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Episode 8 of the Flights of Fancy podcast is out, talking about the Breguet 27. There's a slight glance at Nationalization under mid-1930's France, which will be more deeply explored in later episodes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSUBBEvjdAo Questions and comments are always welcome.
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Mar 1, 2021 15:43
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| # ? Jun 3, 2024 10:08 |
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Tulip posted:Very cool! This in particular was a striking takeaway: The USSR learned the hard way that fuel you have in storage in Moscow and fuel you have at the front lines to put in your tanks are very different things. Even at the end of the war the "last mile" delivery was hard when the tanks outran the supply lines.
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Mar 1, 2021 16:16
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I might've gotten a bit in depth into how "combat reformer" types see tanks and defense analysis and how real analysts look at tank engagements in LatwPIAT's lovely phoenix command king tiger vs abrams thread (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3959659&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1), should I straight up cross-post it here? I've got a rundown of how Mike Sparks' fursona (may or may not actually be him) sees tanks, the much more insane view of Pierre Sprey (yes, more insane than Mike Sparks which should tell you something) and then a bunch of the guts from a 1950s US military paper on combat experiences of armor in WWII. It's a lot of words, mind.
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Mar 1, 2021 18:46
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xthetenth posted:I might've gotten a bit in depth into how "combat reformer" types see tanks and defense analysis and how real analysts look at tank engagements in LatwPIAT's lovely phoenix command king tiger vs abrams thread (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3959659&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1), should I straight up cross-post it here? I've got a rundown of how Mike Sparks' fursona (may or may not actually be him) sees tanks, the much more insane view of Pierre Sprey (yes, more insane than Mike Sparks which should tell you something) and then a bunch of the guts from a 1950s US military paper on combat experiences of armor in WWII. It's a lot of words, mind.  Do it.
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Mar 1, 2021 18:52
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Oh, hell yes. I love Mike "Gavin" Sparks, he's just such the perfect idiot.
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Mar 1, 2021 19:13
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  Taken for, but not used in, Episode 8. These are two series of slides printed in an Ikare volume on Reconnaissance in the French Army Air Force during World War 2.
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Mar 1, 2021 19:35
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WW2 Data Going through more Czech items we arrive at Czech artillery, with a pair of 75mm and one 76.5mm round. Sadly, packaging information is lacking, but there is a good amount of information on the markings and things to look for on Czechoslovakian artillery projectiles.
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Mar 1, 2021 19:48
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Okay, so for a bit of background, LatwPIAT mentioned that someone high on farts and this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYKJ-jWIIFM actually sincerely spent a lot of time and effort arguing that a King Tiger and an Abrams are a reasonable match for each other, and I've seen that idea elsewhere. So I watched the video, and it's by Mike Sparks' alter ego and/or best friend Blacktail Defense. Worse, it reminds me of Pierre Sprey and his hot takes. His videos argue very similarly to some of Sprey's stuff, which is a really bonkers sort of decades late relitigation of vietnam and late Cold War budget battles. Warning, what follows is a massive TL;DR. Don't feel bad for not reading it, it's a mess, and there's three more following shortly. From this guy's perspective, the Bradley, M1, Stryker and so on are overcomplicated messes that cannot be actually kept ready to roll in the field. The problem is that he's a nerd whose main sources of information are a consultant still trying to get fame by reducing everything to a vietnam era budget battle and saying he's the guy who designed the F-16. He tastefully declines to mention that his idea of the F-16 carried two heaters and a cannon to minimize weight, and that he objected to things like BVR and strike capability. He probably loathes the modern F-16 with conformal fuel tanks and AIM-120 capability if he bothers to pay attention outside being all the F-35 haters' favorite pundit. Anyway, Pierre Sprey's brand of analysis looks like this: http://pogoarchives.org/labyrinth/09/07.pdf His understanding is a dichotomy of cheap winners vs expensive losers. Expensive things are overcomplicated by definition, and they're large and ungainly. He's stuck in the vietnam era, so things before then are proven tech, and things after then are overcomplicated whizz-bang gizmos. He also doesn't know much about WWII, as you might be able to tell by the beautiful fractal of incorrectness that is the idea that in WWII Japanese Destroyers beat US Cruisers in isolation, and that this is a victory of simple, robust tech over highly complicated wonder weapons. Destroyers, which are Japanese, have a highly reliable, lethal, large torpedo. Cruisers, which are American, have no torpedo and are slower, bigger targets. The Long Lance is apparently highly reliable, not a bleeding edge development project that was finicky and pushing the limits of the tech base it was built on and prone to calamitous explosions. Radar does not exist, and neither do the battles in which Japan got blindsided at night by a combination of gunnery and stealth torpedo tactics once the US got used to the advanced capabilities of Japanese weapons. But that's not why I picked that slide deck as an example here, the "in depth comparison" between the M1A2 and M48A5 is. You'd think this might be a foregone conclusion, but you'd be right! You see, Sprey has chosen his battlefield with great care. He rates the two tanks on those well known six dimensions of tank performance: operational mobility (read fuel efficiency), numbers engaged, machine gun effectiveness, firefight mobility, rate of kill vs. multiple targets at real combat ranges, and crew survival. So how do the competitors fare? Let's see! Operational mobility, the M1 needs an hour's refueling every 3 hours apparently, and an hour of filter cleaning every 2 hours. I'm sure this will come as a surprise to everyone who's taken a cursory look at operation desert storm. The M48 wins with its performance of (UNSPECIFIED). Numbers engaged, he claims 85% vs 