Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Who were technologically superior? The Axis or Allies in WW2?" video.

What would have made sense was a Panther that didn't have extra armor and gun piled on to the extent that the transmission was severely overworked. Wondertanks in the repair depot or broken down and abandoned on the road don't do anyone any good. Most of the advanced German weapons suffered from this syndrome - maximizing performance on paper without any thought to how they would actually function in the field. Supertanks so heavy that road bridges would collapse under their weight, superguns that needed ammo they no longer had the raw materials to make, superjets whose engines broke down after 50 hours of use because no material then invented could stand up to the heat they produced, superrockets that killed more workers designing and building them than enemies they targeted.
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Many of the American battleships of that era also used turbo-electric propulsion. I'm not sure why they went back to geared transmissions, but electric propulsion turned out to be a dead end for large naval vessels.
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They could easily have equipped much of their armies with StG44s if they'd been developed a little quicker, but it's far from clear that a better infantry rifle would have made that much difference. The M1 Garand was far superior to any bolt-action rifle, and it gave American riflemen an edge, but I've never heard of any battle where it made a big difference.
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The original AK had a milled receiver. The AKM was optimized for ease of manufacture, and was significantly cheaper to make than an StG-44.
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@Happy Carnivore US Marines outfought the Japanese on pretty much every occasion, even in their first encounter in the war on Wake Island before they were overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers. Later in the war it was a matter of overwhelming American resources but this was not the case on, for example, Guadalcanal.
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@Perkelenaattori The American philosophy was that the carriers' best protection was their planes, not armor. And until the advent of kamikazes I don't think a single American fleet carrier that was lost would have been saved by deck armor no matter how thick, the ones that were sunk were all sunk by torpedoes (although damage from bombs penetrating the decks did hamper flight operations at times).
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Both of those examples are more a matter of design priority and execution than technological superiority. The Mark 14 wasn't a more primitive design, it was just badly executed, and its flaws undiscovered because the Navy wasn't given an adequate budget to test it. Like the Zero, the Type 93's superior performance came at the cost of a dangerous and explosive propellant that was more of a design choice than a technological advantage - the Allies didn't want anything that dangerous on their ships. You see the drawback when they detonated on the ships that were carrying them, as on the Mikuma at Midway. Likewise, the Zero had paper stats better than Allied fighters, but at a terrible cost: flimsy construction, poor handling at high speeds and especially in a dive, no armor, and unprotected fuel tanks that made it incredibly vulnerable compared to an F4F. Once Allied pilots learned to fly to the Wildcat's strengths and the Zero's weaknesses the kill ration turned in favor of the Wildcat. Put it another way: there was nothing in either of those designs that the Allies couldn't have copied if they'd wanted to make the same design choices. This is unlike, say, the proximity fuse or the a-bomb that the Axis powers couldn't possibly have built. The Japanese crews did have advantages in training and experience at the beginning of the war, but that's also not quite the same as technological superiority.
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Many have argued this here, but the Zero was not a better fighter than the Wildcat, the difference was that the Japanese pilots were better trained and more experienced at the start of the war. Once American pilots learned to exploit the Wildcat's strengths and the Zero's weaknesses the Wildcat proved the superior fighter in every respect except range - and even that was a double-edged sword since it encouraged the Japanese to fight very far from their bases (over 600 miles from Rabaul to Guadalcanal) which meant even minor damage often resulted in the loss of plane and pilot. The D3A was inferior to the Dauntless in pretty much every respect. The only clearly superior carrier plane the Japanese had was the B5N, but that superiority only lasted about 8 months since the TBF, which, ironically, was introduced the same day as Pearl Harbor and had replaced all TBDs in active service by the autumn of 1942, was a greatly superior plane.
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I'd add two more: 100 octane avgas and penicillin.
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That wasn't so much a technology issue as one of industrial capacity and natural resources. If they'd motorized their entire army they'd still have ended up turning to horses and boot leather when the fuel ran out.
