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The 'balanced' tank of the interwar years was the T-26 which had neither armor nor speed nor reliability, just a pretty good gun in the later variants.
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Aug 11, 2016 22:36
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The T-26 had okay armour for when it was designed, since it was before everyone had AT guns and heavy machine guns. Also it was plenty reliable*! *By 1939
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Aug 11, 2016 22:51
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feedmegin posted:Hmm. My granddad was a welder's mate in World War 2 (and manned AA guns in his free time), so it's certainly not like the concept was unknown. Granted, he was building ships not tanks. In general I'd be very surprised if 'union rules' would be an issue for something like that in wartime, both because patriotism on the part of the workers and because the government wouldn't gently caress around with unions disrupting the war effort. I know, if WW2 America can employ black women in shipbuilding, you'd think some sort of British office could sort this out. I mention it just because I've come across little remarks like this for years now. Maybe...some tanks had rivets because they needed production right now drat ye and decided not to bother with retooling? I don't know how plausible that is.
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Aug 11, 2016 22:53
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Nebakenezzer posted:I know, if WW2 America can employ black women in shipbuilding, you'd think some sort of British office could sort this out. I mention it just because I've come across little remarks like this for years now. I've heard that it was a lack of willingness to retrain, which sounds a lot like "We don't have time to retool" and would be easily spun as "Unions standing in the way of progress".
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Aug 11, 2016 22:56
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Panzeh posted:The 'balanced' tank of the interwar years was the T-26 which had neither armor nor speed nor reliability, just a pretty good gun in the later variants. If I recall it beat the poo poo out of everything else in the Spanish Civil War.
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Aug 11, 2016 23:04
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Btw well done new thread. Best tank chat in a real long time! I love these threads but the refresh has done a lot of good. Thanks all  On milhist notes, I'm currently living in a small hamlet on a small island in southern sweden based on what used to be the residence of the official soldier of the commune.
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Aug 11, 2016 23:05
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feedmegin posted:Hmm. My granddad was a welder's mate in World War 2 (and manned AA guns in his free time), so it's certainly not like the concept was unknown. Granted, he was building ships not tanks. In general I'd be very surprised if 'union rules' would be an issue for something like that in wartime, both because patriotism on the part of the workers and because the government wouldn't gently caress around with unions disrupting the war effort. Not WW2, but wasn't there a bunch of labour disputes in Britain in '17-'18, in the face of rising costs and frozen wages in the mining and munitions sectors?
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Aug 11, 2016 23:07
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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OwlFancier posted:I would personally suggest that they, like the infantry tank, became somewhat irrelevant in the face of advancing technology. They make sense for a certain set of conditions (powerful raiding vehicles utilizing speed to evade fire rather than relying on limited armour technology and sacrificing mobility) but by the time they were produced, the conditions ceased to really exist. By the late second world war you could produce an effective medium tank which could do everything. Cruiser tanks were obsolete when the war started. Of course people wanted fast tanks, but the tradeoffs were enormous. The British were making tanks like the Crusader well into 1943, even thought it was essentially an unreliable Panzer III (a 1937 tank). The Crusader could go really fast, but what good is that when tanks have to stop to shoot anyways? The Covenanter was a cruiser tank with 2000 produced units. It lit itself on fire so constantly that it was only fit for the Home Guard. A whole tank delivered to Dad's army! Crazy thing, Cromwells came into service in 1944. The first functional cruiser was a 1944 tank. A riveted box tank with an engine derived from a 1936 engine. Meanwhile, the Soviets figured out how to make a 48 ton heavy tank that was better protected than the Tiger II. I keep reading the refrain "The MBT is an integration of cruiser and infantry tank design", where does it come from? A Leyland catalogue? It may have felt that way for the British, but everybody else figured that poo poo out already. Put a gun on a vehicle, armor it up to your engine's capacity. The wild and eccentric school of British tank design built on this idea by taking a world-class aircraft engine, putting it in a tank, and puffing themselves up like peacocks while they coasted on their colonial legacy.
