A turret ring isn’t a turret.
A T-34-76 turret looks like this:
And not like this:
It’s the same deal with the IS-3. They put more armor on the turret, by making it flatter and sloped like a dome, which decreases the internal volume for the crew, instead of having nearly flat walls.
Also why don’t you explain, how exactly it’s not cramped?
Posting a picture with some values, without understanding them doesn’t mean anything.
No, I’m not making excuses. You are.
It simply doesn’t matter what some 70 year old Soviet report says that is summarized on one page without any actual context.
You don’t need some values on a paper when there is reality.
And the reality is that a two man crew inside a T-34 that merely has a single rotatable periscope with inconvenient ammunition storage is NEVER going to come close to putting the same amount of rounds on targets as a tank with a three man turret, that has more space for the crew to work with and a commander who doesn’t need to aim or reload the gun.
For the VK 3002(M) its written the tank weighs 35t, which is simply impossible.
And any reasonable RoF for the T-34-76, particular the 1941 variant, is never going to come close to that of other tanks of their time.
Doesn’t matter how hard to you try to use some unreliable sources to claim that.
If one Panther commander wrote his crew fired 20 rounds in one minute, that isn’t going to be taken seriously by anyone who actually was inside a Panther and knows what it’s capble to do.
Here I corrected it for you.
And that’s simply for reloading and then firing at a target that is straight ahead, which isn’t even specified in the report.
It’s not about moving on the battlefield and finding targets to fire upon.
Panzer IV turret is wide for the same reason the Tiger turret is wide. The wide spacing of the recoil group forces the coaxial MG and main gun sight outwards, which is obsolete. T-34 is similar to a modern tank, with a small mantlet and tight grouping of coax, gun, sight.
By the end of the war, Tiger II achieved the level set by T-34 in 1940, by using the same methods. A tight recoil group enabled a small turret face without sacrificing ergonomics.
However, Germany used similar designs to make tight gun mounts, for example, in StuG.
The T-34 has 2 rotatable periscopes, and the blueprints with dates are obvious.
And of course…
Aiming, firing, then reloading, aiming, firing again, takes considerably longer than just reloading. As you can see from IS-3 trial.
Using the Soviet methods, we can find Valentine shoots at an amazing 2.5 rpm. Or the Stuart at 5. But you’re fixated on “T-34 must shoot slowly”.
The gun on T-34 76 and 85 is designed to be compact, more like the Kwk 43 or StuK 40, which is why it’s considerably narrower than it’s caliber suggests for a WW2 tank.
That’s why, even though on the StuG the loader can have as little as 250mm of space due to the gun traverse, it can have an acceptable rate of fire. But you don’t quantify, or chart any of it. You just assert and imply.
You are comparing apples to oranges. Because neither of these reports is scientific in any way.
The report DOESN’T specific anything about the firing conditions, or the target.
There is no aiming when the target is straight ahead, doesn’t change and it’s not specififed in the report what the target is supposed to be. The only condition was testing the reload time differences between the old and the new ammunition stowage.
You are simply assuming that this trial for the T-34 in 1941 underwent the same conditions as the IS-3 trial in whatever year that was.
The exact same reload rate discussion as before in a completely separate topic.
As for the T-34 hull hatch, which the topic is about, I don’t see much of an issue with it not being a huge weakspot and having the performance of its stated armor thickness. You could probably find tons of examples of things that should be weakspots/inherently weaker but aren’t in game like the majority of pistol ports for tank turrets.
While this is true, none are so large as the T-34s driver hatch and don’t actually increase the protection of the vehicle.
On the Pz IV H the driver viewport isn’t even modeled for some reason anymore.
Which I personally find better than this armor mess of holes and armor cover, like on the StuG III G, that sometimes reaches completely ridiculous protection levels.
I’m generally a big fan of consistency. Which isn’t really War Thunder strong suit.
It should also be noted that not only the door was weakened, but also the armor around it, since it damaged the integrity of the armor. That is why the viewport driver was removed from the Panther G, to keep the front homogeneous in all its parts.
Because it obviously isn’t one besides the very first models which had less sloped armor in the upper part of the hatch near the hinge, for the periscopes.
Irrationally, it’s being projected to later models.
Similarly, the ROF discussion is equally ludicrous. If it can shoot through 100 rounds in 20 minutes, how is that “4”?
“it’s not relevant because like, it’s a note”
Frankly, people don’t realize how much WT’s T-34 is underperforming, in part because the youngest WT Sherman is from mid 1943.
