860 réponses à ce sujet

[vometia]

Pffffft, all tanks modern and old pale in comparison to the mighty sherman! The best worst tank evar!

I'm not entirely sure why the Sherman gets so much hate, really: it may not be the most exciting tank, but it was certainly good enough. It also had a nice big fat turret that could have serious firepower like a 17-pounder shoe-horned into it, which could do some really serious pwning at comfortable ranges.

My personal favourite is the Comet, which might not have had fancy-pants sloped armour (the just-slightly-too-late for the war Centurion that replaced it finally did that) but its 77mm gun was powerful and accurate, it was very quick and reliable and had a conveniently low profile.

I guess I like a lot of the tanks that remain largely overlooked, or if they aren't totally ignored, they get a bad reputation. Another favourite is the Panzer IV, which often finds itself forgotten, left in the shadow of its bigger siblings, even though it was the real work-horse of the German army.

[bEVEsthda]

Well, if the Germans had kept down the weight of the Pkw V, i.e. Panther to 30 tonne, as demanded in the army's original specs, they could have had a viable successor/replacement for the Pkw IV, and maybe been able to produce and get it to the front in viable quantities. As it is, Hitler & co demanded another 16 tonnes of unneeded armor, and they had yet another immovable piece of breakdown-prone junk.

 

As for the lack of love for the Sherman, teenage fanboys only understand big cannons and thick armor. Anybody can build a tank like that. It doesn't make it a good tank design. A good tank design is one that allows you to win the war, instead of guaranteeing that you'll lose it. I'll take 49,000 Shermans that can be easily transported by standard ships and standard railway, and are easily loaded and unloaded with standard equipment, over 500 Tiger II that trickle to the front one at a time, every day in the week. I'd also rather take 80,000 T34s which - in a pinch - can be driven to the front by themselves.

[Kaiser Arian XVII]

Pffffft, all tanks modern and old pale in comparison to the mighty sherman! The best worst tank evar! 
 
 
https://medium.com/w...nk-4631b6388008
 
Murica, FU*K YEAH! 
 

 

Those guns are better than Brits, Japs, Germans and Commies guns though. I HAVE PLAYED ENOUGH CALL OF DUTY TO KNOW THIS!

[vometia]

Well, if the Germans had kept down the weight of the Pkw V, i.e. Panther to 30 tonne, as demanded in the army's original specs, they could have had a viable successor/replacement for the Pkw IV, and maybe been able to produce and get it to the front in viable quantities. As it is, Hitler & co demanded another 16 tonnes of unneeded armor, and they had yet another immovable piece of breakdown-prone junk.
 
As for the lack of love for the Sherman, teenage fanboys only understand big cannons and thick armor. Anybody can build a tank like that. It doesn't make it a good tank design. A good tank design is one that allows you to win the war, instead of guaranteeing that you'll lose it. I'll take 49,000 Shermans that can be easily transported by standard ships and standard railway, and are easily loaded and unloaded with standard equipment, over 500 Tiger II that trickle to the front one at a time, every day in the week. I'd also rather take 80,000 T34s which - in a pinch - can be driven to the front by themselves.

Yeah, I heard about the "mission creep" problem with the Tiger's specifications. Maybach still tried to alleviate the problem of the overly heavy tank by pushing for a V16 engine to be put in place of the now way over-stressed V12, but he was overruled by some pointy-haired boss who said it would add unnecessary weight. Probably the same one who insisted on the inclusion of all that extra armour that caused the problem in the first place. Still, it makes the fanboys all excitable when they look at its specs. Ooh yeah, specs.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the Chaffee in my list of favourites. Yeah I know, technically it's a bit rubbish, but look at how cute it is!

[bEVEsthda]

Here is another Icon:

 

 

 

This is the Messerschmidt Me 262. The worlds first jet fighter in operational service.