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Aug 11, 2016 23:07
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PittTheElder posted:Not WW2, but wasn't there a bunch of labour disputes in Britain in '17-'18, in the face of rising costs and frozen wages in the mining and munitions sectors? *Lights the lenoon signal*
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Aug 11, 2016 23:08
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I keep reading the refrain "The MBT is an integration of cruiser and infantry tank design", where does it come from? A Leyland catalogue? It may have felt that way for the British, but everybody else figured that poo poo out already. Put a gun on a vehicle, armor it up to your engine's capacity. The wild and eccentric school of British tank design built on this idea by taking a world-class aircraft engine, putting it in a tank, and puffing themselves up like peacocks while they coasted on their colonial legacy. If written by English for the English then it'll reference the national history in this area. I've never seen this phrase before in any of my books, but then I don't have much of an interest in bad tanks  
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Aug 11, 2016 23:23
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feedmegin posted:If I recall it beat the poo poo out of everything else in the Spanish Civil War. It performed well mostly because it had an actual anti-tank gun as its main armament.
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Aug 11, 2016 23:24
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PittTheElder posted:Not WW2, but wasn't there a bunch of labour disputes in Britain in '17-'18, in the face of rising costs and frozen wages in the mining and munitions sectors? Short answer; there was consistent rumbling industrial unrest from 1915 onward, first over the cost of living, then over dilution in the munitions factories, etc and anon. At one point I was following it and then lost the thread under the weight of the summer offensive. Fabulously interesting but never quite directly relevant to a battlefield story, except insofar as e.g. how dilution (the use of unskilled workers to increase shell-manufacturing capacity; making shells is a skilled job that can't just be done by any old idiot) was a double-edged sword; on the one hand you had a lot more shells, but on the other hand you had a lot more duds. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 23:31
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OwlFancier posted:The story about the canal jumping Cromwell is a relatively good illustration of the latter category save for the good fortune of the tankers. You shouldn't really be stumbling on an enemy camp on the other side of a hedgerow by accident with your tank squadron.
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Aug 11, 2016 23:42
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Cruiser tanks were obsolete when the war started. Of course people wanted fast tanks, but the tradeoffs were enormous. The British were making tanks like the Crusader well into 1943, even thought it was essentially an unreliable Panzer III (a 1937 tank). The Crusader could go really fast, but what good is that when tanks have to stop to shoot anyways? The Covenanter was a cruiser tank with 2000 produced units. It lit itself on fire so constantly that it was only fit for the Home Guard. A whole tank delivered to Dad's army! The MBT concept is a somewhat inevitable result of advances in engineering permitting the creation of an effective tank that is heavier than a heavy tank, faster than a light tank, and better armoured than an infantry tank. Britain didn't invent the MBT, everybody eventually gravitated towards building them because they just became the obvious thing to build. Yes you can have as much armour as you want, yes you can have a massive gun, yes you can get up to 30mph offroad, yes you can shoot missiles out of the main gun. Tradeoffs ceased to be particularly necessary. Cruiser, infantry, heavy, medium, light, all foms of tanks for the most part were subsumed into the MBT as technology advanced because there ceased to be a pressing need for any of the other designs as tanks. You get light armored vehicles sure but they're not fielded like tanks. It's just... odd to me to say that other tank designs are stupid because they were invalidated. It's like saying battleships were stupid because the aircraft carrier invalidated them. Yes they would be a bad idea to build nowadays and even in their heyday they did not function as expected because people were very shy about actually committing them to battle, but the idea that brought them forth was not stupid, they were the logical progression of naval warfare at the time, as the specialist tank was a logical development of interwar tank theory, as were medium tanks. Even stuff like the Tiger weren't stupid ideas, because building tanks that were too tough to be destroyed did work, that the tiger was mechanically unreliable was not a problem with the concept because the Russians built heavy tanks that worked, so I'm not comfortable saying ideas are bad because they aren't executed well either. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 23:47
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As I say, I feel like the powerplants involved are enormously important in these kinds of things. Kicking another 100hp out of an engine is a pretty big deal when 150 gets you from Valentine to Churchill. It's probably kind of simplistic to say "Better engine=better tank", but it certainly seems to help.
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Aug 11, 2016 23:52
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OwlFancier posted:battleships were stupid ... they did not function as expected because people were very shy about actually committing them to battle I stopped playing World of Warships, but I don't think I'll ever stop being salty about cowardly battleship players (who inevitably end up in my team) in that game. 
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Aug 11, 2016 23:54
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What Mr. Owl Fancier said. My additional two cents would be I think the MBT was also the result of something else: having the goddamn time to perform the RnD on a tank that would remain useful for a decade at least. Once you get deep into World War 2, the planning horizon is "better than the other guy's".
