Tanks Vidya

/tanks/ is dead edition

Also is that Battlezone remake worth a pirate?

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miniclip.com/games/tiny-tanks/en/
thesovietarmourblog.blogspot.com.au/search?updated-max=2015-10-09T20:44:00-07:00&max-results=99&start=5&by-date=false
youtube.com/watch?v=BvfABFaiBVo
store.steampowered.com/app/410320/
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1st for no good tank vidya and the only tank vidya are money grabbing русский games with terrible balance.

time to post some cool tank shit

Why live?

Which one? There are several of them.

Supposedly Redux is very good but I haven't played it yet. Have a magnet link. 2 gigs, gog installer

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:85EA7104B2D16F78DC573BBC2746DE7470A1E9A3&dn=battlezone+98+redux+gog&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fglotorrents.pw%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce

Has anyone else played thunder Brigade? It wasn't really the best of games but I remember enjoying it pretty nicely

Only if you play F2P Slavshit

Tell me more user?

Infantry transport simulator sounds a little dull but then again I'd love a Black Hawk module for DCS

I hear even the new battlefield is trying to emulate their light/medium/heavy/sniper tank setup.

I've played WoT for about a year and I don't think I've enjoyed much of it. Even when I'd play good which was rare because the game ran like shit on my PC.

There's the 1998 version, the 2008 one and the 2016 one

God damn this OST is bringing back some memories.

Does anyone have a copy of this game? If yes, does it run well on modern PCs? Mine came bundled with Bubsy and it got corrupted a long while ago.

wew

Thanks user!


I used to do that a lot in Arma Was fun but now everyone wants to just shuttle about in helicopters now. Such is the way of faggots

Disgusting, although on a side note on Battlefield, how's Forgotten Hope 2's tank battles?


I never knew that existed. Is it shit?

But it's so cool

Does anyone know of any recent and good futuristic arcade-y sci fi tank games?

2008 I think was an XBLA title and not a very good one at that. I remember seeing it in a mall once.

Russians did it better

It's meh, it's just a remake of the arcade game. It doesn't add a huge amount.
It's also a 360 exlusive.

BMPs are lame. Bradleys are a e s t h e t i c

Bet you it would enjoy a 100mm round up its ass.

...

I much prefer the Marder series.

Is it me or in the third webm there's something at the tip of the round that like disintegrates or spins too hard and falls off? It's like small extremities

I think what you're seeing is a supersonic shockwave coning out around the round. The bend in air pressure creates a lens that warps light.

So no recent hovertank games? Is the genre dead?

Amazing.

It's pretty awesome, yeah.

In regards to your question, Planetside 2, if you're a filthy Vanu spandexnigger.

Battle Engine Aquila is pretty close to that.

I wanna drive this motherfucker around.

So the genre is did.

Afraid so. The only place I really see hovertanks nowadays is embedded in genres that either don't focus on them or put you in backseat control at best. They're pretty common in RTS, for example.

who do I need to kill for a tank multiplayer game where all the tanks have fully modeled insides? I don't even need DCS levels of button autism but just something where I can sit in my spot and look around and see my co-op crew members doing their jobs while we hunt enemy tanks on varied maps.

Red Orchestra 2 came close but Tripwire became well, Cuckwire.

Check out www.tankionline.com

It's the Quake of tank games.

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You can do drifts and parkour on Tanki.

What is this nitronic rush with tanks?

thats actually a good idea

The new physics in WoT allow drifting, I think.

Oh god, that game is good
FAST TANK

Too bad there's plenty of 12 years old so your chat is a bit messed up

You mean, "good thing there's plenty of 12 year olds so you can club plenty o' seals."

On a note about F2P Slavshit, is Armored Warfare dead yet?

Yes, its ded.

What killed it anons if I may ask? Just curious?

All I remember was that the PvP mode was a worse copy of WoT that was a 15vs15 clusterfuck.

Huh. Guess all that shilling about it being WoT done right wasn't really justified after all.

Almost nothing have changed since open beta. They have copied worst shit from WoT, yes its still clusterfuck, still extreme lack of content and fixes, it still lacks optimization and game runs like shit. "I swear, we almost fixed shot delay!!! Buy our Independence Day tank pack goyim"

I decided to check that out and holy shit, 10,000 Gold? What is that, $40?

Oh for a while it WAS WoT done right.

And then they started copying wot hardcore after beta. Notably, there was originally a reason to carry different shell types. Cap rounds could over pen IFVs, so HEAT was good against them and had higher damage. If you couldn't pen that MBT that was a tier higher than you, you threw HE at him so you could at least do SOME damage. Removing shit like that destroyed class balance as well as tier balance. Now, there's no reason not to play as an mbt. Half your games you'll be in the position where you can't pen the enemy and HE does nothing, so you either pixel hunt to try and do something, or you just take your loss knowing that the other half of the games you're in the position of power.

Also there's no reason for shot delays in 2010+ or having multi gig patches once a week.

The only thing being liberated here is your wallet.

God damnit do they have to fuck up all their games? Skyforge was okay but they had to make it P2W and shit.

Meh BMP-3 are so last season.

It's obsidian.

Of course the game was bound to be a fuckup.

Since when is Obsidian making f2p slavshit? I thought this was my.ru or something

Going through their website and saw this, guess they are going to sell this as well? Also why does the Russian site say the game is called Project Armata?

What's this? Slightly near future World of Tanks?

It's Armored Warfare user, not been paying attention to the last dozen posts?

I was aware we were talking about AW, I just don't know what that image is of, it looked kind of futuristic and I thought Project Armata was a vidya name and not a tank name so I assume wrongly.

Ah okay user, there's a few vehicles on the Armored Warfare websites, it looks like they are churning out "Premium" Tanks as cashgrabs. Not sure if it's fair to judge at moment but how many tanks are actually in game that are non-premium compared to premium?

mail.ru is an investor/publisher, Obsidian is a dev, they're trying to copy WoT
what a shame mess

Think I just answered my own question when I came across this.

aw.my.com/en/forum/showthread.php?79035-The-Premium-Tank-Question-when-so-much-is-too-much

Holy shit nearly half the tanks in game are "Premiums" Even Wargaming wasn't that bad, they basically have a ratio of 1:6

"This comes after a close relationship is formed between Mail.Ru and Uralvagonzavod. Mail.Ru is, of course, the publisher of Armored Warfare in Russia just like My.com is for western countries. Uralvagonzavod is a well-known producer of armored vehicles and based in Russia. The Russian Armored Warfare portal has had content related to Uralvagonzavod before, but the rebranding of Armored Warfare was still a surprise to me."

Oy blia

A third* Cause I can't do maths

Still ration is 1:2

Jesus christ trying to drift with Abrams must be pure torture when Leo2, CV90 and a goddamn AAV can do it.

They reload it through the hatch behind the turret and it only takes about 10 seconds, that's not a big deal

Screw you guys, you don't know fun

the devs drinked the kool aid and added in the game neutral pronouns when talking about the tanks

I remember playing the demo back in the day. That, Tanktics, Battlezone, Armored Fist.

There was also this one tank game that took place on some shitty planet of rocks, where you controlled the tank in the third person and shoot at other tanks. IIRC you had the choice between a red and a green one.

Oh, and that RTS where you control machines, with the gimmick that you can enter any unit in the first person and control it like an FPS. Man, those were the good years.

Even better is that there is an event they are running to "win" it. Problem is you are getting players literally forming groups in PvE and deliberately stacking points giving them huge scores. So you get literally one person doing all this damage and spotting damage and getting massive score that couldn't be done in a normal match. Also the event is heavily P2W for Tier 3 and Tier 6 groups, as the only way to really get those scores easily or at all is with vehicles that you have to pay for, with the cherry on top is that these vehicles getting these scores can no longer be bought at all Abbot VE and Terminator

Fuck I was wondering what that game was called, I completely forgotten about it. I remember it being the shit.

have to stick your head out of a vehicle, likely in a firefight, that must remain motionless, with the turret in a certain useless direction, and untangle and snip the old guide wires, then bring up the new round.

takes 10 seconds, no big deal.

Well they are objects, not people…

Did you know Iraqi tanks lack power traverse? By simply backing up faster then they could work the turret crank, nothing could hit the crew and after about 15 seconds there were no longer any Iraqis in the area.

Apparently you learn a lot in a Bradley, and at least half of it is prefaced with "only try this if you are going to die anyway."

I remember seeing some documentary where a bunch of burger tanks came up to a shitload of Iraqi tanks and just blitzkrieged their ass because the Iraqis literally could not turn the turrets quick enough to hit anyone.

...

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Kek Had this saved but was too lazy to search for it

So anons, I know it's more F2P crap but what do you think of World of Chinks?

meh.

No problem, onifam.

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BMPT TerminatoR

I am curious anons. Considering there seems to be a God for everything these days, who do we pray to in regards to tanks? Who is the Tank God?

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There is only one God and it's the God of the Bible.

The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
The creator of the universe.

Jesus Christ is God in the flesh.

...

Steel Beasts Pro PE 4.0 when?
I need my T-72B fix.


Probably a holy trinity of these three.

I don't know if you ever played APB Reloaded, but it sucked. However this song in webm related quickly became my friends' and my go-to song for when we were driving dangerously or things were spiraling out of control in an XTREME way

tl;dr i made this i hope it makes you laugh

Asians, besides japs, are ass at making good video games let alone balancing them.
I speak from experience, plus, they're only good at regional locking their games.
And since it's made in China, expect North Korean "tanks" matching up against M1A2 Abrams with no problem.

Can you please tell me who is the artist for the first pic? tried SauceNAO and it didn't give me any results.

沖田 あばば/Okita Ababa, pixiv id: 1159100
Do you like getting spoonfed, user?

Thank you

...

Would be kind enough to tell us what the song name is, m8?

lava lava by boys noize

Try War Thunder.

The grind is also terrible because it's F2P but the game is still better.

Mmmm.. tank with "Girl & Panzer" decals…

2142 PAC hovertank

Also if you want to have fun with a Bradley just go play Arma 3 and download the CUP content. Shit has a pretty well done Bradley in its content. Arma while not being perfect is probably one of the better games to drive a tank around in.

War Thunder
The game with so much Russian bias that the soviet medium tanks can even fly.

How about you play the game a little bit longer, given that you're so interested in a game that actively kills it's oldfags.
War Thunder is casual-tier tank sim for those who can't into real tonk sim.
The game is probably fun if you love being laughed by slavs with their 1960 munitions up against 1945 vehicles. Also fucking ATGMs on not even modern tonks.

Honestly the only decent tank gameplay I've seen since Panzer Front that's not some jewish trap or some always online pseudo-MMO crap is Men of War.