 

Though it should be understood that there was a good deal of desperation behind that “operational service”. USAAF or USAF would never have deployed the aircraft. The American air force demanded a minimum of 70 hours service life from a jet engine before accepting an aircraft into service. When the Me 262 was tested by allies after the war, they only got an average of about one hour per engine. One have to assume though, that German pilots selected to fly the Me 262 had a better idea of how to treat the engines. Current publishing gives the engines about 12 to 10 hours service life. A few years back, when texts were much more fanboy-ish, it was more common to see “estimates” of 30 hours. A very old quote from a very reputable source, though I don't remember who or where, estimated a 7 hours average, but that probably included an expectation of soon-failure and premature exchange of the engine.

Anyway, whatever, the big problem for the Me 262 was the German jet engines. A short service life directly impacts numbers available, and overtaxes production capacity and economy. It also impacts survivability, as so many combat sorties had to be concluded by limping home on one engine.

 

The aircraft in itself, the airframe, was a great design, probably Messerschmidt's finest during the war. The systems and details were exquisite and the plane handled very well. It was cleverly and skillfully designed to make the most of its advantage of jet-engines, by being optimized for as much speed as the weak engines and huge fuel load could give. This meant a high wing loading, but it was the correct choice for the time and role of the Me 262.

 

That the Me 262 emerged so mature in 1945 should be no surprise though. Design started already 1939 and the first jet powered prototype flew already in the summer 1942. So it had a healthy development period.

 

Another problem with the Me 262 was the armament. The four MK 108 cannons were very unsuitable for a fast aircraft. Their muzzle velocity was way too low, as was their fire rate.

 

There are no mysteries with the Me 262. The plane is well documented and was extensively tested by the allies after the war. And today, replicas fly with modern, good engines.

The level top speed of the Me 262 was 530 Mph aka 850 Km/h at about 22,000 ft, nothing else. The never to exceed ias was Mach 0.84, nothing else, though apparently the Germans had reached Mach 0.86 during development testing. But it got difficult to control above M 0.83 and would get fatally out of control and disintegrate at speeds somewhere above M 0.84.

 

This makes it a true 1'th generation jet fighter, entirely comparable to de Havilland Vampire, Gloster Meteor and Lockheed P-80. It compares unfavorably to these mostly because of the latter's developments  extending beyond the end of WW2, and their eventually much better jet engines. But during the war, it was the fastest at altitude, despite the rather weak engines.

 

Adolf Galland's perception and books have promoted the idea, that Hitler's idea to make a bomber of the Me 262 delayed the fighter program. This is unlikely. The needed design additions for carrying bombs were already made and in the loop by then. If anything, Hitler's interest likely only secured better funding for the engines. The engines were always the problem and the main reason for delays.

 

Lack of strategic alloy metals is often quoted as a source for German engine problems. But the Germans also settled for only developing axial flow jet engines. Axial flow engines wouldn't come mature until around 1950. This technology has a good deal of inherent problems. It relies on aerodynamic flows around airfoils in the compressor to function. This, of course, only occurs under certain conditions which forms a slim envelope. The British, main inventor of the jet-engine, Whittle, realized early on that a radial compressor would be a more fruitful way for early developments. This compresses the intake air by centrifugal action, and cannot stall as easily as the axial compressor. By also giving a more consistent high compression, and thus greater expansion after the burner, the heat problems for the turbines are less severe and fuel efficiency better.

 

The allies radial compressor engines matured much faster, and by the end of WW2 they had some very good engines ready, like the American Allison J-33 , RR Derwent and de Havilland Goblin. “Luft '46” would not have been a good experience for Germany.

 

That-withstanding, German engineers came up with a lot of good ideas which were incorporated in general jet-engine design, like auto-throttling devices and cooling turbine blades with a boundary layer of cooling air, for example.

 

Final words: The main impact of the Me 262 was that it put a thorough boot to the butt of allied jet-engine programs.

 

- It undoubtedly brought in the age of jet powered flight like no other thing!

