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Jobbo_Fett posted:Do one of the Leningrad Tigers A.K.A. the first ones that saw combat and where one was captured by the Russians because it bogged in swampy terrain.  Doesn't look that great on a shelf, but whatever floats your boat. spectralent posted:KV-2 is so cute. It's 100% for sure a KV-1, but it had an extra guy along for the ride, so everyone thinks it was a KV-2. Dick Trauma posted:I've seen a few references to tank destroyers. Did I miss some sort of tank vs. tank destroyer pissing contest in the last thread? "Tank destroyers vs. towed guns vs. just give every Sherman a 76 mm gun" is as common and uncreative topic as "hey have you guys heard about that bear" and "Gay Black Hitler" Ensign Expendable fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Aug 2, 2016 |
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xthetenth posted:The only acceptable answer is stuffing the Sherman turret full of high velocity 122mm. Yugoslavia to the rescue.  spectralent posted:Ah, I can see where that'd be confusing. Very likely. The situation in late July was extremely chaotic, so a junior commander trying to get a lift to where he was supposed to be wouldn't be uncommon.
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Aug 2, 2016 21:12
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Yvonmukluk posted:I kind of read this as one thing and my brain kind of melted figuring out how that work. A modded game of Civ gone horribly awry? http://forum.worldoftanks.com/index.php?/topic/327199-our-problem-child-a-teardown-of-pzkpfw-v-panther/ My long winded grogness can be read here: http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/p/long-winded-articles.html
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Aug 3, 2016 00:05
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TasogareNoKagi posted:How do you keep the various military subdivisions straight? Battalion, brigade, company, corps, division ... You can't, not really. Not only can a certain term mean two different things across the front lines, the amount of subunits in one kind of unit can change within one nation throughout a war. A good rule is the "rule of threes": three platoons to a company, three companies to a battalion, three battalions to a regiment, give or take. Usually.
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Aug 3, 2016 00:07
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OwlFancier posted:If you like army organizational groups you will love ship classifications from the age of sail through to the modern day! That entire family looks pretty similar. Or maybe I'm just an American TD racist. 
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Aug 3, 2016 01:52
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spectralent posted:As a thought that just struck me, is the increased amount of mechanisation, as well as the increasingly lighter weight of body armour, a factor in the increased adoption of it in military use? WW2 practically nobody has body armour, but they're also just expected to be walking wherever they're meant to be, right? I figure if your assumption is that you're going everywhere via carriers, airlifts, and that kind of stuff, then maybe making everyone heavier is less of a problem. Or am I completely wrong? The Soviets tried for the whole war to develop a breastplate that would protect from pistol bullets, but it turned out that in order to be thick enough to guarantee protection, the plate would be too heavy to run around in. Plus then they tested the SKS against the prototypes and shelved the whole thing. Towards the end of the war you start seeing projects for kevlar vests, but I haven't seen how those developed.
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Aug 3, 2016 15:23
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They've already gone through that song and dance for the T-26, glad to know that no one learned anything. There was also an amusing document I read that absolutely forbids Kotin from making any changes to a tractor clone that aren't absolutely necessary for production, since you just know that guy would tinker with it for a year and end up with something completely different.
