Gaston Marty (Login Gaston1) from IP address 206.123.3.138
Hello all.
To begin with, I have to correct a misleading statement I made to Bruce Culver about the Jagdtiger barrel being about 75mm long out of the mantlet, and I am now pretty sure it is closer to 78mm.
I have now stretched mine to 80mm while waiting for a more definitive answer.
Does anyone out there have the precise figure, or at least the hull lenght so I can deduce the overhang? I doubt it and here is why;
"My" Jagdtiger model has been stretched about 10 scale inches instead of the probable 12 to 14 inches required, which makes it 1 to 2mm short in overall lenght. No real problem here for me.
The model matches well on width and height, and with a barrel that I think is 2mm too long the overall lenght comes in at 213.5 mm, which is 10248mm in 1/1 scale. Here is the problem; quoted lenght from two different sources agrees at 34'11.5", or 10655mm; a whopping 407mm longer than mine!
Even if you substract 100mm from my too short hull, it still comes out at 307mm longer, PLUS another 50mm that I almost surely will shorten the barrel by for a more plausible appearance.
Compounding this mystery, I am now practically certain that the Jagdtiger at Bovington, the one with the collapsed suspension, has a much longer barrel than any other Jagdtiger I have seen, and this by about the same amount of 350mmm. Given that the Aberdeen one hast its barrel "shot in" at the mantlet, that leaves us only the Jagdtiger at the Kubinka museum in russia to know reliably what is the lenght of an "in service" Jagdtiger.
Anyone in Russia can help before I cut my barrel?
A measure of the barrel from the mantlet would be all that is needed, plus the overall lenght. What does Panzer tracts say Bruce? Help!
Where is the barrel length measured from? Muzzle to Mantlet? I very much doubt it. Run out or at full recoil? I suggest that dimension is from the muzzle to either the front face of the breech block, or possibly to the start of the rifled section of the barrel, both points buried deep inside the turret!! I'd offer to measure it next time I'm down at Bovington, but I think I'd need a step ladder, and I suspect the Dorset Constabulary might have something to say if I rode through their fair county with a step ladder strapped to the Yamaha....
Tim
www.fighting48th.com
128mm L55 barrel is 7040mm from muzzle to somewhere down the back end....
128mm L66 barrel is 8448mm from muzzle to somewhere down the back end....
But where? That is the question!
I bet your 10 metre figure includes the breech block, AND the chamber, AND the portion of the shell up to where the rifling starts. In other words, the TOTAL length of the whole gun.
This message has been edited by wunwinglow from IP address 82.45.21.118 on Mar 31, 2008 7:44 PM This message has been edited by wunwinglow from IP address 82.45.21.118 on Mar 31, 2008 7:40 PM
Previously the response feature would not work, so I made a separate answer.
In any case the ten meter plus dimension was for the ENTIRE vehicle, and given how accurate my model looks at about 10m 30, I am very suspicious of the 10m 65 that is usually quoted. (given also my 10 inch stretch.)
This suspicion is now seriously magnified by one of the rare pictures I saw of the entire Bovington Jagdtiger, were the barrel simply looks impossibly long by at least a foot proportional to the mantlet. I could easily be wrong because the photo is not fully a profile, but there is nowhere on my model where an extra 30cm could go, unless Tamiya's King Tiger was much too short to begin with.
The fact that the Bovington Jagdtiger was taken from a prototype testing ground means it could potentially have many atypical features.
If that is true then the only remaining way of knowing the exterior barrel lenght of an in-service Jagdtiger, and its true OVERALL lenght for that matter, is the Henshel production type at the Kubinka museum in Russia.
Remember, what is mostly of any use to modelers are the exterior dimensions, and with the Aberdeen example having its barrel shot in, we may have no definite answer to this very basic pair of questions until someone who is in Russia speaks up...
10.65m just seems wrong, and it is possible the Bovington example has led all references astray. This simple thing may be out of our reach...
