Is2 1944..... still absurdly underpowered

Machinery of War Discussion Ground Vehicle
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They engaged at whatever distance was necessary or demanded by the tactical situation. Sometimes that did mean up close, or in urban environments. Sometimes it meant at long range.

A few examples:

The IS-2 proved itself at pretty much any combat range. Of course at closer distances it was also more vulnerable, but that’s why the Soviets designed the T-44 and the IS-3 next. And eventually the T-54. A tank half the size of a Tiger II with a comparable gun of a bigger calibre and near-total frontal immunity to its gun. That is damn impressive.

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I read some German accounts that stated when they ran into IS-2s at close range in their King Tigers the IS-2s would usually disengage and retreat to long range before reengaging. Of course you are right that all tanks fought in un favorable situations, I should have probably worded it as “they preferred to engage at longer ranges when possible”

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T-54 was quite damn good design. But even if you look at WW2 tanks. 76mm Jumbo had frontal and side protection in-between Panther and King Tiger II, with arguably better turret than the latter, and all of that at 38t.
We know French fit equivalent of Panther gun in Sherman turret. So lets add 1500kg due to bigger gun and ammo. We arrive at 40t with a tank that beats Panther everywhere but in suspension department, but is stabilised, lol.

This just show how inefficient weight and size wise Panther and Tiger II were.

IMO the large part of the success of T-54 was how advanced cast turrets got, which allowed to eliminate unnecesary space wasted in older designs, which allowed for smaller size, smaller weight and better protection with a big gun.
And if you reduce weight in 1 spot, the you save weight in suspension which can be lighter. So the engine and transmission can be lighter without sacrificing reliability. Fuel tanks can be smaller. Which means tank can be smaller with same range. Which means further weight gains. It all stacks up.

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The more impressive part of that is that it was done to a Sherman chassis. The Sherman had enormous modernisation reserves. So did the T-34. The only German tank that comes close is the Panzer IV, which was also updated a ridiculous number of times and could accept much more weight and a variety of guns. But it was a 1930s design and by the late war, it showed.

Meanwhile, take the Panther. Born so overweight that the final drive killed its reliability. You want to up-armour it? Cannot be done without radically altering its design. You want to up-gun it? Also cannot be done. Fantastic characteristics for a tank in 1943, but literally un-upgradeable. Every time people say it’s the best tank of WW2 I roll my eyes just for that reason.

Even the Allies eventually fell into this trap. There’s a reason that even in Korea the Pershings hadn’t fully replaced the Shermans. The lesson of WW2 was that you needed a 25t medium that could grow to 35t with modernisation reserves, and that heavies should if possible stay under 50t.

At the end of the day, the issue is twofold. Germany fought with the tanks its industry was capable of designing and building; and German engineers designed the tanks that the political leadership was issuing requirements for. Both sides were dysfunctional. In a semi “normal” work environment, Kniepkamp would have been removed from office in 1938. The requirements issued for the Panther, the Tiger and the Tiger II are a mess, so of course they produced messy designs, and on top of that industry screwed that up, too.

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Panther was unupgradeable because German industry was “unupgradeable”.
Take a look at Fw 190 Anton.
Basically the early variants were best performers. Why? Because the BMW 801 engine could not be uprated due to metallurgy problems.
Basically if you slapped that baby with MW50 on experimental A4 variant, it was grenading itself. To get anything more out of it, relatively scarce C3 fuel was needed and it was still a far cry from performance increases other radial engines got during the war - f.e. Japanese were able to make a few hundred more horsepower out of similar displacement in their Homare, using relatively low grade fuel.
Result: Anton was already outperformed in late 1943, and got slaughtered in 1944. When Dora arrived, it was too little too late. Was Anton non upgradeable? Sure as hell not. If Americans got to redesign BMW801, that thing would be rocking 2000HP in no time.

Damn, Bf 109 got to F-4 and it basically did not improve in performance until 1944, G6 was using downrated engines for quite some time, then in 1944 they finally solved some of the issues. But that means essentialy 2 years without real performance upgrades, when every enemy out there was getting so much better.

