Splode posted:

Is it the panther or the tiger that's gears break before it runs out of fuel. I can never remember.

During WW2, I've seen a lot of off hand mentions of enemy equipment being captured and used. How did the various belligerents go about this? Specifically, how did they avoid friendly fire incidents? Were there a bunch of panzer IVs with red stars painted on them?

Empress Theonora posted:

It's more like "the Sherman is literally the only tank I can identify by sight because I'm a WW2 equipment dunce", actually.

edit: are there, like, ww2 tank flashcards or something. i'm kind of embarrassed i can't even tell a t-34 from a....... well, that's the only tank i can name.

Koramei posted:

why does it have an eagle on it? i thought those were always associated with nobility/ monarchy

Ainsley McTree posted:

I enjoyed the Brothers in Arms games because they were as much about pointing and shouting as they were about actually shooting anybody. I liked SWAT 4 for the same reason. More FPS games need to be about pointing and shouting, in my opinion.

Also, tankchat caused me to remember that the KV-2 existed, which in my opinion looks like one of those tanks that probably ought to be fake (or at least a goofy prototype that never saw combat) but I guess nope, it was out there.

Grey Hunter posted:

I'm thinking of running a game of Black Powder that has all the divisions commanded by Goons (on both sides) - with everything going through emails and messages moving via riders. I want to recreate as much of the fog of war as possible - I'm not sure HOW often to make the messengers get lost, or how fast to make them move yet, but the planning stage is there.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Well, when you have one road through a marsh and a giant column of vehicles, any tank that could reliably penetrate any of the tank therein would've been successful at that. I remember it ran out of ammo, which is why the crew ended up abandoning it and withdrawing.

quote:

Also, the KV-2 did not like any terrain that wasn't flat.

P-Mack posted:

So I'm playing HOI4 as France, and this game is making me think that the Maginot line was actually cool and good. Am I wrong?

P-Mack posted:

We're the French just totally in the dark while this traffic jam was developing? What stopped them from loving the Germans up before they got themselves through the forest and sorted out on the other side?

HEY GAL posted:

the miniatures game? only if our little dudes really exist on a table somewhere and Grey Hunter takes pictures of them every so often

Ensign Expendable posted:

It's 100% for sure a KV-1, but it had an extra guy along for the ride, so everyone thinks it was a KV-2.

quote:

"Tank destroyers vs. towed guns vs. just give every Sherman a 76 mm gun" is as common and uncreative topic as "hey have you guys heard about that bear" and "Gay Black Hitler"

P-Mack posted:

Thanks for the in depth summary. The above is what I did in HOI, managed to hold the line until the yanks showed up.

Would it be fair to say that the invasion of France, and Russia for that matter, depended heavily on the defenders making a poo poo ton of mistakes, large and small? I just get the impression that gay black Hitler is really facing an uphill fight just to reproduce Germany's historical performance, let alone do that and also add that one weird trick wehraboos think would win the war.

pthighs posted:

Can someone explain what was so special about that extra millimeter between the 76mm and 75mm?

I mean I get it upped the penetrating power but was there a muzzle velocity change as well or something? Otherwise I don't see how a single mm makes a difference.

Plan Z posted:

Yeah I mean considering that the picture depicts four vehicles, two chassis, three guns, and two turrets, I couldn't blame anyone.

Xerxes17 posted:

As others have said, the total weight carried per soldier has generally been the same since ever as humans haven't changed much. Lighter body armor is kinda why it has been put into practice as it has to have a certain level of protection given for a certain amount of weight. Like in WW2 you possibly could have given dudes rifle-protective breastplates, but they would have weighed far too much and often not made much of a difference anyway due to getting shot in the extremities or the face. (See: Kelly Gang from 19th century Australia ) That's before you get into the whole thing of artillery, mortars and etc.