I think WoT really killed the genre, nowadays you won't find any good tank game free of bullshit.

Funny fact: I actually saw one of the TCs in my platoon sacrificing his drivers blood into the fuel thingy on the rear deck. Their tank had been having issues and they wanted to appease it's machine spirit before an exercise. Now whenever I bleed I smear it on the bore evacuater for luck

hnnggg

iqdb next time friend

If it's got russian bias I'll pass

It does

What would happen if you sticked your dick inside a tank's barrel and it shoots?

It would be extremely painful.

miniclip.com/games/tiny-tanks/en/

What level can you get up to Holla Forums?

I haven't been there in years.

and I got to 8, fuck the blue tank shots and nice music.

Level 21 is a pain in the ass.

RIP

it does, but it mostly affects air battles. Tank battles simply have bullshit all around.

Weren't the Russians able to field KV-2's, KV-1's and T-34 42's against generally early Shermans, Panzer III's and short barreled Panzer IV's?

if you get really shit matchmaking then yes. KV-1's and 2's are generally matched with long-barrelled Pz.IV's, late Pz.III's with spaced armor, and Stuh 42 G's. all T-34 rank placement is pretty bullshit, however.

lmao

Though the germans STILL dominate certain battle ranges because Russian players are just so fucking bad.

Pretty much any good german tank is put in a battle rating so high that it faces some level of bullshit postwar garbage. Ironically confirming that Germans have the best tanks despite slavboos and sekrit documents ))))))) on the official forums.

If you want to have fun, player the dicker max at 4.3 BR, and never get any other tank that's higher than 4.3. Play only in Realistic Battles.
You can snipe Russians 2+km away and enjoy butthurt tears as they spawn in their soviet shit-prop planes and try to hunt you down.

Wasn't there dev butthurt when a Slav actually pulled out official Soviet documents from WW2 citing that the devs stats for a lot of Russian tanks were bullshit?

Would you fuck a tank?
I'd fuck a tank.

That happens pretty much every week, user. Most of the time it isn't even a dev, just a forum moderator or community manager.

They've actually admitted at one point that they portray soviet tanks in an idealized manner in the game because russian gamers are their primary target audience.

I just remember the butthurt was special this time cause they cited "historical data" and it was the Russians that were the ones calling bullshit on their data.

Who here /BattleTanx/?

someone ought to remake it for pc

It's like you dont even enjoy suffering, user.


I do recall a specific event like that, but it's all pretty blurry at this point. Nowadays, the only response you'll ever get from them "According to our statistics/documents/data, it is correct", that is if your post didnt just get deleted right away. Of course, they've never publicized that "data" of theirs. It is sekrit dokumants, komrade :^)

It'd be weird if you didn't.

I'm not talking about those humanized types.

Is there any game where me and my friends can go rolling around in a tank with a modeled interior and decent armor mechanics that isn't RO2?

That's actually pretty neat

...

no.

Well, nothing other than full-on military training sims as far as I know.

WoT - dying a slow death.
AW - ded.
WT GF - garbage with extreme russian bias
ARMA - work simulator

I would have no problem paying $5-$10 a month for a good armor/tank focused game.

F2P has ruined everything.

I can't bear the salt to drag myself any further, plus, won't you face still face ATGMs at 4.3?
Slavshitters always overwhelm my whole team at every possible angle 10 minutes into the match, IS-2s don't even need to rangefind because of 122mm shell mass.
I'd get into sniping if Gaijin can stop erasing my shells from existence upon landing on slav tonks.
best feel

Arma tanks are also Shit

Heavily modified Arma 3. I think a few modders put in detailed tank interiors, Challenger 2 mod springs to mind.

It's not even Obsidian's A team making this. They got the publishing deal and then threw the project at their interns.

I'd be surprised if there were more than a 100 people on the NA server now. AW is dead.


They focused on adding more tanks and bells and whistles rather than actually improving the fucking game. Like this user says, they removed overpen so there's no real reason to play anything other than MBTs. ATGMs are worse than useless because you have to literally stand still, exposing yourself for the entire duration of flight until you hit your target and it means absolutely nothing because every vehicle in the game has an indicator that shows you're being targeted by an ATGM. You even have to stand still for 2 seconds BEFORE you can even fire your damn ATGM! This makes ATGM carriers hell to play like the M60A2 Starship where you need to rely on HEAT rounds to do any damage and when your equivalent tier Russian MBT is a T-64 which has composite armor designed to specifically defeat HEAT rounds…well….

In addition, late tier tanks (nearly all which have composite armor) all have options to add Active Protection Systems and cage or ERA armor that makes ATGMs absolutely useless at anything past Tier 5.

Speaking of indicators, every vehicle in the game gets an indicator and an audio warning ("Incoming arty!") to warn you an artillery shell is coming. Pretty good right? Well combine that with the fact every vehicle has WoT's sixth sense by default and you get matches where artillery is almost completely useless since Arty in AW doesn't do much damage by design and everyone in the game camps like a motherfucker since accuracy is much much better than in WoT.

In terms of graphics, AW was supposed to look much better than WoT by virtue of using the Cryengine but the game ends up looking WORSE THAN WOT. Just compare the Chieftains in WOT and AW. The game is also unoptimized and runs like shit. While in WOT you can see the whole small 1kmx1km stage from anywhere, in AW the camera angle is designed to make stages look bigger than they are but they're the same as WoT's at 1kmx1km and there's objects that aren't rendered till you get within 500 or so meters from them.

And while PVE mode was a good idea on paper (you can grind out stock tanks without going into PVP) it split the small userbase between the two modes so PVP have to endure long queue times while PVE players call them "elitist". The few PVE players who do go into PVP are crushed because they learn incredibly bad habits from shooting braindead bots in PVE (Which is basically a five player horde mode).

Finally, the game's devs are even more jew than WG. At first it was nice "Oh wow I can have unlimited garage slots for free! I can max level my crew fairly quickly? Cool!" but then they just started piling on more and more prem vehicles, some of which were overpowered in the classic Type 59 way (Platoons of Zhalo-S and AMX-10P PAC 90 at lower tiers to seal club). A lot of premiums weren't even new vehicles but rather the same old vehicles but with a new paintjob and premium status. It's the epitome of low effort.

I'm probably forgetting some other shit but that's the major points. Goddamn I hate how this game turned out. I was so hype for it.

Those were all shit to begin with, apart from ARMA which is currently better than ever for armor due to stuff like the RHS mod.

How did they managed to get such small maps with the CryEngine? Honestly how? It's party piece is detailed forested/jungle environments up to 8kmx8km, and I know this is fucking possible with 64 players on the server! See Mechwarrior Living Legends

Because they want to be WoT so much.

Large map sizes with 15 v 15 teams like WoT with similar view ranges as WoT would throw the game off balance. Not to mention having larger maps would tax the potato computers Russians have. This is a Russian published game and they have to make sure it runs on Russian minimum specs to get as much F2P suckers into the game.

The tutorial for that game is downright awful. I'm not sure I want to grind through it.

The last time I tried, I somehow managed to detrack the tutorial Matilda.

Good man

Anybody who'd choose a human "tank" rather than the real thing is a pleb.

Would you a flying tank?

I like the way how WoT handles it being playable on russian minimum specs, it just doesn't actually use more than one core or something and as a result it runs like shit for everyone regardless of PC.

Was this rape /tanks/?

Ratbat is great. I think he actually drops by from time to time in 8ch /k/

Ratbat's a chick.

Proof?

how about 30 bucks for a good singleplayer game

I'd fuck a tank if it were a girl.

Fuck.

Don't lie user, you'd fuck a tank regardless.

Butt stuff is gross, and things going up by butt is strictly forbidden.

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Naw.

Just check her website and Pateron, man.
Don't get your hopes up, though. She's not hot, she's what you'd expect a chick who goes to imageboards, plays vidya and wants to fuck vehicles would look like.

I always liked the idea of a single-crew tank with a sophisticated feminine AI that has a crush on you and always makes sexual references to you being inside her. She's also very protective and easily gets jealous.

user I think we might be the same person from different points of the timeline.

is that trans?

No, just fat.

You think a game like that could work?

I can kinda imagine it being set in a future world, you plays as a mercenary with your sentient tank. You can upgrade her with different armaments and armour but she'll essentially stay the same throughout the game.

Yeah sure. Imagine the love story of a man and his tank, blooming on the battlefield.

Oh man. If you don't waifu her well enough she'll suddenly start having "mechanical failures" or glitches during combat.

Perhaps the endings would depend on what kind of relationship these two have developed, who's in charge and so on.

...

I've heard that on they M1a2 SEPs they have a voice system, though I don't know if it says more then Warning and all that

Burning T-34's is so satisfying.

user you do realize it wasn't for the PvE mode nobody would bother with AW at all? Quite literally it's the only interesting and sadly good thing about it. The PvP mode they've got is a dull boring mess that is just the shit we've played in WoT thousands of times before!

If they wanted to make their PvP mode appealing they should have put more than 5 seconds of thought into it.

PVE mode was just as mind numbing as the PVP sadly. Not to mention the AI arty was more annoying than anything that came before it.

Weird thing is if they made the maps more open, combined PvP and PvE mode together, for example have AI units like AT Guns or soft targets on the field it could have spiced things up so much. Instead though we got a WoT clone.

fun fact: in the air force, any computerized voices are always female and are supposed to sound attractive. from the air force's point of view, a fighter pilot is much more likely to pay attention to a pretty voice

I agree. I don't think PvE in a tonk game is a bad idea at all. It could have been amazing but it was just as bare bones as the rest of the game (the go to excuse is "IT'S STILL AN ALPHA VERSION, user! DON'T BE SO HARSH, NOW BUY OUR PREMIUM TANKS, GOOD GOY! NO REFUNDS!)

It was just "Drive to point A, shoot respawning enemy bots"

A lot of premiums weren't even new vehicles but rather the same old vehicles but with a new paintjob and premium status. It's the epitome of low effort.

I prefer this, honestly. It's e-penis, while everyone can access that same units and shit and have an even playing field.


I wouldn't mind if stuff was idealised. German tankers mentioned that especially early on in the war, the crews for T34s were shockingly bad and even in the heat of combat they could tell there were up against people who'd not been trained properly, if at all. German tanks were suffering towards the end of the war with dodgy armour due to poor supplies, ect ect. It's never going to be idealised across the board though. I accepted that and I've never touched any of the WoT genre games since.

