PJungnitsch

No problem with the Sherman itself, it's a big tank compared with the PzIV and had a much larger turret ring. The problem was that there were too many factions that controlled US tank development and they tended to deadlock each other, that and a lot of ideas were floating around that were simply wrong. Some fought 90mm Shermans on the basis that the 90mm should only go to properly designed new tanks (the Pershing, who's development ended up taking to long for the war). Others fought 90mm Shermans on the basis that tanks shouldn't fight tanks, and the 90mm would just encourage that. Then there was the idea that the 76mm would be loads of gun to fight whatever the Germans had.

I think that refers to this quote from George Forty: "As a very young officer, newly commissioned in the summer of 1948, I remember vividly being taken to visit the battlefields in the Ardennes area and coming across what seemed to be an entire regiment of Sherman tanks which had been completely annihilated. There were Shermans lying in heaps everywhere one looked, turrets blown off, hulls ripped apart, most had clearly been brewed up -not for nothing was the Sherman known as the 'Tommy Cooker'. They had been advancing with the grain of the country and clearly been taken by surprise from a flank. The follow-up echelon had then turned right-handed towards their tormentor, but had found little cover along their new line of advance. The author of all this carnage was one single Jagdtiger, whose immense bulk still occupied a perfect fire position in a farmyard at the top of a commanding hill feature. The Jagdtiger itself had been burnt out, either by air attack, or perhaps by its own crew when they ran out of ammunition. The memory of the scene has remained with me for nearly 40 years, a perfect example of a tank destroyer doing its deadly work."

Thanks, I found that too, but it is a bit weak to reference 'Aussie Smith said....' I thought that it would be easy to find a hard answer for this question but apparently not. Just not a lot written up on the Sherman I guess other than Hunnicutt.

Anyone have an idea? It stands to reason that the rotation mechanism would have to be strengthened to take the increased torque on starting and stopping, and this would tend to slow things down, but so far the answer seems to be the rotation speed was the same, because Hunnicutt said so.

Oh, and nice article on the Elephant at AFV interiors.

Err...not sure what brought that on...I wasn't contradicting you there, Jason. What the Soviets found so impressive probably had to do with the types extremely thick frontal armour, especially as it entered battle far before the Kingtiger. The fact that a number were crippled and lost by mines probably made the Soviet PAK crews extremely grateful, as they was not much they could do to such a monster, at least frontally. And of course the long 88 could rip through anything the Soviets had. Quite a change from facing down a Panzer III.

A big problem of the Ferdinand was the high ground pressure, about double that of the Kingtiger, due to the way the suspension/tracks were designed. Another advantage to holding them back, I suppose would be the ability to keep them on known ground. Still, the Soviets ended up calling all German self propelled guns 'Ferdinands' so they did make an impression. It would be interesting what the total kill record of all the Ferdinands/Elephants would be. Didn't some last almost to the end of the war?

If you want to get more into this the papers are posted on my web page here. (You may have to wait a while, free web file hosting has its limitations). The measure BTS uses is called nominal ground pressure, NGP, which uses only weight and track area. This is a very easy to figure out method but is really only accurate on a concrete floor, where ground pressure is not usually an issue. MMP, mean maximum ground pressure, measures the pressure spikes the track places on the ground (since it is flexible and not a solid bar). The less sections the track has and the better supported it is the better the tank will actually 'float' over soft ground. This concept was not well understood and resulted in things like the Kingtiger having twice the floatation of the Elephant, despite having approx the same weight. It's one reason why commercial bulldozers have long track links and lots of small track support wheels compared to military vehicles. It's a low speed suspension, but it floats extremely well.

Why was the Fireflies turret rotation speed reduced to medium in the last patch when Hunnicutt lists it at the same 15 seconds for 360 degrees as all the other models of Sherman?

I thought this was quite interesting. This web page holds that the 'miracle of Dunkirk' was mostly due to an unusual weather pattern, that grounded the Luftwaffe but yet kept the Channel calm enough for the evacuation. Any truth to that?

I'd hold with the manufacturing issue of building and welding together large slabs of heavy armour plate. The one undisputed area in which 'stepped' glacis designs like the Tiger or Churchill have an advantage is that they can be made up with relatively short pieces of plate, while a Panther or Centurion must use one that is very long. Light armour was always much easier to work with and so light tank and half track designs had large areas of sloping plate much earlier. Once the manufacturing and welding process caught up a sloped Panther-type hull is a very simple design, no double part of the reason the Panther was so cheap to build.

You are right. Not only more and larger roadwheels, but the length of the track shoes makes a difference. For example the T-34 had far better floatation than the Cromwell despite the tanks being otherwise similar, as the British engineers had halved Christies' track shoe length to reduce pin wear and noise. More details at angelfire.com/trek/mytravels, click on 'other interests' then 'ground pressure papers'.

With the diesel engine and external tank range is 160km on roads, not bad. While no Panther as far as speed goes (20km/hr tops), it could turn in place and was reputedly very manuverable, being easy to drive with a high obstacle crossing ability. No bridge could carry it, true, but it was designed for fording and if needed, submersible capable up to 26ft. Agree though that the resources could have been better spent in other places, so cancelling the program in mid '43 was a good thing. Still, imagine a tank with 200mm of armour all the way around, 350mm equivalent on the front plate, topped with a 128mm armed turret that could rotate in 16 seconds. What a nightmare to face that.

The MMP ground pressure rating is high for a tracked vehicle but not any worse than an armoured car. The tracks are over a meter wide which help!

Hey Steve No offense meant. I'd sent the Rowland papers that deal with MMP to Matt back in November (11th or 12th? I think) and I had assumed you all had had time to look at them by now. They were up on my website for quite some time for others to download. When I get a minute (papers are due!) I'll upload them again but they should be on Matts computer somewhere.