The Military Thread

@Kurushio

Thanks for the help! Re: bridges etc. IIRC, the Maus was never actually designed to cross bridges, it was anticipated that it would ford or submerge to cross every river it came to(!), or, if the river was too large, get a barge (which would, of course, require a barge large enough to take a Maus).

Also, tank destroyers are Awesome Yet Practical, if the testing of the Swedish S-tank is anything to go by. OTOH, the Swedes did replace it with license-built Leopard I Is, so...

BTW, the Royal Navy equivalent was the Admiralty Fire Control Table.

During earlier times, when MBTs were more or less Mighty Glaciers, tank destroyers sure had their place (and missile-equipped ones still have a niche, I guess). But MBTs are the trope image for Lightning Bruiser these days, and no gun-armed tank destroyer would have a decent chance against a fast-rotating, stabilized turret on a highly mobile platform anymore.

edited 21st Mar '14 4:54:26 AM by kurushio

So toss ATG Ms on a Humvee or equivalent, and you have a Lightning Glass Cannon.

edited 21st Mar '14 4:56:22 AM by GeekCodeRed

Fair enough, though NATO did test the S-tank and found it fairly good for it's time period:

edited 21st Mar '14 5:06:53 AM by Achaemenid

As I said, in earlier times, sure. But later comparison trials between the Leopard 2 and the VT tank showed that most advantages were gone, most of them lost to reliable stabilized guns; and that the disadvantages started to build up - no hull-down positions possible, slow reaction time on chance encounters, lost in forests and urbanized terrain (both very defining characteristics of central Germany.)

It's sad. VT tanks looked cool.

edited 21st Mar '14 5:11:10 AM by kurushio

It does sound like it'd be a cost-effective way of modernizing fleets of older tanks to be competitive with modern MBTs, though. The famous Sturmgeschuetz assault guns are the basis for this: take old Leo-1s/Pattons/T-55s/whatever-have-you, rip out the turret, slather on thicker front armor, and stick a bigger gun in a casemated superstructure. Sure they can't match MBTs in versatility, but they should be cheaper on a unit-by-unit basis, and they'd be invaluable in the defense. After all, StuGs did quite well in the hedgerows of Normandy.

Couldn't you use missiles for that, though? Something to bear in mind as well is that the S-tank was designed from the ground up to be turretless; it could use hydraulics to peek over obstacles, giving it a very low profile, and had a very quick traverse speed. I'm not so sure a converted T-55 might be as useful.

edited 21st Mar '14 5:19:58 AM by Achaemenid

Well, you could, but missiles have a few disadvantages, foremost being that they're slow. A TOW missile at short of 300 m/s would take about seven seconds to reach out to 2000m; if the terrain has any folds in it, a canny tank driver can duck behind a ridge, a fold in the terrain, or a copse of trees. Even older APFSDS rounds would cover the distance in just over a second. This becomes especially pronounced at 3000m or so; two seconds of flight-time for a sabot round versus eleven seconds for a missile makes for a pronounced difference, especially in broken terrain (which a good commander would attack through on the basis that short sight-lines would favor the attacker instead of the entrenched defender). Plus, sabot rounds are cheap compared to missiles.

There was a proposal—I'm trying to find it; it should be on the DTIC defense archive—to create a super-Stug of sorts using the M1A1 Abrams as the baseline, citing that exact rationale. That, and the possibility that without the weight of a turret, the frontal armor thickness could be doubled to 900mm+ against KE rounds, something no APFSDS round at the time had a prayer of penetrating. You wouldn't get such dramatic results using older tanks instead of the super-MBTs of the late 1980s, of course, but the improved armor would be very welcome.

Besides, for maximum effect, a company of such tanks would team with ATGM vehicles to get the best of both worlds, and perhaps a smaller unit of MBTs as a fire brigade/counterattack reserve.

Mind you, I still find it odd that the US isn't using a version of the M1 Abrams as an ARV, and is still using the M88 instead — that surely isn't good for logistics?