T-34 crews being so bad wasn't just a matter of the crews being bad, it's just an awful fucking tank. It's an overcompressed death trap where, no matter where it's penetrated in the main hull, everyone is going to die horribly from shrapnel, ammo detonations from said shrapnel sinking into the floor made of ammo plates and fuel tank, and the whole engine block going up in flames from the usual German APCBC-HE piercing head lodging itself directly inside after the HE component detonated on the front plate and sent it straight through. And if the turret is penetrated, that's still a write-off, because the Soviets don't bother to recover their tanks and the crew is now down both the commander-gunner and the loader, plus the 85mm ready ammo might've burned the whole tank down anyways. The early versions had no cupolas, and the later versions had pretty poorly ones in design and quality. Wartime optics were shockingly bad, which Slavaboos will counter with the American test tanks being declared as having 'the best in the world,' nevermind that these were constructed to a far higher standard. The 85mm turret improved matters a bit with a standard (if bad) cupola and a gun to punch above its weight class, but it was still a death trap hull on an obsolete suspension with an engine that burned itself out in no time. Nevermind that it wasn't exactly cheap in terms of resource expenditure or labor, having an all-aluminum engine block amongst other things. 'Shockingly bad' is a bit of an understatement. I never, ever understand T-34aboos. Big cat fans who ignore the problems caused by expediency are a little irritating, as are those who portray them as total logistical failures in of themselves rather than this being a matter of wartime pressure and the ill-conceived 'short war' idea hamstringing the Germans, there's always the tommy cooker dickery over whether they lit up because of psychotic ammo stowage or inherent flaws in the non-overloaded stowage, but T-34 fans are the most absurd creatures. The only particularly modern thing about it was that it had sloped armor, which was largely its downfall due to being too narrow and too low. It had a rear transmission, but not a power pack arrangement, and that engine deck does not look fun to service. Is there something I'm missing about this nonsense, beside 'muh slope' and 'muh on-paper penetration?'

I read somewhere they had the average life expectancy of the tank was about 6 months (due to mechanical failure, let alone actual hostile action) which is one of the reasons they were so cavalier about the manufacturing standards

The KV-1 and T-34 sent Aberdeen were both two years old at the time they were shipped. They weren't specifically designed to fool Americans.

I need more arcade-style tank games.

I recall reading rather specifically that the Aberdeen tanks, or some particular Soviet tanks sent to Aberdeen, had been constructed with Soviet design and American labor. Where am I garbling that up from, then? I thought I remembered clearly, but maybe not. Were there multiple tests with multiple tanks, or am I thinking of something else entirely? Point granted, then. It's a fluke compared to wartime experience is what I'm driving at, but maybe I'm misinformed and the gunsights are fine compared to the terrible viewports?

I remember hearing a rumor that at one point during the war Brits were considering adapting the T-34 and KV-1 designs for their own use. Think they were going to put a 17pdr on the T-34 and a 6inch gun on the KV-1.

It's really a shame that the genre is dead. You either get hard simulators, moderately hard simulators with balance-driven inaccuracies, or Wargaming peek-a-boo simulators. Fast shoot-and-scooting with HP bars and goofy secondary weapons & shells would be great with modern technology.


Interesting, but it sounds disastrous. A T-34 Firefly would be a fiendish if thinskinned tank destroyer on paper, but beside awful hull arrangement and the various logistical difficulties of the tank- likely lessened by British crews actually bothering to clean the engines' air filters on time and the like- would the gun even fit in the ordinary cast turret, with any kind of useful depression? Not the barrel, which seems to be a bit shorter than the ZiS-S-53 when eyeballing the shell size & calibers, the breech assembly. Maybe they could have a cast roof hump in a new turret for the gun to raise up into. But that'd ruin the cupola's field of view in addition to being a pain to load, which'd necessitate a funky cupola design with the vison blocs on that side being periscoped to look over it.

And a six-inch KV-1 would just be a KV-2 without much operating room, unless they came up with a compromise turret with similar volume, but less horrendous weight. It all seems silly even for bong designers.

I know that the British post-war tests done on Panthers were actually British made Panthers but as American made Soviet vehicles? I'm unaware of that happening but it doesn't seem too farfetched. I recall SOMETHING like that happening but can't put my finger on what.


Two tanks were sent: A T-34 model 1941 the F-34 76.2mm gun and a KV-1 Model 1942 with the ZiS-5 gun.


The gun-sights were fine the problem was the periscopes. In American tanks, the gunner's periscopes and gun-sight are both linked to the gun. In the T-34, the periscope is independent of the gun, so the gunner had to find the target in the periscope, flip over to the gun-sight and then find it again before firing.

As for the viewports, I know from Zaloga's "T-34-85 versus M26 Pershing" that compared to both the M26 and M4 Easy 8, the T-34 commander's cupola was inferior in vision. Don't know how it compares to the German tanks.

Nope, not at 4.3

You still get the tiny little ASU being a piece of shit though, otherwise it's just T34s and KV-1/2s.

www.tankionline.com

Didn't know about this. Neat.

Which is rather why it stuck in my head. Must've just been a couple crossed wires, some vaguely-remembered American test of Soviet materiel with their manufacture with the absurdity of the 'best gunsights in the world' statement. Putting aside above-average quality or a higher average quality than I think to be the case, the Americans might have thought them bad enough to rib the Russians and it went totally over their heads. And beside that, a little more brushing up reveals that some Soviet sights were clones of old Zeiss models from the Molotov-Ribbentrop collaboration, funnily enough.

But why? Didn't everyone else on top of their game have a synchronized gunsight/periscope arrangement, with the occasional built-in rangefinder? With how cramped the turret was, you'd think there'd be more incentive to compact and integrate them.

Likely not well. The early cupolas for a lot of tanks sort of resemble the T-34/85 style of 'dumb cylinder with vision slits,' albeit lower and with less narrow ones. Later, you get stuff like the late Panther & Tiger cupola, with the lower profile, armor-sunken but wider and higher-angle vision slits, and the rotating hatch.

Soviet tank recovery teams, at least in the 2nd Guards Tank Army, tended to receive glowing reviews from their commanders by 1944. The problem was that the T-34 was designed at a time when no German tank could reliably penetrate the damn thing at a normal range, so ammo storage seemed like no big deal. Like Germany the Soviets assumed that the war would not be long enough for fancy new designs to hit.

You can tell it is a decent tank because Germany inverted their tank design dogma as a result of encounters with it and the KV. Until 1941, Germany FLAT OUT BANNED guns that extended over the hull. Mobility was the key factor. Starting with the one research committee in December 1941, mobility became the least concern of new designs after armor and firepower.

Finally, I am pretty sure you don't grasp how rapidly everything turned obsolete in the war. It was the exact opposite of a death trap when introduced. By 1943 the design was way behind where everyone else was.

Actually, not everyone used that arrangement. The Panther was the biggest offender in this regard, the gunner in that tank had NO periscope at all, forcing him to use his gun-sight at ALL times to view outside the tank.

...

That's Guard units, though. Reading I did from American military observers was not favorable in the least; hundreds of tanks were left at the side of the road, be they husks or recoverable, first by frontline units with the excuse of 'follow-on units will get it' followed by follow-on units leaving them still burning at the roadside.

The T-34 was rather designed at a time when not much of anything would penetrate it, German or otherwise. It was flatly an interwar design, rationalized in shape for the shortest men possible, and still cramped for them.

I'm curious about this. I've already read about the Icebreaker proposal and the Soviets' offensive footing at the time of Barbarossa, but I wasn't aware they explicitly held a short war conviction.

It's plainly not. Under very specific circumstances, it and the KV became a very troublesome operational speedbump that slowed the German advance, as while they most often could not effectively engage the Germans, they could not be destroyed either, resulting in repeating assaults and retreats.

Which is really rather nonsense. Honestly, if they'd adopted a pocket tank doctrine and given the long 50 and 75mm guns more attention than in OTL, making every main combat tank a zippy anti-tank gun rather than a turreted assault gun, they never would've had to deal with the speedbumps.

This is partly, but not entirely true. Concern about Soviet designs getting heavier and heavier led to the idea of a need to outpace such with the development of invincible vehicles, culminating in the idea of the Maus as a counterpoint to theoretical Soviet designs which never actually reached the warfront in relevant time or fashion, but the other concern was standardization. The Panther was an improvement over the Panzer IV, but strictly speaking on the hull, was only slightly more expensive, thanks to the rationalization offered by only having to cut two glacis plates versus the Panzer IV, which even in the late models had a composite of four plates of two flat-two sloped plates. The flat plates were thicker and at only 10 degree angling- which the German research departments had determined as, at the time, the more or less ideal angling without excessively increasing weight, increasing width or constraining the turret ring with a heavily sloped arrangement in addition to thicker plates being less subject to overmatching- while the joining sloped plates were thinner. Beside that, they needed a platform that could meet increasing demands, and the Panzer IV couldn't. The T-34, bastard operational speedbump that it was, offered a number of legitimately good features, in spite of being rather bad itself once past the interwar and would've been yet worse if the Germans bothered to keep their guns up-to-date. So, they take the sloped armor, high velocity gun, and the wide tracks for low ground pressure and apply them to the Panther and elsewhere.

Believe me, I do. It's rather a theme through both world wars and the turn of the century in general, as the recent Rule the Waves threads thoroughly demonstrated; things generally rolled off the line already obsolete, their time of design some years earlier. Frankly, the Panzer IV was Germany's T-34 in that when initially designed and compromised, it seemed sound, and it drew some blood early on and even later after it had gotten some retrofits, but it was flawed from the start. Somehow, I think they could've done without a penny packet of Panzer IVs in Poland, but moreso they could've done without rushing the design work out the door three years in advance with a leaf spring suspension that dead-ended it, when it potentially could've never been replaced by the OTL Panther to begin with, as they originally wanted torsion bars after a brief flirtation with interleaved roadwheels.

It kind of still was, considering most any mine triggered by the inner end of the tracks would gut it with a fuel tank explosion and the horrid vision blocs made it trivial for enemy infantry to sort out. Considering how the Soviet infantry were even worse off in the interwar, it would've rather been in a worse situation outside of tank-to-tank combat and gotten thoroughly Winter War'd on a general European front in its prime of modernity.

Absolutely, and that's what I'm driving at. T-34aboos have this awful conviction that it was hypermodern, even trying to claim it as 'the first proto-MBT' for being a fairly standardized medium tank with good on-paper stats. Wehraboos claim the opposite for the Panther, and a bit more convincingly, but even it still isn't quite there. It had a novel and very effective armor arrangement for the interwar and was ahead of schedule on the (relatively) high-velocity gun train, which remained effective as a speedbump well past when it should have due to circumstance of German undergunnedness and eventually served in the Soviet rolling offensive tide with very poor K:D ratios, but was a 'war winner' in sense of being there to the end, and nevermind that this, too, was a matter of circumstance of German industry being unable to keep up with the demands of the war due to mismanagement of the air front. Maybe I rag on it a bit too much, though, for the small number of distasteful fans it has. Those individuals, plus the Legend versus Performance article on it, have left me with a very unfavorable view of the thing. Nevermind that it's so damned ugly. Just a weird mess of welded angles & cast curves, it's gross.