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Aug 3, 2016 15:40
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ArchangeI posted:That makes me wonder: Can anyone talk about how Lend-Lease was actually handled at an organizational level? Did the US government decide what to send based on what they decided they didn't need but could be useful for others? Could other states just send in a wish list like it was Christmas and Uncle Sam might bring a nice country its very own Sherman 76mm? Was there a shopping catalogue? Was there a system of value, so that you could get B-25s OR Shermans, OR a few B-25s and a handful of M3 Stuarts? Who decided what went where? The Soviets had "catalogues" to order from, plus occasionally military intelligence would report on a cool new thing the British/Americans had and they'd as for that too. Sometimes that thing didn't actually exist, but them's the breaks. With tanks, a handful of them would be ordered if the paper description was good enough, then they'd be run through trials. If the tank did well enough, more would be ordered. If there were problems with the tanks during trials, receiving, or use, those problems would trickle up to the military mission of the supplier and something would be done about it, usually.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:21
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Nebakenezzer posted:It's a good question. Actually, another question about this, since you brought it up, is "was the poo poo sent to the Soviets actually lend-lease?" I know lend-lease to the UK was sent on a "here's the stuff; just pay us whenever" basis. Until some point in late 1941, it was "cash and carry". Show up with a boat full of gold, leave with a boat full of tanks.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:22
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PittTheElder posted:Yeah, that makes a fair bit of sense. Did Soviet units have much in the way of radios at all? The Germans had built them into all their tanks by the time the war kicked off, correct? Did their infantry have mobile units as well? The Germans had at least radio receivers in all their tanks by the start of WWII. The Soviets didn't: the platoon (three tanks) commander and up would have a radio for "regular" tanks (T-34, T-26, BT), but "premium" tanks (KV, T-28, T-35, IS) had a radio in every tank. By the time IS tanks started coming out, every T-34 produced had a radio as well. The T-60 did not have a radio at all. The T-30 was supposed to follow the usual ratio, but it was more of a "best effort" kind of situation. There would also be a communications company in every regiment (brigade, or other independent unit) with a radio platoon (3-6 radios depending on the time of the war), a telephone platoon, and couriers with motorcycles/horses. Infantry battalions would also have a communications platoon with five radios and a telephone station.
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Aug 4, 2016 05:32
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Taerkar posted:Also note that the thing about thicker armor to stop KE projectiles is that you're also going to have bits of that armor coming through with the penetrator if it makes it through. There are spall liners and such to help with that though. Ductile armour is very helpful. I read a report where a Valentine was penetrated by 50 mm German APCR and the only effect it had was that the commander was "stunned".
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Aug 5, 2016 18:11
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Dick Trauma posted:Can someone talk a little about the change from rifled to smooth? I always thought the rifling was to give stability through spinning. Are the rounds themselves stabilizing now? Fin and shape stabilization are the new hotness. HEAT is not as effective when fired from rifled barrels, plus you can achieve much higher velocity if there is no rifling.
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Aug 5, 2016 18:13
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spectralent posted:I used to wonder why the hell anything was riveted, but I realised a year or two ago it was probably quite a while before tanks existed that were both up against really high kinetic impacts and had armour enough to survive penetration anyway. Like, getting hit with a rifle probably isn't going to cause massive rivet failures, but at the same time since you've got like 20mm of armour everywhere anything like a .50 cal or an antitank rifle is just going to go in anyway. In an environment where weapons are pretty all-or-nothing rivets probably don't seem that bad. Welding armour is hard. If you don't do it right, you end up with cracks (sometimes microscopic, sometimes not) that make your armour trash. The harder the steel, the harder it is to weld. Surface hardened/cemented armour is almost impossible to weld: you have to drill holes for rivets, then harden, then attach it to stuff. Problems with rivets coming off were around since the beginning, even from AP bullets, but there was simply no alternative for a long time. HEY GAL posted:is that...good? In the late 1940s, the Soviets decided that any tank weighing over 50 tons was a terrible idea and is more trouble than it's worth because of how hard it is to transport it. This is twice as heavy. Ensign Expendable fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Aug 5, 2016 |
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Aug 5, 2016 18:16
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wdarkk posted:It's not quite that bad since you can take the ablative armor off for transport. It's still going to be a huge pain if you have to cross anything while the enemy might be nearby. The Germans tried that with the E-100, everything old is new again. Vegetable posted:Was there ever a battle where people on horseback beat the poo poo out of people in tanks? Many battles in interbellum colonial wars had tank forces get their poo poo rolled because people haven't figured out proper infantry cooperation yet. It was really easy to walk up to some half-blind tanks confined to a narrow mountain pass, shove some straw into the engine grilles, douse it in gasoline, and set it on fire.