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@johnburns4017 The Matilda was an excellent tank, just too early to call it the best of the war IMO. It could never have been upgunned to deal with late war tanks. The Churchill was also an excellent design, but only in a specialized role, it was too heavy and slow to be a general-purpose tank. You can't call it versatile if it's too slow to carry out a tank's primary mission which in WW2 was to rapidly exploit breakthroughs. Guns and armor are good but for a tank mobility and reliability are more important. The Sherman was a great tank because it had an adequate gun (in the 76mm version) and armor but great mobility and fantastic reliability. It could ride in landing craft, cross bridges, and climb slopes that none of the late-war monster tanks so beloved of fanboys could even dream of. The only one in the same league was the T-34, for the same reasons, but the Sherman was considerably more reliable and easier to service than the T-34, as well as having vastly superior ergonomics (which is a field too often overlooked in evaluating tanks - a tank with a fatigued, overwhelmed, and half-blind crew is a much less effective tank). There's a reason the T-34 and Sherman were the only WW2 tanks that saw widespread use after the war, most notably in Korea. If you're looking at gun, armor, and other paper statistics, the Pershing was a fantastic tank, but in real life it was mediocre at best because, like the Panther, it was overloaded and consequently had mediocre mobility and poor reliability. The Challenger was a good design as well, but not enough were built in WW2 for it to have had much effect on the outcome of the war. But the Cromwell and Challenger were both immature designs - the really outstanding tank from that line of designs was the Centurion, which was better than any WW2 tank but didn't see combat until Korea. (It was a bit slow compared to the Sherman or T-34, but otherwise had excellent mobility.) For its time I'd say the Centurion is one of the best tanks of all time - but it wasn't around in WW2. The Firefly was also a very good tank but again built in fairly small numbers and more of a specialist than a general-purpose war-winner. The 17 pounder barely fit in the turret (sideways) and that caused serious issues for the crew trying to load and fire it and otherwise fight in the tank. Many of the overgunned late war German tanks and TDs had similar ergonomics issues.
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@bakters The US wasn't getting large numbers of replacement pilots either in autumn, 1942. But they understood that fewer pilots who were not half-dead from exhaustion, stress, and tropical diseases was better than more pilots who were at that point of collapse. Sick, exhausted, demoralized pilots were more of a liability than an asset. The Japanese simply expected their pilots to buck up and take it, and that was a terrible idea no matter how good the pilots were or how urgently they were needed. Winning at Midway wouldn't have changed much except the temporary balance of carrier decks. Relatively few Japanese pilots went down with the carriers at Midway, most of their aircrew losses (a bit over 100 men) were to US AA fire and would have happened even if they'd won. Their pilot losses in the Santa Cruz battle, which was a tactical victory for the Japanese, were actually more severe than at Midway, despite fewer carriers being involved and none lost. Santa Cruz is a typical story: the Japanese inflicted more damage on the US fleet, but lost 99 aircraft to the US' 81,and, much more important, 148 pilots and other aircrew to 26 for the US. American aircrew were highly likely to survive the loss of their planes while Japanese aircrew were not. The really bad human loss at Midway was the hundreds of highly skilled mechanics, armorers, and other technicians who were in the carrier hangars when they were turned into infernos. Even the engineering spaces of the doomed carriers had a better survival rate than the hangar decks. But what killed the pilot corps of the IJNAF was the long, relentless slog of the Solomons campaign as a whole. A major factor was the difference in recovery rates for downed aircrew, which was the result of several factors but had the united theme that the Japanese simply didn't prioritize this while the US did. This is where having a feudal death cult mentality in a modern technological war gets you. The US didn't need to throw hordes of untrained rookies at the Japanese, not because they were getting large numbers of replacement pilots, but because their veteran pilots were surviving to fight another day regardless of the outcome of individual battles while the Japanese veterans were dying gloriously for the Emperor.