Yeesh. That can be compensated for by way of good commander-gunner communication in the same fashion as gunner-driver coordination could see to it that the engine throttles for quick turret traverse of the non-independent motor, both of which were more than possible, but it is a glaring flaw.

All these little things really make me want a dieselpunk tank design+simulator game. Continually, I look over these little design quirks, flaws, and what-ifs, and it would be nice to put the potential solutions into practice. I'd really like to make some chimera designs of early war German boxes and the late war rhomboid chassis, with sloped upper plates ala the scrapped Panzer IV H Krupp proposal, while sloping the upper side armor out to where the skirts or mud covers usually are; draw a line between the top of the Tiger I's side plates down to the tip of the track cover, that's the kind of arrangement I'm driving at. Cutting the plates to meet at the corner created might be a bit tricky, though. The T-34 did get one thing right in that sloped side armor is the bee's knees, just not when you heavily constrain the turret ring and sit the crew on top of every explosive of note in the tank to attain it.

at least read through genesis before shitposting about the bible

This meme again.

You'll notice that it was that during ww2 just as many tanks had unity sights as went without, everyone just brings up the Panther because of that ridiculous French post-war report.
Maybe someone could explain to me why it doesn't matter that the Cromwell, the T-34, the Panzer IV and damn near every other tank that wasn't an M4 or an IS-2 lacked unity sights, only the Panther.
On top of that the Panther, unlike pretty much all Allied and most Axis ones featured a gunner's sight with high and low magnification modes for target acquisition and engagement, whereas in an M4 for example, you would have to locate the target and then move your head to a completely separate sight to begin engaging.
Even that wouldn't be so bad if you could actually fit your head in the space where the telescope was and if it wasn't jumping up and down while on the move because of the vertical stabilizer, due to the telescope being un-articulated.

It would certainly want to be, considering it's the commander's job to be finding targets and telling the Gunner where to look.

Of course it is, and it was rather stupid how I phrased it, but it is a disconnect for the gunner from the outside if they have only a gunsight to work with. But the Panther and a number of midwar on German tanks have a rotating cupola sight that allowed the commander to accurately range and relate targets by clock positioning, independent of where the gunner has the turret turned, if I'm not mistaken? That's what drove my thinking.

That has far less to do with technical failings than training and lack of command and control. The summer engagements using T-34s failed because they were generally rushed forward without any of the parts or kits that were standard issue to keep them running for any length of time, and because Red Army units were always issued orders to immediately retake every inch of ground lost, regardless of how suicidal that was. For example one of the Soviet's most promising commanders, Yakovlev, was executed when he refused to use his two surviving BT-7s to retake a city held by two panzer divisions.

Starting around October you start to see actions like the one at Mtensk, where Katukov destroyed the bridgehead over the local river. The key was that the Germans could not destroy his units without 88s (which took ten minutes to deploy) or 10cm guns and above (which took an eternity). By the time an 88 was finally able to get into action without exploding two panzer companies were gone. He lost 1 KV and 2 T-34s burnt out. This is the engagement I referred to earlier that prompted Guderian to voice his opinions on tank design, as the standard response to big Russian tanks was starting to fall apart and was implausible to carry out while attacking. The best book on Barbarossa I've found is the one by Robert Forczyk, he covers all the bases even though he's allegedly only focusing on armor engagements.

Finally, while I love to argue about this stuff, I'm quite firmly of the opinion that technical details are borderline irrelevant compared to crew competence.

This is true to a point, and it's how the Germans whipped France so thoroughly in spite of Germany having largely autocannon equipped just-above-tankettes while France had bubble hull beauts, in addition to doctrinal lack of concentration. But also of relevance were the French commander/gunner arrangements and the MG turret-style cupolas on some tanks, which have never been of great use and more often a constraint.

Meanwhile, it's just not a good idea to have a cooker of a tank that can't see shit. The Mtensk action described is a very particular, peculiar situation, where the Soviets full well knew where the Germans were and were able to compensate for their poorly tactical visibility, and the Germans threw themselves fully into an engagement that was thoroughly not in their favor due to the disparity in guns and armor. I really cannot say that it is a demonstration of the usability of the T-34 as a design in itself, as much as it is one of the early displays of Soviet elan combined with the sheer immodernity of the German designs in gun and armor compared to the post-Barbarossa retrofits.

Crew competence is the greatest part of bringing out a weapon's potential, but first it has to HAVE potential. And, to have weapons with potential, there must be a logistic to support them. These situations and the what-ifs always lead me to consider the potential breakpoints, and the tactical-technical ones of the weapons themselves are not something one can fail to consider.

You're know a lot about tanks, user. Got some recommended readings?

I'm just a dabbler, so not really. Sorry to disappoint.

You come in here babbling about glacis plate construction and the potential of war machines and the relationship between the technical and tactical aspects of tanks and you can't even cite a book or two for interested anons to read?

Oh well.

That's true, but it's of arguable consequence.

Sort of.
The Cupola doesn't rotate, but there is a rotating ring on it that displays turret facing.
There isn't any equipment for the commander to range with though, that sort of thing didn't show up until post-war.


With an attitude like that no one is going to recommend you any books apart from ones on how to kill yourself.

Troublesome, innit? I've just got a bunch of moderately good information gleaned from threads like this, but I haven't properly delved into the phonebook-thick original information.


Arguable consequence is arguable consequence. If the commander misses something, a periscope-scanning gunner might catch it. No periscope, and it may not be caught when it could have earlier.

Aha, I knew I wasn't entirely off. I could've sworn there was some kind of actual sight, though. Not a stereoscopic rangefinder proper, just a notched sight that one can approximate range with based on size relative to notches. Blame vague accounts and vague memory.

Go easy on him. I am blathering a little for one whose reading is essentially second-hand.

That's what the low-magnification setting is for: it has a balance of magnification (2.5X) and field of view (24 degrees), whereas a unity sight has a much better field of view, good luck trying to see anything at any decent range.

Now I understand what you mean.
The cupola is just a bunch of periscopes without any markings, only the gunner had any way of rangefinding.

True, but it's only directly forward, although the gunner ought to have his attention forward at most times anyways.

Is there no practical way to put multiple magnifications on a unity sight? Additionally, would there be practical space as a general rule for both a multi-magnification gunsight and a useful unity sight/gunner's periscope?

Well, would a commander's gunsight have any merit? I worry that it might just create an increased load where the commander ought to be calling out and lining up new targets instead, but in theory, it would allow the commander to call one target and range it if the gunner has to turn for overly long, and otherwise to acquire, allowing the gunner to range and fire, while in the meantime ranging a second target, assuming an immediate kill on the first. Am I reinventing the wheel here, or is it more of a square?

Jane's Technology of Tanks by Richard M. Ogorkiewicz is the definitive tank book of all time. Find yourself a PDF.

That's the norm for all gunner's sights, the unity sight is fixed in place on the M4 and even today a gunner doesn't have access to any panoramic optics.

I've never heard of a unity sight with variable magnification.
During ww2 it was uncommon enough for any sights at all to feature it and these days unity sights are only ever used for getting a look at your immediate surroundings, rather than engagement.


There would definitely be space, I'm just not certain there is that much of a point in doing so.
I don't think the TFZ-12 in the Panther took up more space than the M70 in an M4, despite it having dual magnification and an articulated sight head, which meant the gunner didn't have to move his head up and down as the gun was elevated or depressed.

Absolutely.
Pretty much all modern tanks feature panoramic commander's sights with some kind of rangfinder, from cold war stadiametric markings to the Leclerc, where the commander has his own laser rangefinder.
On top of that modern commanders can use their sight as a gunsight and override the gunner's controls, so that even if the gunner is knocked out, the commander can fill in for him

That's very close to what modern tanks do, it's called hunter-killer capability.
For example, in a Leopard 2 if the commander sees a target he can press a button on his joystick and the turret will immediately point to where he is looking.
Although generally because turret traverse and laser rangefinding is so fast, instead of ranging, the commander immediately begins searching for other targets.

Though during WW2 it the technology probably wasn't available to give the commander magnified panoramic sights.

Well, that's a bit questionably useful then. It's just extra optics that a variable-magnification gunsight could easily take the place of. Couldn't even a limited traverse be implemented? Or was the wide field of view considered as good enough? It looks thoroughly fixed in place, but I could see at least a couple degrees of turn if it wasn't.

We do have multiple frontal vision blocks, though. I suppose that comes with increased turret volume of MBTs, plus miniaturization.

More vision is more vision, it's just a matter of mating the close-in unity sight to a medium mag/high mag sight instead of a monomag sight.

Interesting how technological advance turns dead-end concepts into perfectly valid utilities, isn't it? Commander-gunners were bemoaned through the second world war, now having the commander as a back-up gunner is a plus.

It could be simplified quite heavily by having only one magnified sight, which rotates to face through each of the unmagnified panoramic vision blocs. Synchronize that with the rotating turret band and you have dieselpunk hunter-killer capability. The problem is miniaturization, those gunsights look rather long, so it's questionable how useful any magnification sight that could be fitted would be. But, any vision is good vision. What was the average physical size & strength of magnification of a tank commander's binoculars? Something as strong or a little stronger in monocular would have plenty of utility, although the lack of depth perception is troublesome. If size isn't the problem, the only issue is the expense of mass production of finicky precision optics. Definitely going to want good cushioning on the eyepiece, in any case. Don't want the facial equivalent of Patton cupola ribs.

I played a little bit of that, the only torrent I could find with seeders was entirely in russian. I figured out how to do most of it just by trial and error but for some reason there were no campaigns.

What game is that?

It could, but then the gunner is beginning to be overworked looking for targets on top of doing his job.

Not for gunners, generally he'll have one at most.
M1's don't have unity sights at all.

Post-war Soviet commander's sights were similar to what you are talking about, but with a single 5X magnified periscope sandwiched between unmagnified unity sights.
There's a button that overrides the turret traverse towards the commander's view and whole cupola rotates opposite the turret's movement to keep the commander on target.

Looks like Steel Fury.

Thanks user.

Nobody said anything about you being the one to take it, user.

True, although how much work it is to swivel the sight to and fro until either he or the commander acquires a target is debatable.

Well, that's good for keeping the armor sealed nice and tight, but really, nothing at all?

