Post your
 

Favorite tank
Multiple era's are allowed so you don't have to decide between X tank from 1942 and Y tank from 1977. :DL

Me
WWII - Jagdpanther, The best tank hunter of the war, sloped armor and a low-slung fighting compartment gave this tank a menacing look that I just adore.

Cold War - The M60 Patton
Not a very great tank. But theres one near where I live and it is possibly the coolest-looking thing I ever got to climb in. Standing in the commanders cupola, it just felt right :yep:

Modern Day
Russian Black Eagle
One threatening-looking SOB. Its a beauty. even though it was cancelled.

Favourite armour
 

Sledge by Black Eagle are you referring to the T95 ????

My own choices:

WWII Panther ausf. G favourite tank and the Jagdpanther is my favourite TD/Jagdpanther( like you I believe the best combo for a TD). Favourite SPGs equally Stug III G and SU100.

Post WWII, Leopard 1A5, Merkava 4 and Leopard A26. APCs M113, BMP60, Marder.

Hmm, for me (from WW2 at least) Hmm... The later panthers or the King Tiger.

(Or the T 34 on some days)

Not a real fan of modern/post war tanks TBH.

http://www.military-today.com/tanks/t12_black_eagle.htm



Tank=MBT, not IFV, APC!?

My Choice:

WWII: Panther, later versions.

Cold War: Leopard 1A5, T-72

Modern era: Leopard 2A4-A6, Merkava-IV

Why not the T34? It won by numbers, not by technical superiority.

Why not the M60? Too damn slow, lacking agility.

Why the T72? It is underestimated. It's value must be seen in comparison to the era when it appeared - and there it was a beast: fast, small, hard punch, tough armour compared to the weapons of that time. It is the reason why the development of the Leo-2 was speeded up. The Leo-1 dominated all tanks before the T-72, Western and Eastern designs alike.

StuG III G :rock:

One could argue that the T-34 did have a technical superiority against pretty much anything in its weight class, certainly early in the war when it was introduced.

Anyway, my favourite WWII tank would probably be the IS-2, while my favourite Cold War tank is probably the T-72 or T-80. My favourite tank overall is, of course, the glorious Mark V tank.

WWI - Mark I and Mark V tanks
WWII - Panther, Matilda, Cromwell, Firefly, Panzer IV Ausf H, T-34/85
Cold War - Centurion, T-72, M60, M551, M1A1
Modern - Leopard II, Challenger II, M1A2

Best Tanks
 

Hey Skybird it seems we see eye to eye when it comes to our favourites tanks whether WWII or post war:up:

I agree with you the T34s were overrated they had terrible reliability problems and were very crude mechanically.I remember reading a book by a Soviet tanker in which he said that with the T34s the Soviet drivers always carried a wood mallet because the transmission was so hard to shift especially in cold weather that they had to hammer at it to make it shift...

Likewise the JS/IS2 was solid and produced in big numbers but very slow reload, limited ammo only 8 AP shells and its armour was of uneven quality and prone to crack and brittleness...Sov post war tanks were better.

Their SU 85 and 100 on the other hand were not bad....

Some post war US tanks are not bad either both the M48 and M60 ...
The British produced the chietain and centurions which were not half bad.The French AMX 10 and 30 were not in tfirst league at all....

Oh? Everything I heard about the T-34 is that it was highly reliable after the early 1941 models.

Either way, that's certainly better than the German tanks which had to be heated for hours before even functioning in cold weather, or the notoriously unreliable late-war German tanks...

Much of that is because it was designed as a breakthrough and infantry support tank. In fact a 100mm gun with better penetration and a higher rate of fire was considered for the IS-2 but was rejected in favour of the 122mm gun because that one had a much larger HE charge.

The T.34 did well what it did, but it had no real innovations to offer, despite sloped armour. The optics were inferior, the gun was good, but had no really decisive punch, transmissions remained to be a critical item, of the earlier models of the T-34 more tanks got lost than were lost to German fire. The commander had to serve as gunner as well, which led to inferior battle awareness. When the Panzer-IV appeared, the initial superiority of the T-34 started to falter, and the Panther and Tiger simply were superior designs. But when they started to enter the battlefield, the T-34 had been started by the Soviets to be used in big numbers, and no longer as individual lead vehicles. Shooting ranges of German versus Soviet tanks showed the German tanks being superior in most comparsions, due to better optics (precision) and reach of the gun.

The biggest advantage of the T-34 was its armour which initially was a tough bug for the Germans' PAKs, and its good mobility and small silhouette.

