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Yeah, the Churchill always seemed like a real workhorse tank in it's niche. It's true it's not really a very tanky kind of tank, though, it seems like it kind of sat in the role that Germany designed the StuG for. Also, while it was slow it was kind of infamously good at crossing bad ground and going up steep slopes! 
spectralent fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Aug 10, 2016 |
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Aug 10, 2016 20:23
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my dad posted:What's the measure of how tanky a tank is? This is a good question because in terms of keeping aggro and having enough armour and health to survive doing that it did pretty well  I guess I mean "It was bad at the kind of sweeping armoured maneuvers most other armoured vehicles do", it was a dedicated infantry support vehicle.
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Aug 10, 2016 20:27
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OwlFancier posted:Tank pretty good AFAIK yeah, cromwells and similar were very useful in places like north africa where they have wide open plains between fortified rocky outcroppings, in that sort of theater you really do need a cruiser tank because you just want to get up in the enemy's grill as quickly as you can and no infantryman wants to slog it on foot over that much open terrain. Well suited to mechanized warfare and motorized infantry. Cromwells wouldn't have been in North Africa; Cruisers of various stripes were, but the Cromwell was only ever present in Europe. The Cruisers in Africa also had pretty disastrous performance from repeatedly charging nests of infantry and antitank guns with a couple of machineguns. On the other hand, this was probably a doctrinal failure as well; being well designed for a dumb job is still a problem. Ensign Expendable posted:The Cromwell was inferior to the Sherman in literally every conceivable way and also came out two years later. I don't want to join in on a dogpile but it also had better positioned/protected ammo than the first shermans. OwlFancier posted:As can be seen in later years, the general purpose tank doctrine won out. Aside from specialist vehicles, most tank designs are equipped to do a bit of everything, and where the original design doesn't serve, modification kits are developed to help it function better such as the TUSK kits for the modern Abrams tanks. There's a degree to which this was enabled by improvements in power plants, though. If you're working with engines that can give you speed or armour, it might look much more sensible to split the two. Of course, I'm not sure if this was still the case by 1939, but I would assume America's industrial base would give them much better licence to stick engines good enough to try and do a bit of both to acceptable degrees. Even the semi-modern Crusader and Churchill are both working with about 300 horsepower, compared to the M4A1's 400; the first "medium" style British cruisers are at 600 with the Meteor engine powering them.
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Aug 11, 2016 19:41
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I don't know why you wrote a huge block of text about it, but I agree, cruiser tanks were dumb British obsessions that never amounted to anything. Is that the case? I'm aware that AT guns took a real toll on tanks in france, but I thought that had more to do with the conditions there, i.e. being on the offensive in a place littered with narrow hedgerows.
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Aug 11, 2016 20:36
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Too lazy to find dates, but did the Cromwell really enter service before wet-rack Shermans? I'm not sure, but the Cromwells landed on D+1, whereas the M4A1(w) and M4A3(w) weren't in Europe until July and September respectively.
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Aug 11, 2016 20:46
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OwlFancier posted:North Africa had a lot of fortified positions with excellent visibility. While the terrain favors tank mobility, it also gives great line of sight to anything wanting to shoot a tank. And the Germans had some really good AT guns. Yeah, I knew about use of armour in Africa, I just wasn't aware that the high rate of tank losses in France was because of fuckups, I thought it had more to do with the terrain and role they were forced into.
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Aug 11, 2016 22:19
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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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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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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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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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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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Koesj posted:Bagration Bagration Bagration If you say that in a mirror does it summon the ghost of Zhukov?
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Aug 12, 2016 16:22
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Mazz posted:It's always fun to try and explain to people who grew up watching the Hitler Channel how the Soviets post-1943 (give or take) were actually extremely loving good at modern combined arms warfare. I don't think anyone's trying to validate cruiser doctrine, but some of the designs cruiser doctrine produced were good, or at least satisfactory.
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Aug 12, 2016 20:43
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Yeah pretty much those. Also Centurion was created from a Cruiser specification, though it either was immediately or became designated an MBT*. *I don't know which, it's not an era I'm a huge nerd for.
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Aug 12, 2016 21:23
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I'm not fully sold on the Matilda just because of how slow it was. Sure, it was competitively armed and well armored, but tactical mobility was poor due to the top speed and weight. It got a good rep due to the armor, and in a WoT featureless plain that might be fairly useful, but in an actual by-God tank battle I'm not convinced. It was KV-tier impregnable; the degree of armouring outstripped anything the Germans had in common service at the outset of the war. Strategically, not going to make a difference at all; even a vehicle that's totally impregnable can be bypassed, or just surrounded and wait to run out of fuel, and you're right being slow as poo poo wouldn't help. But probably a huge pain in the rear end regardless.
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Aug 12, 2016 21:57
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Siivola posted:Oh man military psych test questions are magical. A Finnish classic is "I have considered a career as a florist (y/n)". What relevance to military service could this possibly have?
