk out of the cream of the Kido Butai, and B: Allowed the Americans to say "Ah-ha! You see, the Japanese struck first in a cowardly sneak attack, but fortunately we were able to defeat their despicable blow with our superior American know-how! Courage, boys, and let's protect ourselves from the treacherous foe!" Assuming that the American preparations were effective, anyways.
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Dec 7, 2015 23:04
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Chillyrabbit posted:Since today is Dec 7 I was wondering, what if the Americans did know the attack on Pearl Harbor was happening? Since I keep on hearing about the advance knowledge conspiracy. First, I think it would have been almost impossible to convince the top levels of government that the Japanese were ballsy enough (and capable of) mounting a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. We didn't think much of the Japanese at that point and the Pacific Fleet was probably the largest and most capable surface fleet in the world at the time (from a traditional assessment of "how many battleships do you have and how big are they", at least). If you did have some sort of absolutely ironclad intelligence that the Japanese were gonna do this thing, and you had a reasonable estimate of their timeline and position, I think they likely would have sailed the fleet out to meet them while furiously negotiating trying to prevent a shooting war at the same time. A high seas fight between the intact 1941 Pacific Fleet and the IJN would have been absolutely crazy. bewbies fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Dec 7, 2015 |
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Dec 7, 2015 23:07
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HEY GAL posted:nice too, just loving good-natured as hell. True that. My favourite professor was Czech. Although his last name was "Serbian". Not as in, etymology. His name literally meant Serbian. A question: A few pages back, You mentioned some papers detailing people regularly hanging around enemy camps, and returning. How close did your guys camp to each other? And more generally, does anyone know something about how close armies could get to each other, before they had throw down, throughout history?
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Dec 7, 2015 23:16
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