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Aug 5, 2016 18:58
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If enemy artillery hits your train, that shipment is hosed regardless of how much armour the tank has on it.
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Aug 5, 2016 19:05
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xthetenth posted:I'm guessing the rationale is that the answer to whether you can get the tank over a given bridge is less relevant than the answer to whether you can get any tank over the bridge and have it last more than a timespan of minutes. Better a tank that can survive to operate in a limited region than one that can't survive anywhere. Which is holy poo poo pessimism about missiles and artillery. If you have a mega-fuckoff-supertank and can't move it anywhere fast enough, the enemy will just attack where the tank isn't with their own tanks, which might have less armour, but that doesn't really matter from the point of view of the infantry it's driving over.
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Aug 5, 2016 21:22
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xthetenth posted:Which would not be a problem if (and pretty much only if) the assumption that those tanks' insides are going to be playing host to artillery or atgms almost immediately holds true. Artillery and man-portable methods of killing tanks have been around for almost as long as tanks themselves. Somehow tanks managed to deal with it.
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Aug 5, 2016 22:56
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Xerxes17 posted:Well, the basic design put forward with the T-64 is now roughly 50 years old at this point and has reached the end of upgrade space. The smallest volume, lightest weight possible design from back then limits how far you can stretch things out even when you change dimensions, swap suspension models and etc. After a point, an entirely new design was needed and has been delivered. T-64 Kharkovite trash never had upgrade space, only superior Tankograd T-72 can be modernized into 21st century 
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Aug 6, 2016 16:03
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HEY GAL posted:Someone just posted this in the map thread I like how the known world ends at Moscow, and then it's just ocean.
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Aug 6, 2016 20:01
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Xerxes17 posted:I recall reading in Anthony Beevor's Berlin that the Navodchiks (artillery spotters) consider themselves to be snipers but with much bigger guns. Navodchik means gunner (literally "aimer"). Artillery observers are called korrektirovsсhik ("corrector").
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Aug 7, 2016 20:16
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HEY GAL posted:you can also get newspapers from the enemy country relatively easily, which considering reporters would mention any military plans they could get their hands on, was sometimes a huge hassle for generals on both sides. The obvious idea is to feed your news guys grandiose plans of swift and complete victory that may or may not represent reality.
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Aug 8, 2016 20:22
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:A lot of Fury was teens trying to write the most hosed up and badass poo poo you can think of. Like that one lieutenant shooting himself while on fire. That and some other stuff came off as so ridiculous as to be laughable. That's like the least rad thing you can do while in a tank and on fire: http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/2016/05/train-rammer.html But yeah, RE: immobilized tank against infantry: once they're swarming all over your tank, you're screwed. The proper way to do it is dismount crewmen with a tank machinegun and SMG and have them shoot from nearby, spotting for the tank if necessary.