Neat. Think you could strip the electronic elements and get just the sighting element into the midwar tanks onwards? Would it fit the Panther's cupola? Frankly, could German electronics handle the whole thing with a few butterflies in late/extended war? Got a boner for althistory, been throwing together little breakpoints for a while now.


Don't put your potato up the exhaust pipe. We have enough maintenance problems as it is.

IT FUCKING HURTS TO LIVE

Actually, I think I was wrong, the M1 does have a unity sight, but it sits in the same box as the other gunner's optics, so it's hard to see.

Very probably, it's a very simple and almost entirely mechanical device.
It would probably fit in a WW2 tank as well, it isn't very big.


This has some info on the TKN-3 sight, near the top of the page.
thesovietarmourblog.blogspot.com.au/search?updated-max=2015-10-09T20:44:00-07:00&max-results=99&start=5&by-date=false

I'd recommend reading Germany's Tiger by Hilary L. Doyle, Thomas L. Jentz.
It has some interesting info on the direction Germany was developing their tanks, things like stereoscopic rangefinders and stabilized gunner's sights.
Also, Panzer Front has fantastic "what-if" designs.

That is some wonderful compartmentalization, that is.

Really? The mess of switches made me think it might be a bit more sophisticated, but then again, the only ones that are explicitly electronic are the night vision and the peculiarly named 'heating' function. What is that? Is that literally just a switch for the heater? A de-icing function, maybe? The article does state that a bunch of shit is placed in the commander's position that's less relevant to his role and more just a matter of there being room for it around him.

The pure mechanical components, I'm sure, and definitely the main binocular unit if you did away with the unity sights. I'm going to make an educated guess the reason the TKN-3 is designed like that is because they made the whole cupola a rotating unit, giving it a good zoom and moderately large field of view while not being as theoretically vulnerable as an all-around bloc might be when blindsided, or just fired on in general.

It'd be no problem to fit a less modern, more streamlined 2.5x/5x array into late German cupolas with a cutout for the race ring indications and/or a small indicating mark on the exterior vision blocs themselves, certainly. If the Germans don't plainly halt their specialist electronics research under the six-month ruling on war-supporting results in spite of their not having much else to do, you might even see some Vampir units that're just a mite bit less boxy and can integrate with it with a bit less exterior junk on top. Did the Allies ever have any developmental IR systems? I know the Germans were fiddling with field testing the stuff from 42 onwards, yet only really got going once things went awry, and as no one else had deployed anything, it was imagined that they could stage armored assaults at night with no danger of effective retaliation. The only problem was the inability to stage said armored assault by the time the systems were produced in number.

If I find the time, I may well do so. I've always heard the vagaries of how Germany was planning rangefinders & stabilization for the standardization program, but the technical details might be worth a look.

Fucking jet-powered Stridspanthers, how do they work? It's fantastic, if total bullshit. The Schwarzwolf bothers the hell out of me, though. Too much weight spent on a heavy roof armor overhang for the tracks without any internal space extended over them for stowage on an otherwise pretty rationalized design, although it does protect a bulgy turret ring as I recall. The rest is neat, though the huge machine gun bulge has always seemed odd to me. Does it double as an escape hatch, I wonder?

i want to fuck cultist chan in her mouth

The picture on the right is a more complex version (TKN-4) with full override, full stabilization, variable magnification and AA sight.
But it looks interesting, having both eyepieces and a direct-view.
The only real working components to the TKN-3 is an electric motor for counter-traverse, IR optics and the traverse override.
Apart from the IR mode it's all do-able with WW2 tech and even then you could just mount the IR system outside of the turret like the Vampir sight, but have it linked to an eyepiece inside of the tank.

I think so, also to stop fogging from occurring.

Pretty much.
The soviets always preferred to keep their optics small to save space and minimize vulnerability.
it's also cheaper and simpler to have the whole thing move than arrange a whole bunch of mirrors and joints to make only the periscope head move, like on the Leopard 2's PERI-17.

The US was at about the same level as Germany, although I don't know if they ever used them on their tanks.
youtube.com/watch?v=BvfABFaiBVo
The problem is with the old active IR systems is that if both you and the enemy have them, whoever turns on their IR lights first gets shot first too.

Actually, Germany was researching turbine engines for use in tanks during the final years of the war but never got them working well enough to use.
Turbines would have been good for a fuel-starved country like Germany in strange way because despite eating a lot of fuel, you don't need top quality fuel to run them.

That's pretty common in depictions of "what if" and E-series tanks.
Considering how constantly hounded German tanks were by the end of the war, I wouldn't be surprised if they went overboard on protecting the tracks from above.
Just look at how thick the roof armor on their tanks were late-war:
The Tiger 2 had 40mm thick turret roof.

i want to see personified tank lolis where maus has huge tits and can barely walk

...

GREAT and now i've got a new fetish.

LIKE I NEEDED MORE AVANTGARDE FETISHES

It took me some time to get used to the odd control scheme, but I'm greatly enjoying Steel Fury: Kharkov 1942 now.

The damage model is great, and though the AI is a bit clunky at times, it does things that you would expect in real life. For example, I shot pic related with a 5cm HE shell, detracking it. The crew panicked because of it and bailed out, only to be cut down by my MG fire.

Similarly, I've been credited with T-34 kills only to find out in the after-battle statistics that none of my shots actually penetrated, or only a single one did but made only minimal damage. The crews of those "kills" simply panicked and ran. The AI gives a good account of itself fighting in tanks but otherwise it isn't spectacular in the humanity department; it doesn't surrender and will fight unreasonably to the death.

The game gives you lots of perspective of what it could have been like back then as a tank commander. I haven't played Soviet tanks yet since I don't like playing as the bad guys but I've learned that there's nothing more terrifying on the battlefield than a KV-1 at 500 meters away staring straight at your Panzer III.

It's worth a pirate. Were the UI better and there was a dynamic campaign it would be worth a buy.

I can see a better, more modern version of this game becoming very popular. Instead devs and their pretentious marketing departments are opting to give us WoT clones.

graviteam tactics routinely goes on sale for 5 bucks but steel armor never goes on sale, its sad. i bought it anyway and it plays a lot like tactics but with smaller maps and you only command the tanks while all the other units are ai controlled and change their orders based on where your tanks go.

worse is you only get 4 campaigns you can play while tactics has at least 8, more if you get some mods

...

at least graviteam has that and is a good alternative

also doesn't steel fury have paid patches?

I never got why WoT was considered an esport

...

Why would you program a tank AI to not only have feelings, but to be able to fall in love?

Aha, but how, that's the question. Where are the wires going to run through, are we drilling into the hatch? How much slack is the wire given to keep it from flapping around in the commander's face while also not disabling him from turning at least 180 degrees or so in both directions? It's an engineering headache I'd like to tackle, if ever I get that design game.

Simple enough.

This is an interesting arrangement. What are the merits, beside the monstrous 8x secondary zoom level?

Curious that you never hear about it. And of course it's Ian who it turns up with.

Yes, I know about the turbine engines. But not actual rear-exhaust, thrust-providing jet engines.

And it's not entirely wrong, since the E-100 had the 50mm cast bubble skirts to de-head and de-energize medium AT gun fire, while the E-10 had exactly the goofy overhang the Scharzwolf has and was probably derived from, although it's certainly not as thick as the adjoining bit of front plate makes it look. Probably meant to keep the tracks & roadwheels from getting damaged by mortar fire if the vehicle was spotted and couldn't bug out fast enough.

It is sensible if you can't protect from every fighter bomber that might come knocking. Even if you can in any hypothetical Axis victory war, it's still not a bad idea to protect from enemy howitzers used as last-ditch AT guns with high-angle fire.

As a tangent, what was up with the Lowe's cancellation? It had a huge turret ring and a turret with excellent ballistic qualities & a mantlet that covered the entire main turret front, with a reasonable 120mm thickness of the cast and who knows how thick of a mantlet with only a moderate shot trap (which maybe could've been given the Panther G treatment of a flat extension) on the very bottom and a small band of uncovered 120mm turret face, the thickest known glacis of the six odd Lowe designs of 140mm would have been pretty thoroughly sufficient and could've still been brought up to the Tiger 2's standard of 150mm, its tracks were wonderfully wide, and it mounted the 10.5cm KwK, which had nearly par penetration and ballistics to the 12.8cm with a slight dropoff at extreme range while obviously being a bit handier, although considering a 15cm medium-velocity gun was also considered, the 12.8cm would've also been a plausible secondary production. It was wide enough to mount a 1000 horsepower MB501 fast torpedo boat engine, running on diesel. But due to vague 'armor and weight' concerns, it was nixed for the slightly lighter but overall rather inferior Tiger 2, which didn't really improve on either area. The finer design work was starting in early 1942, but the contract dropped in May and Krupps' independently continued turret design work ordered halted in July, while the Tiger II was conceived in early 43 and its design genesis in mid-43, so the Lowe could've been coming into series production half a year to a year earlier or so compared to the Tiger II only ramping up production in December 43, after which the entire factory was bombed to rubble and half the in-progress production lost.

It would've had a much better HP-tonnage ratio even at the maximal 90 ton weight and even more so if one optimistically puts it into the 75 ton range, it would've run on dirty diesel with a robust, proven interwar airship/schnellboot engine, it had a much nastier gun that was dropped from consideration for upgrading the Tiger II mainly for concerns of space, which the Lowe has plenty of, loader fatigue, which can be compensated for with the working room and maybe a second loader, and standardization, which won't quite be a problem, or else could mount a huge middling-velocity cannon to serve as a superheavy turreted assault gun, it had similar armoring that could be shifted up or down from the early design stats we know as needed, and it could've gotten into production earlier, with the only great trouble compared to the Tiger II being the huge turret casts being a definite production bottleneck. Plus, it would've dodged the milquetoast attempt to standardize production with the stillborn Panther 2 entirely. It looks like you might have just enough room to slope the upper plate to 60 if you shunt the front hatches back to get it nice and bouncy, if the front transmission would still fit. Really, it'd be a better Tiger 2 and a pocket version of the (fake but neat) monogun Adlerturm E-100. So why the cancellation? Not a war-winning breakpoint, but it might've bled the Allies something fierce in number and with capability for legitimate offensive poise rather than being a logistics-deprived penny-packeted paper tiger made with all too many interim parts. And at around the same time, an Autumn 1943 proposal of modifying the Tiger I with a curved add-on plate was rejected in the tunnel vision on the Tiger II concept, in spite of it being perfectly reasonable to adopt the interim AND the new production. It's not like the slow Tiger I production would respond much to the disruption of preparing new tooling for such. German ordnance procurement is weird.

To create a bond between the tank and its operator.

What about after the war is over and the operator goes home?
What's she meant to do then?

