Quote:
Originally Posted by Von Poop
Trouble is it doesn't just come down to base steel weight. I tried to illustrate before that each component from Guns to sights may require special materials or treatment. Increasing the available lump of steel does not necessarily increase the amount of vehicles/guns that industry can physically produce by that amount, given finite special materials, tools, space, manufacturing bottlenecks etc.
Cancelling one Tiger may theoretically give roughly enough base steel to produce chassis and superstructure for 2XMk.IVs but it only frees up material/production of 1XGun, 1Xengine etc.
I've spent the last few years carefully picking away at the 'wunderwaffe' reputation of Germany's vehicles as I think it's been most important to redress the balance of opinion and try to get a more realistic assessment of the panzerwaffe's tools. However on production I'm now having to accept (or even concede!) that Germany did exceptionally well at producing what they could with limited resources & that the logic of the heavier vehicles must have seemed inevitable to their situation. There was still much wasted and misdirected effort but where it really happened and it's true effects are much harder to pin down.
(I place the Jagdtiger outside of any thinking on this... just plain loopy as far as I can see, the one at Bovington just makes me giggle).
Cheers,
Adam.
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Yes you mentioned the materials, and i have stated that had the Germans just concentrated on the Pz MkIV and Nashorns as primary panzer and panzerjeagers, they could have had those materials, i.e in smelting and reusing captured war materiels, obsolete panzers and the like and issuing lisences to other Axis nations on a 20 to 1 basis, Italy for example although limited say she was able to produce say 2,000 Pz MkIV and 500 Nashorns, but the main problem for the Germans is that they had almost all of their production centralized in Germany, had the Germans decentralized their factories this also could have alieviated their situation.