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Aug 9, 2016 15:55
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Flipswitch posted:Bit of a side question to this topic because I was thinking about it the other day but wasn't sure how to ask the question. When tanks were first fielded, it rapidly became clear that heavy tanks are expensive as gently caress to build and run. Light and medium tanks were quickly developed, and you could do 90% of the same things that a heavy tank could with a Whippet or a Renault FT. During the war, that other 10% was fighting other tanks, a fairly important thing, at least until the war ended. Now the primary enemy of the tank was no longer a well organized enemy army, but bandits, revolutionaries, uppity colonials, that sort of thing. Against them, a light two-man tank was more than enough. In the early post-war years, the Renault FT and its many many clones and modernizations reigned supreme. Improvements in rifle caliber armour piercing ammunition and development of heavy machineguns made heavy tanks completely impractical, since their armour could easily be pierced by a much smaller tank. These smaller tanks were also an easier pill to swallow for militaries who no longer enjoyed beefy wartime budgets and industrializing nations. Some amount of medium tanks are built during this time, but their advantages over light tanks can be boiled down to "more machineguns". Crazy one-offs like the Independent also exist, but the majority of the world prefers light vehicles. The difficulty in making long-lasting track links makes convertible drive tanks very popular, which isn't really a solution you can apply to heavy machines. In the early 1930s, the world is ravaged by a financial crisis, but the Soviet Union has money to burn. Out of the ridiculous poo poo like the Grotte tank and the other Grotte tank comes a fairly reasonable line-up of tanks, including the medium T-28 and heavy T-35. The point of these tanks is to break through enemy fortified regions. The 76 mm cannon can fling enough HE against light entrenchments, and the machinegun turrets can sweep through trenches. The two 45 mm gun turrets on the T-35 are there to destroy enemy tanks, since the low velocity 76 mm gun leaves much to be desired in that respect. These "heavy" tanks have pitiful amounts of armour, up to 30 mm, but even that is enough to resist low velocity 37 mm guns and heavy machineguns, which is what most of the world is using. In the mid-1930s, the Spanish Civil War shows the world what a real clash of armoured vehicles looks like. Machinegun-only PzIs fall easily to the 45 mm cannon on the T-26, but the latter is equally vulnerable to the newcomer: the light and high velocity 3.7 cm Pak anti-tank gun. Small, concealable, and easy to reposition, this weapon became a serious headache for tank manufacturers. Heavier armour was needed, not just on specialized breakthrough tanks, but on every tank. Here's when you see bigger and beefier tanks appearing. The French have impressively thick armour on even their light tanks, but their heavy B1 and medium S35 tanks are built to be completely impervious to this new threat. The FCM36 comes around: a revolutionary new design that offers armour which is both sloped to improve the chance of ricochet and welded, a superior alternative to rivets or casting. In the mid-to-late 1930s, the French are kings of heavy tanks. Unfortunately for them, these new tanks are expensive. The majority of the French tank park still consists of light tanks that are using the same low velocity 37 mm gun from the Renault FT. By the end of the 30s, the rest of the world begins to catch up. Britain comes up with the Infantry Tanks MkI and MkII, boasting impressive amounts of armour. In parallel with attempts to slap more armour on their existing designs, the Soviets develop the T-100 and SMK tanks, which are comparably protected but still bogged down by the archaic multi-turret paradigm. Partly by chance, the "budget" single-turret version of the SMK, the KV, shows its superiority and is chosen over the competing designs. This tank has 75 mm of armour and regularly returns from the front peppered with small dents from 37-47 mm guns. The Americans and Germans, however, continue to focus on lighter vehicles with up to 30 mm of armour. Their doctrines don't require anything heavier. The French campaign makes the Germans reconsider their approach to tanks. The heavy armour of French tanks proves to be troublesome, and their 25 mm high velocity cannon eats 30 mm of armour for breakfast. Plus, the Finns passed on knowledge of the Soviet T-100, referred to by the Germans as the T-35C. Bigger guns and thicker armour were needed. The solution was a short 50 mm gun for the PzIII and extra armour plates for the most progressive tanks the Wehrmacht possesses: 25-30 mm of armour bolted onto the front. This bolted armour is a half-measure as it cracks and falls off when hit, but designs enter production with homogeneous front plates up to 50 mm thick. By 1940, medium and even light tanks have more armour and firepower than heavy tanks could have dreamt of in the mid-1930s. The KV-1 concept appears satisfactory to the Soviets, and is worked upon incrementally. The KV-2 is a