[Kaiser Arian XVII]

Here is another Icon:

 

 

 

This is the Messerschmidt Me 262. The worlds first jet fighter in operational service.

 

*sniped*

 

Final words: The main impact of the Me 262 was that it put a thorough boot to the butt of allied jet-engine programs.

 

- It undoubtedly brought in the age of jet powered flight like no other thing!

 

Another great Messerschmidt!

[Althix]

 Suvurov

are you talking about Rezun V.B? if so - i pity you.

[Fidite Nemini]

are you talking about Rezun V.B? if so - i pity you.

 

Ah, so you demand sources and when I give that to you, you declare the sources are pityful ... AGAIN without explaining why (did his defection color your opinion, or is there a real academic credency issue here that you simply chose not to mention?). Anyway, there's no reasoning with someone like you. You evidently won't accept something that doesn't conform with your own bias.

[Althix]

i will explain why. Rezun is good enough as writer of fiction. Because no one in the right state on mind would consider him to be a serious historical writer.

 

Aside from criticism across the globe from professors of history from Russia to USA (such as David R. Stone, Philip Michael Hett Bell, Walter Moss, David E. Murphy, Jörg Echternkamp, Stefan Martens, Alexander Hill, Gabriel Gorodetsky and many others.) Because mister Rezun can't prove anything and never had any facts to back his fantasies up. Rezun also claimed that SR was about to attack Nazi Germany, so the Nazi Germany attacked first. And all of this on a background of Mein Kampf.

 

It was THAT bad so you couldn't find a book from a proper professor of history and read it? Like this one?

http://www.oxfordbib...791279-0050.xml

 

And instead of making your what was it? school presentation? on a basis of work of serious historians, you decided to read mister Rezun...

 

Well, what can i say? It was a pleasure to have this conversation with you. Have a nice day.

[Aimi]

Ah, so you demand sources and when I give that to you, you declare the sources are pityful ... AGAIN without explaining why (did his defection color your opinion, or is there a real academic credency issue here that you simply chose not to mention?). Anyway, there's no reasoning with someone like you. You evidently won't accept something that doesn't conform with your own bias.

I have to agree with Althix here. As much as "Suvorov" - the pen-name of Vladimir Rezun - was able to write an entertaining book, and as much as it was formed around a core of correct observations, much if not most of Inside the Soviet Army is rather flawed. He was a defector, and he mostly wrote what Western military audiences expected to read. Also, he couldn't check his facts while on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Most of the American officers I know who served in the eighties have a copy of Rezun's book; it helped spawn a cottage industry of doomsaying literature like The Third World War: August 1985 and Red Army that posited a Soviet military that was internally monstrous and externally nearly invincible, a situation which would require Western armies to be beefed up dramatically to match Soviet forces in Europe.

Rezun's more famous book, Icebreaker, has come in for nearly-universal academic opprobrium. In it, he claimed that Stalin was planning an invasion of Nazi Europe set to begin in the summer of 1941, but the Hitlerites struck first and, with the Red Army massed on the borders preparing to invade, were easily able to encircle their foes. There is basically no historian who takes the so-called Icebreaker thesis seriously, and mentioning it in most quarters is equivalent to citing Ancient Aliens or Anatoliy Fomenko's "New Chronology". Rezun's evidence was largely illusory, and his reasoning was the sort of tour-guide, barrack-room history that is never all that reliable.

Icebreaker pretended to be a work of history; Inside the Soviet Army was more of a handbook and lacked most such pretensions, but since it was written by the same author with a similarly cavalier approach to detail, it got tarred with the same brush. There are some decent observations in the book, but you'd be better off finding them in a source with a bit more rigor. Monstrous the Soviet Union certainly was, but Rezun is not the author one ought to prove it.