For instance Terminal Ballistic data gave M61 APCBC;
2 inch @45 degree defeat for 2030 fps (muzzle velocity)
Notice how that’s just about T-34’s upper side armor.
Or British testing with 6 pdr. The safety limit of 42mm @50 degrees, of low quality British armor is 684 m/s for APCBC. Converting safety to a penetration is 6-10%, 738 m/s.
29.8mm@60? (it’s useless against T-34 glacis) 700.7 m/s for APCBC to safety limit. In fact, to pen a T-34, the 6 pdr needs maneuvering angles like it’s shooting a Tiger.
And yeah it is really low quality armor, it can’t even defeat 15mm BESA properly.
It’s futile, but I’ll post evidence; T-34’s hatch in the first version isn’t straight cut.
They tested the hatches ballistic resistance when developing T-34, and found it was equivalent to the glacis.
Of course it not relevant.
Because when you need to make up unknown factors, it’s not a fact.
The note never said anything about how much ammo the T-34s fired nor under which condition.
Likewise the reload trials also don’t talk about adjustments in aiming time.
But if you want to continue this stupid discussion make your own topic and call it “how much the T-34 in War Thunder underperforms”.
And tell everyone about superior Soviet engineering of making turrets so narrow and ammunition storage so advanced that they could match the rate of fire of others nations medium tanks with larger turrets and three crew inside.
Agreed, that’s 5 RPM, not 4. Although the report does state 20 to 25 minutes, and with 25 minutes that would be 4 RPM.
The report is also from 1943 but I don’t know if that means every single T-34 is a T-34 1943. I haven’t done the research related to the T-34, but I know that with Shermans the crews would just continue using them until they got taken out, so you would have earlier war Shermans even in 1945, and as far as I can tell this report is simply stating what the crews of tanks experience. If they were in an earlier T-34 it would mean 70-80 rounds of stowage, but it could be that soviet tank crews were continuously receiving the most updated T-34s, there were tens of thousands built after all.
One thing to point out is that the T-34 1942-1943s in game specifically have a faster reload rate than the other T-34-76s. It’s not by much but it is there.
It’s not, the in game M4A1 has all the characteristics of a 1942 Sherman, like the M34 mantlet that had been completely replaced by the M34A1 by April of 1943.
I know you’re talking about the live fire tests in Cairo that show the turret’s effectiveness to be lower than the stated thickness, together with the other blueprint that shows the entire tank with no measurements, but the other blueprints you provided that show the turret in detail and provide actual rulers to measure the inches of armor are from 1941, with revisions throughout 1942 (as stated in the bottom right), and they agree with the M4A1’s current armor for the front and rear of the turret.
As for the rest, everyone and their moms has complained about how armor penetration is calculated in WarThunder. US APCBC-HE is basically known to overperform, while their solid shot and APCR rounds underperform. APCR in general is either wrong, or wronger (I mean take a look at 100 mm BR-412P APCR, it has less flat penetration than 100 mm BR-412D APCBC, when the whole point of APCR is better flat penetration). It also has basically nothing to do with the T-34’s armor directly, it’s an overall issue. Every nation has rounds that overperform, rounds that underperform, or even rounds that are pretty close to their real life performance by sheer coincidence.
4-5 r/m for 100 rds is sustained.
The T-34 should fire slower than a Sherman as a peak rate, but still quickly, similar to PT-76 (~6s).
Reloads inaccuracy topic is like armor. There are layers.
For instance, restocking of ready rack should be slower.
Reflects number of ready rounds; 1941 T-34 has 6, like a later Sherman.
IT.80 isn’t high spec RHA, and, you conjecture when I have the hit locations.
Turret face had established limit of ~550 m/s for 6pdr and muzzle velocity for 2 pdr. Hit to joint of rotor shield and face is further below limit and permits partial penetration by 2 pdr.
Agree it’s 76.2 by 1943 blueprint.
M34A1 mount is mid 1943 yes.
Forgotten about M4A1 but;
WT replaces the unmagnified sights.
3.3 M4A1 shoots M61 APCBC, unavailable in 1942.
Armor is an extra error.
Correct, armor & shell performance is wrong, but it’s acute in T-34 because of the overmatch curve.
Back to hatch
For the hatch to pass into the tank as described it needs to be smashed hard enough it bends or breaks the edge of the glacis supporting it.
Since the ballistic limit is equal
And because optics are black hole armor (familiar WT issue)
It’s not reasonable on the first T-34. Let alone 75mm hatch.