Replacing Bf 109? Same story, a bunch of failures.

Pz IV received a ton of upgrades between 1939 and 1942. But 1942 should have been its final year, because it reached its limit by then. Then it was just limititng mobility by trying to ,increase protection (with rather non-spectacular results) and simplifying (removal of APU, then removal of electric turret drive f.e.).

Sherman got completely new hulls, new turrets, new engines, and new cannon, new internal layout etc. That was possible because of US industrial capacity. Germany couldn’t modify Pz IV too much because “muh production line disruption”. Not that it would have made much difference - sloped hull Pz IV would still have paper turret, sides and top.
Panther II was less of a change over normal Panther than 1 big sherman variant over the other and they couldn’t do that either. And Panther II fixed the transmission and final drive problems by using (if I remember right) Tiger components that would thrive around 46-50 ton (because that’s what they were designed for, Tiger 56-57 tons was too much for some of these).

Anyway, if one thinks of it, the state of German late war engineering was pretty damn poor. They were going for big and heavy because to make something smaller, lighter and better, some big changes have to be done to components and production methods. And best Germany could do was cast mantlet.

I fully agree the requirements did a number on these designs. Anyway, my point is, it’s very easy to look good compared to Tiger II and Panther :D

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I agree. If the while point is to help/buff the IS-2, no point nerfing it along the way. Especially not for a .3 reduction in BR. I still wouldn’t use IS-2 over the other USSR 6.3s, though. But it would be good lineup depth.

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Huh?

G2 was better than F4 while highest kill ratio achieved by G6 (thanks to Eric Hartmann).

Now its true that 109 lost its advantages during late war but G6/10 and K4’s were still formidable opponents.

Not to mention despite bein late to the war 190 Dora family proved that they can challenge allied planes without too much issue.

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G-2 hardly changed anything over the F-4 because it got heavier.
By the time the G-2 appeared, allied planes, which were previously outperformed by the F-4, caught up and the G-2 didn‘t remedy this issue.

Same story with the G-6, which might have even worse performance than the G-2 due to the MG 131 blisters.

Only in 1944 the G-6 received MW50 and got the performance boost it needed to compete with allied planes. This final iteration of the G-6 was then standardized as the G-14.

If the G-6 had its initial performance in WT it would simply be a fatter F-4.

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What I love the most about G6 are wheel blisters. It’s like "yeah, we need bigger wheels to improve ride quality and landing gear durability, especially needed on eastern front grass/hardpack runways, so lets make wheel shaped blisters on the wings, because coming up with more aerodynamic solution is beyond our ability. I mean, Jesus, it took them like way over a year to come up with something better, that “something better” was a slightly bulkier wing panel. Same story with tailwheel - “oh boy, bigger tyre doesn’t fit, lets just throw away the whole ‘retractable’ idea, because who the hell needs topspeed in a plane we have just removed large part of maneuvrability from”.
It’s like they just did not give a damn. Which reminds me of Gaijin handling of plywood bug 2.0 and severe damage vs stabilizer/elevator fiasco.

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Don’t forget the dumbest aspect of them all.

Between 1938 and 1942, Kniepkamp kept trying to get rid of the Pz IV. This is because he believed (correctly) that Germany should only produce one medium tank, not two; but he also believed (incorrectly) that production should focus 100% on his baby, the Pz III, and that the Pz IV was an irksome competitor that needed to go.

Four years.

The Pz IV saved Germany’s bacon in 1939, when there weren’t enough Pz III to go around because its production was completely dysfunctional. And as the Pz IV got upgraded again and again Kniepkamp kept trying to have it removed from production.

All that stopped once it became clear that the Pz IV accepted the long 75 no problem, which the Pz III simply could not.

This is the year you single out as the year when they should have finally moved on to a new medium tank platform that could see out the rest of the war, and instead it’s the year where they finally managed to bury the Pz III…

Just unbelievably out of touch. The Allies should have given Kniepkamp a medal.

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The biggest flaw of the Pz IV is that its a bigger, more complex and expensive Pz III without torsion bar suspension.

