discovery channel stuff

M551Sheridian

10 Jul 07, 21:30

Does any 1 actually believe the stuff tat discovery channel says about the t34 tanks??? they say those tanks were the first to make sloping armour and was the best tank in the world.

Based on my own knowledge i believe ther was some tanks tat had sloping armour b4 the t34s eg. those french light tanks,polish tanks,

french tank 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMR_33
2 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCM_36
3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMC_35

all were built b4 the t 34s and most had slanted/rounded armour... and if the t34 were the best why were there reported cases of the soviet ppl using the lend lease program and trading in the t34s for sherman tanks of the americans????

Share ur thoughts here....

tankfanatic

11 Jul 07, 12:23

probably because it sloping armor is the only one that cant be pierced?..or the realisation that sloping armor increased thickness came from russian experience?

SingaporeTyrannosaur

11 Jul 07, 12:32

Originally posted by tankfanatic:
probably because it sloping armor is the only one that cant be pierced?..or the realisation that sloping armor increased thickness came from russian experience?

Actually the effects of sloping armour had long been understood before WW2... basically because it's a piece of common sense to anybody who took the time to observe and battleship warfare already provided a lot experience in how armour worked.

The problem was designing a tank that made good use of sloped armour, which too a while for people to catch on.

Darkness_hacker99

11 Jul 07, 12:51

Originally posted by M551Sheridian:
Does any 1 actually believe the stuff tat discovery channel says about the t34 tanks??? they say those tanks were the first to make sloping armour and was the best tank in the world.

Based on my own knowledge i believe ther was some tanks tat had sloping armour b4 the t34s eg. those french light tanks,polish tanks,

french tank 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMR_33
2 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCM_36
3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMC_35

all were built b4 the t 34s and most had slanted/rounded armour... and if the t34 were the best why were there reported cases of the soviet ppl using the lend lease program and trading in the t34s for sherman tanks of the americans????

Share ur thoughts here....

It's mass produced last time mah.. And T34 plays a very important role in WW history.

M551Sheridian

11 Jul 07, 18:04

then any1 able to explain the t34s being traded in for the shermans?

Arnhem

11 Jul 07, 19:29

Originally posted by M551Sheridian:
then any1 able to explain the t34s being traded in for the shermans?

Lend Lease Shermans supplemented the T34s, they never replaced them, 57,000 odd T-34s of all variants produced by war's end vs approximately 4,000 Shermans supplied to the USSR. The Brits also supplied Matildas and Valentines to the USSR at some point, it was more a case of grabbing whatever they could lay their hands on. Manpower was not an issue for the USSR.

As a comparision, the Brits had 3 times more the numbers of Shermans supplied to them than the Soviet Union.

DriftingGuy

11 Jul 07, 19:34

A T34 cant stand up against a German Tiger right?

SingaporeTyrannosaur

11 Jul 07, 23:18

Originally posted by DriftingGuy:
A T34 cant stand up against a German Tiger right?

Does it matter if you can build far more T-34s then Tigers.

The Tiger was not a war-winning concept from start to finish. It was expensive, complex, unreliable, slow and more or less a heavily armoured 88mm mobile gun. That is good for some stuff but when you need to fight a war you'll realize that the disadvantages of the design become a real liability when you want to get things done.

No tank (except prehaps the Pershing, Comet and the Soviet Heavy tanks) was a match for the Tiger but the problem was that there simply wasn't enough Tigers around to make their superiority in firepower and armour turn the tide.

If the Germans had abandoned their plans for super tanks at all costs, and focused on their excellent Panther, things might have been quite different.

tankfanatic

12 Jul 07, 14:24

oh how i love the Panther....

M551Sheridian

15 Jul 07, 13:57

panthe wasnt really excellent the gun mount area was rounded so rounds ricocheted off it and into the thin roof killing the driver so they added a lip to catch the bullets.... and the 75mm wasnt really effective

Arnhem

16 Jul 07, 17:00

Originally posted by SingaporeTyrannosaur:
If the Germans had abandoned their plans for super tanks at all costs, and focused on their excellent Panther, things might have been quite different.