45% availability rate advantage for the M48 and that it's 1/3s the cost, which means you can apparently field 6 times as many. No discussion of how they find the 6 times as many crew, provide for the fuel and maintenance needs, fill out all the supporting arms in proportion, and so on. Machine gun effectiveness, the M48 carries 200% more MG rounds and can sweep ditches with MGs. That this makes the M2 medium the best tank of WWII is implied but not stated. The M48 is three for three at this point, can its streak continue? Firefight mobility is a ?. One of six dimensions of tank combat performance, and he doesn't really know which is better. He says the M1A2 throws tracks in maneuvering, truly an unique issue for this one tank, but it has a small edge in short dash acceleration. Rate of Kill vs. multiple targets at real combat ranges naturally goes to the M48, with its slightly faster loading rate, same accuracy on the battlesight (which I assume is the tertiary optic on the M1A2 for after the multiple FCS linked systems fail because he doesn't believe technology ever works, and I guess we're disregarding ballistics too), more ammo, and an apparent high rate of failure with 120mm caseless ammo. I will note that yet again, the 37mm M3 on the M2 medium is better than the M4's 75mm by this standard. Crew Survival goes to the M48, of course, you've gotten the feel for this. Not one live firing test against a combat-loaded M1, he says in the year 2007 after the M1 has been in multiple battles and caught its fair share of modern munitions. The M1 is better against infantry hand-held anti-tank rounds from the front but worse from rear, an interesting phrasing of nearly invulnerable from the front aspect and having rear protection that's a bit more useless. Both are penetrable by modern tank cannon rounds, the M1's exhaust is visible to IR at 3 miles, and the M1 is much more flammable apparently, a conclusion reached from ???. I am genuinely not joking when I say by these criteria, behold the greatest tank of WWII:  Normally when I do that it's a convoluted troll where I phrase it such that I can count the M4 Sherman as a simple later development on the same powertrain, but I am actually genuinely of the belief that these criteria are best fit by the M2 medium. It's light, reliable, cheap, its gun fires quickly, it has MG ammo galore, with specific deflector plates to hose down ditches even better. No tank in the war is immune to modern tank cannon rounds from all angles, so there's really nothing that can beat the M2's insurmountable lead in the early parts. Now how does an impressionable nerd exposed to this genius methodology respond? Well, he doesn't get a knowledge of WWII, because that's clearly not required, and he innately susses out that anything from before Vietnam is proven tech. So the King Tiger is a mistake, but so is the Abrams, and everything bad is the same amount of bad. So actually both tanks are the same! Blacktail takes the tack that "These two tanks are eerily similar in size, complexity and density, even having very similar armor thicknesses, and also in design philosophy." So he makes the following comparisons: Mobility: Top Speed: 42 MPH > 28 MPH Combat Weight: 72 tons > 77.1 tons Range: 260 miles > 105 miles (No, don't ask how a tank that needs to refuel every three hours and can only do 42 mph can cover 260 miles in those three hours) Power/weight: 21.4 hp/ton > 9 hp/ton Min. Turn Radius: Pivot > 15.7 ft Suspension: Torsion bars = Torsion bars Ground pressure: 15.5 psi < 13.7 psi Clearance: 19 in < 20 in Gradient: 60% < 70% Side Slope: 40% > 30% Vertical obstacle: 48.96 in > 33.46 in Trench: 9 ft < 9.84 ft Fording 4 ft < 5.34 ft Engine: 1500 hp gas turbine > 700 hp gas V12 Torque: 2626 lb/ft^2 > 1225.46 lb/ft^2 Torque/Weight: 36.47 lb/ft/ton > 15.89 lb/ft/ton Transmission: Automatic 4 fwd, 2 rev > Manual 8 fwd, 4 rev Now how does he compare all these many dimensions of performance? Some deep analysis of situations in which one's advantaged over the other? Lol no he adds up the wins and losses. This really isn't that bad in comparison but note that he's assigning a point for which is the lightest, which has the most engine power, and which has the best power/weight ratio! Also, having 5% less clearance has the same impact on the mobility calculation that having less than half the power to weight and two thirds the top speed. Abrams wins though. Firepower Main gun: Smoothbore 120mm/44, 12 rpm > Rifled 88mm/71, 8 rpm Main gun ammo: 40 < 86 Main gun rounds: APFSDS, HEAT, APHE, Canister < AP, APHE, HEAT (I'm guessing he's docking points for a multi-purpose HEAT shell not being a single purpose HE shell. No idea what he means by M1 APHE) Indirect Fire Ability: No < Yes Coaxial gun: 7.62mm, 700 rpm < 7.92mm, 1100 rpm Coaxial Ammo: 10000 rds > 5850 rds Bow gun: None < 7.92mm, 1100 rpm Bow gun ammo: None < 5850 rds AA gun: 12.7mm, 400 rpm > 7.92mm, 900 rpm AA gun ammo: 1100 rds < 5850 rds Missile(s): none = none Missile capacity: none = none (does this mean he did a video on North Korean tank comparisons? Even I don't dare inquire) Gun elevation: +20 > +15 Gun depression: -10 > -7 Oh no, here we go, firepower is a Tiger II win, 7 to 5. Yes, you can say that under this metric, the bow gun is the entire margin of the King Tiger's firepower superiority over the Abrams, and that overall it is possible to make a tank with exceptional MG armament and no main gun that is better than either. I'm glad to see the M16 MGMC can remain my favorite tank with its four .50 machine guns. Or maybe they'd need to be on different mounts? Fire Control 360 degree slew: 9 s > 15 Stabilization: 3 plane > none Dynamic lead: Automatic > none Auto-tracking: no=no Rooftop GPSE: yes=yes Rangefinder: Laser < Stereoscopic (I'm sorry, what. This is just bonkers) Ballistics computer: Digital > Mechanical Hunter-killer capability: Yes > No TC override: Yes = Yes Laser Designator: No = No (Five bucks says this is a gimmick on another tank's brochure that's now just a checkbox for comparison. If someone wants to tell me what a tank can look at with its gunfire control setup and not just fire its main gun at to destroy it, I'm all ears) Huge Abrams win, even with the baffling decision that having a guy get a migrane trying to superpose two images onto each other over the course of multiple seconds is better than pushing a button and getting a range. Protection Amor Type: Laminated RHA Steel + DU > FHA Steel Spall Liners: Yes > No Flammable Fuel: Yes = Yes (I'm captivated by the notion of fuel that doesn't burn) All-Electric Turret Drives: No = No Fire Extinguisher: Halon > None Blow-off Panels: Yes > No Ammo Compartment: Yes > No V-Hull: No = No APS: No = No ERA: No = No Escape hatch: No < Yes Another huge win for the Abrams, even with the odd preference for explosive reactive armor (both armor type and ERA) over non-explosive reactive armor of equivalent protectiveness (just armor type). Ergonomics Crew capacity: 4 < 5 (Yep just stuff another whole-rear end human into the volume, this improves the ergonomics.) Passenger Capacity: None = None Air conditioning: No = No (Note that this is the M1A2 SEP, which definitely does have that) NBC System: Overpressure > None This is a draw, under this metric. Having a radio operator/bow gunner in your legroom is apparently enough to offset being able to survive a chemically contaminated battlefield. Surprise Length: 32.25 ft = 33.63 ft Height 9.47 ft > 10.10 ft Width: 12 ft > 12.33 ft Driver Optics: Night vision > N/A TC Optics: TIS > N/A Gunner Optics: TIS > N/A Landline Cable Jack: No = No Tank-Infantry Telephone: No < Yes APU: Yes > No Top speed: 42 mph > 28 mph (Uhh, sure, let's double count I guess) Combat Weight: 72 tons > 77.1 tons Range: 260 miles > 105 miles Crushing Abrams win. Endurance Fuel Consumption: 8 gpm < 2.6 gpm Track Endurance: 1800 mi > 500 mi MMBF: 152 mi > 15 mi (!) (Exclamation point emphasis not mine, don't worry, this cataclysmic flaw will not be treated as anything more than a checkbox point) Average Main Tube Life: 400 rds < 500 rds Battle Main Tube Life: 50 rds < 250 rds Multi-Fuel: Yes > No Fuel Endurance at idle: 8 hrs < 33 hrs (I remember something about an APU...) Naturally, this gives a 4 to 3 win to the tiger. Being able to drive 15 miles without expecting a failure is overrated. Combat Engineering Mine Plow: Compatible = Compatible Mine Roller: Compatible = Compatible Dozer Blade: Not compatible < Compatible Demolition rounds: APHE < APHE, HE (Yeah, he just doesn't get the whole multi-purpose HEAT thing, and doesn't know about the M908 round they decided to have on hand for fortification destruction. This very specific purpose, and it's really good at destroying concrete) Torque/Weight: 36.47 lb/ft/ton > 15.89 lb/ft/ton In a typo, he says this is a 1-0 win for the Tiger II, where he's actually claiming a 2-1 win, into the teeth of a massive torque/weight advantage, and the Tiger's inability to tow other Tigers with any real reliability. Because he doesn't get modern HE capability and hasn't seen a picture of an M1 with a dozer blade on it. Production and Development Factors Development cost: 94 billion < 600 million Unit cost: 10 million < 1.225 million Development span: 10 years < 2 years Production Span: 10 years > 2 years Number Built: 1720 > 489 Number of Users: 1=1 Another 3:2 Tiger 2 win! I sure do love converting between 1944 Reichsmarks and US Dollars from somewhere between 1980 and now! Naturally, the result of a comparison with 4 wins where the Tiger barely has an edge even with the most tortured criteria possible and 4 one-sided drubbings in favor of the Abrams is an overall tie. TL;DR Standbys such as millimeters of armor don't actually show up anywhere and the analysis is just as bonkers if not more so for its lack. Sure, the Abrams will see first and shoot first with a massive edge in mobility, but it doesn't have a shell that's labeled as HE and it wasn't made with 1943 Reichsmarks. The Abrams' better armor is apparently offset by the heavier machine gun fitment of the King Tiger, and the deciding factor is that the Abrams can't fire many, many combat loads through the same gun barrel without replacement, which is a much bigger downside than an inability to drive 15 miles without failure. It's a baffling checkbox based means of comparison. It is interesting for how it's methodologically opposed to the big cats in theory, but it hands them a bunch of many unearned wins because of what it treats as important. An elaboration: A characteristic showing up in mobility gives 1/17th of a point, firepower 1/14, fire control 1/10, protection 1/11, ergonomics 1/4 (!!!!), surprise 1/12, endurance 1/7, combat engineering 1/5, production factors 1/6. This leads to some fascinating Objective Truths About Tank Design! Ergonomics factors are massive. Just jam bodies in there. Who gives a drat what it does to the rest of your design, if you've got six crew and a passenger in there, everyone will have tons of room and nobody will butt elbows. This suggests a direction for the ideal modern tank if only the designer has the audacity to dream. Combat engineering is another big one. You need a mine plow, mine roller and dozer blade, HE rounds and a solid torque to weight ratio. Next is production factors. Make it cheaply and develop it quickly. Really, past that, everything builds up slowly from a lot of factors, but some are still interesting and ripe for abuse. Protection is interesting. Armor is two factors, materials used and whether there's ERA, none of this messing about with what it can withstand from what angles business for professionals with their numbers and computers. Throw an APS on there for another point. As an aside, note that this means that the tank with the best potential for protection in the late Cold War period is the T-55, since you could probably fit it with composite, ERA and an APS. gently caress it, why not. Then there's ammo compartment with blow-off panels, this one's a kindness to the Abrams, though I'll point out that the existence of them is the point winner, not whether all ammo is in them. V-hull and escape hatch are pretty definitely GWOT era additions. Sure. Why not. Advanced materials, ERA, APS, check those boxes but don't worry too much about using much material to stop oncoming fire. It doesn't matter. Add a big escape hatch and make sure there's a separate ammo compartment with blow-out panels. Firepower is another fun one. A main gun is six characteristics. Each machine gun fit is two each. Ammo is one of the main gun and mg characteristics. The gun's characteristics are one point, then there's ammo capacity, elevation, depression, shell types, and indirect fire capacity (still weirds me out). So ideally you'd want a lot of machine guns built into the vehicle, and you can either go for the same caliber as other vehicles with the highest fire rate possible and compete on ammo count or just go for smaller caliber with oodles of ammo. It's probably not worth trying to have higher caliber guns, it's just a wash because you get a point for the gun being bigger and you promptly lose it for having fewer shots. Fire control is just have the electronics. Give everyone a thermal, make the turret turn fast, have hunter-killer capability, honestly there's not too much nonsense to be had here. Mobility. Make it light, fast and powerful. This is just such a mess of things that individually barely matter. So, with that all said, I actually have a pretty good mental image of a tank that'd excel at his criteria and he'd hate it. That's right, by the criteria of an avowed Sparks and Sprey fan, whose take on modern military materiel is a pretty undilute shot of Pentagon Wars, I think that a derivative of the M2 Bradley would be an outstanding tank. I know, it's not actually a tank but I don't write the rules, I just interpret them while maximizing for perversity. Mobility: It's not bad. Relatively quick because it's light. Great ground pressure. Firepower: Actually really good. 25mm Bushmaster is smaller than a 120mm smoothbore but it has vastly more ammo, way better elevation, it has one less degree of depression but the TOW launcher is nearly