However the existence of the APC/IFV being a core part of the squad structure has led to soldiers being a bit more overloaded than they have been in the past as the vehicle is supposed to take them the big distances. I recall reading about some complaints in Iraq that US soldiers had no chance of chasing down insurgents as they have what, 30kg of gear on them? While Johnny Insurgent has his civvies, an AK and two magazines that he is carrying.

However the bigger thing I'd say that has lead to more body armor being made is that the armies have been getting smaller.



Body armor for half a million is doable. Body armor for 3million, not so much. Just look at the soviets who were still just rocking a helmet and shirt for several decades after WW2.

Mind you this isn't my area so I could be wrong but since the new thread doctrine is ...

SeanBeansShako posted:

I just had a disturbing thought.

What if this myth persists simply because it is easier to remember the bullshit rather than explain it. This might explain a lot of things with these kind of myths.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Doubtful, since again you're not creating enough of a pressure difference by missing with a projectile. You might react instinctively by going to ground because you heard (or saw) a projectile coming your way /passing you by, but you're not getting dizzy or knocked off your feet by a miss.

Fangz posted:

Can someone explain what exactly happens in a tank when it is penetrated by an anti tank shell? What actually 'takes out' the tank?

Is it the ammunition cooking off? Overpressure killing the crew? The crew directly being killed by spalling/fragments and the survivors deciding to bail out?

Xerxes17 posted:

Czech Tanks at the start of WW2 were notorious for having terrible spalling because the plates were rather brittle high-hardness stuff and everything was riveted.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Not sure, but at that point its not overpressure anyways so

Dick Trauma posted:

Can someone talk a little about the change from rifled to smooth? I always thought the rifling was to give stability through spinning. Are the rounds themselves stabilizing now?

Nebakenezzer posted:

If you define "good" as having the heaviest armored vehicle ever deployed, hell yeah, eat poo poo Jadgtiger

bewbies posted:

To expand a bit more the developers aren't idiots, they put a ton of work into analyzing all of the mobility and sustainment requirements for what we have taken to calling jabba the tank. I don't know any details but they seemed...less pessimistic than you'd have thought.

It is basically being built for one mission, and that is an offensive type operation in eastern Europe, and there basically wasn't a way to do it without more passive armor (apparently, I really don't know much about APS options and how they perform versus modern missiles although the inference is...not well at all). There was also sort of the general theme that this was the end of the line for the Abrams and with it probably tanks as we know them which has all sorts of interesting implications.

Phanatic posted:

1. Any round will precess/nutate a little bit. As the projectile length:diameter ratio increases, the degree of spin required to keep precession to an acceptable degree becomes impractically high. For a kinetic penetrator, you want to maximize cross-sectional density, which means increasing length:diameter ratio, which means you reach a point where spin-stabilization doesn't work anymore and you use a fin-stabilized projectile at which point you go smoothbore.

2. Spinning a HEAT round is counterproductive because it serves to disperse the penetrator jet. If you're using a rifled barrel you can use slip bands on your HEAT rounds that allow them to leave the barrel without much spin, but if you have a smoothbore barrel you don't need to worry about that.


Literally everything we've procured for decades has been procured with the assumption that we'll have air supremacy in the area of conflict. Which is sort of bad as soon as we have to do anything more important than Operation Bomb Useless Dirt because the USAF is the smallest it's been since it was part of the Army, we don't really have any mobile SAM platform worth talking about, and we cut the F-22 buy in favor of a bunch of F-35s that will never be anything more than acceptable. The Russians have been doing spectacularly effective things with rocket artillery in Ukraine and we have let a lot of our capabilities go without much attention for far too long.

Xerxes17 posted:

Okay, so.

First we have Rolled Homogeneous Armor which is commonly shortened down to RHA. This is exactly what it sounds like and is just simply steel with a certain range of qualities that you cut, weld, rivet, bend, etc into the desired shape of armor that you want. RHA can have quite a few variables such as ductility, hardness, high-hardness heat treating, and much more. These qualities will determine how it deals with penetrations, non-penetrations, sharp-nose impacts, repeated impacts, blunt-nose impacts, smaller shells, larger shells and so on. Material quality of the steel is extremely important and running out of things like Molybdenum will cause big problems for you. However the basic rule of thumb here is "more is better" so 50mm of RHA is going to be not nearly as good as 100mm of RHA.