I like the Panther, it's easily the sexiest WWII German tank but I think even if Panther production were tripled the outcome would still have been the same. More men would have died and perhaps an Allied division here or there mauled badly, maybe added 2, 3 months to the war in Europe but the end result would have been the same. On the East front, mountains of tanks, infantry and artillery would have crushed however many numbers the Germans would have cranked out, quantity is quality.

On the West Front, one factor alone would have been decisive. Absolute Allied air supremacy would have seen to making it difficult for the tanks to get to the front lines without getting shot at at least once and curtailing the supplies needed to run them effectively, especially fuel. American infantry while not as lavishly equipped with Bazookas as their German counterparts with Panzerfausts/Panzershreks would demonstrate in places like Mortain and Elsenborn Ridge that they could take on German armor and prevail to say nothing 76mm gunned Shermans, Jumbo Shermans and the johnny come lately Pershings.

Still, one wonders if production for the Mark IVs were dropped in favour of retooling to push out more Mark Vs....

Arnhem

16 Jul 07, 17:14

Originally posted by M551Sheridian:
panthe wasnt really excellent the gun mount area was rounded so rounds ricocheted off it and into the thin roof killing the driver so they added a lip to catch the bullets.... and the 75mm wasnt really effective

I beg to differ. The problem you speak of is known as a shot trap and it became apparent in the earlier production models and the mantlet was redesigned to prevent such deflections from happening,

As for the 75 being crappy, no wai. It's not about the size of the gun in this case, the 75 mounted on the Panther was streets ahead of the 75 on the Sherman and in terms of armor penetration we're not even talking about the ammo differences. The longer barrelled gun (L/70 vs L/38 on a standard M4) mounted on the Panther had a higher muzzle velocity for one thing and it was supposedly terribly accurate beyond the effective range of it's counterpart on the Sherman. Can't kill something if it kills you first before you can reach your own effective killing range yourself.

chino65

16 Jul 07, 19:19

Originally posted by M551Sheridian:
panthe wasnt really excellent the gun mount area was rounded so rounds ricocheted off it and into the thin roof killing the driver so they added a lip to catch the bullets.... and the 75mm wasnt really effective

The Panther's 75mm gun was very potent.

I won't say it is the best but the French copied the gun for the AMX-13 tanks.

There were many good guns. The Tiger 88mm were very powerful.

But the British came up with the best Allied tank gun of WW2 and it is the 75mm or 17pdr used on Sherman Fireflys and a few other Allied tanks.

M551Sheridian

16 Jul 07, 20:45

if im not wrong fireflies had 76.2mm/76mm guns ... and i would rather design a tank which is in between medium and a heavy tank than to build millions of light tanks to sacrifice to destroy 1 heavy tank... arming the the panther with the 88mm and making its design alittle bit more on the heavy tank side would have made it the best tank in WWII so if they did i suppose we be speaking german now lol

mozzi190

19 Jul 07, 22:49

The T34 was the weapon and the tank that made the biggest contributions to the defeat of Nazi Germany. Thus, in history, due to the role that this tank played in the eastern front, this tank can be counted one of the best if not the best tank ever produced.

The strength of the T34 was that it was easily manufactured, with great simplicty in it's design and it can be produced in large numbers. The German forces simply was no match for a large force of T34 travelling in fast speed across the steepes of Russia. In addition, the German 88mm gun (which was originally a flak gun) was the only gun in the entire German armoury that could pierce through the plating of the T34 tank. Soviet T34s were more than a match for any German tanks that were fielded on the Eastern Front.

Compared to Soviet tanks at that period, the German armaments boards had too many tanks,too many different calibers of gun. German tanks (esp the Tigers and Panthers) were simply too complexed to be build in large numbers and they often broke down while moving to the front and there were too few spare parts for the repair. In fact, Heinz Guderain, the Inspectorate of the Panzer forces requested for an increased procuction of the reliable Panzer III in place of the newer tanks sometime in 1944.

Perhaps the greatest compliment that the T34 could be given was that the Nazis tried to copy the design of the T34 in their own tanks.However, again they overlook the strength of the T34 by simply adding too many customisation to the tank. In fact, there was even a force of captured T34 used by the Nazis against the Soviets on the western front.

Thus, I give my vote to T34 as the greatest tank of the 20th century with the M1 Abrams and the Tiger followed behind.