unbeatable there and adds in the missile checkboxes. It's got a coax, but the real winner is that it has four firing port weapons. One of the vital changes to make this a good tank is making four dismounts into dedicated gunners. The FPW in particular is good because it's got a bonkers fire rate so it should beat any other integrated firing port weapons. Fire Control: It's got a pretty full suite. Nice. Protection: It's got laminates, ERA, the box launcher for the TOWs is something I think can be counted as an ammo compartment and blow-out panel, electric turret drive, fire extinguishers, and a giant 'escape hatch'. Outstanding, the M2 Bradley Tank is much better protected than the Abrams. Ergonomics: NBC system, passenger capacity, and with four FPW gunners as crew, it's got a crew of seven, absolutely drubbing any contenders. Also I'm pretty sure there's an air conditioner. Surprise: A bunch of tech and a short overall length, not bad. Endurance: It's light, doesn't use a ton of fuel, doesn't break down very often, and it gets two more points with the main gun being a lower caliber and lower pressure piece. After all, the ability to fire many combat loads of ammunition through a tank's gun is nearly a third of its overall endurance, twice as important as being able to drive out of the parking lot. Combat Engineering: There's an engineering vehicle version, just borrow those features and we're set. Production and Development Factors: At this point who cares, but as a jerk I'm going to point that this isn't actually an M2, it's a derivation of it leveraging existing technologies. Sure, the only changes are a bit of paperwork shuffling and combining the features from multiple variants, but that's a lightning fast development time! Now we just need to build a ton and sell it to anyone who wants. Have you ever watched so much Pentagon Wars that you accidentally end up implying that the M2 Bradley is the ideal tank platform for the US Army? Don't worry, the next over-long post is going to be about sane things, that is actual empirical information about how WWII tank fights actually worked, to contextualize this whole tank dueling thing.
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Mar 1, 2021 21:05
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So there's a lot . . . so loving much . . . to unpack in all that but I just want to highlight this bit from the beginning:xthetenth posted:
The man who hates overcomplicated messes that cannot actually be kept ready to roll in the field champions the King loving Tiger?!?  edit: we need that ^ smilie but it's German transmission gears spewing out of the sockets.
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Mar 1, 2021 21:26
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xthetenth posted:His understanding is a dichotomy of cheap winners vs expensive losers. Expensive things are overcomplicated by definition, and they're large and ungainly. He's stuck in the vietnam era, so things before then are proven tech, and things after then are overcomplicated whizz-bang gizmos. Excellent post. For what it's worth, that mindset - "cheap = good, expensive = bad" had a lot of sway in the post-Vietnam era, as the US military tried to figure out why the most technologically advanced army in the world got it's rear end kicked by rice farmers. If you're a wargame nerd you can see this filtering into a lot of the games of the era. The designer's notes for SPI's games like Invasion America really push this mindset, and they indirectly make it into subjects like Panzerblitz. (Which is itself interesting, as this mindset is very different from the then-common "Wehrmacht superior German Engineering" mentality of the day.)
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Mar 1, 2021 21:26
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Cyrano4747 posted:The man who hates overcomplicated messes that cannot actually be kept ready to roll in the field champions the King loving Tiger?!? Soooort of. The idea was more along the lines of "the expensive bloated messes of today haven't meaningfully advanced from the expensive bloated messes of WWII." Which is bullshit, but was a very common mindset in the 70's. In those days there was a massive “crisis of faith” in the US military. The high-tech military had just been utterly humiliated in Vietnam. The weapons that were thought to be decisive – in this case, tanks, but also high-tech fighter planes and many other systems – didn’t do well there. In contrast, the cheap weapons of the opposition had proven to be good enough to win the war. I mentioned a wargame above, Invasion America. It's representative of the zeitgeist and it really pushes this mindset:  And, in a way, it makes sense. In Vietnam, expensive F-4 Phantoms were shot down by cheap, less capable Mig-17s. Everyone had heard anecdotes about how the M-16 was outperformed by the AK-47. And tanks? They just weren’t suited for Vietnam. And when tanks WERE used in numbers in the Yom Kippur War, the elite Israeli armor suffered disproportionate losses to Arab armies firing cheap “Sagger” missiles. So:  That’s from the “Campaign Analysis” booklet included in the wargame Panzerblitz, one of the (if not the) best-selling wargames ever made. It was written by James Dunnigan, whose views were both very influential and representative of his time. (Dunnigan later consulted for the DoD and the Naval War College.) “On paper,” he’s right. The book stats of the then-used M-48 are indeed roughly comparable with those of a design from WWII. But, as covered above, he’s wrong. And he’ll be a lot MORE wrong when new technologies start being used on tanks. Nonetheless, that mindset (cheap = good, expensive = bad) had a profound impact on a generation of analysts and strategists. Cessna fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Mar 1, 2021 |
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Mar 1, 2021 21:30
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I get the feeling that even as late as the run-up to GW1, the only people who were really seriously confident in the capability of any chunk of the US military were the people who were doing things in that specific field. And then there's the consultants who I feel like half of them were specifically marketing themselves to the distrust among outsiders of major weapons development programs.
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Mar 2, 2021 01:02
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You can read story after story about Tiger Is and IIs and Elefants and everything else getting massacred by the USSR's 85mm gun so it's not like they were even that effective in WW2
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Mar 2, 2021 02:10
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Pryor on Fire posted:You can read story after story about Tiger Is and IIs and Elefants and everything else getting massacred by the USSR's 85mm gun so it's not like they were even that effective in WW2 IIRC in terms of its K/D ratio wasn't the Elefant fairly effective or am I thinking of the Nashorn?