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@johnburns4017 "An argument you would lose." Only in the mind of an armchair historian who has no idea about actual effectiveness as opposed to statistics on paper. As I've said before, ten Shermans in the field beat one of any other tank plus several more abandoned on the road or sitting in a repair depot.
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@johnburns4017 I will say you make a very strong case for the Churchill. However, while it may have been good at negotiating rough terrain, it was NOT a fast tank - its top speed was about half that of a T-34 or an Easy 8 Sherman.
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The problem with the American torpedoes wasn't that they were technologically obsolete, it was that they were too cheap to test them to get the bugs worked out. Once that was done they performed just fine.
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@johnburns4017 The Chieftain would like a word with you.
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@Happy Carnivore That's a laugh. US troops love bitching about their equipment, it's a national pastime. But the Sherman was arguably the best tank of WW2 and went on to own T-34/85s in Korea. There's a lot more to a good tank than statistics on paper, and ten Shermans in the field easily beat one Panther in the field plus three or four others abandoned on the road or stuck in a repair depot.
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@johnburns4017 Whatever, little boy. What got you so butthurt about the US? American aeronautical inventions are too numerous to even begin to mention, including, of course, the airplane itself. American fire control computers for naval guns and submarine torpedoes were the most advanced in the world; the US was the only country producing 100+ octane avgas, which gave a huge performance boost to Allied fighters; the Higgins boat, often called the weapon that won the war; synthesis of penicillin on a useful scale; blood plasma transfusions; radar fire control for warships; synthetic rubber; and, of course, the atomic bomb, probably the most important development in weapons technology since the invention of stone tools. "Even the A-Bomb was worked out by the MAUD Committee then given to the USA free" I don't think you could possibly make a more ignorant statement. The theoretical science behind the a-bomb was the product of many people in many nations (although the world's first nuclear reactor was, of course, in Chicago, not London or Berlin), but the only nation that actually developed a working bomb, indeed the only nation that had anything remotely approaching the ability to refine enough uranium or synthesize enough plutonium for a bomb, was the US. You might as well say the V-2 was an American invention because of Robert Goddard.
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@scottgiles7546 No, the work done by the Poles was essential, but it was the British who developed the technology to read messages in real time. Without Turing's computers that never would have happened. The Germans, btw, realized that Enigma could be cracked by brute force, they just didn't think anyone would bother to do it, since even with a massive number of human "computers" it would take so much time that the messages would be uselessly out of date by the time they could be read. What they didn't predict were machines that could do the required computations thousands of times faster.
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Something I haven't seen anyone mention: 100+ octane aviation fuel, made only in the US, which gave a huge performance boost to combat aircraft, especially fighters because they could run at higher compression ratios and thus get more power out of the same engine. Most Allied fighters would have been outperformed by their German counterparts if they'd been using the fuel the Germans had available.
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I would dispute that the Shokaku class were superior to the Yorktown class. They were more or less equivalent in terms of carrying capacity, speed, and protection, and the Yorktowns had greatly superior AA armament and fire suppression equipment. The huge disadvantage the Americans had in carrier warfare was malfunctioning torpedoes carried by obsolete planes - if the Americans had had B5Ns and their torpedoes and the Japanese TBDs and Mk 13s for the first four carrier battles of the war, the only US carrier lost would have been the woefully underprotected Wasp (and that to a submarine) while Shokaku would have been sunk twice! I would also dispute that Japanese cruisers were better than the Baltimore or Atlanta class or that Japanese destroyers were better or even as good as modern American destroyers. They were simply optimized for night surface actions, so of course they did better there, at least early in the war. But the American ships were vastly better at anti-air and anti-submarine warfare, and also had a huge advantage in radar once American commanders learned to use it properly (or even at all). And in the war these proved more important by far than night surface actions - aircraft (and carriers) and submarines decided the war, not surface ship. The Americans lost at Savo Island and Tassafaronga and still won the Guadalcanal campaign, while the Japanese lost at Midway and lost the battle vs. American commerce-raiding submarines and lost the war. (Another factor you don't mention is that the Japanese were not so much better at designing ships as they were better at fudging treaty violations - or in the case of Yamato simply ignoring the treaties. The South Dakota class battleships were arguably the best treaty-compliant (more or less) battleships in the world and technically superior to the Yamatos in pretty much every respect, but having an extra 30,000 tons to play with makes a big difference, if not making much sense from an economic standpoint.)