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Aug 13, 2016 16:43
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As a kind of related thing: What kind of training did the Red Army give it's soldiers? One of the things I hear a lot is that soviet tank crews were just trained to do their job, whereas the German crews were all trained to fill all roles so if a German tank got hit and lost a driver someone else could drive it, whereas if the Soviet one did the tank was immobile, and suchlike, but then I also read Soviet memoirs (from places like I Remember) where they talk about crew swapping positions during marches so that nobody's getting too tired of one station, or people from other tanks filling in roles when crews were lost, so is that just total bullshit? I also gather that the Red Army had less time to train it's men than the western armies all did, but how significant a difference was that?
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Aug 15, 2016 17:11
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Ensign Expendable posted:From what I read, the commander was trained to perform all crew functions, then cross-training for other crew members was done in the field. Sure, training could have been lacking in some specific instances, but this was the exception rather than the rule. For example, here you can see an SPG crewman's report card. His courses cover a wide variety of topics. Huh, interesting. Would SPGs be unusually well-trained, or is "artillery" here also going to cover tank gunners?
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Aug 15, 2016 17:38
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chitoryu12 posted:The fuel inside is ejected under pressure, but it doesn't spontaneously ignite on contact with air. You still need an igniter at the end to light the fuel. Bullets blowing up oil drums or propane tanks is Hollywood and video game fiction, unless you're firing incendiary rounds. Would the phosphorescent element in a tracer from a machinegun, or the burning element of a smoke shell, possibly do it?
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Aug 15, 2016 21:56
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Fangz posted:Am I right in believing that despite the dramatic effects as shown in various photos and videos, ordinary HE would be a lot more lethal than WP rounds for artillery? HE rounds are amazingly lethal, and WP seems to be pretty localised to the thing it hits, albiet kicking up loads of smoke, so I'm going to go with "yes". I'm not an expert on WP rounds though by any means. Or to be fair, HE rounds.
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Aug 16, 2016 16:55
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Disinterested posted:The most Nazi moment in this book so far is army group north had thousands of Jews in Riga producing huge quantities of desperately needed winter clothes for the German army and then they were all liquidated with the ghetto in November of 1941. Simultaneously the army quartermasters are still at this point telling the generals on the front to stop requesting winter equipment. Wooooooooooooooooooooow. This is both  and  as hell.
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Aug 16, 2016 23:34
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Disinterested posted:It's 20 battalions with their own Lieutenant. That's approx 3 ranks too low. It's like all those sci fi stories where a heroic junior officer ends up in command of a battleship by some calamity, only with more genocide.
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Aug 17, 2016 01:28
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Star fort bypass chat was really interesting, because I admit I used to think "Why didn't they just bypass those things more often?", but I guess a requirement that your static defences stretch for miles of front happened relatively recently. I was going to ask "Why not just surround it" but I guess that's just called a siege.
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Aug 17, 2016 12:15
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Arquinsiel posted:TBH I can see there being a little windmill on the top of the tank connected to the speedometer which will tell you how fast the tank is falling after you've driven it off a cliff. Greco-irish.
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Aug 18, 2016 22:48
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chitoryu12 posted:He's an Irish soldier who moved to the US and served in the Nevada Army National Guard (two tours in the Middle East) as a tank commander. He's qualified on both the M1 Abrams and M2 Bradley for gunnery. This is why he's able to speak so well on the ergonomics of armored vehicles: he knows it firsthand. Also one of his parents was greek.
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Aug 18, 2016 22:51
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Disinterested posted:There were other associated psychological phenomena, particularly this concept of ‘will’: people who complained too much about logistical issues or the need for their men to rest for coming fighting were regarded as defeatist (inasmuch as victory was assumed to be imminent) and also insufficiently lacking the will to victory: ‘will’ is taken to be capable of overcoming any obstacle or difficulty, and people who grumbled about difficulties or realities on the ground were regarded as lacking this crucial quality. What's fascinating is that Soldaten indicates that "will" was principally a faith principle of senior nazi figures and the SS; the POWs spied on make very few references to it and seem to ignore (at best) or mock (at worst) the nazi virtue of "fanaticism". Conversely, "courage" is lauded, but it seems to be taken for granted that courage does not also require ignorance of practicalities.
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Aug 19, 2016 00:54
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Arquinsiel posted:Well I more mean how he pronounces "traverse" like he's saying "Travers'" etc. It's an Irish accent trait I've heard before, but I can't remember where from. I'm really enjoying the actual tank talk, because he's got a good rules of thumb to evaluate them with. It's also a great series because "How well does this tank do in a white room" and "How well does this tank do as an operational asset" are all pretty heavily covered, but "How much would I like to be sat in this given seat" is, I think, pretty unique to that show.
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Aug 19, 2016 01:31
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Disinterested posted:You get the sense about the campaigns of 1941 as a whole that the Germans had thrust a brittle weapon in to the Soviet Union's gut only to have it snap off at the hilt. This is an amazing line.