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Mar 2, 2021 02:24
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Pryor on Fire posted:You can read story after story about Tiger Is and IIs and Elefants and everything else getting massacred by the USSR's 85mm gun so it's not like they were even that effective in WW2 Hehehe, speaking of data from WWII: Okay, so I promised some actual armor analysis from people with real ideas and methodology. I've got a fun little reprint of a 1954 Aberdeen report, this guy: https://www.amazon.com/Data-World-War-Tank-Engagements/dp/1470079062. On looking, it seems like google play has it as an affordable ebook, which the amazon listing is pointedly not. https://play.google.com/store/books/details/David_C_Hardison_Data_on_World_War_II_Tank_Engagem?id=9P3lKQUy6kcC The google books preview includes the charts I mentioned earlier as well: https://books.google.com/books?id=9P3lKQUy6kcC&pg=PA46&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false Basically what it is is reducing all the times 3rd and 4th US Armored Divisions fought enemy armor in Europe between 15 August 44 and 6 March 1945. They combed through all the records for information on armor engagements. It's hard to reduce engagements down to nice self-contained data, they give an example where an allied force trying to bypass a town is engaged from the flank, with the immediate loss of 5 tanks, and later destruction of 9 that became bogged by enemy fire. Subsequently, allied forces attacked the town where the fire had come from, losing five more tanks, but in this fight managed to ambush a pair of Mk. V tanks moving to reinforce, destroying them. This is given as an example of how complex turning combat history into a series of discrete 'engagements' can be. In these two engagements the total number of enemy combatants is unknown and even their type is somewhat unclear. The second could even be split into two parts, the attack on the town and the ambush of the Mk. Vs. So, what do they end up putting in the table for a fight, that is what do they think is really the important stuff for analysis? They note down the number of allied and enemy weapons at the start of the engagement, the number of allied and enemy losses in the engagement, the combat range at which the losses were incurred, who fired first, the type of allied and enemy weapons, who's attacking (IE who's trying to move forward and take ground), who withdrew, and some remarks (normally giving some context). The broad categories of allied weapons are M4s (gun type not noted usually), Tank Destroyers which are apparently 'generally an M10, mounting a 90mm gun' (I guess the M36 is some/all of them?) and others, which means a combination of the above as well as the M5 and M24. The broad categories of enemy weapons are the Mk V (the Panther), the Mk IV (the panzer IV), A/T (towed anti-tank guns, type usually unkown), SP (self-propelled guns, usually stug 75 of some description), and Others, some combination of the above, with the potential for others like the Tiger. First, despite saying they don't really have enough data to properly compare, they do break things down by weapon type first. There's some interesting things to be seen, like how the Panthers fare really poorly overall, and when they are fired on first while attacking, that goes from 'fare poorly' to 'get utterly savaged holy poo poo piss'.  Yes, when tank destroyers fired first on attacking Panthers, they killed literally every single target that presented itself. Interestingly, overall M4s in the 'mixed' situations of attacking but firing first and defending but being fired upon first come out ahead, and when they fire first on the attack it's pretty brutal. They have a big numbers advantage in some circumstances but they inflict a fearsome toll outside the two fights where they get successfully ambushed. Barring a fight where Panthers blundered into TDs at point blank range, they didn't knock out a single TD, despite one engagement where they got the drop on attacking TDs. At 2200m it seems like they got flatly outshot. By far the most effective weapon on the German side, it seems, are the anti-tank guns. They get the drop on M4s a bunch and they very rarely lose any of their number. As a rule it seems that the vast majority of the time, American tanks get the drop on Panthers, and enemy AT gets the drop on them, and everything else is one or two fights. The next table is a breakdown of the losses of attacking and defending forces, followed by a breakdown of the losses of the force firing first and second. Generally, the defenders lose far fewer vehicles, and the first side to fire loses fewer, and when those are the same, it's absolutely brutal. The next factor they consider is the numbers of tanks in a fight, and there's some interesting things. Firstly, as the ratio of the force that shoots first to the force that shoots second increases, the percent losses of the force firing second trend upwards in a roughly linear fashion (actually an involved formula that'll be in the graph I try to get a picture of sometime soonish). This makes sense, with the trendline starting at about 30% losses for a group of tanks fired on by 1/5th their number (though there is one utter humiliation where the allies fired first on five times their number and killed every enemy). If the enemy gets the drop on you, the losses you take are going to tend to be a function of the ratio of their guns to your tanks. This makes good sense, but it is interesting, especially in how you can probably approximate it pretty well with a linear function. Next you've got the losses that the force that fires first takes. This is the leg of an L-shaped curve like the graph of y = 1/x, but with its asymptote heading to 6%. It seems that there's always some risk in war, who knew? That said, there's a lot of clean sweeps, and a lot of outliers high of the curve. It is worth noting there's only two battles where the side that opens fire first gets wiped out, and in both cases they have less than 30% as much force. Then they note some interesting things about the trendlines and how they interact. If two forces were to run up against an identically sized enemy force, the larger force would inflict greater damage on the enemy but suffer greater casualties. This is not what you'd normally expect, but I suspect that this has a lot to do with the battles not frequently resulting in the annihilation of one force. As long as a force has greater than about three tanks engaged, if it loses it will probably have survivors disengage. The author suggests the following factors as standing out in allowing a decisive advantage: Information: knowing where the enemy was located Tactical mobility: the ability to take advantage of natural terrain features. Rate of kills: the ability to capitalize rapidly on advantages. Next they consider the ranges at which casualties occur, and note that it's quite variable, and then point to a "sighting range" study of Northwest Europe for further detail, pointing to work being done to understand the expected battlefield ranges. The next up is an analysis of numbers and ratios of weapons employed. How many vehicles show up on each side and whether the number one side shows up with is related to how many the other side shows up with is of keen interest. Firstly, the more vehicles and time a combat involves, the less the authors expect factors like surprise, concealment and initiating the fire fight to matter. With more targets it's easier to spot something to shoot at, and so on. They draw some interesting conclusions from the data. First, engaged forces tended to be quite small. Half of the time the enemy had three or fewer weapons. Half of the time the Allies had six or fewer weapons. Half of the time there were fewer than twelve weapons total. Past that, the numbers of opposing weapons tends to be completely independent. Second, the allies used roughly two and a half times the weapons total. Does this ratio hold on average? The answer is very much no! It varies as a function of the overall disparity in numbers, but the cumulative distribution of force ratios is nearly symmetric about the ratio of the number of weapons each force employed on average. That said, the odds were in the favor of the germans only 14% of the time. 50% of the time, the allies had better than 2.5 times the number of tanks the germans did, but the number of tanks in any given engagement isn't self-similar. On the whole the