The biggest strength of the Pz IV was that it was a bigger Pz III.
Allowing them to put a long 75mm into a tank, to at least fight allied tanks on some even ground.

With the Panther they took so much T-34 influence that they forgot what made the Pz III great for it’s time.

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It had more modernisation reserves even beyond the gun, but they were all pretty much exhausted mid war, as we know.

To me, the best summary one-liner description of the Panther is the one given by the Chieftain in his video about it. “I am so impressed by this tank. I am so not impressed by this tank.”

The lack of visibility/situational awareness. The lack of a coherent doctrine for its employment. The (related) inability to replace its predecessor. The lack of modernisation reserves. Like you said the Germans took in a lot of T-34 influence (even the Tiger IIs have turrets that are clearly inspired by the T-34) but they never imitated the T-34’s modernisation reserves.

It really was a skill issue, at all levels of German decision-making.

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Not really. What did they add other than the gun?

They put more armor on the Pz III than IV and the IV was always less armored compared to the III.

Sure the IV had an electric turret traverse, which the III lacked. But that was there from the start.

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Remember how the Pz IV was born: originally, Krupp was supposed to only design the turret. They politically finagled their way into designing a whole tank, and it happened to be the only tank that actually matched the given requirements. It started out at 18 tons, with 10mm of frontal hull armour, and 16mm of frontal turret armour.

The very first version of the Pz III started out with identical armour but the 37mm, so it came at “only” 15 tons.

On paper therefore aside from the armament the vehicles start out mostly identical (which was the primary argument for unification of the design), however from the very get-go the Pz IV has a relatively trouble-free production while the Pz III goes through no less than five iterations of its suspension and remains stuck in development hell until the beginning of WW2:

So even before we discuss anything that came later, you have two raw designs one of which is simply easier to work with, produce and upgrade. If the Germans had immediately ditched the Pz III and focused exclusively on the IV in peacetime, they would have had a greater number of modern medium tanks in their Pz.Div. at the beginning of Fall Weiss. The Pz III eventually got to a similar state but it required more attempts, time, and effort to put it in that position.

The designs end their life cycle at 23 tons (the Pz III M) and 25 tons (the Pz IV H and J). IIRC counting all applique and extra pieces they end up with 70mm front hull armour for the Pz III and 80mm front hull armour for the Pz IV H and J, but correct me if I’m mistaken.

Even operating on the assumption that I’m incorrect and the later Pz IIIs had more armour, so long as it’s 10-20mm more, it’s negligible enough that it is much more important to the longevity of the design to be able to upgrade the gun instead. The PaK 40 is a bigger step in lethality over the 50mm than a fraction extra hull armour is in survivability.

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Well, like I said, the 75mm was an immense upgrade, in both armor and soft target killing power.

Which kept the Pz IV in service while III only lived on as the StuG.

And then they had to keep the IV around despite already having the V, just to pump out some numbers.

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I have a question: what are the actual performance figures for the BR471, BR471B, and BR471D? The main difference between the BR471 and BR471B is that the BR471 drills more at 0° and the BR471B drills more at 60°. But how does the BR471D improve upon the others?

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More 0° performances and decent slope performances.

Both B and D in WT aren’t all that different in effectiveness.

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Okay, it seems strange to me that if the APBC and APCBC were practically the same in reality, why did they bother developing it, since its main enemy would be the M46 and 47, which don’t exactly have very heavy armor? Unless the steel of those tanks was strong enough to break the APBC bullet, requiring a cap and a sharp point.

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The D was developed because tanks received thicker armor that the blunt B shell couldn’t penetrate.

So with APCBC there was a better chance to go through the turret of some tanks, even when that meant it couldn’t pen sloped hull armor that well anymore.

In WT the B is more effective than in reality because it has unrealistic high 0° penetration.

The BR-471 as well, because WW2 Soviet AP shells were simply too soft to go through as much thick armor as western AP shells.

In reality a penetration is most likely going to end the fight, so having ammo that can penetrate most vehicles is advantages. Especially on the turret, since a vehicle might be hull down.

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