The T-34 is one of the leading historic actors in WWII, no doubt. But it was not that innovative that I would rate it as a decisive benchmark of tank building in that era. And after the Tigers and Panthers and 5.xx calibre PAKs appeared, it more and more depended on being operated in huge numbers - like the Americans had orders that their small light tanks, the Shermans, should not engage German Tigers if they had not at least a 7:1 numerical superiority.

Darauf ein Zeiss! :DL

My choice is more based on the toughest combat conditions in history and
overwhelming odds::yep:

1.) Of course
http://www.tanksimzw.com/images/A_Tiger_01.jpg

and 2.)
http://www.tanksimzw.com/images/ZW_Panther_A_1.jpg

ZeeWolf :salute:

Hmmm...probably want to add the KT to my WWII list too...I mean, I know it wasn't the most reliable thing on the road, and the build quality by that time (since the factories were under attack or scattered) suffered (spalling) but damn, it is a fine beast and it looks lovely.

Prefer the Panther over it though, deadly thing in the right hands. :yep:

I agree with Skybird, the T34 rocked the Germans because they had been too conservative , too Western Europeans in their approach to tank warfare.The Soviets faced with a poor infrastructure( few good roads and raliway lines) and their manpowrer was often illetrate( the litteracy rate in the SU of the 30s and 40s was less than 40%, a legacy of the Tsarist and post WWI civil war era and they needed a tough, unsophisiticated and easy to operate tank.The T34 was perfect for the job as it addressed the bad roads and poorly educated peasants who were the Soviets' cannon fodder..TBut the Communist system being what it was andd still is the emphasis was on filling the 5 year plan, producing mass numbers,pleasing the master of the hour in the Kremlin and the hell with quality.Even as late as the 80s the Soviet people preferred to buy anything from their Eastern European sattemlites over their own products so shoddy was the made in USSR stuff.

Even then to Soviets consistently lost more tanks than they could produce except in 1945 and it was the tanks provided by the Anglo-Americans during the landlease that saved their skins and allowed them to be able to replenish their terrible losses.

The T 34/85 is a fine tank.It was easy to make and reliable and that's why it remained popular for so long but it was not equal to western design which is why it was defeated one-on-one by the Panther in 1944-45 and by the M36 in during the Korean war.

Sorry to say so Oberon but I think the koenigstiger was a terrible tank to make for a resource poor country, with shortages of fuel, fighting against an enemy with mastery of the air( less so in the East), overwhelming numerical superiority and facing round the clock bombings of industrial and transportation facilities.It would have been formidable for the Germany of 1942 . Even the Panther was too heavy and ti would have been the perfect tank had it been 10 tons lighter.... I know ZeeWolfe loves the Tiger but I think had the Germans dropped it and focussed on producing more Panzer IV G or H and more Panthers they would have ben better off Sorry Zee!

Oberon, if I had to choose a real tank (not a spg, like the Jagdpanther)
I'd second you on the Kingtiger.
It's a wonderful piece of work, problems aside.

and although I prefer the Porsche-turreted versions
http://www.wartoyz.com/Merchant2/gra...orsche-450.jpg

I'd have to choose the Henschel versions, for battlefield survivability.
http://www.aaamodels.co.uk/List_Pics...NG_TIGER_H.JPG

The Porsche version is sleek, but the Henschel version looks brutish. I'd probably need a change of pants if one of those showed up in my binoculars.

Also, lets not forget the Maus!
That thing is my favorite fantasy tank.
one day Hitler was looking at pillboxes and he pointed at one and said
"Can vee get one of zose....vith TREADS?! Imagine the look on the alliez' faces!"

Klein Tiger
 

Just as a matter of correction( don´t want to sound pedantic:D) but the so-called Porsche turret was in fact manufactured by Krupp.Porsche participated in designing but it was made by Krupp thus it should be referred to as the Krupp turret. The KT with the weight of the pànther would have been perfect .In fact the Panther II with the schmallturm and the KwK43 would have made a perfect KT.

BTW TIger lovers there was a plan to build a Klein(small) Tiger with sloped armour weighing 33 tons and equipped with either the kwK43 or a 105 mm.It was designed by Krupp and presented to the Waffenamt( weapons procurement office of the German army) in December 1944.However at that stage of the war the project was not feasible and only remained only on paper.There are blueprints somewhere of that Tiger Cub.I ll try to find them.

Lend-Lease tanks saved the Soviets? I don't have the numbers right now, but IIRC the total amount of Lend-Lease tanks that arrived in the Soviet Union amounted to less than 7,000 tanks. Compared to the tens of thousands of T-34s and other Soviet tanks produced during the war, this could not possibly have been the factor that "saved their skins". Lend-Lease trucks and similar items were much more important to the Soviet war effort.

