Part 21: Trenches around Kursk
Episode 21: Trenches around Kursk Youtube, Polsy
Hymirvetr posted:
So, lets talk about the Elefant-Tanks, also lovingly called "Ferdinands", in this Video.
They were basically a modified 8.8 Flak strapped on aMarder Chassisrejected Tiger Chassis Design, of which Ferdinand Porsche had 91 lying around in a corner somewhere, until Hitler commanded them to be used for a Tankdestroyer. It was powered by two Diesel Engines which powered multiple electric engines to move the thing. A Hybrid Tank. This may sound awesome, but they had a few flaws:
- The Hybrid Engines were prone to failure. Of the 90 shipped Tanks, over half failed after no more than four days.
- It had massive armour, and could penetrate a T34 with a frontal hit. It drove through artillery fire basically unharmed, after which it was easily surrounded due to the fact that it's backup couldn't follow and the Tank was basically slow as molasses.
- It had no Machinegun(Or maybe it had an MG34, the Spreadsheet tells me that one was equipped as second armament, yet the text claims that it had no Machinegun?). Basically one guy with a Charge or a Molotov thrown in the shell casing ejector could disable it. The crew got fitted with weird guns though, see below
- It was used in the offensive, which was fatal for the aforementioned reasons. This is a defensive Tank in its concept alone. How they missed this, I have no clue.
Panzerjäger Tiger (P) „Ferdinand“, AKA „Elefant“,
Krummlauf-Barrel for the Sturmgewehr 44 :
Yohan posted:
About TheLastRoboky's comment about guns that fire grenades: Rifles Grenades
They can be considered the precursor of the modern grenade launcher, they were first used at the Russo-Japanese 1905 war and were in use until the creation of grenade launchers around the 60s. While they allowed you to hit father enemies with grenades, they were rather hard to use in combat as they needed the use of blank ammo to trigger the mechanism, which made you useless in a direct firefight for a while.