modification with a huge 152 mm howitzer to take on fortifications. The KV-3 is a slightly improved version of the KV-1: thicker armour, stronger engine, high velocity 76 mm gun based on ballistics of the mod. 1938 AA gun. This is considered fine until rumours of German tank development are picked up by Soviet intelligence. Reports of a 90 ton tank armed with a 105 mm gun (this was an abandoned German project for a breakthrough tank with a short 105 mm howitzer) were assumed to be a new superheavy tank with a 105 mm AA gun. Soviet trials determined that this gun could penetrate up to 130 mm of armour, making their 90 mm KV-3 obsolete before it even came out. This was a huge game changer. Existing heavy tank projects (the old KV-3, proposed again under the index KV-6, and the T-220) are cancelled. A new KV-3 tank with 120 mm of armour and a huge 107 mm gun is designed, along with its more enormous KV-4 and KV-5 brethren. One of these three tanks is destined to become the Red Army's heavy tank in 1942 after all three are built and comparative trials are held, but the start of the Great Patriotic War sobers up tank designers. There are no German heavy tanks. A whole host of mega-guns and super-tanks is swept into the bin. As single KV and T-34 tanks prove to be an enormous hassle for the Germans, every effort is made to resurrect old tank programs. The Durchbruchswagen (breakthrough vehicle) concept is revived, its short 75 mm gun growing into a long 75 mm gun, then a tank version of the 88 mm AA gun, the only effective weapon the Germans had against British Matilda tanks, eventually evolving into the Tiger we know and love. The tank combined some interesting new innovations with a critical drawback. The hull was a good old fashioned box shape, and while 82-100 mm of armour was a lot in 1942, the rest of the world wouldn't be sitting still. Even now, Soviet 85 mm AA guns and 57 mm anti-tank guns were capable of destroying the Tiger. Before the first Tiger saw combat, the Tiger II was already in the works, incorporating the progressive sloped hull design and an 88 mm gun based on an even bigger AA gun. The price for these huge jumps in armour and firepower were weight and complexity. The Tigers had to be collected into specialized battalions with a hilarious amount of engineers and technicians behind them to maintain even the humble availability rate that they did. Meanwhile, across the front lines, Soviet light, medium, and heavy tanks served in the same units. However, the concept of a heavy tank was changing. Instead of going heavier like the Germans, the Soviets valued reliability and ease of production. The KV tank became lighter and faster, pre-war ideas of a medium tank with heavy armour were brought back. The result was the T-43 and KV-13: medium tanks boasting more armour than the Tiger, but still that same old 76 mm gun. Work on bigger tank guns shifted down a few gears in 1941 and progressed slowly. 85 and 122 mm guns were tried, but the military's reaction was lukewarm. This changed in 1943 when the Ferdinand hit the battlefield. The appearance of the Tiger resurrected the 57 mm anti-tank gun and 85 mm designs, but it was really the Ferdinand's greatly improved armour and firepower that forced the Red Army to make the next big jump in armour. Both the T-43 and KV-13 were too expensive to replace the medium tank, so a compromise was reached. The more protected and roomier turret from the T-43 along with its 85 mm gun would go on the T-34 to give it enough firepower to combat heavy tanks while keeping costs low and production high. The KV-13 became the IS-2, a more expensive heavy tank, but with a much bigger gun. With 120 mm of front armour, it was incomparable to anything else on the battlefield at the time. The new tanks were formed in new units: the Guards Heavy Tank Breakthrough Regiment. Unique among the Red Army, IS-2 crews were given their Guards badge in advance. Much like the German Heavy Tank Battalion, these were envisioned to be the spearhead of offensive operations, except unlike the Germans, these tanks were actually used in their doctrinal role instead of as plugs for vulnerable sections of the front lines. Naturally, while Germany and the USSR duked it out in the east, the rest of the world wasn't sitting still. The Churchill tank was developed in Britain, with quite obvious roots in WWI heavy tanks. This was an awkward boxy design which was very long, very narrow, and had very confusing choices for armament. Unlike the Tiger or IS-2, various modifications of the Churchill carried guns that were also available on much lighter vehicles, with the exception of the "flying dustbin" engineering spigot mortar. The Americans had more interesting things in store. The massive M6 Heavy Tank was excellent at being a propaganda machine, but shipping these things overseas caused problems. The lighter and more compact Pershing was developed, but it suffered from growing pains and only arrived towards the end of the war. In the meantime, the Sherman "Jumbo" assault tank was the closest thing that the Western Allies had to a heavy tank. This tank was almost indistinguishable from a regular Sherman, but carried a hell of a lot more armour. These tanks were mixed in with regular