Cast Armor is steel that has instead been cast into shape instead of forged. This apparently makes it not as strong as RHA but makes getting those lovely curved shapes that cause deflections (See Soviet soup-bowl turrets T-54 and onwards) possible. Both of these are very basic technologies by this point and not up to the task of protecting a tank. Consider how much 200mm of RHA must weigh, and that most basic HEAT weapons can go through 300mm of RHA easily, well plain old steel can't deliver anymore.

Next however we get to Spaced Armor which is either of the above that has a gap in between two plates. This gap will cause HEAT jets to dissipate and can create significant lateral forces on APDS and APFSDS that make them shatter or lose energy. Spaced armor works in a pinch even to this day, but it was always much better against HEAT than KE, which soon saw similar development, reaching +400mm RHA equivalent numbers. Against such, the KE round will just punch through the two plates and the gap with no problem. However it dies help against smaller rounds. For example the Germans put 5mm skirts on their tanks to protect against 14.5mm AT-rifle fire as the skirt would deform the bullet and make it fail against the main armor. A modern example is the "slat armor" that you see on nearly everything in the middle east to protect against the very common RPG-7.

So what to do? Now we get to Composite Armor where we start adding things like rubber, aluminium-silica glass, fiberglass, ceramics, DU, and other things to fill the space in spaced armor. This is where stuff starts getting very complex (and classified!) but broadly speaking this armor type works by making the penetrator go through a mixture of materials. This causes the penetrator, HEAT or KE, to start "refracting" and get bent out of shape due to it existing int multiple phases at the same time. "Combination-K", "Super Dolly Parton" and "Chobham" are all examples of this.

Next we get to Non-Explosive Reactive Armor often called NERA. NERA composite armor that is designed to change while under attack in order to counter the penetration in more ways than just a static block. Imagine that you take a big straight-line punch at someone with all of your strength. But, before your fist connects they hit you on your elbow causing it to fold inward. Now it's only your fist and forearm that is "on target" while the real power, your body mass and power merely crumples in a different direction. Same principle applies here. For example, the turret facing of T-72B tanks have arrays of high-hardness plates of RHA surrounded by rubber. When the round hits, the plates will get penetrated, but then the rubber will cause them to vibrate back and forth laterally and repeatedly, introducing shear force on KE rounds which hopefully makes them fragment and the compression and decompression of the penetrator as it breaks through the layers also plays a part. Against HEAT this kind of armor is even more effective as the constant high-low density changes play havoc with HEAT cone formation. Nearly all tank armor these days is some kind of NERA.

Finally we get to Explosive Reactive Armor which operates on the same principle. However instead of using differing materials in an array to move steel plates around on a hit, they just use high explosives to cause a much more energetic effect. Basically, angled plates sit in a box surrounded by explosives in an "N" shape. When they are hit, they detonate and push these plates into the penetrator from several directions. This stuff is extremely effective against HEAT, but only certain kinds add to KE protection. Russian Kontackt-1 and 5 are good examples of each. The problem with this stuff is that it's basically coating your tank in frag-grenades which is no good for your supporting infantry.

Also keep in mind that modern tanks also have all this fancy stuff concentrated on the front only as it's simply too heavy to armor the sides as well. As an example the Cheiftain Mk.3 would have 200 to +400mm RHA on it's front (including armor angles here too) but only a paltry 50mm on the sides. This can be improves a little by putting ERA blocks here, but against KE threats there is not much to be done aside from "don't get shot".

Tevery Best posted:

TerminalSaint posted:

To expand on that question, at what point do we switch over entirely to remotely operated tanks or tankettes? Ditching the crew compartment might open up some interesting design possibilities.