side with more stuff with have more stuff in fights, but it's equally likely that the ratio of units in a given fight differs from the overall ratio by any constant factor. So what are their conclusions? - Firing first was a huge advantage, as is being the "defender" - The number of tanks involved directly in a fight is generally small. The number of potential targets for a given tank is small. Concentration is as much a concept of time as space. - The number of weapons employed in each force is independent of the other. The distribution of the ratio of forces is roughly approximated by a logarithmic-normal distribution. - Roughly half of engagements ended by one force disengaging. Annihilation of a force of over three tanks was rare, only happening in one of nine engagements. - The tank knocks out more tanks than it suffers casualties in the defensive. On the other hand, tank casualties are high when attacking positions defended by anti-tank weapons. - With the small number of samples, the large number of variables, and the relative insensitivity of the engagement outcome to minor differences in weapons characteristics, it is hard to ascertain the difference in combat effectiveness of the various weapons. Whatever major differences in weapons effectiveness were existent have not been ascertained (from this data). That last point is interesting considering the entire industry of books self-consciously obsessed with proving the conclusive superiority of one piece of kit and how it definitely made a massive difference. The key weakness the authors identify in allied and enemy tanks is the inability of its crew to obtain information as to the exact location and nature of the hostile weapons. Tank engagements generally developed suddenly, often unexpectedly, and usually ended quickly. Firing the first aimed rounds provides a huge advantage, the casualties in any given battle are usually small, and one force suffered no casualties in seventy-seven percent of engagements. All of these suggest that at least one force was generally engaged by an enemy whose immediate location wasn't previously known. The recommendation of the authors is that unless they can be made relatively invulnerable to opposing fire, tanks might be profitably improved by providing the crew with the means for more quickly detecting the location of opposing weapons and lessening the time to obtain a killing hit once the target is identified. So, in light of this analysis, how do Sprey, Blacktail, and the implicit design philosophy of the Abrams stack up? Interestingly, in a way of looking at it, Sprey's analysis is consistent with this to a minor degree, in that by focusing relentlessly on operational considerations a superiority in numbers can be achieved in a majority of engagements, but crucially the distribution of losses in fights doesn't follow a Lanchester n-squared distribution* (yes I'm adding footnotes to my effortposting, what has gone wrong with my life) in full, since having more numbers doesn't fully protect from casualties. It helps, a good bit in fact, but superior numbers cannot be used to prevent losses, both because fights with less favorable ratios will happen and no matter the ratio, statistically even the force that fires first will take some losses, and the force that fires second will take a walloping even if their numbers are superior. That said, in basically every other way, he misses the forest for some random tumbleweeds he saw. Vision sensors are 'technology' and cannot be allowed to work, and he does the laziest possible assessment of how quickly the tank can spot and engage targets. Blacktail accounts for all these features. He also accounts for all other features. He makes no accounting for what features are actually important. The one real standout of his analysis is the 'surprise' section. There's some daft stuff in there, but at least he gets that this is a big ticket item. The Abrams seems to reflect the entire analysis strongly. It's mobile, but within the context of that mobility and modern non-explosive reactive armor standing up well, it makes a frontal arc very resistant to contemporary tank fire. Other protection is relatively limited but from that frontal sixty degree or so arc, it's hard to get a killing shot in. Its first design priority is crew survival, so the ammunition rack is designed to blow out rather than blowing the crew compartment out. In a fight, the loading doors are open a decent amount of the time. If one side is getting blindsided, then those ammo rack hits aren't killing tank and crew in one shot. The gun is high velocity, reducing the impact of getting the range estimation problem wrong. But then there's all the stuff Sprey disdains. The Abrams kill chain is leagues beyond what came before. To spot the enemy, it has thermal sensors and some very nice magnification capability (10x/3x) with a good field of view, so you can scan for hot spots really quickly. I've got no info on whether turbine exhaust heat stands out more because it's extra hot or if modern sensor sensitivity makes it much of a muchness. There's even a cupola optic on the MG, so you can scan and ID with some magnification (or light fools up with a .50) from a minimal exposure. The commander even has an extension for the gunner's sight, just in case you want another set of eyes on the thermals or for the commander to walk the gunner on target even more easily. The gunner has a unity sight with a comparatively decent field of view, missing out on the Panther's notorious issues. When they find a target, the laser range finder and ballistic computer allow blindingly fast aim solution computation, and that loads into the sights seamlessly (For more info, see this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDs5oQW1vNA** Battlesight backup discussion at 32:04). Once they have a solution and the turret is lined up, they can send a shell. None of this messing about with stopping, guessing at the range of the target based on comparing its size to etched lines or taking the time to use a coincidence rangefinder, waiting for the chassis to stop bouncing and the gun to settle before shooting. Hold the button for the ballistic computer, track the target with your sight for a second and a half or so, push a button to lase the target, your reticle shifts in your sight picture as the turret incorporates the lead, and if you did your job right the reticle stays on the target and you hammer a shot out into where the enemy will be when the shell gets there unless they change direction in a major hurry. The one downside is that there doesn't seem to be a way for the commander to separately acquire a target and point the turret directly to it before the M1A2 or the SEP. That said, the gunner has everything needed to be hellishly effective at scanning for and engaging targets. The next level of capability is emergency mode, which doesn't have the benefit of the ballistic computer, so you lase the target, put the reticle on the target, but then have to lead manually. Only after that system fails too do we reach Sprey's 'battlesight' that he compares with the M48. As a comparison, the Panther's notorious setup is a magnified optic for the gunner with a terribly limited field of view and the commander being the only one to scan. The only precise way they have to discuss gun laying is references to hull angle and local landmarks or relative direction. As a result, French tests (https://worldoftanks.com/en/news/chieftain/chieftains-hatch-french-panthers/) found that after the commander has located the enemy, it takes between 20 and 30 seconds before he can open fire. That's an eternity. So, how does this all pan out in practice? Thankfully because we live in the grim darkness of the far future of 2021, unlike Pierre Sprey in the benighted year of 2007, linear time has been invented and we can look back to combat experience in 1991. I don't actually think it's perfectly representative, but 73 Easting is pretty illustrative in my opinion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72XLTfmcaAw Here's a good time-lapse of the thing. At very close range Abrams, and more importantly for my overall point, Bradleys run into a major force of armor. They take return fire, but they do not take killing hits in the very short amount of time they allow the Iraqi opposition. One of the recon troops' fights is 9 abrams and 13 bradleys against 39 Iraqi tanks, 54 armored vehicles and 200 infantry at close range. It's a massacre. After