Panzer III's > T-34's

[jubjub]

Forget that T-34's have way more armor and a much better gun.

[jubjub]

wtf is with the stats of this gun? vArm better than the T-34 gun, and 162 mm of penetration?? From what I'm seeing on Wikipedia about this gun, it has to get withing 500m to penetrate the t-34's SIDE armor. Can't wait to see my IS-2's get rekt by panzer iii's.

[AlbertN]

The T34 guns were pretty bad tbh - it's not a matter of pure caliber and all but of overall gun qualities.

Also the defender shoots -way better- than the attacker in general.

But I may agree the AFV losses are high in general. Considering the numbers above are destroyed proper, and not 'damaged' ones too, on both ends I believe.
I lack grand experience in late game though but I remember in my MSAG game that while Soviet AFV losses were heavy, so were Germans - massively short of panzers all over the place.
Numbers to make a Kursk akin operation or massing were somehow a wild, wet dream.

I do not express myself on the math for the weapon systems, I do not know them well enough; nor how the maths have been done to compute the sloping bundled in armour thickness and all.
In general I go with the vibe of the game and the battles. And what I can see is a bucket of AT guns here and the Panzers are of an Elite division. In '43 that's like 90 Morale / Experience stuff. In the defense.

[Jango32]

HVAP refers to tungsten ammunition rounds. I don't know if all combat in the game uses the tungsten rounds. Those were very potent but weren't the primary loadout of AFVs. My suspicion is that the game mostly fires rounds with the 102 penetration value and sometimes fires HVAP with 162, but that's just pure conjecture on my part.

I'm also not sure how the penetration stats are determined.

[Zebtucker12]

Pz 3 had alot better soft combat values.
Radio crew comfort and ergonomics etc

[Denniss]

Penetration is in most cases a value from close range, then falling off with distance. I believe HVAP of the 5cm L/60 is stated with 160mm penetration at 100m vs non-angled armor.
There's a certain change to use HEAT/HVAP over standard ammo in combat but don't know how this is exactly done.
The 5cm L/60 was actually a high-velocity gun but due to lack of projectile mass it lost performance over distance rather fast.
Lack of projectile mass was not helpful vs angled armor like on the T-34 front as that and the straight line of fire often caused the projectile to ricochet off the armor.

[Stamb]

it looks like Soviet armor is just born to die
pretty often it will suffer tremendous losses

it is not uncommon to see 1000+ AFVs gone in 1 turn
was it happening historically? 1 turn is 7 days btw.
i dont think so that Kursk battles were happening every week

[Stamb]

For example wiki says:

1.png (8.82 KiB) Viewed 959 times

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equipment ... rld_War_II

Which can be achieved in game in 80 or even less turns. As tank production is the only limiting factor how many tanks you are loosing.

[jubjub]

Penetration is in most cases a value from close range, then falling off with distance. I believe HVAP of the 5cm L/60 is stated with 160mm penetration at 100m vs non-angled armor.
There's a certain change to use HEAT/HVAP over standard ammo in combat but don't know how this is exactly done.
The 5cm L/60 was actually a high-velocity gun but due to lack of projectile mass it lost performance over distance rather fast.
Lack of projectile mass was not helpful vs angled armor like on the T-34 front as that and the straight line of fire often caused the projectile to ricochet off the armor.

The HVAP round's speed and penetration fell off even faster at range, with wikipedia showing a max range of 1000m. The fact is that this gun was totally inadequate for dealing with T-34's and KV-1's, and the Pz III was nearly obsolete by 1943.

In this combat I showed, maybe they were shooting at the light tanks ? It's hard to tell, but they should not be the largest source of AP hits regardless.

[loki100]

you maybe misleading yourself a bit, the game engine has a fairly broad definition of the types of elements counted as 'AFV', the definition is in 33.1 and its probably a bit wider than most of us would have readily in mind

the other problem is that combat report doesn't give you a cross tab (which relates to the above). You can modify your exe to tell it to generate the detailed reports (the sort of stuff you see at speed 7) which can help but it comes out as a very large text file

[tm1]

Forget that T-34's have way more armor and a much better gun.