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Aug 19, 2016 20:26
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PittTheElder posted:How destructive is the firing of a 15 inch battleship gun anyway? Like is it dangerous to any crew who might be topside during a firing? Undoubtedly it would be deafeningly loud I guess. IIRC the reforms were meant to be done in 43 or 44? So the window to attack wasn't huge.
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Aug 19, 2016 21:10
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Disinterested posted:This is a good opportunity to ask a question Stahel doesn't answer: why, in the figures I listed above, would the IV's losses be 75% of total strength, while the III and II's losses were at 50%? Given most of the losses were reliability or supply related, were the IV's in 1941 that much more unreliable than the rest of the tank fleet? He says that they tended to ditch the heavier armour when they had to ditch vehicles for fuel and parts reasons as well, so I'm assuming that might have been a factor? The Pz IV was a couple of tons heavier than the III, depending on the mark of course. I don't think it was a massive difference, though, but that might explain it if they're preferentially cannibalising heavier vehicles?
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Aug 19, 2016 21:58
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Plan Z posted:The most disgusting thing to me is how they're slowly achieving some kind of exalted status as an "elite fighting force." To say nothing of the fact that they were largely poor-to-acceptable fighters, I'm more bothered that they're treated as anything but jackbooted monsters. Yeah, the SS have nothing particularly redeeming about them. Of course, reading stuff like this, it's really easy to see why people go "X atrocity? Probably the SS" whenever the Heer get brought up...
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Aug 20, 2016 18:06
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aphid_licker posted:Are we just posting MAJOR HUNKS now? Speaking of all these dudes what's with the hats that don't fit? I notice it on a bunch of parade uniforms.
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Aug 20, 2016 20:41
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OwlFancier posted:It was also, I believe, supposedly an uncommonly bad winter that year. This was german propaganda at the time but it wasn't especially true. Every winter probably seems like the icepocalypse when you've decided that warm woolies are an unnecessary frivolity. EDIT: Hell, the winter came early, which cut short the far more devastating Rasptitsa by freezing over the mud-hell that the rainy season makes the roads. And no, it wasn't the case that winter came too early for the winter clothing to get to them; the winter clothing didn't exist because the Germans were expecting a campaign that took... what was it, 6-8 weeks? They were completely delusional and failed to prepare for a protracted conflict. spectralent fucked around with this message at 13:31 on Aug 21, 2016 |
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Aug 21, 2016 13:27
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Nenonen posted:Hitler should have invaded Russia during winter 1939-40, I hear Soviets sucked at winter operations at that time. Ironically the winter war clusterfuck was one of the reasons that the Germans assumed the Soviets would just immediately collapse.
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Aug 21, 2016 15:58
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nothing to seehere posted:Just post
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Aug 21, 2016 23:00
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Deptfordx posted:Isn't a lot of IFV ammo sabot in one form or another? Much smaller rounds obviously, but much higher ROF. Is stray sabot bits something infantry have to watch out for in situations where they're advancing on something with the Bradley/BMP/Warrior etc at the back providing fire support. I'd expect there's a combination of sabot petals of an IFV being way less high-energy, and also that the use cases for 25mm sabot are generally ones that preclude having loads of infantry standing in front of your vehicle. If you're firing over your dude's heads as they're charging towards something, you're probably firing HE-T. If your guys are charging directly towards a tank something's probably gone wrong somewhere. To be clear, HE rounds so far as I know are generally not sabot.
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Aug 22, 2016 15:15
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Deptfordx posted:The fire support was just an example, it's easy to think of a situation where there's friendly infantry between the autocannon vehicle using sabot rounds and the enemy. An enemy vehicle suddenly popping up on a flank is an obvious one. I guess either they use HE for fear of conking someone, or they reason the odds of hitting someone are fairly low and there's little KE* to them and let rip. I wouldn't know which. *I assume there's far less force imparted on the sabot of a 25-30mm gun compared to one four to five times the size.
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Aug 22, 2016 17:58
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On the historical wargames thread Colonial Air Force posted this: http://www.20thgmb.com/rkaa-tactics.html It's a miniatures summary of soviet breakthrough tactics 1944-45. I have a question (besides the obvious "is it accurate"); how many guys would that be standing in for? I assume there's some scale involved, but if it's a stand = platoon or such then that's a lot lower level than I pictured deep battle operating.
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Aug 25, 2016 13:46
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Ensign Expendable posted:The article gets the gist of it right, but messes up on the details. The IS-2s are following too close and without an infantry escort, plus anything where a heavy tank brigade is used would be way too important for T-70s. Also all the fluff like "there was an expectation of friendly fire", "losses of 37% were normal" and "guns standing literally axle to axle" id nonsense. Also the Soviet rolling barrage was a lot more complicated than described. What kind of scale-ratio should I be inserting for the diagrams? How many tanks are those figures standing in for? Is it pretty much as-is or should I be expecting a company wherever there's a team stand or whatever?
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Aug 25, 2016 16:33
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Ensign Expendable posted:Again, that's a very liberal translation. The term was "obkatka", literally "rolling over" Are there any cool/funny Russian soldier terms for things?
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Aug 25, 2016 17:32
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