[Fidite Nemini]

I have to agree with Althix here. As much as "Suvorov" - the pen-name of Vladimir Rezun - was able to write an entertaining book, and as much as it was formed around a core of correct observations, much if not most of Inside the Soviet Army is rather flawed. He was a defector, and he mostly wrote what Western military audiences expected to read. Also, he couldn't check his facts while on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Most of the American officers I know who served in the eighties have a copy of Rezun's book; it helped spawn a cottage industry of doomsaying literature like The Third World War: August 1985 and Red Army that posited a Soviet military that was internally monstrous and externally nearly invincible, a situation which would require Western armies to be beefed up dramatically to match Soviet forces in Europe.

Rezun's more famous book, Icebreaker, has come in for nearly-universal academic opprobrium. In it, he claimed that Stalin was planning an invasion of Nazi Europe set to begin in the summer of 1941, but the Hitlerites struck first and, with the Red Army massed on the borders preparing to invade, were easily able to encircle their foes. There is basically no historian who takes the so-called Icebreaker thesis seriously, and mentioning it in most quarters is equivalent to citing Ancient Aliens or Anatoliy Fomenko's "New Chronology". Rezun's evidence was largely illusory, and his reasoning was the sort of tour-guide, barrack-room history that is never all that reliable.

Icebreaker pretended to be a work of history; Inside the Soviet Army was more of a handbook and lacked most such pretensions, but since it was written by the same author with a similarly cavalier approach to detail, it got tarred with the same brush. There are some decent observations in the book, but you'd be better off finding them in a source with a bit more rigor. Monstrous the Soviet Union certainly was, but Rezun is not the author one ought to prove it.

 

 

Never read Icebreaker. And only read Inside the Soviet Army for the chapters alluding to the penal battalions. Like I said, school presentation. Not something of academic value like an essay you submit to a prof during your studies. I'm pretty sure a good part of the good score I got was due to the fact I used more than just Wikipedia as was the norm for most people at that time.

 

Is there anything lightweight I could read up on the side to eliminate my seemingly hazardous information sample size?

[L. Han]

I thought the Sherman was designed to be an infantry support gun carriage. With such a low velocity gun and tendency to have it's turret blown off, the soldiers actually refer the Sherman as a deathtrap. That said, it was probably one of the most efficient battle tanks in the war. Being very easy to fix, fast due to it's (relatively) lightweight chassis, and some fancy new suspensions that most other tanks did not have at that time.

[Fidite Nemini]

Well according to Patton the m1 garand was the "greatest battle implement ever devised." They were still using them in Korea, and the replacement m14 was pretty much just an m1 with a bigger magazine.

 

Considering that the average rifleman of WW2 was still using bolt-action rifles, a semi-automatic weapon fielded in significant quantities meant that US troops had a noticable advantage in individual firepower. The various submachineguns that were in use during WW2 were unbeaten in urban warfare, but horribly inaccurate at range and the odd number of rifles that would usher in the age of assault rifles were still far in between compared to the spread of the M1 among the regular US troops.

[bEVEsthda]

I thought the Sherman was designed to be an infantry support gun carriage. With such a low velocity gun and tendency to have it's turret blown off, the soldiers actually refer the Sherman as a deathtrap. That said, it was probably one of the most efficient battle tanks in the war. Being very easy to fix, fast due to it's (relatively) lightweight chassis, and some fancy new suspensions that most other tanks did not have at that time.

 

It was. Just as most tanks. It was well protected against normal battle field damages. As for dedicated antitank cannons, no tank could withstand those, and no tank was good to sit in, in those circumstances. And the same can be said about aircraft rockets. All tanks had a tendency to have their turrets blown off, you could say.

 

The Tigers had some greater resistance to cannon fire than most, depending upon the cannon, distance and direction. But it didn't last. The 17-pounder the British equipped their "Firefly" -Shermans with, shot through the Tigers just as readily as the Tigers shot through the Shermans. But the Firefly was a dedicated anti-tank tank, so it never replaced the normal Sherman.

 

The thing is that in the end it's not worthwhile to sacrifice so much in numbers, mobility and practicality, as the Germans did, just for thicker armor.

