Alsace too, no? Never got off the drawing board for obvious reasons but France had the infrastructure and naval doctrine to build Richelieu class and Alsace is just a step above
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Naturally. Dunno if the Italians had something similar in the works. The only project they had that got ruined by the war was the carrier Aquila.
If November 1937 was the start date for the Yamato,
And
January 1939 is the beginning of the SovetSky Soyuz.
Yamato is completed: December 16 1941 (4 years 2 months)
Displacement: 72,809 metric tons (7600~ more than SovetSky’s displacement)
Length: 263.0 meters (SovetSky: 269.4)
Width: same
Cannons: 460mm vs 406mm on the SovetSky.
So let’s assume even with all the capability the Soviet Union had, that it takes at least the same amount of time as the Yamato to be built. (We will even add 6 months for extra complications)
Therefore the likely finalized production time would be around May 1942 to at the latest December 1942.
(And they were going to build 4 of them)
Also, a lot this depends on the shipyard.
In the case of SovetSky Ukrania, it was actually being completed quicker than the Soyuz.
Not:
If there’s a will there’s a way.
To again list things the Soviets had not yet built by the suspension of the class in June 1941:
- A single turbine for any of the engines.
- More than one gun.
- A main turret or it’s feed system.
- The dual purpose secondary guns and their turrets.
- Cemented armour of the correct thickness.
According to you, the Soviets would have managed to resolve all of these bottlenecks AND put them together to create a ship in under a year?
Ah yes, the “Smekalka = Magic” school of Soviet propaganda.
We saw how smekalka works with large ship designs of the era with the Kirov class. In short, not well at all.
You can’t just will a large battleship into existence no matter how many gulag slaves you throw at the problem.
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There was also a project to repurpose incomplete Impero ship into a platform for launching V-1s.
Sure it was known. They Designed the Jagdpanther, the Panther and the kingtiger with the sloped ufp. Thats (also but not only why i specifically said
Pz 2, 3 and 4 are basically Boxes compared to the t34. And while, sure that also has benefits as you said, basically everything has up and downsides like less space in the tank for crew, ammo and whatever, considering protection while saving weight by not having to use as much material fo achieve the same armor thickness the t34 is just way better…
And still the tiger 1 is the definiton of a box…Now im not much of a tank design or history nerd but given the general design considering weight and the armor protection it achieves the t34 simply achieves better protection basically all around than a pz4…ofc that leaves out other important bits of the whole tank package like gun, reliability of the whole thing, crew comfort, how easy it is to repair in the field and 1000s of other factors. Im thinking just about the general armor design of the turret and hull here. Even the shermans are basically boxes compared to that, at least they have a somewhat angled ufp but the sides are flat, turret front is flat…i mean theres reasons why further tank designs and nowadays mbts go with the sloped armor method?
i absolutely can believe that. Im not trying to praise the t34 to the skies as if it is the best tank design ever or something. as i said the medium tanks, all medium tanks no matter if you take pz4, t34 or shermans were such “early” designs i think im not leaning too far out of the window in saying im quite sure they all had massive up and downsides.
sure, the heavy tank was doomed at that time already, they were too heavy (too much material, too hard or impossible to transport etc etc), too expensive and with the upcoming of high penning chemical rounds there was simply no reason anymore to slap this amount of metal on a tank. I see all of that.
Still it was a very good tank apparently (though ofc only prototype) theres no point in denying that? the russians were capable of designing and building very good heavy and medium tanks like 6 to 8 years after the first proper medium tanks started to even see production…And one that could have most likely held up to the m103 (and its insane gun, well bar the Heat-Fs round obviously, but the m103 would have had the same problem with chemical rounds) designed around the same time and that was put into service and even surpass it in certain aspects…
And these are the factors that are why so many nations didn’t go all in on sloped armor to the extend the Soviets did with the T-34s.
Crew comfort most obviously. The T-34 was notoriously awful to crew. The hullform was already cramped from it’s low profile and the sloped armor. Then add on the Christie suspension, which robbed even more internal volume, and you have one of the worst tanks ergonimcally ever put into mass production.