There is only one way to find out!! Trouble,is, the JT is SOOOO big, it would need a ladder to reach the muzzle. I have just joined the Friends of the Tank Museum, so apart from being able to help out at shows and restoration work on the exhibits, I hope I might have a few more opportunities to take a closer look at the vehicles. When I can, I will try to run a tape over the JT, but remember, it is prototype.
By some accounts, the troops detailed to use them hated the things. One officer said he spent all his time chasing around in a kubelwagen, trying to find roads and bridges that could take the size and weight of his tanks! Most were abandoned by their crews after breakdowns, lack of fuel and ammunition, and, not surprisingly, realising the game was up and there was no point in dying for a lost cause. Thank goodness the German tank procurement system was such as mess! If they had adopted the US and USSR approaches of sticking to one or two designs, and mass producing them, instead of dissipating their obvious talents on duplication, jealous rivelries and over-engineered dinosaurs, the war might have taken quite a different path....
Russ Mars, one of the original AFV Association bunch (George will remember him), was a TD battalion vet, and told us about the time they ran into a JT that had been abandoned in the middle of a road in a wooded area. Apparently the crew had left it in gear, and nothing the Americans had would budge the thing. Nobody would go inside for fear of booby traps, so eventually the engineers were called and built a corduroy log road around the beast through the woods, and back onto the road on the other side. Just one of his JT stories - he met up with these things on more than one occasion.
Russ Mars, one of the original AFV Association bunch (George will remember him), was a TD battalion vet, and told us about the time they ran into a JT that had been abandoned in the middle of a road in a wooded area. Apparently the crew had left it in gear, and nothing the Americans had would budge the thing. Nobody would go inside for fear of booby traps, so eventually the engineers were called and built a corduroy log road around the beast through the woods, and back onto the road on the other side. Just one of his JT stories - he met up with these things on more than one occasion.
That's being unfair to the Amish!! AND....you're using electricity!! Back to the lumber mill...hand saw me some 12 x 12's.....and don't forget to put the triangle on the buggy...we almost got killed last time we went to town!!
It is a common view that the King Tiger and Jagdtigers were an oversize and unreliable waste of ressources, and that given the opposing T-34s and Shermans a smaller more practical tank was needed.
Yet there are several arguments that mitigates the apparent irrationality of these large tanks.
First of all the most produced German AFV of the war was the lowly Stug IIIG, NOT the apparently much more expensive and unpleasant to use Panzer Mk IV, as is often assumed. (It had unpleasant vibrations I'm told.) Both had the same gun, if I'm not mistaken. Together they do cover the need for less expensive tanks, and it would be hard to guess how many more could have been made were no Tigers produced at all.
I would venture the MarkIV tank was a much bigger waste of ressources than the entire Tiger program, if only because of its high silhouette when compared to the Stug...
It took on average nine T-34/85 to kill each Tiger 1, making the T-34
the most overrated tank of WW2, in my opinion. Little known is that the Sherman 76mm gun was far superior to the 85mm, which probably accounts for why it took only 5 of them to knock out each Tiger1.
The Tiger 2 was more problematic, practicality wise, than the Tiger1, but not for the reasons usually mentionned. Because of a lack of molybdenum in the side armor the Tiger2 had much inferior side armor to its predecessor. It needed also to stop more often on the move to tension its tracks, admittedly a major defect for offensive maneuvers...
Reliability wise the Tiger 2 had the same availability of 80% than any other German tank, once the production bugs were ironed out, as the Jagdtiger never had the time to prove.
All Tigers did break down on uphills, as did the Pershings and Pattons in Korea, which is exactly why the Sherman had to play such a prominent role there.
Given the size and power of the JSII and soon to be JSIII, the King Tigers and Jagdtigers don't look so irrationnal, but should never have been used on the western front.
I think this is a more balanced assesment of these "giants".
Gaston.