This done right could easily be a very good and thought provoking game. The union between man and machine through the battlefield where bonding becomes intimate since without each other, neither would survive.

He'll wake up one morning to find the car in his garage flattened in a fit of jealous rage with his armored companion casually resting on top of it.

How did it get to his house?

Satellite uplink, isn't it obvious?

I mean, what if he was deployed oversea or something? How did it get across the ocean?

If it was made by Russians chances are it'll be amphibious :^)

first tank best tank

Why would it care that much to travel across an entire ocean for some guy who didn't chose to stay with her, anyway?

Cause bitches be crazy user!

What if it wasn't his decision?

What if the guy was seperated by force by his goverment and now tankfu is pissed and will stop at nothing to bust her loved one out?

Running them through holes in the cupola is pretty normal for tanks with cupola mounted searchlights and stuff.

In tanks with powered cupolas I think the power is supplied through the cupola race.
It's hard to find any actual information so detailed but in the T-72 it looks like the rails above the turret drive teeth might touch contacts in the box to the top right of the image.
That way no cables have to move at all.

A lot of things, you don't need to move at all to look 360 degrees around, you just sit there and move the stick rather than have to physically follow the sight around like on the TKN-3.
It's easier to connect the commander's sight to the gunner's sight so the commander can look through the gunner's view with the press of a button, and on top of that it's completely stabilized.
All of that in 1979 was very impressive.
It's much bigger, heavier, a lot more expensive and way more complex though when compared to Soviet commander's sights of the time.

I think a lot of Americans like to think they were underdogs in WW2 and relied on grit and courage over technology.
Having top of line night vision, radar and fire-control computers damages the narrative.

I thought they had just set up the turbines to vent straight out the back of the tank rather for propulsion because the vents are blocked through the middle.
Still, the idea of jet powered tank is as awesome as it is goofy, just like the Soviet rocket-boosted tanks.


I don't really know anything about the Lowe at all, unfortunately.
While that's a good thing in hindsight, wouldn't that have been a major blow to it getting support at the time?

That's mild way of putting it.

We need to get some drawfags on a comic for this shit or something. Should the tank be a hover tank?

What's wrong with big lovely and thick tracks?

Also, tankfu should have "eyes" like pic related, although more feminine looking ones.

Getting rare meme tanks in WoT is such a fucking grind.
Just kill me now. I can't stop playing, though. Fully addicted to tonks.

The question is just where to put the holes for an add-on Vampir system. Guess it'd come down to how they were mounted in OTL with a few improvements.

Not a candidate for dieselpunk, then. Cutting edge 1979 tech does not fantastic if plausible 1939 tech make. Ah, well.

Very much so. Also harmful is the passive-aggressive foreign policy, jingoism, inane and often dishonest propaganda, par amounts of rape and looting, and large general material & manpower advantage leveraged into strategic superiority by the total collapse of the Axis economy and therefore long-term defensive let alone offensive ability by bombing the continent to rubble. This said as an American.

I'm pretty sure it's precisely because it adds more propulsion, because the Japs are nutters. Although if it had a diagonally vertical exhaust, it would admittedly be venting straight into the air and compromise the otherwise ultra-sleek low profile.

Nobody really does, to my knowledge. The readily available information on it is dodgy, with the 'Leichter Lowe/Schewe Lowe' fiction parroted around a great deal. There were no less than six working designs & revisions, but specifics are scarce beside some on-paper stuff. Still, what one can generally glean from it is that it was a better Tiger 2 and an earlier Tiger 2, or else the overweight makings of one that could have been cut down on the side armor to fit such a profile. A mean mother with a gun that would've made IS tanks cry at standoff range and enough horsepower & fuel rationalization to maneuver there in the first place.

Not really. Again, I'm working with dodgy, surface information, as I haven't looked into the Panzer Tract on it, but this singular page shows the rough developmental versions as we know them. The projected weights are probably too much or too little going by the general similarities to the Tiger 2 in dimensions, even accounting for the on average thicker cast turret, and that's rather the problem; the vehicle wasn't quite big enough. Porsche as a friend had Hitler's ear, and presented him with very optimistic concepts and designs centered around his obsession with the utmost in automotive performance and quality. So, the Lowe gets arbitrarily dropped for not being a big enough cat, and on comes the Maus' not too pointful development and the more reasonable Tiger-Maus and later E-100 competitor, also going nowhere.

But there's still a need for a vehicle like the Lowe, so the experience ends up going into the Tiger 2, a highly similar vehicle that is mildly lighter with a worse overall arrangement of parts and a more standardized gun. Mainly, the infamously poorly engine and the overstressed transmission are the worse elements. As a matter of course, the Tiger 2 is conceived as having interchangeable components with the Panther 2 as the Germans become aware that having quite so many proprietary designs when the proprietary factories are going up in flames is a poor idea, but the latter never reaches production or a proper prototype with its designed schmalturm (not the Ausf F one, mind) due to there not being an ability to put it into meaningful production, or much wisdom in doing so as opposed to simply expanding the original Panther production, as the design was more or less sufficient.

If Porsche hadn't thrown a wrench into things with the unreasonably powerfully armed & armored and unproducible Maus, or in a timeline where things went a bit more smoothly to allow more lenience on R&D, the Lowe would've been pretty reasonable as heavy/superheavy tanks go, having a powerful early MBT-alike gun, enough armor to not care about the enemy if its flanks are covered, and mechanics that would actually run it, while not being too much over the Tiger's weight or else having better HP/tonnage anyways despite stupidly high weight. Could probably shave a few tons off with a Tiger 2esque angled-plate series turret after the initial cast run, furthermore. Would've been alike to an IS-3/T-10 that saw some proper action before getting similarly reserved in favor of the more efficient shiny new MBTs, while the Maus would be an IS-7 dead end, although one that might also see combat.

No, really. It's just downright strange. High velocity guns that fully fit the turret rings of tanks explicitly designed to accept later upgunning in this regard are only developed on low priority, rather than being crash developed for combat testing followed by series production. Four-frontal-plate designs are adopted at first for maximal volume and good protection for the least weight compared to the overmatch prone sloped middling plates or high weight of thick sloped plates, before later switching to more rationalized two-plate ones anyways in an attempt to prepare for total war production that really should've been at the forefront of their thinking earlier, Molotov-Ribbentrop was a ruse in their minds and the Soviets', and yet they felt very assured- supposedly- that there wouldn't be such a war until 48.

They had an extremely early assault rifle design in the Vollmer machine carbine in GeCo 7.7x40 which, although a mess of too many fine parts & expensive machining work and characteristically interwar-y in this regard, would have tipped them off to the value of intermediate cartridges with a chunky round between 7.92 Kurz and 7.62 AK food, allowing them to start replacing their rifles or submachineguns and eventually both well before Hitler gets a chance to start pussyfooting around testing the Sturmgewehr, which was snuck around him not because he hated the concept, but hated the idea of making even more of a mess of East Front logistics by introducing a novel but unproven new cartridge & weapon, fully planning to start the largest mass production possible if it worked. And they had a nearly all sheet metal body semi-automatic in the A115 with a novel annular gas system, which with further development might have got an early G43 rationalized design in the troops' hands after the kinks were worked out and the unworkable kinks they discovered directed them to simpler systems.

At first, they were a bit sluggish with a few star prewar children and some great doctrinal ideas. Then, they got very stiflingly conservative, and Hitler didn't want anyone wasting time on anything that wouldn't immediately serve the war effort, torpedoing the electronics & any chance for independent corporate R&D to go wild while the war didn't yet demand total rationalization. And then they just went all over the place, trying to find the most absolutely workable concept and stick to it after they were at the point where they needed said ideas yesterday. The strategic breakpoints are the usual fare for althistory, and singular designs as being somehow 'war-winners' are the poor man's breakpoint, but the overall industrial arrangement incorporating both is really what flabbergasts me the most. You're quite certain there's shadowy interlopers preparing to fuck your shit through the other great powers, and yet you think in the terms of a 'short war' followed by a long turtling buildup followed by a steamroll, in which one's prime regional and global enemies will be twiddling their thumbs. Frankly, it feels like living in a bad althistory AAR, shit grammar, sweeping brush strokes and gamey research choices and all, or else a very researched one from the opposite perspective on how to contrive a successful Allied macrowar. They're a bit similar in the end result, leaving aside the fine details.


How can you stand it, though? War Thunder was bad enough even with proper module-based damage, albeit with a hidden HP bar for getting pinholed too much. How can you stand World of Tanks' HP system and the pop-in vision? Doesn't it seem like you could be playing better simulators instead of beating your head on a freemium Slav-extorting skinner box shitshow?

I just feel it plays okay for a game. It's not a simulator at all, but multiplayer simulators don't work that well unless everyone has similar skill levels and control setups. Still waiting on War Thunder having inside-tank view, since that sounds amazing for sim battles, though it'll probably never happen.

Gaijin seems to have the same mindset as Obsidian in that they think that more vehicles = better game, as opposed to actually making the game better. When Enduring Confrontations for RB debuted, I was hyped as fuck. It was the only time I saw players actually coordinating with each other, and not flying to space for fear of getting killed too easily. I thought then that War Thunder was moving in the right direction; I thought that it would soon become a proper flight MMO like Fighter Ace years before.

Then they locked the mode for sim battles only and seemed to stop caring about it. My hopes and dreams were crushed.

I'm sure Naval Forces will be rad, though.

Until they subsequently gut it and sekrit dokument the living hell out of the Soviet line with scrapped & paper vessels while staunchly refusing to accurately follow the plans of other nations' real or planned vessels. Yes, the paper part sounds much more like Wargaming than Gaijin, but the Soviets aren't going to have much else going for them otherwise. And just you watch as Plan Z big gun ships intended to be laid down in the 30s or early 40s at the latest to serve in the late war end up fighting cold war Soviet missile boats.

I like the idea of removing one of the periscopes and having a specialized replacement periscope that feeds the sight picture from vampir down into the cupola.
That way during the day you could just unbolt it and put the regular periscope back in.

Not really, though a lot of the functions and features would be possible with WW2 technology, it would just have to be spread out over multiple systems and components.
For instance both stabilized optics and optical rangefinders were being developed for German tanks, but both for use as gunner's sights.
If they were to instead fit stabilized sights and a gun stabilizer for the gunner and move the rangefinder further towards the rear of the turret and have the commander operate it, it would be possible to have a tank that could range accurately and also fire on the move with pre-1950's technology.


I started reading about the Lowe and it's got me irritated.
I can't believe they canceled it in favor of the Maus of all things, the biggest dead-end development of the war.
People like to gossip about Hitler being crazy about oversized tanks but I would swear half of Germany's less viable tank designs lead straight back to Porsche acting like a mad scientist.
The Tiger-maus would be better of without the Maus turret, being bloated with a pointless coax cannon and huge frontal shot-trap.