This may seem like a small detail, but it makes a huge difference. Crew comfort makes sure that your tank crew isn’t exhausted before they even make it to the battle. It keeps their mind focused on the fight, not on how awful the ride is.
And the crampedness also impacts in another way. Survivability. When the T-34 got penetrated, the surviving crew were able to bail out of the tank in only 15% of cases. For the Sherman, it was closer to 80% of the time.
Surviving crew means more veterans, meaning more experience which is saved even when the tank is lost.
The T-34 is a clear example of the pros and cons of an aggressively all sloped design.
The reason is simple. They’re much, much larger than most WW2 era tanks. Even something considered unusually small and short for a modern tank with awful crew comfort, like a T-72, dwarfs a T-34 in every respect.
For western tanks, which value crew comfort, they are almost comically larger than their WW2 counterparts.
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Really ? Like the majority of interbellum and WW2 French tanks look really comfortable and that 1 man crew turret looks really good. Or Italian WW2 tanks they seems to be really comfortable not even slightly cramped.
Data from Korean war and from US side which is difficult to verify. Soviet data estimate 20-40% K/M on every destroyed T-34.
Project A140, AKA Yamato started as early as 1928.
Construction didn’t begin until 1937, after her weight ballooned over twice the initial project’s displacement requirements.
Edit
That’s why I put the span of 3 years instead of two. This is simply guestimating based on the overall sluggishness of the project up until that point - And maybe some ‘morale increasing’ via removal of ‘slackers’ to Stalin’s icy hotel chain.
The secondaries were probably the least problematic to the progress of the ship’s construction but that’s beside the point.
Assuming they solved the bottlenecks in the first place. They could have cut corners. Which would have resulted in an even worse ship than I have already guessed.
And I doubt the soviet coffers would have been especially happy either.
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Is Theres a will there’s a way applies to every nation?
Additionally, we were talking about only building 1, and no invasion taking place.
I feel it’s plausible by the date I estimated.
Yeah but see, that assumption is already flawed.
Japanese at that point had far more know-how reagarding battleships construction than USSR.
Having the raw industrial output is one thing, but you need experience when building complicated things like ships, unlike tanks or even planes
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Well, if combat losses didn’t change priorities for the US navy, we would have had 5 Montanas built and we were capable of building those ships, so I guess we should get the Montana in game.
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I believe the only viable option for Italy would be the original Ansaldo UP-41 project for Soviet export, aka Littorio with 16" guns. Dunno how viable it is though.
+1 I would love a Montana
Tf are you talking about atp? Japanese ww2 tanks in games are already pretty much the most overtiered of all nations.
Montana wasnt laid down nor had any specific parts for it made before its cancelation pretty early in the war. So cant be added according to current rules no matter that it could have been build. It has less of a chance than Super Yamato since that had two guns and shells made and even that would have been more possible to finish than how Soyuz is in game.
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It’s pretty clear now that Gaijin change their rules whenever they want. If they want Montana to happen, it will happen.
Though, as far as paper ships go, it’s not the worse thanks to the extensive documents. Montana has detailed, finalised blueprints. Furthermore, it’s not a massive, groundbreaking evolution from the Iowa, just basically bigger and better, so we know fairly well how it would have gone if it had been built. It’s a pretty straightforward addition if they want to. Same goes for the British Lion class, for example.
Not so sure about the A-150, maybe you could bring some info about that. I don’t know how well the blueprints and technical docs have been preserved over the years for this particular project.
Reliability isn’t the issue and japanese tanks were built to work alongside infantry, light enough to be easily transported, constructed and tackle densely forested islands. Within Japan’s battle doctrine, they were capable vehicles.
It’s when the japanese started seeing the likes of the M4 Sherman that Japan realised just how outgunned they were.
A lot of the Imperial higher ups were old fashioned, still believing in the likes of the infantry charge but this is beside the point.
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How? Name a single over tiered one.