I think the Panther and Tiger comparison is somewhat flawed, not only because both were designed and introduced much later (In the case of the Panther, as a direct result of the T-34's early superiority), but also because they were significantly heavier. The Panther was nearly 50% heavier than the T-34/85 (Despite being a medium tank by design, it weighed almost exactly as much as the IS-2, a heavy tank by all means), while the Tiger was almost twice as heavy. For example, you could equally take a Panzer IV and compare it to an IS-2 (Well, almost equally, since, as I said, the IS-2 was designed as an infantry-support tank), which would easily win, but that does not make the IS-2 an inherently superior design.

The T-34 was tactically superior to anything the Germans had early in the war. It was, after initial problems, much more reliable than the later German tanks, was much easier to produce and maintain, and was still effective by the end of the war, especially against other tanks of comparable weight and purpose.

I understand frinik, of course you and skybird make a good point. There was definitely two philosophies in manufacturing that must be understood if one is
to get a grasp of the more complex notions that opens a better, accurate understanding of the times and the decisions made. I believe once you profile
with a simple contrast of the German and Russian philosophies you will not only see the short comings but the strengths as well. Like for instance the Soviets had no real quality organizational capacity the would nurture the intricate details involved with what is required in quality Mfg. The Germans on the other hand had a homogeneous well educated and very capable, competent population that had generations of the best teaching and training skills of any nation in Europe. The Soviets however a multicultural multi-ethnic society that was held together by brutality and force. This is not the case with the Germans. Germany as a cohesive nation that had a deep rooted Christian heritage gave the Germans the edge above all the nations of Europe. The pride of one's nation the pride of one's work and the pride of one's people and a system based on merit and built on a real strong Nationalist foundation. The Soviet attempt to unify and organize their nation was a disaster. The 1930s in Russia were the most horrific time for the Ukrainians and the Soviet Officer corp and especially for the average Russian who suffered the rule by terror that lasted until 1989. Of course I am leaving out many details about war time Germany but that is still filled to the brim with war time propaganda that I do not want to get in to in this thread.

I can t remember where I read it may be in one of Thomas Jentz " s books but it said that in 1942 and 1943 the Soviets lost more tanks than they produced and the difference was made up by the land lease tanks which allowed them to compsensate for these losses.Only in 1945 did their production get ahead of losses.Naturally not all the losses were combat related quite a number of tanks had accidents dues ot the carelessness and runkenness of the crews and mechanical breakdown resulting in fires or accidents.

The Panther ausf. Dweighed 43 tons thus only 8 tons more or 20% than the JS2 odel 1944 not 50 %.The G weighed 2 tons more The TIger II weighed 68 tons thus twice as heavy as the JS and the TIger I 56 tons.However those tanks carried far more shells and were designed with difference purposes in mind than the JS which was not designed to be a tank-to -tank fighting machine and simply ended up fighting them on variosu occasions more by chance that by design.

I agree with Zee Germany had a very sophisticated society whereas the SU inherited the Tsairst mess of an uneducated and repressed population and added some of their own horrors.

The Germans however had their own flaw which was to overwork and overengineer their machines to the point of forgetting practicality and simplicity.The Soviets had not choice but to make cruder but simpler machines so their largely unsophisiticated crews could operate them with a minimum of training.It worked but only because Hitler made the fatal mistake of declaring war on the US and overextending Germany's limited resources in manpower and indsutrial capacity.

If they lost more tanks than they were producing throughout the war, then the much fewer and generally inferior lend-lease tanks could not have done much difference, much less accounted for the increase in size of the Soviet tank force. You also have to make the distinction between tanks lost which could be repaired and put into service and tanks which are total write-offs; they could very well have knocked out all their tanks, but if they could repair them in a couple of weeks and put them back into service, then it doesn't have much long-term effect.

I was referring to comparing the Panther and Tiger to the T-34, not the IS-2. The Panther Ausf. G's combat weight was about 45 tonnes, the Tiger I weighed 57 tonnes, while the T-34/85 was 32 tonnes. This means the Panther was approximately 40% heavier and the Tiger was 78% heavier than the T-34/85; the difference was even larger compared to earlier models. True, it's not quite 50% and double, but very close. The IS-2, for comparison, weighed 46 tonnes, only very slightly more than the Panther.

EDIT: BTW, this is going a bit way off topic, so perhaps this should be split off into a separate thread?

Just some visuals guys
http://www.tanksimzw.com/images/ZW_TankChart_1.jpg

ZeeWolf :salute: