Tuesday, February 03, 2015
E-10 Hertzer via The Tank Maker.Blogspot
If the Germans in WW2 had a better leader or even the same leader and just a couple more years then things would be totally different today. They were on the verge of standardizing war production across all manufacturers and the results would have been impressive...even with round the clock bombing.
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ReplyDeleteit looks better than the E-25 and the Hetzer! it would be deadly in the game. can you imagine the camo rating this thing would have?
DeleteWell that's it WOT will have to make a premium tank out of this I love it. Would definitely have better ergonomics than the original Hetzer.
ReplyDeleteJust as good or better than the E25 hate those little things they need to be nerfed more.
DeleteAs with all Stugs, the limited traverse of essentially their least capable PAK-39/L48 (75mm low pressure) gun would have proven crippling in the city fighting to hold 'Festungs' for the six months which Goebbels said in a private speech to Hitler's closest aides in January 1945, 'would change the outcome of the war' (Plutonium cooking away in Jonastahl wine barrels).
DeleteUnfortunately, the critical shortcomings in Chromium, Magnesium, Nickel and Molybdenmum (not to mention POL) which were what really crippled German industry from making new system advances in the last full year of the war would have remained crippling even as more and more of Germany was swallowed and rail connectivity between development centers in the East and the remaining Krupp, Mann, MNH plants was lost.
By the end of the war, the substitution of Vanadium left German armor steel with huge embrittlements, especially around the forced-labor keyed welds which often caused whole segments of the armor to fail inwards when taking Soviet 100-122mm hits.
The German way of making armor steel was incredibly effective at face hardening with graduated retempering and quenching in molten salt baths but even this was not enough without good baseline steel to work with and it would have been inadequate in any case to match the effects of the early APDS and HEAT rounds which were coming online to replace APCR/HVAP and APCBC in the majority of particularly British armor.
In the case of the E-10, with it's 60mm front and 30mm sides, we are talking Mid-1942 Panzer III equivalent protection with the reinforcing frontal plates which would have simply not been survivable, even angled, in 1945.
In this, the basic E-10 model would have had all the disadvantages of a waffentrager but none of it's (superior sighting and position based pre-lay of the main tube) strengths as an ambush hunter in a cluttered urban landscape and thus the E-10's greatest utility would have come in it's adaptability instead to followon Pz.III/IV based utility roles as the basis for flak, auflklarungs and other light roles.
Ironically, the biggest innovation of the E-series, it's use of common automotive components in an integrated rear transmission, powerpack and final drive rafted layout, would have been the least useful on the E-10 as it's design signified the first 'armored box' concept which would have been truly mass produceable (limited number of hull surface planes to weld, compared to even the E-25) as a proto M113, _if_ it stuck with a forward drive.
Forward drives are vulnerable to mines as well as direct fire hits and cannot typically be short tracked but they leave the entire rear of the hull open as a universal payload box which is what Germany really needed as a APC means to carry the LCD element to battle, protected against splinters and MG while replacing the costly and complex half tracks (four different models) then in use.
A man with an 8.8cm Panzerbusche or Pupchen equivalent can stop a tank, as can a 2.8cm SPzB41 squeeze bore gun, far more cheaply and in greater attrition redundant (low training) numbers, from the flanks of an armored breakout than a real tank.
DeleteAnd a 10 tone vehicle operating on a 250-300hp engine can sustain the pace of operational tempo to keep up with those Soviet proto-OMGs at little more fuel burn than an Opel Blitz.
Something no 85 ton class E-75 ever would manage on the diminished fuel refinement capacities that Germany was still capable of producing fuel at
If you really want to make a standalone tank hunter, from the mid war point where (just after Kursk) it /might/ make a difference, the key was to combine 'the little things' of autoloaders and new ammo types with a conventional and proven, cheap AT gun (PAK-40 L/48), with it's trace roof-welded straight from the factory. Given even a limited, 60-90` traverse and elevation capacity using hydraulic servo drives attached directly to the gunner wheels, you would have had a capability to engage in open field offensive maneuver, something a turretless destroyer was explicitly forbidden from doing.
This ability to fight the vehicle as a tank without the production hassle of lathing a turret ring and balancing a full turm would have been critical to production efficiencies.
Using periscopes, the gunner could have sat within the hull on a chair attached to the turret drive post and had full magnified view while under armor, unlike an open mount. The enclosure of the gun mount with 100mm side and frontal plates, angled at 30` on a backpack frame, would have provided superior protection to any known tank at only 2-3 tons added weight while keeping the gun and particularly it's hydraulic rammer from being exposed to direct fire.
With a simple revolver magazine, reloaded from a sliding roof hatch behind the mount and an aft mounted chair for a similar (masted) hunter sight for the commander, the overall center of balance, tube projection in front of the hull, rate of target engagement and engagement from a reverse slope depression capability would have been superior to any extant jagdpanzer.
DeleteWhile the production:cost values would have been 4-5 times that of a Panther or Pz.IV.
Dispensing with the hydropneumatic kneeling suspension would have furthered this productionization process to perhaps 6:1. Six tanks firing 5 rounds each from a revolver cylinder for every 3 shots from a Panther would have equated to a 10:1 firepower advantage which, at 3 shots per kill average would have yielded 10 kills for every 1 of the Pz.V.
Add to this Pfielgeschuss (arrow shot = early APFSDS) penetration values and the Wehrmacht would have had a new degree of anti-armor capability by 1944 and the height of Bagration. Something of critical concern as hostile airpower dominance, coupled to lowered crew training standards and absent maneuver fuel, made the ability to mass tank forces ever harder to achieve, especially in The West.
One other thing that deserves mention here is the development of a prototype NERA armor called 'Brimstone'. Created in cheap spot weld packages of mild sheet steel with folded vee sheet steel spacers and concrete/brick paste filler for attachment to cheap steel frames permanently welded onto the panzer, this was the result of Hitler's personal insistence that an emphasis on ligher, cheaper, panzers be accompanied by new methods of armoring to compensate for the shift to lower grades/thicknesses of armor steel, once he became aware of the increasing shortages of molybdenum and the coming loss of Finnish and Ukrainian nickel mines.
Anyone who has seen photos of the 1950s Jagdpanzer Kanone 90 or Raketenpanzer Jaguar is seeing the truth of the 'disappearance' of the E-25 from the Alkett werke outside Berlin but just as important are the applique armor arrays on the sides which represent another of the sacrificial spaced armor types developed under Projeckt Brimstone. Suspending large blocks of cheap, sacrificial, armor in a ring around the upper hull would have also helped defend the vulnerable lower armor gap of an E-10 with a powered PAK tube rather than full turret drive.
I always like that project... pity I will not see it in WT.
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