Shermans and didn't form special units like the Soviets or Germans did. The Americans also developed the T28 super-heavy tank to take on the Siegfried Line, but the line fell before the tank could be completed. After the completion of WWII, heavy tanks reached their zenith. The Soviets reached the end of what they could do with traditional hull and turret shapes and began producing ridiculously armoured behemoths with variable thickness casting and piked hulls. At a mass of ~60 tons, these tanks were better protected than the German super-heavy prototypes. The Pershing grew into the much more polished family of Patton tanks (now classified as a medium). In Europe, British and French "medium" tanks were hanging around the 50 ton line. In the meantime, the Soviets set a hard 50 ton limit for their heavy tanks. Just as in 1941, a whole heap of potential designs was trashed. It didn't matter much, however, the age of the heavy tank was at an end. Much like in the interbellum period, proxy wars and minor conflicts were better fought with medium tanks, and the development of high velocity smoothbore cannons and new types of armour piercing projectiles made old fashioned steel no longer viable. Not being hit at all became the preferred alternative to carrying enough armour to weather a hit. By the time armour technology caught up with guns, the heavy tank class died out.
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Aug 10, 2016 16:46
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Perestroika posted:Huh, was that based on intelligence reports or actual frontline experiences? I'd always kind of assumed that the Ferdinand was another white elephant ( Frontline experience. The Ferdinand was expected to be a hell of a lot more common than it ended up being. I don't know when/if the GRU discovered that production was very limited, but the IS-4 was envisioned as an anti-Ferdinand tank.
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Aug 10, 2016 18:00
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Nebakenezzer posted:OK, EE, please correct me if I'm wrong on this. The Ferdinand had a loony toons hybrid drive system (gasoline/electric for those that don't know) because Prof. Porsche was obsessed with the idea of very large tanks, and once you get so big you actually have to use the hybrid system? Porsche was right, BTW, the tracked vehicle thing that moves the space shuttle uses engines generating electricity to drive the treads, and those crazy huge coal miner things use the same system (though conveniently they don't need an engine; they just plug themselves in via a gigantic power cable.) You don't *have* to, but it helps. The advantage of driving your tank with an electric motor is that you can simply adjust the value of a resistor to change how much current goes to the final drive. No clumsy gearboxes or discrete gears, only nice smooth continuous luxury. The downside of this is you have to use two tons of copper per tank, which is all sorts of unacceptable, especially at wartime when you can't even get enough nickel for your armour.
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Aug 10, 2016 21:49
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Nenonen posted:
2-pdr in the turret, 3 inch howitzer in the hull, that's how we roll motherfuckers! Except then the 6-pdr that replaced both of those had no HE produced for it, oops.
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Aug 10, 2016 21:51
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I haven't read any reasoning one way or the other, only people's opinions on the end product.
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Aug 10, 2016 22:43
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MikeC posted:Can you direct me to sources for this? I would love to read up on what the Soviets were thinking when they saw the Tigers and Ferdinands. Assuming its in English and not Russian of course. Yeah you're not going to find an English language source for that. There's a good book on the Ferdinand by the publisher arm of Wargaming (the World of Tanks people), but they folded and took all the rumours of an English translation with them. PittTheElder posted:Today I learned that tanks can jump: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrbCWCEO2r8
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Aug 11, 2016 02:43
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PittTheElder posted:
Yeah, there was someone in it. Jumps with BT tanks were fairly regular things. The driver was tied to the seat
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Aug 11, 2016 16:33
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The Cromwell was inferior to the Sherman in literally every conceivable way and also came out two years later.
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Aug 11, 2016 18:18
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ArchangeI posted:Is sloped armor just really difficult to make or why did they decide to go with a box tank in tyool 1943? Not just a box tank, a box tank with rivets. It took ages to get into production, but even in 1942 the British were already comfortable with casting and welding, so it's very weird why they'd put out such an archaic design.