about 22 minutes, all 21 vehicles are intact after destroying a whole battalion. Other formations don't crest a ridge right into an enemy formation, so they are able to pick the Iraqis apart with impunity. I get the feeling that in the analysis when they mentioned minor differences in weapons characteristics, this is at or beyond the magnitude of what they'd count as a major difference in weapons. *Lanchester's n-squared law is different from the previous 'linear' modeling of losses in a fight, where losses are held to be even, and the margin of victory is the number of weapons the side with more stuff brought to the fight. So 7 tanks against 10, both sides would lose 7 and the winner would have 3 left over. In a lanchestrian analysis (http://navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-076.php is a good explanation with a lot of analysis on what this means for battleships, which are very lanchestrian in how they fight), they trade shots, the weaker side is diminished by more than the stronger, and then in the next volley the stronger side is ahead by more and this spirals out of control. Most real fighting is somewhere between the extremes of linear (probably the closest you can get to this is holding a narrow pass in melee), and n-squared (probably the closest you can get is an odd sort of idealized fight between units that perfectly degrade in ability to deal damage as they receive damage) **Main time indices: Commander position and what they can see, with a digression on how to tell hull bearing relative to you in the turret***: 2:05 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDs5oQW1vNA&t=123s Gunner position and what they can see: 10:55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDs5oQW1vNA&t=656s How you engage a target with the Abrams' main gun: 19:32 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDs5oQW1vNA&t=1172s Battlesight, the very old fashioned way of shooting: 32:04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDs5oQW1vNA&t=1924s *** One thing I think Chieftain is underrating when he mentions the complicated system German tanks in WWII have for telling the commander his relative bearing to the tank hull is just how claustrophobic Panther optics are, there's only the gunner's magnified sight. So you need better than 'gunner, scan 2 o clock' to get the guy onto target with the soda straw he has to work with.
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Mar 2, 2021 03:06
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This is really interesting to me because of Xteenth's second post, which I read previously in the M1 v. King Tiger LP. Yes, there are many paper qualities that are similar. But the Army's research basically indicated that if you shoot first you win, and the way that you shoot first is by being able to A) see the other dude first and B) lay the gun on him first and find the range and C) shoot with a high degree of mechanical accuracy. None of that stuff tends to enter in to the benchracing of tanks. The M48 had some pretty significant innovations in observation, rangefinding and gunlaying compared to the Pz. V. The Pz. V. had a telescopic sight with 28 degrees at 2.5x or 12 degrees at 6x, versus M48 with a coincidence rangefinder and a ballistic computer, and had automatic gunlaying. The M48 is going to acquire targets faster, shoot quicker, and shoot more accurately. Even if all other factors are the same, a Pz. V with M48 fire control would be superior. I don't understand how all of these analysts ignored a bunch of the key factors about tank-on-tank combat, that had been researched and evaluated years before.
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Mar 2, 2021 04:00
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I don't think the Panther is a bad tank but even the "Best until mid-1950s" is a pretty big yikesarooney.
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Mar 2, 2021 04:07
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Jobbo_Fett posted:I don't think the Panther is a bad tank but even the "Best until mid-1950s" is a pretty big yikesarooney. Especially when the T-54 was around! There's just no way I think the Panther is at all a better tank than even the early T-54.
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Mar 2, 2021 04:08
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Raenir Salazar posted:Especially when the T-54 was around! There's just no way I think the Panther is at all a better tank than even the early T-54. Or the Centurion!
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Mar 2, 2021 04:11
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One little bit on the abrams switchology post- m1 Wasnt the first modern tank with that killchain, in fact it went all the way to m1a2 before the full hunter-killer mechanism was implemented with CITV. Leo 2 had a commanders PERI with 8 time magnification and full designation suite from the first prototype, and night configuration from I think a2 variant onwards. Ofc Theres a plenty of coldwar tanks on NATO side with parts of hunter-killer implementation earlier such as I think chieftain, m60 and certainly conqueror, But Leo 2 was first with the suite of TC designation/full stabilization/automatic firing solution from lase return meaning ”designate-lase-hold crosshair-instakill. Also the tube life of m256 cannon is not that short.
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Mar 2, 2021 04:25
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E: Is that the Leo 2's commander, or is the gunner in the loop of that? And is it just putting the crosshair on the target, holding while it gets a solution and when the turret gets there it fires? If so, fully sick. I'll advance the troll thesis, that the Panther is not only not conclusively the best tank of the 1950s, it's not conclusively the best German medium tank in the 1943-45 period. The Panther's gun laying workflow is especially bad not just by the standards of later tanks, but of its time. In Normandy, Panzer Lehr tries its best to avoid bringing Panthers into the bocage until it has no other choice. At Arracourt, almost as a rule Panthers die ineffectually and Panzer IVs have a chance to mount successful counterattacks when hit by Shermans. It does well in a very specific sort of engagement that its other weaknesses make exceptionally unlikely to happen. For the things it does well at, a Jagdpanther is better optimized for the task. Worse yet, it's a nightmare to move around. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Mar 2, 2021 |
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Mar 2, 2021 04:26
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the gun is long tho
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Mar 2, 2021 04:32
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:the gun is long tho Which IIRC was actually a problem in Normandy, as it made it hard to swing the gun around in the bocage without smacking it into poo poo.
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Mar 2, 2021 04:41
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Which IIRC was actually a problem in Normandy, as it made it hard to swing the gun around in the bocage without smacking it into poo poo. Since it's running off the tank engine will the turret just rotate anyway and smash through whatever you hit? Or is that enough to knock your sights out of alignment?
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Mar 2, 2021 05:06
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xthetenth posted:I might've gotten a bit in depth into how "combat reformer" types see tanks and defense analysis and how real analysts look at tank engagements in LatwPIAT's lovely phoenix command king tiger vs abrams thread (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3959659&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1), should I straight up cross-post it here? I've got a rundown of how Mike Sparks' fursona (may or may not actually be him) sees tanks, the much more insane view of Pierre Sprey (yes, more insane than Mike Sparks which should tell you something) and then a bunch of the guts from a 1950s US military paper on combat experiences of armor in WWII. It's a lot of words, mind. Pierre Sprey's current gigs are record producer and seller of audiophile poo poo. As a record producer he fixates on accurate reproduction of live music and gently caress any concepts of post production. The man has a certain amount of consistency.