It's certainly easy to imagine that if things had gone a little differently Germany could have ended up mass producing a tolerably reliable "Tiger II-like" during the same time period they were in real life struggling to tie down the all loose ends of their tank development and make something workable out of it.

I've read about corporate bickering concerning armament that was so bad there should have been executions for it.

I think a lot of it shows just how much of a panic the entire government was in once the war broke out, like everyone collectively thought "Oh shit, I thought we'd have at least until the mid 40's before this happened."

There's a lot we're missing though, considering the amount of lost or destroyed documents that might make sense of a lot of actions and attitudes.

just put lashes on it
dudes dig lashes

That's actually pretty brilliant in its simplicity.

Again, a head-smacker. Compartmentalization of duties is the name of the game before technology allows double-duties in a pinch.

So it really was cancelled for the Maus, then? Did you get that from the Lowe Panzer Tracts? I lost the dropbox link to the .pdfs ages ago, but it'd be the most reliable thing. Everything else is rather dubious.

He was certainly ingenius, but he perpetually outpaced his technology and resources. The Porsche Tiger was by all means the superior vehicle on paper (beside those awful sub-front armor turret cheeks, those should've been 100mm) but it just plainly didn't run. Sure, it totally omitted the need for a mechanical transmission with a dual electric drive and was a little lower than the Henschel, albeit a little wider & narrower and thus a little less inherently maneuverable turnwise, but it didn't work, because the copper for the electric drive was shit. Still, Hitler continually let him come into these things with developmental vehicles that just didn't quite work because of the personal friendship and the fact that Porsche COULD produce something grand if he'd just stop going for maximal automotive performance without regard for what definitely works and is available. And all that culminated in the Maus, because if they didn't make the Maus, their shit might get fucked up by a Soviet almost-Maus down the line! No qualitative superiority means they lose, in this mindset. Nevermind that all they really need to do is get as many pocket tanks and Waffentragers onto the field as possible to gut the half-blind Soviets every time they try to advance without actually losing the guns in the process when you trade a little space for time. Can't really win at that divergence point, but you can bleed the enemy enough that their occupation is so horrendous that they're not making it back home without some shrapnel & limb loss from the partisan response, both organic and professionally prepared with the time gained.

That'd be the point of the Maus 2 turret. World of Tanks is usually not big on accuracy, but that stupid box turret on the E-100? Totally accurate to the original plan. The co-ax has some merit in that having the 75mm HEAT slinger for T-34s is better than wasting perfectly good 12.8cm/15cm HE or APCBC on them, but what's even better is not having your sexually confused assault gun transtank bothering to plink at the small fry to begin with. You're either smashing bunkers, casing poor bloody infantry, or confronting heavies & other superheavies. Anything else is not your problem in a combined arms situation, or else it's a big enough problem that you're going to fire a sure-kill snapshot of the main gun at flanking tinker-toys and like it. And once you rip out said 75mm gun to make something like the E-90 fakes, you reach the point where you might as well be making a super Lowe pattern E-80 instead.

So anyone still play WoT?

Do tell. I know the obvious stuff like the constant contract jockeying, but outright bickering is new information.

More or less. I don't get how they got into this mindset; as soon as Beck started being a cunt on the Danzig issue and taking the old Entente guarantees, the Germans should've known that they were being pressed into an early war and needed to prepare everything they had. Not 'only everything that'll be done in six months,' EVERYTHING.

True. They burned absolutely everything to keep it out of Allied hands, even as they themselves wouldn't be able to reorganize and use it. Not like Werwolf got any traction, there's a reason The Man with the Iron Heart is an obscure nickname for Heydrich and a Turtledove althist novel inspired by instead of a postwar legend. It's surprising we've found even this much information about what materials they were planning. Still, declining to develop and test cutting edge arms during the short war in which said arms can be afforded in favor of waiting until one is balls deep in the Soviet Union- even if one conceives that the commies will have terrible garbage, which they sort of did in 41, but were in the process of rapidly modernizing from, which bodes ill for the 'wait 'til 48' crowd- is just inconceivable.

I can understand why Hitler split the front with the three-target offensive plan. I can understand why he gleefully diverted forces after a successful offensive and unknowingly delayed operations by causing a huge traffic jam. I can't understand why the procurement departments didn't penny packet some shit for their own interests while they had the chance. Quite frankly, Hitler needed to be more involved in his goddamn paperwork rather than issuing sweeping orders to counteract this nonsense. Coincidentally, this was precisely how Stalin operated, albeit with often questionable results. And when he did get involved, it had to be more in the fashion of, 'Can we make a 100-calibre 75mm gun work?' 'Holy fuck, no!' 'Fine, make it as close as you can!' instead of '100 CALIBRE GUN, MAKE IT HAPPEN!' shortly followed by a murmured 'yes, my Fuhrer' and a quiet shuffling of the relevant napkin scribbles to the 'rejected' folder.

"Panzer Tracts Schwere Pzkpfw Maus and E-100" has "5-6 march 1942, item 2 - Directive to Krupp that instead of a 72 ton panzer, a 100 ton panzer is to be rapidly developed as a trial vehicle.
And then: "21-22 march 1942, item 18 - Porsche is to be given the contract for independent design of a 100 ton panzer."
So I suppose not then, since the Maus didn't exist at that point.
That's what I get for believing what less reputable books and websites claim.
Also, I'd link you to the dropbox if I had it.

I wonder where they got that idea from, and why it stuck so hard.
Even the IS-7 never broke past the 70 ton mark.

I generally like the idea that they'd continue to push in a sort of high-low sort of direction: Hordes of dirt cheap, turretless and/or open-topped tank destroyers doing the regular work while 50-70 ton monsters play fire brigade.

You're right, horribly right.
I expect that had it ever reached anywhere point where the E series were likely to reach production, you'd see anything bigger than the E-75 quietly dropped from the paperwork.
As if the poor old HL230 wasn't overworked enough pushing Tiger II's around.

The whole thing stinks of "We'll make it do everything ever", even more so with that 20mm AA gun they tried to cram in.


I'm not sure it would have been considered viable to be withdrawing units back to Germany from Russia to re-train with new weapons and equipment when they were so desperately short on manpower and transport as it was.
Of course that's still what they ended up doing regardless, but I expect that's more a sign of how badly things had been going wrong than anything else.


I'm not too sure either way.
As it was, Hitler was too fond of micromanaging everything and too easily swayed by things like Porsche's "just make it weigh a few hundred tons and it'll be perfect" tendencies.
But on the other hand, without Hitler's demands concerning a lot of up-armoring and up-gunning Germany would still be relying on L40 75mm guns mounted on tanks with 50mm of frontal armor while Russia rolled on in with IS-2's and the US put the finishing touches on the M-26.

I think that sums things up though: Germany could have gone with quality and lose the war, or Germany could go with quantity and lose the war.

Just outright make it a T90 with AI.

Nope.

Also any tank game that doesn't include soft targets may as well be called Tank Destroyers online.

yes

Steel armor seems to be fairly fun.

I think the only good thing with War Thunder is seamlessly drifting around a T-34 slavaboo in glorious StuG III and blowing their ammo on them the matchmaking gets a bit ridiculous.

I-I do. Wanna platoon?

Sure, send me your username by email
Or just post it

Norinvaux

I never knew I wanted this.

Well cocks, looks like my idea is appealing.

If I ever get off the ground then I'll definitely make this game.

>tfw nodev

If you can draw then just turn it into a little comic.

I can… kinda?

That would be good enough for us user.

I'm only saying its the best I've ever played because it's the only one I ever played that was fun, not to say that there isn't bettero out there.

I think war thunder sucks, but the tanks mode was alot of fun.

Ok, I'll see if I conjure something up tomorrow. It's getting really late over here.

yes please.

please also make it for linux and Wii U, but not shitty ass AAA consoles like playstation and xbox

please user yes yes yes yes yes
and look at this comment tho

It might be far away in the future when I make it but I'd make it for PC primarily. Console version sounds very unlikely.

you could sell it on Wii U as one of those generic independant yet really cool yet not "indie" looking games. but I definitely want it to start on PC. my pc is weak and will never be able to run it though, I was extremely happy to see that Kerbal Space Program was announced for the Wii U.

if kerbal space program can make it to the Wii U, so can your idea!

I love this idea so much. this will be better than blood dragon, even though ubisoft is shit, that was the only good thing that they ever made.

also really look into ALL the things that microsoft, ea, ubisoft, activision, bethesda ever did wrong, even make a thread on Holla Forums sometimes (more than once in a few months to get different answers) asking them all the reasons why they never buy anything from them anymore. this will help you avoid making the same mistakes that drive people away. if you DON'T do what they did, you will be in the right direction.

bumping for good idea!!!!!!1

So anons in the comic should the tank be a hover sci-fi tank like suggested?

Or be a Chechen Removal Cheeki Breeki Treaded Machine like suggested?

Well, since the T-34/KV shock has already been discussed to death, I'd be quite dull not to point to it as a likely source. The shock convinced them they had to achieve more than just achieve ability to kill it or parity, but had to have an individual qualitative superiority. Which isn't necessarily wrong, but the numbers are still silly.

I really do find it odd how hideously inflated German tank weight got. I don't quite get it, even accounting for Soviet tanks being intentionally built for manlets to lower the profile, the American paper or early postwar tanks just aren't nearly so heavy for similar armoring. Part of it comes from the cast armor letting them get the shape & thickness in the right places, but it's still odd. Must be from how tall they are.

It's one direction they had somewhat planned, but couldn't quite get going. Even in 43, they had a candidate for it in the RSO/Pak 40, which was literally a prime mover with a gun on top. But Steyr never got a numbered order once the pre-production vehicles were decided as worth it, so they never went into production. R&D on an improved version with wider tracks, chassis, a V8 engine, and a PaK 43, but Steyr was unanimously ordered to cease production on tracked vehicles by the Ministry of Munitions. It was THE solution to AT guns lost to retreat, as it was little additional expense for a vehicle permanently mated to the gun. The profile was high, but that's what tank dugouts are for. Again, just an absurd, miniscule thing that seems like it was torn out by an observant, puzzling hand.

It's not that it's a bad turret relative to the Maus 1 turm. It's just such a silly waste of height and weight for the little gun.

Most likely. And if they ever got that far, they'd probably be at the point where they could put in something less underpowered, either because of the industry not being fucked or being so fucked that they can supply enough engines for how few tanks they'd put out.

