what is the primary limiting factor in the development and production of tanks/afvs, in particularly during the ww2 period?
aircraft production and development seems entirely bottlenecked by the development and production of higher and higher powered aircraft engines, but i'm not sure if there is a similar restriction on tank development
it seems surprising to me that hungary could produce at least functional tanks and were on the verge of producing a medium tank equivalent by 1944 despite being a tiny country with little manufacturing base
i'm fascinated by the conversion of civilian manufacturing to military production, particularly with regards to the production of tanks/afvs
canada is an interesting study in that it had substantial railway and automobile industries for building lots of tank and aircraft frames, but never made engines on their own
also all development industries were set up by bongs and burgers
Factories themselves -> machinery, smelters, heat treatment ovens, welders. All of them needs time.
Most countries weren't as good as the US to mass produce in series like Ford (that also made soviet factories). Or their factories were carpet bombed for years.
Strategic metals in case of Germany, Having no molybdenum or nickel, almost no manganese or chromium makes the heat treatment far more complicated and any error/interrupted heat treatment will make the plate brittle. Japan never allocated much steel for their Army.
For the soviets and germans: high power/reliable engines.
Germany didn't have a +300 HP engine during most of the war and soviets didn't have any reliable engine beyond the Ford-GAZ.
The soviet Kharkiv V2 was 'good' for tanks but with short life.
The engine and turrets needs iterations, you can't simply design a good turret or compact engine from scratch. Most WWII engines had cooling problems, shaft snapping due to resonance (a serious problem with multiple engines),etc.
i'm a moron so is the most important "component" the materials that go into producing the frame/armor plate?
didn't the churchill tanks make do with lorry engines?
though i guess engine output isn't necessarily super important if you don't intend on going fast
Nickel and molybdenum are essential to make hard but non-brittle armor plates. Especially thicker plates. Germans used different hardness (besides FHA) for different plate thickness.
ADA954407 (Panzer FHA)
ADA954952 (Panther RHA)
Without nickel and molybdenum the heat treatment is less forgiving to mistakes and less hardness -that didn't matter because the hard FHA don't work with well for thick plates and against capped shells is weaker than a than softer alloy-.
>didn't the churchill tanks make do with lorry engines?
Matildas?
A lot of tanks had double engines, coupling them isn't trivial (see T-70/Su-76 problems).
>though i guess engine output isn't necessarily super important if you don't intend on going fast
It matters off-road and for acceleration.
i thought all the infantry tank engines were based on either bus or lorry engines, matilda/valentine/churchills
i mean it's not ideal and they'd probably be better with better engines but i guess they worked
i guess i'm just curious what the most complicated tank a non-major country could slap together
I wonder, why couple the engines at all? Why not have one engine per track?
Grossly inefficient for absolutely no gain?
if you lose an engine you can still limp around with partial power
if you lose an engine in your set up the tank is just straight up immobilized
also duplicating a lot of gear for no real reason
for the germans, the limiting factor were engines
only a single factory made engines for the panther tank, resulting in hits to that factory causing major production shortfalls
the US and british faced similar issues, though they were better about finding solutions
the M4s radial engine was both hard to produce and les than ideal due to being an achilles heel in reliability, resulting in the M4A2 using a pair of civilian diesel engines and the M4A4 using 5 car engines
while the british used two bus engines for the matilda
once the engine solution was partially solved, the next bottleneck was just plain old labor
they couldnt make the M4s welded hull fast enough, so they turned to their massive casting foundries to produce the M4A1 and its rounded hull to speed up production
while casting is slow and expensive, and it can be scaled up to some truly astounding proportions with little labor cost
by the end of the war they had enough welders to make the welded hull, but they kept the casting foundries up and running because they really did just need every hull they could get
the germans lucked out on this one, since they had a lot of trained welders since even before the war
were the radials actually that hard to produce? they're like 20's era engines that were licensed produced by some not particularly technologically advanced nations so they can't be that complicated
i'm just curious what the stripped down sten version of a tank would look like, a tank that could be manufactured by just about anybody
>i'm just curious what the stripped down sten version of a tank would look like,
the valentine
its a tiny <20 ton tank, powered by an equally modest 120hp diesel engine, designed to be spammed in huge quantity so that every infantry brigade got a platoon
the british managed to push out 8000 of them despite only producing them out of a handful of plants in the UK and a plant in canada, most of them smaller factories
>20 ton tank
>120hp engine
Christ Almighty, how does it even get moving from a standstill? Do they measure hp differently for diesels? My tiny shit box is about ~2400 pounds, and it's 108hp gas engine certainly leaves a lot to be desired.
>how does it even get moving from a standstill
barely, the valentine was an infantry tank
so it had a top speed of 24kph on roads, or about as fast as a bicycle at most
its actually 130hp, not 120hp, though later models had some mercy and uprated it to 200hp
neat, thanks
i'd figured it be something like a stug but i can see the valentine outcheaping it by a lot
Not him.
Single row were simple and reliable. The problem was size and if you can make a 9 cyl you probably can make more 18 cyl for bombers.
Most problems with radials were related to high boost pressure and cooling problems for multi-row radials during mid and late war.
there's a reason modern aircraft have largely moved away from piston engines (besides ultralights)
>IT'S JUST SO SIMPLE BRO
it's simple for everyone else as well
you can easily make a substandard tank, yes
but The Enemy can make a better tank than you, how now brown cow?
Modestly off-topic, but what is the deal with tank engine HP in WW2, and how do you even compare tank engines? Some early war tanks barely have 100HP but supposedly have tons of low end torque, but isn't torque really just dependent on the drivetrain? Would a 1 litre 100hp Ecoboost smoke those old engines with the correct drivetrain? Would a 6.2 L Chrysler V8 producing 800HP beat every single WW2 tank?