People are talking about a mere 2 guns? pff.

Also, my Grandpa keeps saying he drove a M50 in the National guard, but says it wasn't that thing. any ideas?

How about the M-50 Water Tanker?

Heh, no, it was a tank. One guy drove it off a small cliff and stuck the gun in the ground once

The Ontos had to be hand loaded from outside the vehicle and used a spotting rifle. It had very light armor at best. The Marines used up pretty all of them in Vietnam because they are fairly easy to knock out.

edited 21st Mar '14 4:30:05 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Has technology evolved enough to make that less of an issue?

...Indeed, I ask the same question of the various WWII tanks that were too impractical back then.

edited 21st Mar '14 10:27:33 AM by FFShinra

@joesolo: Unless it was the Israeli National Guard, I'm stumped. :)

Depends on the concept, but not everything that's technologically feasible is logistically or infrastructurally sound. As said before, tank troops are quite conservative when it comes to design.

Uh, aside from the Sherman, the only M50 tank I know is the Israeli Super Sherman.

Are you sure he didn't say M60? Because those are Pattons, and those were common in the US.

Simplicity is the virtue, I heard.

I'm fairly convinced he actually drove a m60 and just forgot.

Well, yes and no. Something I first heard said about the Harrier but which applies pretty much all over is that all wars are one-offs, and what might be the perfect weapon for one war might also be less than optimal for another. For instance, a lot of tanks which were uninspiring or outmatched in Europe were very useful in the Pacific during WWII. As an interesting counterfactual, say Viktor Suvorov was right^note And not a fucking joke of a historian who makes my blood boil...(*twitch) and Stalin had pre-empted Barbarossa and invaded German-occupied Poland and the Reich proper, we might be talking about how the Soviet tanks of WWII were too crude to match the sophisticated German designs - as, operating with much shorter supply lines, the infamous reliability problems of German armor might have been mitigated enough to become less of an issue.

If it's within your ability to make and maintain a more complex and yet more capable system, then sure, build it. The trick is knowing what you can feasibly operate - something Hitler never managed, which is why he built ever more elaborate tanks and halftracks whilst still relying on horse-drawn carts to supply his infantry.

I don't know, the most hilarious Humvee variant for me is the Avenger, even if only because it demonstrates the rather abysmal state of American short ranged air defences for their ground units. As I've pointed out before, the Warsaw Pact had a rainbow of different anti-air systems designed to protect everything from the mechanised infantry to the crucial C³ installations. During the Cold War, American (and to a lesser extent Western in general) militaries lacked anywhere near the same breadth and depth of options.

Well, the Tiger and Panther were thrown into battle before they were ready. I suspect that in turn we wouldn't be talking about the unreliability of the bigger kitty cats so much if they didn't break down in such embarrassing numbers outside Leningrad in 1942 and at Kursk in 1943 respectively.

So I just started reading "15 minutes to nuclear annihilation".

I`m very early in, but already the author confused me mildly with his non-sequitur. A couple of chapters in I can tell there is a pattern, so I guess he`s going somewhere with this.

Anyway, the info is golden already. I can't remember who suggested it (Sabre or Flanker I think? I'm bad at remembering names), but kudos to you, I could do like 80% of my research just with that book.

Right off the bat I now know that nukes make skin falls off. That's something I didn't know. I'd comment on how much it must hurt, but I don't think I can put it in words without abusing the Understatement pothole again.

It was also interesting to learn that, at first, people believed that Lemay's bomber fleet couldn't win the war single-handedly. And well, if Grave Of The Fireflies was any indication, it was more likely that they could wing it (heeeeh?!) even without the nuke.

edited 21st Mar '14 3:48:45 PM by QuestionMarc

Mostly because World War II Japanese tank design was crap — either way, that led to the Matilda II being the only British tank to be in service 1939-45, and the M3 Lee/Grant to last until the end of the War, despite being officially obsolete.

True dat. I wonder how Soviet designs like the T-34 or the IS would have fared during the island-hopping, though.