Honestly, the 20/30mm AA/self-defense turrets do make sense for some of the vehicles like the lighter Jagdpanzers. Just a little extra something to beat off the fighter bombers if they're made, or something to sling at infantry and extra-soft positions when used as an assault gun, or trucks in an ambush, things that aren't worth hitting with the main gun's HE. Putting it on the extra-big cats is a complete afterthought.

As I recall, the Porscheturm was originally intended for Porsche's Tiger 2 competitor, which was a cutesy little baby King Tiger mounting the same gun & turret with lesser hull armor. Never got a prototype, but they made turrets. Probably Porsche's fault.

Not even in Russia! In Poland, France, the Balkans and Africa! The Vollmer assault rifles' first trials were in 1935, hence its being called the M35, with work beginning in 34. It continued development until Poland, but was dropped as 'too expensive for wartime' at 4,000 Marks. The PaK 40 first started development in 1939 as a direct response to vague reports of the new Soviet tanks it was needed to fight, but was only given low priority until the invasion started and they encountered precisely the tanks they knew of. And the PaK 38 was designed in its designated year and mass produced in 39, but not mated to a Panzer III tank until, again, after Barbarossa, and before that mounted 37mm guns for peculiar standardization purposes, yet the vehicle was designed with an accommodating turret ring as a compromise to the originally intended 50mm gun. Both guns would've been excellent in flat-ass North Africa and would've been wise to trial as early as possible to see if they worked. It just ill makes sense how many interesting little things were passed up until later.

To a degree, but other times he was content to make a sweeping order and allow his subordinates to fill in the gaps. That resulted in just as many headaches as his interventionist moments, although those were often riddled with further headaches because of his subordinates contradicting him in the field for better or worse. More worse than you'd think.

Sort of, but not quite. Regardless of which way they'd gone, they'd both go much better if they focus on their R&D when it counts and standardize after, which is the complete opposite of what they did. Beside that, make the fluke butterflies ala the Bismarck's rudder damage go the other way and change up a few strategic decisions and it's all good. Focus on cratering southern English airfields to damage their capacity to a manageable level- they'd still be able to operate out of Scotland, but better this than the ineffectual Blitz- to thus keep air superiority, doom the bomber boxes and save German industry. Focus initial rocketry application on the relatively promising SAMs towards the former end instead of V-weapons. More firmly warn the Italians against an unprepared Greek adventure when one wants a quiet southern front and no reason for the Yugoslav-Greek allied sympathies to blow up instead of their continued 'Axis'll lose, so we're not joining in' neutrality. Give Rommel his four divisions to sort that whole front. Use the resultant unfucking of the macrostrategy to start Barbarossa on time, and damn the end-of-rail line supply problem, take Moscow and watch the whole regime collapse in a series of disastrous coups. Maybe get the prewar butterflies to flap the radical Kodoha faction to power in Japan and have them get slapped by Russia early, then prepare for a second go while working out the originally intended Anti-Comintern Pact with China, nevermind any postwar Manchukuo spat. Victory was entirely possible, and often less tied to the logistics than to the correct use of it. But damn if the logistics don't have some kinks to work out.

The latter, clearly.

It may have actually gotten a prototype considering the Soviets account for a Tiger (P) found in Kummersdorf when all the known vehicles were converted into Elefant TDs and the only remaining Tiger (P) command tank was lost somewhere in the Russian steppe. But we won't know unless somebody finds photos or it turns up as a wreck buried somewhere (like the Kugelblitz vehicles).

Might happen, they generally find new wrecks each year digging trenches in Eastern Europe or finding tanks at the bottom of rivers.

Just installed it myself, you did notice you have to register to get the download links right?

And man, what a fun little game. Super weird at first, couldn't quite make the anti tank ditch in the tutorial and had to figure out a way of getting myself out, but man is it rewarding. Much more stable than I thought it would be too.

I played it when it first came out, and recently played some campaigns in a KV-1 and a KV-2 because that's all the mods I could get my hands on.

I'm extremely interested in the Panzer III, I like the feeling that I'm not invincible and have to be careful where I place my tank, as well as keep my eyes peeled for threats. Bombing around in a heavier tank is always less interesting to me because I subconsciously let my guard down. Even in the T-34 campaigns I had that sense of invincibility.

Ever since playing a full campaign in Panzer Elite with a company of Shermans I've liked playing in that style. Knowing the enemy could kill you at any moment is infinitely more interesting than being a harbinger of doom.

Fuck if only graviteam could into multiplayer. We'd be enjoying the greatest tank-sims ever with more than just our lonesome.

When will we ever get the adventures of Major Woody and his Spank Tank?

I heard they are thinking about it

Does anybody besides me remember a couple years back when /k/ had an interim obsession with mechsuit planegirls?

It's gonna be like that, all over again. All we need is for a mentally unstable Australian to show up and start writing a fucking novel and we will have come full circle.

Yeah, apparently there is a German ex-army tank mechanic who is restoring a Tiger to running condition with a few salvaged hulls, one of which was found buried under a road in France or something.
A lot of these guys are very private so few info out about anything really.

They've been thinking about it ever since Steel Armor came out, but nothing tangible has come to fruition.

Just have a look in the options menu, there's a whole "Network" section that doesn't do anything because the lazy slavs gave up on it.

Planegirls are just reskinned sharkgirls.
I remember Ratbat once posted an image of a fat chick with an airplane cockpit for a head with "THIS IS NOT A FUCKING AIRPLANE" in allcaps written over it

Checked Armored Wafflefare cause I was bored. So many cash grabs incoming. Why are F2P tank games so Jewish?

Something like this?

Other anons seem to be thinking of the T90, but I guess that's fine as well.

Only those without imagination would pick the T-90 Chechen Remover.

This kills the Patton.

it's funny using tactics in a historic environment where they slammed things together like a toddler with toy trucks.

Remember when Atari went crazy and got all games banned on the app stores that remotely resembled anything like BattleZone or anything with vector graphics?

What game?

That's left overs from the interwar thinking and expectations which assumed a tank would benefit more from better HE performance.

From 1941 to '42 more than 50% percent of the T-34s lost in combat were destroyed by the long barreled 50mm according to the Soviets.
Now one could argue that as said every design is obsolete by the time it rolls out but if you consider that you should either try to design with that thought in hindsight or it's worth it to build a deathtrap.


Totally understandable sentiment, if either Germany or the USSR would have met theri production quotas the Soviets wouldn't have had a chance.


Graciteam Tactis/ Achtung Panzer - Operation Star with the Shield of the Prophet Dlc.
If you can wait for ≈ 12 hours I can post some links if you wan't to test them before buying or not buying at all.

this is incredible

Steel Armor Blaze of War. Based on the same engine as Graviteam Tactics, and is using same models

Yes, but at the time, the Germans had already been starting to dicker around with high-velocity AT guns, specifically the 37mm. And they had good results early on. You'd think that might key them into there being more efficient solutions than using more HE filler earlier. The PaK 36 was first designed in 1924 and issued in 1928 as horse-drawn AT, for God's sake! The only thing they changed in 36 was the wooden spoked wheels. If they'd not been so leisurely in their pace developing the 50 and 75mm long guns, then in addition to having tanks and AT that can destroy just about everything they'll confront, you'll have a ton of spare 37mm guns to mount on halftracks earlier than in OTL. That's going to be a nightmare for the rest of the 1941-early 42 Soviet tank park, which WAS exceedingly vulnerable to said weapon, as now every properly up-to-spec mechanized infantry battalion (admittedly not that many without butterflies, as most were stuck with the Opel Blitz instead of the commonly-imagined armored halftracks) can independently knock out scads of Soviet T-26 and BT tank groups.

Correct. Horrible optics placement does not do one well to getting outmaneuvered by an enemy full well capable of penetrating your armor once in middling ranges who has far better situational awareness than you, as I was saying way back. The PaK 38 and the T-34 were designed and produced just about concurrently with one another, with the latter issued in number first, hence 'not much of' rather than 'nothing.' Those numbers would be from the Legend vs Performance page, right?

That's more or less my argument when it comes to althistory. Take the blinders off the German procurement authorities in the prewar and flap the butterflies towards failure of the strategic bombing campaign, and that's the end of it for the Soviets. Anything else just speeds things up a bit.

What I meant was that during the interwar period they expected anti-tank duties to be performed by other elements and tanks mostly engaging soft targets.
I would say that there is also the factor of them not expecting equipment development/armor thickness to increase that quickly and that tactics and doctrine developed faster than they could catch up with, the expections for war with france was for a long time close to either WWI eastern or in a bad case western front.

Yes they could and should have in hindsight but considering the aforementioned expectations I think it made sense back then.

Can be, it's something I still remember so I'm not sure.

I'm not sure whether you mean with procurement authorites simply the kinds of equimpent they choose or more.
I think the biggest issue was that germany's production was rather "simple", lack of assembley lines, lack of specialised tools, Tigers were build like one would build ships, stuff like that.
Considering the coal and steel production of Germany one estimate put their expected production quotas close to the US.

Except for their main battle tank, the Panzer III. Those were expected to directly confront enemy armor, which is what makes the 37mm adoption for 'muh standardization' while having a turret ring initially designed for a 50mm gun so puzzling. Especially because it also makes it very unuseful for confronting enemy AT or other soft and semi-hard positions, because you can't get any useful HE out of such a small gun. That's not good for armor that is supposed to move as independently as possible of other army elements.

It doesn't. If you're doing maneuver warfare, with tanks fighting tanks, you want the tanks to kill tanks as efficiently as possible. Plus, they had some vague awareness of new Russian tanks, and the guns were developed in direct response to this intelligence. Why wouldn't one have it ready before Barbarossa?

It lists 54.3%, so you're on the money.

Waffenamt and the like, as well as the non-military high political officials.

The equipment is one part, as that whole huge chain elaborates on. The other is when it's chosen. They experimented in the late war when they had to buckle down on particular production lines, and conservatively standardized in the early war- which they still thought to be a short war- rather than using said limited conflict as an opportunity to do trial batches of everything under the sun.

That is part of the problem, but German batch production was survivable in the absence of the other peculiarities and/or the industrial bombing.

That's mad. It's somewhat believable if we're referring to the US pre-war economy, but that's just mad, even considering the industrial density of Germany. Do you have a source on that?

Bolo already did this decades ago

Relevant

That's not a chariot.

Does C&C have the best Vidya tank designs?

Forgotten Hope 2's tank battles isn't shit nor good, it's just mundane because the engine couldn't support advanced angling mechanics.

I'll just leave it here
store.steampowered.com/app/410320/

Imperial Guard Simulator?

Still better than F2P trash.

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I didn't state that it was better or worse than War Shitter, anything is better than this pile of slavic mistakes.


You can do the same to an armored car, why bother?

Anyone up for claiming /tanks/?

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