German gunners realized the periscope zone is a weakspot, in protection and structure, in the first models. Doesn’t mean they spelled it out exactly.
Think for a moment, if it pens at the center periscope it’s going to pass through the joint itself. What happens if you keep shooting it?
And you decide this because a 15 mm BESA heavy machine-gun was capable of penetrating 32 mm of I.T.80D spec armor, placed at 0 degrees, at 2588 ft/s (nearly 800 m/s)? Actually it’s not even a full penetration, they are using the army ballistic limit.
These are the two blueprints you posted in the other topic. I’ve taken the liberty of using the ones where I had cropped out the ruler to measure the thicknesses of the armor, and added the highlight on the dates.
This one states that the blueprint originally was made on July 16th, 1941, and had revisions on the following dates:
Now for the next blueprint.
The original for this one comes from October 6th, 1941, with revisions on:
The blueprints themselves state that they are from 1942. And they match the thickness of 3 inches front, 2 inches rear.
You are correct about M61 though. I had forgotten that M61 was only made later, apparently after some German APCBC rounds had been studied. But that’s about it. Gaijin doesn’t “replace unmagnified sights”, they make it so any gunner sight with a magnification under 3.5x simply defaults to 1.9-3.5x.
You didn’t read it carefully.
2 pdr hit is NBL 527 m/s against 53.8mm 320 BHN IT80, when it’s partial penetration against 50mm German armor is over 800 m/s.
British assumed German armor was about equal or lower quality than their own before North Africa. So they believed 60mm FHA was required to protect against 2 pdr. It transpired that it would not do this at any distance.
It’s a low hardness chromium manganese armor with about a % of both and under .3% carbon. And even if the hardness is increased the coefficient of resistance doesn’t meaningfully change because of its poor hardenability.
The coefficient is of resistance is ~1680 for naval limit hit. When WT uses ~1900-2000 and most shells overperform.
The daylight limit here is ~2000-2200 at slope but sometimes the plate plugs much earlier than that anyway.
Yes you are using the mount diagram, I prefer the diagram with armor shaded, which we agreed gave results consistent with trial.
Please point to the page where this is stated.
Except these blueprints are still not consistent with that, the trial says that the rear wasn’t 2 inches, those blueprints say it is 2 inches.
The mount diagram looks like it’s 3 inches but is weaker than the face.
Round 68 pierced the joint at 548 m/s, only the base was caught so this is stricter than army limit. For 813 m/s MV it’s around 1.3 kilometers range.
According to your estimates it penned 76.2@30 at 548 m/s.
The coefficient of resistance in the case you indicated is ~1470 while above army limit
N. BL here means “Normal, ballistic limit”. It is a 0 degree hit, with the same army ballistic limit as the rest of the table.
This is also how I know that the 15 mm BESA shots were at 0 degrees.
It states in results it’s at normal, then NBL.
Though if it is normal obliquity… (and not naval limit)
It looks better if it’s army limit but only +a few vel% to full pen
The paragraph I just showed specifically says that it applies to “column (8)”.
There’s no “though” and “if” about it. It’s just what that column means.
Section 11 (“Correlation of results with Proof of Plate results”) explains why they did this.
Most of the plates used in this trial were check production plates. Up to 35 mm. thickness the plates had been proved at normal attack with 15 mm Besa A.P.T. (Greenwood & Batley) and from 35 mm. upwards the plates had been proved with 2 pdr. A.P. at normal. Thus three determinations have been carried out on each plate. Graphs V to VIII plot the deviation from the mean line for the results at normal against the deviation from the mean line for the results at angle for 2 pdr. A.P. and A.P.C.B.C. and 6 pdr. A.P. and A.P.C.B.C.
If a plate which was good at proof would resist well heavier projectiles at oblique attack, there would be a tendency for the points to be about a line through the origin, but no such tendency is visible and, in line with general experience, it is found that a plate which is good under proof conditions (shell projectile at normal) is not necessarily good under service conditions, if it is mounted in a tank at a large angle of tilt, so that it will have to stand up to heavy projectiles at oblique attack. In the first case, normal penetration takes place, but in the second the mechanism of penetration is entirely different - the shot breaks up and a plug is driven out, so that it is not to be expected that the qualities which ensure good resistance against the first attack will necessarily ensure good resistance against heavy oblique attack
It goes on. But the idea was to see if a plate being good at normal means it would be good at angles against heavier projectiles. And the conclusion was “not really” because the mechanism of penetration is not the same.