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Mar 2, 2021 05:22
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The Lone Badger posted:Since it's running off the tank engine will the turret just rotate anyway and smash through whatever you hit? Or is that enough to knock your sights out of alignment? I'm just imagining like an old-school Vaudeville board gag with someone turning and knocking people over but it's tanks. Thank you for that.
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Mar 2, 2021 05:41
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The 1972 oil crisis seems to have broken some people's thinking. "Fuel shortages will force even the military to consider fuel efficiency. And what's more efficient than replacing one 50t tank with two 25t tanks!  " Just what would the mass armies and their logistics be powered with, overall, if oil is in short supply? Horsecarts and hay? Granted, that would be a fascinating setting.
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Mar 2, 2021 10:02
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Nenonen posted:The 1972 oil crisis seems to have broken some people's thinking. "Fuel shortages will force even the military to consider fuel efficiency. And what's more efficient than replacing one 50t tank with two 25t tanks! grain alcohol
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Mar 2, 2021 11:02
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That would make for a pretty grim world, food production and the military competing directly and the advantage going to the guy who is unafraid to starve some people. Kinda-sorta cannibal militaries.
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Mar 2, 2021 12:43
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Did the Brits continue paying Bren licenses after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia? And did they continue paying them after WW2?
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Mar 2, 2021 13:26
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An old buddy of mine just bought a Bren. He was quite surprised to learn that I already own a bunch of ancient .303 I bought on sale like 15 years ago. Is it weird to own ammo for a half dozen calibers which you also have zero guns capable of shooting? Anyway I finally get to go shoot it next weekend, I will post pics if anyone cares.
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Mar 2, 2021 14:13
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The Lone Badger posted:Since it's running off the tank engine will the turret just rotate anyway and smash through whatever you hit? Or is that enough to knock your sights out of alignment? trees and earthen berms are pretty sturdy ChubbyChecker posted:Did the Brits continue paying Bren licenses after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia? And did they continue paying them after WW2? At least for the US, there's a paper on this available here, which is kind of interesting: tl;dr: For existing actively licensed patents where the patent holder was either from an enemy country or an occupied country, the USG took over the patent and collected the same royalties from the licensee as before per the licensing agreement. Essentially, the exact terms of the license remained in force, only with the USG as the patent holder. The USG also eliminated various restrictive clauses (eg export restrictions, assignment of future rights) as required to support the war effort. The USG would also offer the licensee the opportunity to case payment of royalties in return for the revocation of exclusivity. At least in the case of the patent for atabrine cited in the paper, it appears that the USG persuaded the license holder to take this option, which increased total production massively. Unfortunately, since the paper is contemporary, the war isn't over so the only discussion of payment of license fees after the war is the idea that in theory, patent holders of occupied countries would be paid out their royalties as per licensing agreements with the USG as the payer. I'm not sure what would have happened in the event of a change to a non-exclusive license with no royalties, but couldn't find anything in my brief additional searching. It mentions that enemy patents seized in a similar way in WWI were generally not freely returned and the expectation was that this would continue. For the Bren specifically, I did find a reference in a Parliamentary debate from 1943 that the Ministry of Supply continued to pay royalties (in this case to Germans after the occupation of Czechoslovakia in full) until the outbreak of the war, but I can't find anything on postwar payments. I presume that the license fees would have been paid provided that the patent was still in force, as the Cold War hadn't kicked off yet.
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Mar 2, 2021 14:29
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Nenonen posted:The 1972 oil crisis seems to have broken some people's thinking. "Fuel shortages will force even the military to consider fuel efficiency. And what's more efficient than replacing one 50t tank with two 25t tanks! it's still oil, but the people at home are doing the horsecarts and hay instead of driving cars
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Mar 2, 2021 14:30
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aphid_licker posted:That would make for a pretty grim world, food production and the military competing directly and the advantage going to the guy who is unafraid to starve some people. Kinda-sorta cannibal militaries. ChubbyChecker posted:grain alcohol So this is kind of a fun thing - as much as Americans joke about how everything they eat is corn in some form or another, corn that goes into people's mouths is like 9% of the corn we make in the US tops (that 9% also includes "industrial"). Like 27% goes to ethanol, mostly to make fuel already. That grim world is already here it's just instead of war it's "jockeying over congressional subsidies." xthetenth posted:
What I'm getting here is that my video games completely loving lied to me lol
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Mar 2, 2021 14:48
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xthetenth posted:E: Is that the Leo 2's commander, or is the gunner in the loop of that? And is it just putting the crosshair on the target, holding while it gets a solution and when the turret gets there it fires? If so, fully sick. I think given the difficulty of using the technology, and based on some reading of how engagements went, that the fire control capability of ww2 era tanks were more based on crew experience and training than technology, as they required a lot more human input into the parameters. That's how you get Panthers at Arracourt being an absolute joke while 2nd Panzer Division's Panthers on the way to Bastogne wrecking the 9th and 10th AD's tanks. Even in similar situations in the Bulge, there's a difference between the performance of 2 Pz which had spent months in the strategic reserve preparing and, say, 12th SS which was hastily formed, where crews had barely any chance to practice firing the cannons on their brand new Panthers and jagdpanthers.
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Mar 2, 2021 15:01
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I find Sprey and Sparks' analysis pretty convincing. If a time lord offered Heinz Guerdian a hundred Abrams in exchange for a hundred Panthers, he'd surely spit on the offer. His tanks have a similar caliber gun and they weigh the same, but his have more machine gun ammunition and an extra person inside. The advantage clearly goes to the Panther, or if he thinks they're close, surely the cost difference would sway him. lol
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Mar 2, 2021 15:32
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xthetenth posted:Hehehe, speaking of data from WWII: Not available in Canada  Quite a shame, I would have liked a copy.
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Mar 2, 2021 15:57
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:At least for the US, there's a paper on this available [url=https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2231&context=lcp]here[url], which is kind of interesting: many thanks!
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Mar 2, 2021 16:00
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Ensign Expendable posted:Not available in Canada vpn?
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Mar 2, 2021 16:01
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Google Play is too smart for that, turns out.
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Mar 2, 2021 16:10
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