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Aug 11, 2016 23:56
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my dad posted:I stopped playing World of Warships, but I don't think I'll ever stop being salty about cowardly battleship players (who inevitably end up in my team) in that game. They're just trying to maximise their grog/hr.
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Aug 11, 2016 23:56
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my dad posted:I stopped playing World of Warships, but I don't think I'll ever stop being salty about cowardly battleship players (who inevitably end up in my team) in that game. Look we spent like the entire navy's budget on this thing and I'll be damned if I'm going to let you take it into a fight to get shot at. Just you get back to work griding down those bulkheads, I don't care if they keep the water out as long as they look nice and shiny. Also less gunnery drills please and more time pressing your trousers.
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Aug 11, 2016 23:58
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OwlFancier posted:Look we spent like the entire navy's budget on this thing and I'll be damned if I'm going to let you take it into a fight to get shot at. ONE DAY WE'LL HAVE TRAFALGAR/TSUSHIMA 2.0 ONE DAY!
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Aug 12, 2016 00:00
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Nebakenezzer posted:What Mr. Owl Fancier said. My additional two cents would be I think the MBT was also the result of something else: having the goddamn time to perform the RnD on a tank that would remain useful for a decade at least. Once you get deep into World War 2, the planning horizon is "better than the other guy's".
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Aug 12, 2016 00:00
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Arquinsiel posted:The weird thing to me is that the Leopard I seems to have been built with the same kind of thought process that led to the Cruiser tank philosophy but with the assumption that all infantry would at least be motorised so the Infantry tank was effectively a dead idea at that time. More that "any armor we use is going to be worthless a few years after we put it into service, so why bother?"
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Aug 12, 2016 00:02
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Arquinsiel posted:The weird thing to me is that the Leopard I seems to have been built with the same kind of thought process that led to the Cruiser tank philosophy but with the assumption that all infantry would at least be motorised so the Infantry tank was effectively a dead idea at that time. That reminds me: Does the concept of pure infantry exist anymore? I'm aware infantry do still train to march and actually do marches (especially in asymmetric war where stuff like "the people we need you to attack are up this mountain, which is impassable to vehicles" happens), but if WW3 ever kicked off and there was peer-state tier conflicts going on, do we have any militaries that still envisage a significant role to walking, or is a BMP or M113 or whatever basically assumed to be standard for modern infantry?
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Aug 12, 2016 00:06
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spectralent posted:As I say, I feel like the powerplants involved are enormously important in these kinds of things. Kicking another 100hp out of an engine is a pretty big deal when 150 gets you from Valentine to Churchill. It's probably kind of simplistic to say "Better engine=better tank", but it certainly seems to help. Better as in more power to weight does in a vacuum mean a better tank. It means that for a given speed you can put less weight into the engine and therefore more into gun and armor. Still, all hail the multibank. King of the things that shouldn't work but do. Do we have any paperwork of what other countries thought about that horrifying thing?
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Aug 12, 2016 00:08
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spectralent posted:That reminds me: Does the concept of pure infantry exist anymore? I'm aware infantry do still train to march and actually do marches (especially in asymmetric war where stuff like "the people we need you to attack are up this mountain, which is impassable to vehicles" happens), but if WW3 ever kicked off and there was peer-state tier conflicts going on, do we have any militaries that still envisage a significant role to walking, or is a BMP or M113 or whatever basically assumed to be standard for modern infantry? Hard to tell honestly because modern militaries are so scaled back that there's always enough vehicles if you really need them. If we had WW3 we would probably massively expand the military and enlist shitloads more people, which would lead to shortages of equipment and vehicles unless they started raiding the mothballed stuff. I think to get accurate ideas for large scale warfare you'd have to look back at the USSR/NATO cold war stuff because that was probably the last time we had military spending high enough to really do a conventional WW3. My guess though would probably be no, even if they're not mechanized/airborne they're going to be at least motorized, they'll be driving to wherever they're going even if they fight on foot. As a side note I think I found my favorite word, Russian for "infantry who ride on tanks" is "tankodesantniki" loving trilingual word salad, amazing. I really wish English did compound words sometimes. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Aug 12, 2016 |
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Aug 12, 2016 00:10
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spectralent posted:That reminds me: Does the concept of pure infantry exist anymore? I'm aware infantry do still train to march and actually do marches (especially in asymmetric war where stuff like "the people we need you to attack are up this mountain, which is impassable to vehicles" happens), but if WW3 ever kicked off and there was peer-state tier conflicts going on, do we have any militaries that still envisage a significant role to walking, or is a BMP or M113 or whatever basically assumed to be standard for modern infantry? Yes, even the US Army has light infantry units. Eg. out of the active 30 Brigade Combat Teams 9 are Armored BCT's (ie. Bradleys) and 7 are Stryker BCT's, the rest are plain infantry or airborne/air assault infantry. Of course they have trucks for moving around and hauling supplies and heavy equipment, but in combat they move by foot. There's little point in mechanizing all of your infantry, the bulk of which is going to be positioned to guard flanks, supply lines etc. Infantry fighting vehicles are too loving expensive to just have gathering rust. Also from an organizational point of view, it's far less restricting when you don't need to plan your squads based on how they will fit into a Bradley or BMP. Then there's specialized branches like mountain infantry etc. which operate in areas where roads are not a thing.
