The loaders traverse is connected directly to the gunners. There’s no sort of clutch/engagement system for the gunner. So if the loader is going ham on that traverse wheel the gunner will be trying to keep up, not adding to the traverse rate.
So there might be an initial increase in the time it takes to build inertia, but outside of that the loaders wheel is simply there to:
Assist traversing when there’s difficulties: IE on an incline, poorly maintained, or jammed.
Traverse when the gunner is occupied.
Less physically taxing.
There’s a reason no-one else copied this system. If it suddenly doubled your manual traverse rate everyone would have done it.
Win rate? What are you talking about? Those are the current rotation rates.
You can go back to the old forum five years back and find people arguing that because the loader also had a wheel the Pz III should be magically capable of 24 deg/s in RB. It was silly then and it is silly now, for all the reasons you pointed out above. Hopefully we can let it die now. In any case, if people want to play with their stopwatches:
Hand-cranking a small gear, against the mass and gear size of the turret ring, a second operator is only adding torque, you’re basically stuck by the ergonomics and gearing in terms of your rate of turn.
Sigh… It does not have a limited rpm. The torque is defined by the power reduction in the gears. A single person cranking against the mass of the turret will only be able to rotate it a certain speed. A second person adding their power will increase the rate at which they can turn the gears and thus traverse rate.
I promise you they did not add a complicated extra hand crank just “So it’ll be less physically taxing”.
Drawing shows loaders crank going though a universal into a prop shaft, into another universal, into a transfer box (that has gears) into another universal into a prop shaft into another universal into another transfer/gearbox.
If there is an increase of traverse, it’s certainly not going to be double.
Manual traverse is quite a tiring activity. Especially when it can take 40 wheel turns to just get to 90 degrees. So, reducing the strain per person or letting the loader take over makes some sense.
Also you’re traversing onto a target. Only the gunner can see the target. We’re expecting a loader could stop traversing exactly when the gunner mentally decided they should stop. Even a one-second delay on the “stop” of the loader continuing would over-traverse the target right out of optical field of view and have to be corrected back.
I can’t believe we’re having this argument yet again to be honest.
There is a dog clutch to disengage the loaders mechanism, but that’s yet another step for the gunner to take distracting him from a life-or-death situation.
But that’s the other thing right? Because the gears are interlocked, to achieve 24 degrees per second traverse, the gunner’s wheel would also have to do 6 rotations a second.
Anyone can take a look at that diagram above, imagine that gunner’s wheel spinning in their hand at 6 rps while still applying equivalent force and see that’s not going to fly.
Just try it out, make a fist, lock your elbow and try to move your fist in a circular fashion as if you were trying to move a gear. Try it and you realize at that rate of rotation it would be all you could do just to hold on, let alone apply any force yourself. I’ve tried it with an improvised flywheel and I can maybe get to 4 rps on a similar circumference, without applying any real force at all.
Where are you getting these ratios? But whatever it doesn’t matter because what you aren’t considering is the torque required to achieve any arbitrary rpm. You aren’t going to achieve some speed without sufficient power, no matter what gearing it has. That is why they chose to add the aux. crank wheel.
The ratios are upthread. 4 degrees per rotation of the handcrank. 24/4 = 6. If you want to turn the turret 24 degrees per second, you would need to crank the handcrank fully around six times in that second. This isn’t complex math.
No one is questioning the value of an auxiliary crank if you’re parked on a hill and the gunner needed help to get the heavy turret around against gravity. The question is whether it regularly played a role in combat traverse adjustment. The original claim was that having the loader cranking would allow the turret to go from the 12 degrees per second that the gunner could do on their own (3 cranks per second at 4 degrees per second) to 24 per second. As mentioned this would not work because you could not achieve sufficient precision coordination under combat conditions through voice alone, and the human arm is simply not going to rotate a large crank at that rate per second.
There are no combat reports that anyone has ever found indicating anything more than this was an auxiliary mechanism or that the loader was actively involved in laying the gun faster in this way, no manuals indicating this was standard drill. And indeed it goes against basically everything in the history of gunlaying. The gunner, the one who can see the target, controls elevation and traverse. They don’t control just elevation and have to shout commands at someone else on a separate traverse wheel. Any tank or IFV gunner I know would be saying, “yeah, that wheel over there? don’t touch that. I’m working here.”
But yet the Germans found it necessary to put it in there. We don’t know the Pz III battle drill. They may very well have had commands for the loader to assist in doing course gun lay, and then to get off it and let the gunner do fine sighting.
On some artillery systems traverse and elevation were controlled by two separate people.
Modern tanks and IFVs have powered T&E, if they had to crank that sucker around by hand, I think they would be fine with someone helping out.
Name one where one of those two had no view of the target.
I mean the idea is just laughable if you imagine it in the context of any other precision task like, say, driving. Why don’t cars have a second wheel in the back seat so the passenger can help you turn faster? Answer seems pretty obvious. Plus as mentioned it’s biomechanically impossible. But bad, zombie arguments never die in War Thunder it seems.
Yeah, that’s what I expect as well.
Hence why it has a higher gear ratio. The gunner gets the turret going, potentially in a lower gear ratio on a slope, and then the loader can assist in a slighly higher gear ratio to turn the turret in an acceptable time.
