70th Anniversary of D-Day

[Anomalocaris]

The Panzer V was generally considered the best German tank...



specifically designed to overcome the Russian T-34



Their problem of course was that the Russians built over 10 times as many T-34s.

Panthers are heavily overrated, as were all German tank designs after the MKIV.

Panthers and Tigers appears to be well engineered to automotive gear heads because it heavily overemphasized aspects of automotive engineering, such as even weight distribution and ride quality that are much trumpeted in the passenger automobile trade but were of limited value to combat tanks. But they was very poorly engineered in many critical combat related areas. For example, the designers neglected to give it a balanced turret, as a result if the Panther or Tiger I is parked onany significant slope, its turret would naturally coast until the gun points down hill, and can't be trained onto the target.

Germans optics were good, but in the supposedly more fearsome German Tanks they offset by the fact its hydralic turret training mechanism is very poorly designed and sloppy, so that it is tough to actually point the gun accurately.

Panthers and Tigers were also grossly inefficient design from the perspective of combat power to weight, and combat power to height ratio. As a medium tank Panther manage to outweigh any Soviet heavy tank and yet was grossly inferior to Soviet Heavy tanks in armor and firepower. It was also taller than any Soviet tank, medium or heavy. Tiger II might gave some advantage in armamement and armor over Soviet Heavy tanks, but Tiger II weighed 50% more than any Soviet heavy tank fielded during the war.

When Soviets fielded a heavy tank comparable to Tiger II in weight right after the war (The JS-7), it was so far superior to the tiger II in mobility, armor and armament that it can't but make painfully clear how inefficient and overrated the late war German designs really were.

While Germans certainly came up with some elegant engineering solution to small scale design problems, the overall designs of German war time tanks were nothing more the dumb brutal application of overwhelming amount of scarce steel. No evidence of elegant overall approach to design, no conception of economy of design.