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Aug 12, 2016 00:24
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OwlFancier posted:The MBT concept is a somewhat inevitable result of advances in engineering permitting the creation of an effective tank that is heavier than a heavy tank, faster than a light tank, and better armoured than an infantry tank. Britain didn't invent the MBT, everybody eventually gravitated towards building them because they just became the obvious thing to build. Yes you can have as much armour as you want, yes you can have a massive gun, yes you can get up to 30mph offroad, yes you can shoot missiles out of the main gun. Tradeoffs ceased to be particularly necessary. It's literally just the British who made cruiser tanks, and held onto making cruiser tanks even though the rest of the world correctly determined that focusing on gofast in place of all other attributes just made your tanks flammable as poo poo and otherwise unremarkable. Cruisers were garbage and none of their design principles were inherited by the MBT, because there were basically none aside from "Put as rough and rowdy an engine you can find into this tank". The Centurion, touted as the MBT dreamboy of British tank design, was giant and actually rather slow. A fine tank, but hardly something you imagine "raiding and dodging fire with speed". It doesn't go 30mph anywhere, and the gun upgrades on it were painstakingly implemented. Cruiser tanks were never validated. Where on Earth were tanks raiding? Every single cruiser tank was a failure, and the Cromwell is just a medium tank with a really good engine (And some weird archaic design choices). Arquinsiel posted:The weird thing to me is that the Leopard I seems to have been built with the same kind of thought process that led to the Cruiser tank philosophy but with the assumption that all infantry would at least be motorised so the Infantry tank was effectively a dead idea at that time. The Leopard I had a real gun, and nobody was thinking they'd be charging around like cavalry in them. Also, when the HEAT bogieman can penetrate 350mm of armour, you're kind of out of options.
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Aug 12, 2016 00:23
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SeanBeansShako posted:*Lights the lenoon signal* Awoken from my slumber! Literally in bed though so this is off the top of my head and brief (by my rambling standards). Yes, union relations in ww1 were incredibly lovely. The unions were anti-conscription and initially anti-war, but largely bought off by the fact that unions were given representation on conscription tribunals and did a good job of passing Union men exempt from service. There were waves of potentially serious strikes from 1917 onwards, and striking workers in Glasgow nearly started a communist revolution in 1919, when the army was deployed to the city and tanks roamed sauchiehall street, while the highland regiments were discreetly posted far far away. Wartime strikes were often dealt with on a personal level - Lloyd George visited a few hotspots in his time as minister of munitions, but a fair bit of war crucial industry was under direct state control and (ideally, though in practice this lasted all of ten minutes) staffed by non-union labour. Serious strikes were threatened with conscription, though to my knowledge this was only carried out in some rare and scattered cases in Britain - it was common on the continent. While there was industrial unrest in ww2, the unions got on board a bit more for a couple of reasons - socialist opposition to Hitler and Union involvement in the Spanish civil war amongst them (show me a 1930s union that isn't socialist and didn't send its young men to Spain!). But it wasn't a case of "union laws restricting production" or "the government not tolerating the union bullshit". Instead, the unions were settled by concrete promises of more power - and a better life for workers - after the war. Churchill, pragmatist that he was, brought the ultimate union man into his coalition government and gave him near limitless power over the work force. Ernie Bevin. Trade union organiser, well respected, total hardass Labour man. Used his powers to totally regulate the workforce towards maximising efficient war production and simultaneously built up the unions to the most powerful they'd ever been. He famously boasted that he wanted to settle the union position "from now until 1980", and he did - it took forty four years, to be precise, for his pro-union organisation to be dismantled. Bevin, Bevan, Attlee and Morrison. Churchill's answer to potential Labour unrest during the war. It backfired on him spectacularly, and we ended up getting the NHS out of it to boot. Edit: The idea that the government *could* try a direct confrontation with the Unions during either war is pretty funny. These aren't unions as we understand them today, really, where there are short strikes and there's discontent and they might be led by hardcore socialists. These unions are massive, they