I often wondered what might have happened, if in the Mid 1800's, British railway companies had decided to follow Isambard Kingdom Brunels sound advice, proven on his and other railways, that 'Broad Gauge', at 7 ft 0 and 1/4 inches, was in almost all respects, better than the 'standard gauge' of 4 feet 8 1/4 inches. Locomotives and carriages was a far safer, stronger, faster, smoother and capable of much higher loads, and had far more potential for development, something of which Brunel was a master. Tank design was massively constrained by the need to fit them onto railway wagons and get them through 'standard gauge' tunnels and sidings, and had the larger rail gauge been adopted, who knows what Jagdtiger-like monsters would have played their part at Cambrai, and evolved from then on until today. As it was, with the whole of Europe and the USA using something close to standard gauge, even the British MkIV had to have side gun sponsons that swung inside the hull to allow transportation on railway wagons, and we all know about the Tigers need for two sets of tracks. Just think of what might have been otherwise......
Hindsight is 20-20. Our forefathers made the best decisions they could at the time, within the political, economic, technical and doctrinal limitations set upon them. And if it took 9 T34s to knock out a Tiger, I for one am extremely glad the Russians were able to make 10 T34s. And if some of the political limitations put on messrs Porsche, Messerschmitt, Junkers, Blohm et al, were clearly barking mad, I'm really glad about that too!!
Tim
www.fighting48th.com
This message has been edited by wunwinglow from IP address 82.45.21.118 on Apr 7, 2008 8:08 PM
I was under the vague impression that the reason for the two tracks system on all Tigers was the radius of curve inside German and/or French tunnels, something that would obviously not be easy to fix...
I am also aware that Russian gauge tracks were a significant amount wider than the European standard, which would imply that the tunnels could take Tigers with battle tracks, as I seem to remember they were occasionally shipped like that.
The tunnels were a bigger sticking point than the gauge, as the Germans rebuilt almost the entire Russian railway system in a matter of months as they invaded. The tunnels were probably few in numbers, but that is not the reason I felt the eastern front was a much better place to deploy Tigers, I was just thinking of the flatter ground and wide open fields of view, with still enough dispersed forests for concealment. I see them as specialized defensive items meant to unload manpower, Stugs and Panthers to other more offensive areas.
The Russians did produce at least 20 or 30 more T-34s above the every 9 the Tigers destroyed, but that strikes me as very expensive in terms of human and training costs. This is especially so when one consider the alternate availability of the KV series of tanks which despite usually having armor no thicker than a Sherman, seemed to display an extraordinary ability to sustain hits. These did suffer from short-lived clutch endurance but are in my opinion among the most underrated tanks of WWII. I have this theory that they in fact made a bigger impression on the Germans than the T-34, which led to the acceleration of the apparently oversized Tiger program. I don't know if the KV had, like the Tiger1-exclusive armor quality, some sort of special heat-treatment in its armor, but I have the feeling the Germans fully expected to see more and more of them.
Speaking of heat treatment, I would say the shear strenght of gear mechanism would impose a limitation on tank size at least as much as the gauge of railways, don't you think? At least when going up a hill for sure. German technology at the time used square-cut gears, not the spiral-wound "synchromesh" type gears that have greater shear strenght, which may be why the Sherman displayed such superiority in this area, in addition to its lower weight. Yet the Pershing/Pattons could not cope with Korean hills?
So it is not clear to me how much a wider gauge would have helped tanks get larger, but they do make sense to me from even the civilian point of view!
Re: Plead for a more cautious Jagdtiger assesment.
April 9 2008, 7:08 PM
Fascinating about the Sherman 76mm being better than the T34 85mm gun. Gaston, you are a font of knowledge. And I thought I was the only one with lots of useless crap in my brain. Not that it will help us pick the winning lottery numbers, but it's fun to use on annoying co-workers. Whenever I want to get rid of someone I start quoting armour thicknesses on a Tiger versus a Sherman. Works every time!