 

As for the crews and their chances of survival? I'll do this sloppy, but you'll get the idea: Let's assume five times as many Shermans face Tiger tanks. Let's assume that the Tigers, despite their numerical inferiority are able to get an equal exchange in kills. What is then the Sherman crews' chances of survival? 80%.  What would have been their chances facing a Tiger in another Tiger?  50%.

(It wouldn't be the preferred allied way. They would call in fighter-bombers).

[vometia]

The Tigers had some greater resistance to cannon fire than most, depending upon the cannon, distance and direction. But it didn't last. The 17-pounder the British equipped their "Firefly" -Shermans with, shot through the Tigers just as readily as the Tigers shot through the Shermans. But the Firefly was a dedicated anti-tank tank, so it never replaced the normal Sherman.

The 17-pdr soon became a mainstream gun in the late-/post-war Centurion, the Comet's replacement. Its main problem is that it was initially a bit rubbish at firing HE: it needed really thick-walled shot that had little explosive capacity and which tended to bounce off their target... until someone eventually realised that the HE rounds didn't really need to be fired at the same velocity as AP. Facepalms all round. But even when limited to a purely AT role, it certainly made its presence felt, to the point where it had to be unconvincingly disguised by trying to paint it a neutral colour halfway down its barrel (the Nazis hated it so much they'd apparently devote a lot of effort to getting rid of a Firefly) or it'd be mounted facing backwards in the Archer self-propelled gun which could then rapidly bugger off before it was shot at.

Regarding rifles, I think the Lee Enfield was highly-regarded as a manual battle rifle: having fired one a few times myself, it's amazingly quick to reload and doesn't really drift off target when doing so. Night and day comparing it with a Mauser action, which I respect, but which doesn't lend itself to quite the same rapidity. Of course automatic rifles are better, but thinking of my experience with a FAL, I can't say I did any better with that than an Enfield. Probably worse. Still, the only gun I could aim reliably was a Sterling SMG on semi-auto, and I'm not sure that really says a great deal about my proficiency.

[bEVEsthda]

Here is a “secret weapon”.
Actually, it never was much more secret than any other new project, but I bet on that you've never heard of it before.

 

 

 

 

This is the Republic XP-47J.

It is a prototype and there exists no tooling to put it into mass production. But it is pretty ready. It first flew already in late 1943. There were no significant problems with the aircraft, and production derivatives could have been in service by late 1944.

...- If they had been needed!

 

This reveals something I've noticed few are conscious of. US put on the brakes on many new technologies after 1943. For economic reasons and because they were convinced they would comfortably win the war with existing weaponry. Small improvements were progressively introduced, but basically, the USAAF fought the rest of the airwar in Europe with the same aircrafts they had fielded already in the end of 1943. The paddle-blade P-47D and P-51B and P-51D.

 

But behind the curtains, the technological progress was still as furious as from 1941 to 1943. This P-47J is an example. Many ambitious piston engine projects were canceled because of the jet-engines. But the P-47J used an existing engine.

 

Time to reveal what this is about:
The XP-47J had insane performance. The top speed was comfortably above 500 Mph. It put in a closed course speed record of 505 Mph, 813 Km/h, at full combat weight. It also had a > 1000 miles range and superior climbing performance.

 

It was one of the most advanced piston-engined aircrafts ever. (The others are also American). It relied on going pretty much all-out on three sophisticated technologies, two of them typically American. Turbo-supercharging and cooling design. And then water injection.

 

Water injection does two things. First, and most important, it makes it possible to increase compressor boost, without encountering detonation. Secondly, it improves the thermodynamic efficiency of the engine by lowering the exhaust temperature. This way, the power output of the engine can be increased.
The P&W R2800 engine was bench tested all the way to 3,600 hp for 200 hours. (XP-47J engine stopped at 2,800 hp though).
(Water injection, more specifically water-methanol injection, was also the means the Germans used late in the war to achieve some kind of parity with the allies.)

 

Turbo-supercharging is of course having the compressor driven by an exhaust turbine. US typically employed this on bombers as well as in the P-38 and P-47 fighters.

 

Designing cooling to eliminate cooling drag was sort of an American specialty. They even went further than just eliminating drag. Some aircraft types achieved negative drag, i.e. positive propulsion. The XP-47J achieved 400 lbs of thrust from it's engine cooling.

It was the fastest piston engined aircraft of WW2. (The fastest piston engined aircraft in service during WW2 was the P-51H. The fastest piston engined aircraft to see combat was the P-47M.)

[vometia]

I seem to recall Merlin-engined aircraft achieved a certain amount of thrust thanks to careful angling of their exhaust ports, but planes aren't really my thing so it's not a subject I know a great deal about.

One discontinued weapon I know of was the 32-pounder, which was basically a 3.7" anti-aircraft gun put into the anti-tank role in much the same way as the fabled German 88mm. Only the 3.7" was a lot meaner. It never really caught on, though: from my understanding, it was decided that the 17-pdr was more than sufficient and the 32-pdr was really a bit of a waste of resources, which sounds like a more compelling argument than the gun's mounting not being up to the task, which is a random unconvincing explanation I heard some time ago. In fact the 3.7" AA batteries were apparently often issued with AP rounds in case they needed them, but they were seldom used as they were seldom required. Only one armoured vehicle was produced that carried the 32-pdr, the 70-odd ton Tortoise SPG, which was mainly intended as an assault vehicle. It was never fielded, mainly because it was too ugly. The battlefield needs cuter, prettier tanks like the Chaffee.

[nallepuh86]

This tank i like. Very kawaii desing.   I wish they would make these again, but just with new toys like trophy/arena systems etc.

[bEVEsthda]

- How practical!

Oh, the happy 50'ies, age of pipe smoking and slide rules. No wonder they could land on the Moon 1969.

It almost seems we're a different species now?

 

 

[Cknarf]

[bEVEsthda]

I was going to do something different, but I was posting Icons, and this begs to be included:

The fighter that "won the cold war".

 

 

 

A King Kong plane with King Kong performance and King Kong capabilities. It's a somewhat unsure estimate if Soviet really had catched up 25 years later. That's how amazing it was. It was even so amazing that the US Air Force also bought it, despite it being a navy plane. It replaced a lot of different planes in a lot of different roles.

It also answered a lot of interesting questions, which have affected air war and developments to this day.

 

The F4H, aka F-110, aka F-4. The Satan, aka Mithras, aka Specter, aka Phantom II.

 

(Originally, the designation was F4H, as this was according to the then US Navy's designation scheme. The 'F' for fighter. The 'H' for the McDonnell factory. The '4' for being the fourth fighter type from the McDonnell factory. Similarily, F-110 was the Air Force designation, according to their scheme - which was identical to the previous Army Air Force scheme, except for exchanging 'P', pursuit, for 'F', fighter. The 110'th fighter type ordered for the Air Force. F-4, finally, for the new consolidated, all-service scheme. 'F' for fighter, '4' because the number was available.)

(Originally it was supposed to be named 'Satan', according to McDonnell's tradition and by popular vote; FH = 'Phantom', F2H = 'Banshee', F3H = 'Demon', F4H = 'Satan'. But the boss didn't like it as it sounded too evil. His first suggestion was Mithras which wasn't popular at all. In the last moment, it was decided on 'Phantom II'. Meanwhile, the Air Force briefly named their F-110 'Specter', before adopting the all-service F-4 Phantom II designation.)

[bEVEsthda]

The pace of technology during WW1 and WW2 has been touched previously in this thread. I suppose this is somewhat connected with that. However, I must say that the imaginary concept of "Luft46" was more of an inspiration.

So here's a quiz for you: While none of them participated in WW2, which, of the illustrated aircrafts below, are not american WW2 projects?

 

 

 

<hint:> It's a trick question.