provide Proto-welfare-state levels of care and support to their members, they are led by men who want to a) do right by their members and b) abolish the capitalist state. The Triple Alliance in 1914 (the three main unions one not the German Austrian one), had something like 5,000,000 members vote against conscription. The government cant afford a direct confrontation with them - and would nearly collapse when it did try in peacetime (until the general strike was betrayed, betrayed I tells ya!). What would they do? Strip a thousand men off the western front and ship them back home to try and force their brothers and fathers and sisters and wives back into the factories? It was impossible - the unions were bought and bribed with promises, exemptions and concessions, except in those few cases were unions stood alone and on the Clyde. By WW2, they were well aware - it's why Churchill abdicated literally all responsibility for labour relations to Bevin with the emergency powers act. lenoon fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Aug 12, 2016 |
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Aug 12, 2016 00:24
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Nenonen posted:Yes, even the US Army has light infantry units. Eg. out of the active 30 Brigade Combat Teams 9 are Armored BCT's (ie. Bradleys) and 7 are Stryker BCT's, the rest are plain infantry or airborne/air assault infantry. Of course they have trucks for moving around and hauling supplies and heavy equipment, but in combat they move by foot. Interesting! Thanks. I was going to say "Aren't airborne infantry mechanised by way of airdrops", but is that actually practical these days? I can imagine a carrier airplane is a really tempting target for some dirt-cheap SAMs. What do paras do these days?
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Aug 12, 2016 00:29
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Not parachute, generally, I think. They probably insert by helicopter because paradrops are still rough on troop organization even with modern parachutes and radios. And yeah I wouldn't really like to be flying in a C-130 over enemy territory. And we've never fought a war in a while that benefited from massive numbers of them being dropped in enemy territory like D-Day.
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Aug 12, 2016 00:33
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Leopard I had a real gun, and nobody was thinking they'd be charging around like cavalry in them. Also, when the HEAT bogieman can penetrate 350mm of armour, you're kind of out of options.
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Aug 12, 2016 00:38
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During the actual ground fighting of the Falklands war, wasn't all troop movement via marches? I'm pretty sure one of the crack regiments deployed did a ultra-quick march during nighttime to attack a Argentinian position.
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Aug 12, 2016 00:44
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Arquinsiel posted:Why is the "realness" of the gun relevant? At no point did the British cruiser designs have a gun that wasn't as close to the best AT gun available in that day, with the possible exception of the Cromwell's 75mm. Note that I am not saying that German designers came out of the MBT-70 program saying "what we need is a fuckton of Cruiser tanks like the British wasted time on" but there was definitely a similar element of assumption at work that drastic compromises needed to be made, with the result that it went fast, had a big gun and very little armour except on the front. As it turns out, both schools of thought were wrong and you can armour against the threats of the day without sacrificing mobility or striking power, with the bonus utility of the tank being usable as a drying rack too. The difference is that the Leopard's gun is also a perfectly fine HE-shooter. tbf there were no more AT-only guns around, but that's because cruiser tank doctrine was just completely wrong from the beginning. The Crusader was designed in 1940, the same year as the Sherman, but its 40mm gun didn't have an HE shell. The big deal with cruiser tanks is that the Brits legitimately believed that they could force a breakthrough with infantry tanks, then pour cruiser tanks into the gap like horsemen and then go gallivanting around the rear lines without any infantry riding along. In practice, that never even happened once. The Germans never believed in that, the Panzer divisions always brought a ton of motorised infantry along with them. Leopards were not fast to exploit breakthroughs, they were fast to contain breakthroughs. Another thing is that the Brits had a real option in stacking armour, or at least putting on their tanks. Matildas were nigh-impenetrable in 1939. The Leopard designers didn't have that at all, nobody in the West really knew how to stop HEAT. Also, I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the Leopard Is were reliable, and not utter trainwrecks.