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Aug 11, 2016 18:57
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Flipswitch posted:Awesome replies guys, thanks. Love discussions like these. Berlin was rich with old stone houses supplemented by pretty serious barricades. 76 mm and even 85 mm guns weren't enough to blast through them. The big guns of IS tanks and SPGs were a lot more useful, plus their AA machine guns could sweep upper floors to take out Panzerfaust crews. The Shermans were loved for their ability to do so as well. GABTU were huge fans of the roof mounted .50 cal, it's weird that it took so long to migrate to Soviet tanks.
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Aug 11, 2016 21:10
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The T-26 had okay armour for when it was designed, since it was before everyone had AT guns and heavy machine guns. Also it was plenty reliable*! *By 1939
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Aug 11, 2016 22:51
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xthetenth posted:Better as in more power to weight does in a vacuum mean a better tank. It means that for a given speed you can put less weight into the engine and therefore more into gun and armor. The American M4A4 medium tank is, overall, worse than the M4A2 medium tank. The 30-cylinder Chrysler gasoline engine is large and unwieldy, has many parts and assemblies, decreases the reliability of the tank, and increases difficulty of service. The engine provides good speed, but drastically lowers the tank's fuel efficiency, and increases cost. The fuel is more expensive than fuel for GMC engines in the M4A2 tank. Nenonen posted:To be fair, Soviets had also believed that their Bistro Tanks could run through the entire strategic depth of the enemy front and crush or run circles around everything stepping in their way. But they were smart enough to drop the concept much sooner than Brits did - but this can be attributed to them actually having their equivalent of Cromwell already in mass production (it also helped that most of the ~4000 Betkas were lost in 1941). The idea was that BT tanks would be sent into a breach and never encounter and AT guns, so they were only built to resist rifle fire. Of course, "hope that no one will be shooting at us" turned out to be not the greatest idea, but the BTs were pretty beefy for their time. Slim Jim Pickens posted:Did the British seriously forget to have HE shells for all their tanks? They didn't forget, it was intentional. Machineguns ought to be enough against infantry 
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Aug 12, 2016 04:43
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SeanBeansShako posted:Can't we agree to disagree and just make fun of the Maus? It could have been worse. 
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Aug 12, 2016 18:50
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Nebakenezzer posted:E100? Mauschen.
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Aug 12, 2016 20:47
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SeanBeansShako posted:Square bullets for the non christians. What kind of Christians were Christian enough to be shot at with regular bullets? Was it only the proper kinds, or did they admit that even the Eastern Orthodox heretics deserve a proper round bullet?
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Aug 13, 2016 05:45
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There were a bunch of factories churning out tanks, for one. Urban combat is very interesting, especially when you look at the well oiled machine that Soviet urban assault groups became in 1945.
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Aug 15, 2016 05:50
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darthbob88 posted:let's hear about Red Army shooting grenades into windows. Using windows that are already there is for capitalists, real men make a brand new hole in the wall for the purpose of inserting explosive devices at high velocity.
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Aug 15, 2016 15:49
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spectralent posted:As a kind of related thing: What kind of training did the Red Army give it's soldiers? One of the things I hear a lot is that soviet tank crews were just trained to do their job, whereas the German crews were all trained to fill all roles so if a German tank got hit and lost a driver someone else could drive it, whereas if the Soviet one did the tank was immobile, and suchlike, but then I also read Soviet memoirs (from places like I Remember) where they talk about crew swapping positions during marches so that nobody's getting too tired of one station, or people from other tanks filling in roles when crews were lost, so is that just total bullshit? I also gather that the Red Army had less time to train it's men than the western armies all did, but how significant a difference was that? From what I read, the commander was trained to perform all crew functions, then cross-training for other crew members was done in the field. Sure, training could have been lacking in some specific instances, but this was the exception rather than the rule. For example, here you can see an SPG crewman's report card. His courses cover a wide variety of topics.
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Aug 15, 2016 17:31
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