What if the Germans adopted sloped armor early in the war?

What if the Germans adopted sloped armor early in the war?

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  1. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    We would have developed better shape charges and guns. Don't frick with the US MIC.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >We would have developed better shape charges and guns. Don't frick with the US MIC.

      >Implying the US destroyed even a small fraction of German WW2 armour....

  2. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Sloped armor is overrated/

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Then they could've economized a bit more with thickness given early war steel quality vs. late war material and processes compromises. Internal volume compromises were dubious with the T-34's side slopes ... they needed to put a premium on crew survivability and something like a Merkaba layout - provided they had shot trap mitigation along the lines of picrel - would have been advisable in hindsight.

      >range: 250m
      500m was more or less mutually guaranteed frontal penetration for all main battle tanks, and that kind of spalling & daylight through the hull was GTFO of Dodge cue if it didn't cook something off.

  3. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    BUT THERE'S ONE THEY FEAR, IN THEIR TONGUE, IT'S AMERIKANISCHER TAUCHBOMBER.

  4. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    What is the lower glacis of the panzer IV? Oh yes, very much sloped.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      yeah try aiming to the lower glacis at 500-600m in an uneven terrain with tall grass and bushes, WHILE they fire at you too, real life aint world of tanks/warthunder
      >captha GAY PNH

  5. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    the real problem with german tanks was their reliability and serviceability. german tanks had to be sent back to germany on trains to be repaired, every other army did their repairs a few miles behind the frontline

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      The real problem with their tanks was that they were attached to the German economy, which was wholly incapable of sustaining the war effort that the Nazis threw themselves into.
      >inb4 buh they didn't go all out until later in the war when the spotless and noble Speer took control
      They didn't increase war production because they couldn't without collapsing the economy. It wasn't until everything was so fricked that the economy was collapsed anyway that they could commit total production to the war and demand labor by diktat.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >The real problem with their tanks was that they were attached to the German economy, which was wholly incapable of sustaining the war effort that the Nazis threw themselves into.
        that too
        there's a great book about that, called Wages of Destruction, it goes into some pretty fine detail

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          As the book makes clear, Speer just destroyed general production to throw resources at whatever Hitler was most focussed on with Panzer Priority orders, and then took the credit. He didn't actually increase the underlying production capacity.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            yup. pretty cool book, I liked the section where he talks about the massive strain on the economy that the occupation of france caused. the french got a lot lazier, many were conscripted to work in germany, and so something like 70% of france's economy just disappeared. this forced the germans to pull out their pocketbook to keep france fed

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      3's and 4's were extremely reliable, though. Repairing major battle damage was a depot level thing

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >3's and 4's were extremely reliable, though.
        they were, but that was because they were small and based on a long-proven design track record. it was all of their larger tanks that were rushed into production and had issues

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Their reliability was fine and Germany did more repairs at the front than any other nation you brainlet. Tanks fricked up enough to actually need to be sent back were sent back because they could. Shermans weren't sent back because just sending a new one was less work.

  6. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    They already trashed 5x the shermams and t-34s for every tank they made does it really matter if they got .5 more on average?

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >They already trashed 5x the shermams and t-34s for every tank they made

      No. Frick off weheraboo.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        cope

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          No, it's simply not true moron.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        what were the total losses of t34's again?
        why did the ivans lose about 85% or more of them?
        not talking about western armor here but everything the russians threw at the krauts were utter dogshit. only good in numbers (like today)

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          > only good in numbers (like today)
          thats not how it worked, krauts had no tanks to deal with t34 (or god forbid a kv) early in the war, the only way to kill it was artillery, AT cannons, mines or aviation. also kratus were lucky that the assembly quality of t34 was utter dogshit due to shit workers, it had loads more problems but in general if the soviet command had atleast more than 3 brain cells they could have easily halted german advance

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            T-34s were being BTFO by Panzer 3s since day one, you stupid Black person

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              >t. moron
              even the long 50mm was lucky to ever penetrate t34s (and even the probably from the sides), you could argue that some managed to get trough after repeated shots through the front due to the fact that t34 had a more brittle armour and it would shatter or spall given enough punches, but by that logic the same t34 is superiour to panther since panther had the same problem

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >even the long 50mm was lucky to ever penetrate t34s
                50s were adequate at the appropriate engagement ranges or they would've been dropped entirely from use on the Pz. IIIs, same for the Soviet 57s.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                pz3 armour placement was uneven, with some places having 80mm other 30mm, thus soviets had an advantage in that regard.
                >would've been dropped entirely from use on the Pz. IIIs
                t34 wasnt the only tank the pz3 had to fight, and yes eventually it was pushed out altogether with pz4 with the long 75 replacing it

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                War Thunder isn’t real life you moron

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >mention shit that the game has no hope ever in simulating
                >HURRR WHARTHUNDERR HURRR

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                I’m not talking about weaker steel in the T-34 not being simulated in a game. In real life it could be knocked out by a Panzer III, just not at autistically long ranges

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                War Thunder isn’t real life you moron

                I mean i never had much trouble with T-34s in War Thunder using a Panzer III, it just involves a lot of shooting turret cheeks until the frickers inside finally die one by one.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Because T-34s had poor human factors, including 2 man turrets, complete lack of visibility and often lack of radios. Hence Otto Carius writing about seeing an entire column of T-34's drive past him in a field, all of whom completely fail to notice the german tank watching them, or when it started to kill them, that they were taking losses.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        You're gonna die in Ukraine, Pidor.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Source?

  7. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >front-wheel drive
    >no way to properly get to the transmission if anything gets busted

    LMAO, normal Panzer IV wasn't great about this already. This thing? It'd have the mainteannce personnel on suicide watch.

    Also,
    >no periscope for the driver
    >no cuppola

    Literal early T-34-tier situational awareness LMAO.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >no way to properly get to the transmission if anything gets busted
      >implying it would need a service before exploding
      oh you

  8. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Then the 14-year-olds crewing their tanks at the end of the war would be abandoning tanks with sloped armor instead.

  9. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Sloped Armor isn’t some magic technology that makes your tank stronger with zero downsides. There are always factors to consider. Nowadays it’s easier but back then there were trade offs.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      What kinds of tradeoffs (explain this to me like i am a moron because i am)

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        NTA but it limits space. That’s why T-34s were cramped for malnourished slavs

  10. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    you can slope as much as you like, the 17pdr is still going through you.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      17pdr needed the wildly inaccurate and rather uncommen APDS to go through the front of the Panther's glacis.

  11. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Nothing. Germany lost the war by invading the USSR, not by lacking sloped armor on early war tanks.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      False, they lost the war because the US could fund the Soviets and Bongs without end. Soviets would have lost easilly without the life saving lend lease when they needed it the most after the initial thrashing.

  12. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Here's a more interesting question. Just how much near-future (40s, 50s) tech would you have to give Germany in 1939 for them to actually overcome their massive economic deficit in WW2? VT fused flak guns, a modern tank design Panzer IV factories could still build, Type 21 Elektroboots, airborne radar...

    How much atompunk could you cram in and have them still lose?

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      You could give them a 1950s top of the line factory straight in Berlin, but it won't help having 0 resources and no uniform equipment. Germans to this day still haven't learned, you build your kit to be extended off a common base, not 17 different kits made from 2000 different parts. The US built tanks that could be shipped over an ocean, repaired at depots with tools, and even trained fricking Italians to be a useful mechanic force. Why? Because we focused on the importance of reuse, retrain, and relearn. By the end of the war you could see US equipment on every corner of the globe and every fricking man, woman and child learning to wrench on them. Conversely the krauts couldn't get their best to run their tanks as long as a basic US supply run.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Proximity fuses, G3s in 6.5 and any 50s jet engine to get the ball rolling should do the trick. Tanks were mostly about figuring out what was good and getting good engines going and less about revolutionary technology.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >G3s in 6.5
        They can probably make G3s but the StG used 7.62 for a reason, all their existing barrel machine tools were for that diameter and ammo lines could be adapted to the shorter case

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Give them nukes and they probably would have created a radioactive belt east of the Caucasus Mountains and taken the oil fields

  13. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >the 50 was fine for penetrating T-34s

    It wasn't, which was the entire reason it was dropped; the panzer IV with the long 50 was supposed to be the new tank, but it was dropped entirely after the 50 performed inadequately.

    Yes you can penetrate the sides of tank and some part of the front turret, but even at close range the front of the tank was mostly protected.
    >Poor steel quality
    Not as big an issue as has been made out, the state of German late war steel was actually much worse than early war soviet, poor weld quality was generally a bigger problem for red army tanks.

  14. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    They had it when the war began though.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      what if Germany spent the effort on putting a roof and an autocannon on their halftracks to make an IFV instead of wasting effort on interleaved suspension memes
      >autocannon too big!
      MG 151/20 is fine

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        In my Wehraboo fantasies, they take the turret off the Sd.Kfz. 234 and mount it on top of the half-track, elongating the hull to compensate for lost space, and create a proto-Frankenstein BMP with it.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous
  15. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Germans actually did slope their front armor just not as aggressively as the Russians or Americans. They had a thick upper plate that was canted at about 10 degrees where they put the driver's port and hull MG but then had an almost vertical plate under that where they kept the transmission access hatches After that there was a 45 degree plate protecting the transmission.

    But realistically, changing up the design of the Panzer III and IV wouldn't have changed anything. Germany just didn't have the economy to fight a war of that scale singlehandedly.

  16. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    The main advantage of sloped armor during WWII was reduce plate thinkness. Plates thicker than 40-50 mm are far harder to manufacture so angling the UFP allows doubling the protection without developing thicker plates.
    Slopes below 60º (most tanks on wwii) don't perform much better than the Line of Sight thinkess and against some shells perform worse than LOS (overmatch and normalization).

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      The L/48 on the panzer IV had worse performance against a plate at only 30deg compared to the vertical

      Even slight sloping more than offset a thinner plate, 60deg just more tha doubled effective armor compared to vertical

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >The L/48 on the panzer IV had worse performance against a plate at only 30deg compared to the vertical
        Each calibers and shells behaves differently, the 8,8cm and 10,5 cm were less affected. Some (hard cap) late war american, soviet shells (76, 85, 122) had better performance against sloped armor than LOS (at lower velocity) at 30º. At 60º it's highly dependent of the armor quality so simple penetration tests to stop the shells isn't that useful, you have to tests against real targets. Brittle sloped armor (bad heat treatment) was by far the worse iirc. Many Panthers and Tigers 1 (had good armor) were destroyed by "not good enough shells".

        > ignoring the fact that in sloped terrain it can make the angle far better or far worse, that doesn't happens with barely slopped armor

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Not the anon you're replying to, but one can't simply use LOS thickness as resistance for a sloped plate. Perforation is much more complex, and even involves the thickness of the plate versus the diameter of the projectile: i.e., a thin plate even sloped resists less well versus a projectile with a diameter that overmatches its thickness due to the more energy-efficient plugging that tends to happen in that situation rather than petaling or plastic failure

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Even post-war APDS rounds had worse performance against slopes than vertical armor
          Only long rod penetrators perfrom better against slopes

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Where in my post did I say slope didn't affect penetration? I said you can't use simple LOS to determine resistance (i.e., "60deg just more tha doubled effective armor compared to vertical") because the mechanics are terribly more complex than that.

  17. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    The Germans knew about and used sloped armor as far back as WWI you absolute mongoloid.

    There was always a conscious balance between angle and interior volume. That's why the Tiger's frontal hull plating is angled at 10 degrees, not sitting at a flat 0/90.

  18. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    They'd unironically do way worse because the main advantage German tanks had over most of their enemies designs (Shermans were also pretty good but the often complained about flaw of being tall as frick was a side effect of not being cramped as frick) was that they weren't claustrophobic hotboxes, primarily because they didn't use sloped armor. Their doctrine also called for angling the armor using hull traverse, so to achieve the highest possible effective thickness it just made sense to use a straight vertical wall since it could be much thicker for the same weight, which arguably wasn't the best idea for close quarters but then again German doctrine called for keeping distance to maximize the benefits of having a much longer range gun.

  19. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Like that?

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >DAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN!

  20. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    So long as the plate is not too much thinner than the diameter of the round, highly sloped Armor actually performs much better than LOS.
    At a thickness to shell diameter ratio of 1 a 60° RHA plate will resist up to three times it's thickness in armour against typical APCBC.

    Generally speaking with 60° angled plates and APCBC you need a gun with larger calibre diameter than the thickness of the Armor.
    The IS-4's 140mm@ 60° was effectively invulnerable to (non-naval) APCBC shells for example.

    What's funny is that the advanced navies likely already knew this and took advantage of it, already understanding the dynamics of thick armour and large shells.
    But with most tanks being vulnerable to basically any cannon in the interwar period, it took a while for tank designers to understand and exploit this dynamic.

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