All this information about the 85mm vs the 76mm comes from a single source; a russian evaluation of a captured King Tiger that I found somewhere on the web, but I don't remember the search words.
They had driven it 95km without stopping or maintenance when the left sprocket tore off its bolts, jamming the left sprocket axle permanently.
The cause was the gradual slackening of the tracks, caused by the bending of the track pins, presumably, which created a narrow focus of the forces acting on the sprocket head. The sprocket head was only PUSHING the track under, with no longer enough track tension to be equally PULLING, which would have spread the force around the sprocket head and on several bolts at the same time. Instead, each bolt was taking the full load one at a time, until one failed causing a cascade reaction.
The Russians concluded, somewhat unfairly, That the Tiger2 was an unreliable piece of junk, even though I got the impression that they were aware of the track tensionning issue. The tank needed to be stopped every 20 km to have its tracks re-tensionned, and probably the best way to do this was to forcibly pull-out a few of the worst isolated "slackening" bolts (not easy as they were bent...)and replace them with new ones. The "cheap" way of doing this would be to move back the rear idler until tension was restored, and that was probably done the most often. Unless, that is, that the gaps were so large that the track was in danger of breaking...
I don't know to what extent the Tiger1 suffered from the same issue, but I do know that stopping every 30km was said to produce excellent reliability from even the early Tiger1, as long, I suppose, as there weren't too many hills!
It is obvious that these flaws made the Tigers defensive weapons, unlike the role that the Germans usually tried to use them in. During the Ardennes offensive cooler heads prevailed and the King Tiger only saw a minuscule role there, contrary to what is usually believed.
As for the armor protection, this is where the difference between the 76mm and the 85mm emerged, actually to a shocking extent, which may be due in part to the King Tiger's most serious and unexpected achille heels; its armor!
Apparently German armor was becoming harder inside and more brittle as the War wore on, instead of hard outside and soft inside as it should be. The Russian evaluators were not sure as to the cause of this, and speculated that a lack of molybdenum alloy was the cause. I only know that the Tiger1 was unique among all german tanks in having a very special heat treatment that allowed 90% penetration with the last 10% holding out without cracking; outstanding performance that the British found even in a late war steel wheel Tiger1. No other German tank had this heat treatment, not even the Tiger2!
The results for the Tiger2's side armor were dramatic; the american 76mm gun could pierce the 80mm side armor at 1500m, sometimes 2000m!
The equivalent performance for the 85mm Russian gun was a much more reasonnable 700 to 800m, a difference so large I think it could only have been due in large part to a better design of the American projectile combining very well with the brittle German armor, whose poor performance was underlined by the evaluators. I think the Tiger1's side armor could easily have halved these distances, maybe even more, which is quite a surprise.
The King Tiger's front armor was another story, being impervious to any of the smaller guns. When the JS-2 gun was brought to bear, only at 500m did spalling begin to appear on the inside, but that would surely have disabled the front hull crew, being high velocity fragments.
A tendency of the front armor to jam the transmission in these fairly close range shots was detected, as apparently did happen in a close-to -the-edge shot on the Aberdeen Jagdtiger, which also was shot at very close range. This was judged by the Russians to be a design flaw, though multiple close-range shots are bound to do something eventually... This could in fact be related to the armor being too hard, not absorbing the energy within the hit zone, and instead transferring it to the weld joints, compressing them until the pressure on the transmission cause it to jam. This may be another reason armor should be softer inside...
So given the declining quality of German late-war armor, it appears the King Tiger's size was not a luxury after all!
Apparently one would rather be in a Tiger1 than a Tiger2 against most opponents, as the all around armor of the Tiger1 was much better, and in fact uneclipsed until the Joseph Stalin came along. (Perhaps the Sherman Jumbo doesn't really count as a production tank?)
The JSII had clearly overmatched the Tiger1, however, and against it the Tiger2 was clearly the better choice. The newer gun was judged "outstanding" by the otherwise unimpressed Russians...
