T-34 the best tank of the war?

Justiciar

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Is there not also a training component to this question too? It is much easier to train a crew to a good standard when the tank is turret-less than to the same standard when it has one. There is complexity to communication and target acquisition and tactics that a turret brings with it.
Then there is a maintenance issue between the too as well.
 

Paul M. Weir

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While thinking about turretless AFV, remember there are 2 types.
1) The specially designed TD/AG like the StuG, ISU, JagdPanther, etc which are intended to take and give lumps.
2) Extemporised mounts like Marders, JgPz I and SU-76M.

In the 2nd type the Germans wanted to mount a more capable AT gun on a cross country chassis because their tank guns were insufficient in either numbers or performance (or both) and towed guns were too tactically inflexible. The Soviets on the other hand had as good a gun on their medium and heavy tanks and in numbers but were dissatisfied with their light tanks. In their case having similar tactical flexibility was desirable but the main reason they produced so many SU-76M was that the truck factories that were producing their T-60 and T-70 light tanks were incapable of producing medium and heavy tanks and production of a SU-76M was a way of getting a useful vehicle out of same factories.
 

Brian W

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The 1944+ Soviets built and used them [EXC: SU-85/100] as assault guns with a secondary AT ability. That's not what the Germans needed in 1943+, nor is it why they built them. They needed mobile AT assets. They could produce them cheaply and quickly by forgoing the turret, as well as, like the Soviets in 1943, being able to put a bigger gun on a smaller chassis to fight heavily armored tanks. Put another way, the ISU was made to blow holes in bunkers with direct fire from 1,000 yards and take out the occasional German tank. The StuG IIIG was built to kill Soviet and US tanks and shoot up attacking allied infantry.
 

GeorgeBates

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The T-44 is one they didn't get quite right. It's 0 RoF seems wrong. It's turret was a slightly larger version of the T-34/85 turret and whatever about it's myriad faults, a cramped turret was not one of them. I would give the T-44 a RoF of [1].
Crew and/or ammunition arrangement?

Put a 100L in it to get a T-44/100 or T-54 m1946 and a RoF of [0] (IE no RoF) would be justified.
The 100mm naval gun mounted on the SU-100 and the piece in the early IS is one of the great Soviet missed opportunities of the war. Why it lost out to the 122mm gun is a story that deserves telling.
 

Brian W

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The 100mm naval gun mounted on the SU-100 and the piece in the early IS is one of the great Soviet missed opportunities of the war.
There are probably ten Soviet decisions I can think off the top of my head that would have saved 100,000+ lives each. One really easy one would have saved 1,000,000 Soviet deaths alone. I don't think the difference between a 122mm and a 100mm gun tube is a blip on the radar in the list of Bad Decisions that was the Soviet war machine. I don't even think it ranks number one of choosing the wrong gun for a tank:

US 76mm over the British 17lber.
German 50mm/L42 instead of the 50mm/L60

Others?
 

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Crew and/or ammunition arrangement?
4 man crew with no hull gunner, so a 3MT. Ammo? Unlikely. The T-34 had about half of its ammo in boxes stacked on their narrow but long edge on the hull floor and to get to those the turret crew had to remove the rubber mats that they stood on to get to those boxes. The T-44 with its torsion bar suspension and wider but lower hull had more normal ammo racks. If anything ammo retrieval should be faster.
The 100mm naval gun mounted on the SU-100 and the piece in the early IS is one of the great Soviet missed opportunities of the war. Why it lost out to the 122mm gun is a story that deserves telling.
Supply! The 122mm D-25 (manual screw breech), D-25T and D-25S (wedge semi-automatic breech) was based upon the A-19 corps artillery piece that had been in production pre-war. The ammunition was also in plentiful supply.

The Soviets experimented with a 107mm M-60 gun in a KV-2 turret as part of the development of upgunned KV-3 and later KVs. This was a redesigned stretching of an earlier Tsarist 107mm gun, but it appears that the Soviets decided that such a calibre did not justify the effort and concentrated on 122mm artillery. At some stage they decided that they wanted a 100mm as an AT gun and given that they had the excellent S-34 100mm destroyer gun and some manufacturing capability, a version was designed as the D-10. However it appears that volume of both gun and ammo was insufficient for IS-2, ISU-122 and SU-100 at that time. The IS and ISU series were intended for breakthrough operations rather than antitank work and the D-10's HE round was 15.8 kg and inferior to the D-25's 25 kg. Tanks fight infantry, artillery and bunkers more than other AFV, indeed typically WW2 tanks only carried about 1/3 AP rounds with the rest HE or smoke.

They also had the excellent B-13 130mm destroyer gun, probably the best destroyer gun in the 5 inch range in WW2. This was put in a number of post war experimental heavy tanks and SPG, eg IS-7 as well as a single gun in the SU-100Y based on the T-100 chassis. That should easily equal or exceed the German 128mm gun.
 

GeorgeBates

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You know, it's been so long I'd forgotten - Leno used to do commercials for the T-34:

We'llMakeMore.jpg

Crunch all you want - we'll make more!
 

Bryan Holtby

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Are you assuming that because they produced them in a ratio of 5:1 that the production tradeoff was 5:1? A quick search suggests that the cost to produce a Tiger was about twice the cost to produce a Panther. If true, your trade of 1200-1300 Tigers gets you 2400-2600 Panthers, not 7-8000. Perhaps that's still a good trade, but it's not as obviously good as what you suggested.

JR
Im merely going on time of unit production. Perhaps production facilities assigned to Tiger production were fewer than that assigned to the Panther. Weight of material/resources consumed would suggest an even less favourable replacement ratio for the Panther. Was production 'cost' even an issue in a country with a closed economy? I would think resource availability both in facilities and metal would be more of an influence than $.
 
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