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Aug 12, 2016 01:00
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Cruiser tanks were never validated. Where on Earth were tanks raiding? Every single cruiser tank was a failure, and the Cromwell is just a medium tank with a really good engine (And some weird archaic design choices). To be fair, Soviets had also believed that their Bistro Tanks could run through the entire strategic depth of the enemy front and crush or run circles around everything stepping in their way. But they were smart enough to drop the concept much sooner than Brits did - but this can be attributed to them actually having their equivalent of Cromwell already in mass production (it also helped that most of the ~4000 Betkas were lost in 1941). Sending 'volunteers' to fight in foreign civil wars and having little brawls with your neighbours clearly helps you to stay ahead in war technology, Russians knew it then and they know it today!
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Aug 12, 2016 01:07
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I'm curious where the modern IFV fits into this discussion of the evolution of armor. APCs are easy enough to understand, but then you started running into the Soviet BMPs and American Bradleys and other vehicles that carry infantry but also potent weapons in their own right. I'm curious whether they grew out of the APC role conceptually, or bear more of a relationship to the armored cars and light tanks of WW2, or something else entirely.
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Aug 12, 2016 02:05
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The difference is that the Leopard's gun is also a perfectly fine HE-shooter. tbf there were no more AT-only guns around, but that's because cruiser tank doctrine was just completely wrong from the beginning. The Crusader was designed in 1940, the same year as the Sherman, but its 40mm gun didn't have an HE shell.  they were only issued with smoke shells early on.As for the actual idea of using Cruiser tanks like cavalry squadrons, it was achieved a few times in Africa but modern defence in depth second line deployments resulted in them running up on AT gun emplacements sharpish and getting blown up pretty quick or just breaking down due to poor reliability. The M3 Stuart was early on regarded as what the Cruisers should have been by some of the tank crews in the desert, but at that point they were just using them for any task that required a tank due to their reliability and armament.
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Aug 12, 2016 02:14
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Cythereal posted:I'm curious where the modern IFV fits into this discussion of the evolution of armor. APCs are easy enough to understand, but then you started running into the Soviet BMPs and American Bradleys and other vehicles that carry infantry but also potent weapons in their own right. I'm curious whether they grew out of the APC role conceptually, or bear more of a relationship to the armored cars and light tanks of WW2, or something else entirely. Wasn't the original idea for the BMP about giving the infantry a way to traverse the irradiated hellscape of WW3? As for the extra firepower, I'm sure someone will be along shortly to post pentagon_wars.flv
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Aug 12, 2016 02:37
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P-Mack posted:Wasn't the original idea for the BMP about giving the infantry a way to traverse the irradiated hellscape of WW3? The BMP was made with fighting in an irradiated hellscape in mind- it was designed for the infantry to never leave the vehicle. This is why the BMP-1's armament is exclusively geared toward fighting other vehicles. It was expected that the troops could fire rifles out the ports and they would just roll around without ever leaving. Obviously, this never happened, and the BMP-2 was given armament more consistent with the notion of a vehicle staying back and providing fire support to an infantry squad. The IFV sits at an uncomfortable medium between transporting infantry and actually fighting because the two roles tend to be mutually exclusive, and the heavy armament these vehicles carry tends to compromise crew/passenger safety with the ammunition they carry.
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Aug 12, 2016 02:46
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Arquinsiel posted:Why is the "realness" of the gun relevant? At no point did the British cruiser designs have a gun that wasn't as close to the best AT gun available in that day, with the possible exception of the Cromwell's 75mm. Note that I am not saying that German designers came out of the MBT-70 program saying "what we need is a fuckton of Cruiser tanks like the British wasted time on" but there was definitely a similar element of assumption at work that drastic compromises needed to be made, with the result that it went fast, had a big gun and very little armour except on the front. As it turns out, both schools of thought were wrong and you can armour against the threats of the day without sacrificing mobility or striking power, with the bonus utility of the tank being usable as a drying rack too. German designers came out of MBT-70 thinking "we need to make Leopard II", with the biggest bestest gun+ammo in the west.
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Aug 12, 2016 02:52
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Phanatic posted:Jesus, is that how they actually did it? Just a big honking rheostat? That's insane, that's the most ridiculously inefficient way of implementing a variable current supply they could have possibly picked. It's kinda sorta done that way with diesel-electric trains. Those fans one the top have another purpose to cool down the resistors when braking.
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Aug 12, 2016 03:00
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