Tevery Best posted:

The gear was 100% Soviet-spec. The uniforms were made in the USSR based on those taken from POWs, but it's not hard to reverse-engineer a uniform. And even then, some uniform pieces (e.g. helmets and overcoats) were Soviet-spec.

As for whether it was a Soviet army dressed up to look Polish - that's kind of a political question? Certainly it was overwhelmingly made up of Poles, not Soviets, aside from a large part of the mid- and high-ranking officer corps. The London government denounced it as Soviet, because it did not recognise its authority (and rejecting the legal government is a serious strike against the unit in this regard). Unlike the Polish forces in the West, which at least nominally were subordinate to the Polish Commander-in-Chief and were legally forces of an independent and legal government (even if in practice they operated like British units), the 1st Army did not answer to any sort of Polish political authority, its only superiors were the Soviet army headquarters. We can also note that at least a large part of its soldiers - if not the majority - did not share its political outlooks or goals.

But fundamentally, it boils down to how you define "a Polish army".

Xerxes17 posted:

I recall reading in Anthony Beevor's Berlin that the Navodchiks (artillery spotters) consider themselves to be snipers but with much bigger guns.

Trin Tragula posted:

Short answer: yes, everywhere on every front where there's trench warfare, every so often there's a ping as some idiot gets up on the fire-step to let a working party come through the narrow trench, forgets to duck down, and catches the wrong bloke's eye at 500 yards. That particular loophole is such an obvious target, high on the highest hill, that it almost certainly has one or more sniper posts that were put there to cover it and with standing orders that your first priority is to immediately shoot any fucker who opens it, and given the accuracy it's probable that the main post covering it has a fixed rifle.

Longer answer:

Hogge Wild posted:

MrMojok posted:

OK tankophiles, I know of no better place to ask this.

My Dad just texted me raving about "Fury", a movie I have been wanting to watch. He told me a bit about the plot, and when he got to the point about "lone tank holding off 300 Wehrmacht troops" I said something like "RIP, boys"

I am no armor-head, but it has always been my understanding that a single tank without supporting infantry vs enemy infantry is pretty much hosed. Then Dad says "Yeah Hollywood, but something like this did really happen" and quotes the wiki article about the film, which claims that the film was inspired by a story in "Death Traps", a book which I haven't read, but have heard mentioned in these milhist threads several times. Wiki says it was a disabled(!?) tank that had a bunch of German troops walk up on it without spotting it at night, and the next morning the tank was still there and alive with lots of dead Germans around it.

Can anyone tell me about this? Cursory googling leads me to believe the story is possibly apocryphal, but I don't know.

I'm going to watch the film regardless based on his recommendation, but I find it difficult to believe a single tank with no supporting infantry of its own could hold its own against large numbers of infantry then, now, or ever. They cannot even see well enough out of the tank, to defend themselves. Am I correct, naive, or maybe just ignorant?

Also, what did you folks think of the film overall, if anyone saw it?

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

It's more like the SS troops in Fury aren't supposed to represent real people. Neither is the Tiger supposed to represent a real tank.


Also, even if you need to sperg about Fury, the tank is supposed to be a Tiger II.

MrMojok posted:

Sorry, was tanks trying to maneuver around to shoot each other in the rear end not a real thing?

feedmegin posted:

Likely, even. How likely is it that a tanker at the time would remember the minutiae of Tiger I versus Tiger II side armour in a situation like that, even if they realised it was a Tiger II and not a I, as opposed to thinking 'we've got one shot at this we've gotta make it a rear shot or we might be toast'. Not to mention this isn't binary, it's not like it's 100% certain a side shot would work on a I, just more likely, so even then hitting it on the rear is more of a sure thing.

Perestroika posted:

Huh, was that based on intelligence reports or actual frontline experiences? I'd always kind of assumed that the Ferdinand was another white elephant () like the Sturmtiger or Jagdtiger, produced only in small numbers and with such reliability and mobility issues that it never really made a meaningful impact anywhere.