Hi

I am no expert on the details of either of these tanks, I do know the T -34 was one of the best tanks around and gave the Germans hell.

But I watched this you tube video some time back about about the Pz III's v T -34, you may have seen it.

Of course the views here may not be the same as others but it did give some insight into both tanks.

cheers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xTQ-oyo-G4

[DarkHorse2]

Video was informative.

Ultimately, I feel like the historical accounts supports its conclusions.

During the first encounters of the T-34 and KV tanks by the Germans in the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, these tanks were only seen in limited numbers. Moreover, even though the Soviets had deployed over 1,000 T-34s and 500 KV tanks which were concentrated in 5 of their 29 mechanized corps.

Part of this was because the Germans tried to avoid engaging in tank vs tank battles and Soviet tanks often faced German infantry and anti-tank gun positions.

This is supported by German doctrine at the time that directed German tank formations for breakthrough and exploitation maneuvers and not get bogged down with Tank vs Tank encounters.

No real Kursk '41 in the making here...

The main reason however was because the majority of Soviet tanks were lost to breakdowns even before they engaged in combat.

In just the first two weeks of the German invasion the Soviets had already lost most of its tanks including T-34s and KVs.

Firstly, on the 27th of June, the 6th Mechanized Corps had ceased to exist, having lost all of their 450 new tanks.
By the 7th of July, the 8th Mechanized Corps only had 43 tanks left, both old and new, out of their original 899 tanks.
On the 7th of July, the 15th Mechanized Corps only had 66 tanks left, both old and new, out of their original 749 tanks.
And by the 12th of July 1941, the 4th Mechanized Corps only had 45 tanks left out of their original 414 new tanks.

German reports however did not report about massive enemy tank losses because they hadn’t even encountered them in combat.

This number of tanks lost to breakdowns was unprecedented to the point that Stalin thought that the tanks were being sabotaged by their own crews to avoid being sent to battle.

and the following fairly supported by the video

The driver’s hatch of the T-34 is a major weak spot and was often targeted by German gunners.

Any gun more powerful than the 50mm Kwk 39 was guaranteed to be able to pierce through this area even at ranges where they could not penetrate the other parts of the T-34’s 45mm sloped frontal hull armor.

Even after the driver’s hatch was increased in thickness to 75mm (which made it much heavier and harder to open), the edges of the hatch were still easy to pierce through and this is due to the structural weakness caused by the hole cut on the frontal armor for the driver’s hatch opening.

This is called the “edge effect” which determines that the edges of an armor plate are structurally weaker than the areas far away from them.

The edges or the areas nearest holes cut on the armor are actually much less capable of distributing stress due to the smaller area it has to bend and absorb kinetic energy.

This is why it’s not really a good idea to have lots of portholes and hatches on a tanks armor and for this reason many late war tanks stopped having any hatches and viewing ports placed directly on the frontal hull armor of the tank, placing them instead on the hull roof.

And in conclusion, by the end of December 1941, the Soviet Union had lost over 2,300 T-34s and over 900 KV tanks in just 5 months, accounting for 15% of the 20,500 tanks lost that year.

[Stamb]

and you know what happens in game?

Soviets can move 50 hexes with minimal amount of tanks damaged

[DarkHorse2]

I definitely feel your pain there.

Wondering if this could not be addressed in the scenario data where a notable portion of the Soviet armor starts off as damaged? (... thinking out loud ...)

[Denniss]

Both T-34 and KV were known to be quite unreliable in the early models. Some of it was mechanical but much of it was improper training for the drivers who where used to drive the light tanks at or below 10 tonnes, not the 25-50 tonne T-34/KVs.
So they quickly burned through the clutches and/or damaged the transmission