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The Japanese and Italians had a theoretical technological parity, but an inferiority in industry (methods as well as scale) meant the machines they were actually capable of turning out in useful numbers fell further and further behind as the war continued. Both had excellent fighter designs (the C.202 and Ki-84, for example) for which they couldn't produce engines, or in the latter case, engines that actually worked, in anything remotely like the numbers needed. The Italians got by with the engines they could persuade Germany to provide, the Japanese simply kept relying on planes like the A6M that were badly obsolete by 1945. F4U-4s vs A6M5s wasn't exactly Martini-Henrys vs. spears, but it wasn't technological parity either.
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The Emperor was far too exalted to take part in any such exercise. I like to think it would have gone like a Tarantino movie: Tojo sitting impassively for a few hours of Hitler's ranting until he had enough of the ill-mannered gaijin and drew his katana and decapitated der fuhrer with one stroke while Mussolini laughed and said "You have NO idea how long I've wanted to do that!"
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@Happy Carnivore Sure, that's what the Japanese kept saying, even after those "poor quality" American soldiers had kicked their butts all the way from Buna to Okinawa. You're good for a laugh just like they were. And outside of tiny special ops units, there was no, not one, more skilled, brave, or motivated fighting man on the planet than the United States Marine (and there still isn't).
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@misarthim6538 " In terms of air combat, that means that it could pretty much choose when to fight and thus only fight under favorable conditions." Only if the fight started low and slow. If not, F4Fs and P40s could always dive away from the fight while Zeros, which would become uncontrollable and even shed wings at speeds the American planes could easily tolerate, could not. It also had insufficient armament - the 20mms had atrocious ballistics and very little ammo, and the 7.7mms might as well have been peashooters against the tough American planes - and could take far less damage. And in a head-on, which was relatively easy to achieve with the right wingman tactics, the American plane had a huge advantage because of the advantages in toughness and firepower. Climb rate is nice to have, particularly for bomber interception, but climbing into a fight would get you killed even in a better plane, and climbing couldn't save you from an opponent who started with a big advantage in energy and position. Climb rate mostly helped in an even engagement between similar small numbers of planes starting at a similar speed and altitude, and while often that's the expectation in games, in the real war the Americans quickly learned not to even think about fighting like that. The Japanese pilots, even more so in the AAF, placed way too much stock on maneuverability, particularly tight turns at low speed, seeing air to air combat as a dogfight with victory going to the first plane to get guns on target. The planes they ended up in reflected that. The Americans, like the Germans, quickly learned to treat fighters as ambush hunters, not knife fighters, scoring kills when they had an initial advantage and refusing combat when they didn't, and the planes they flew reflected that.
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@misarthim6538 "Zero's could choose whether they'll initiate fight or not because they were faster in level flight and climbed better." Again, only if they start on an equal or better E basis. If the Wildcats or Warhawks started with a significant altitude advantage, the Zeros were trapped because the American planes were faster diving than the Zeros were either diving or in level flight. If the Zeros started with a significant altitude advantage, the American planes could still dive away unless they were already on the deck. And... "Zeros could fly circles around Wildcats without Wildcats being able to do anything about it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thach_Weave Zero pilots never learned any way to counter this tactic. Part of its effectiveness was because a Wildcat could always turn into an attack by a Zero, while a Zero didn't dare turn into an attack by a Wildcat because the much sturdier Wildcat would win the resulting head-on nine times out of ten. Anyway the numbers just don't bear your assertions out. Zeros racked up impressive scores for the first six months or so because the inexperienced American (and British, Commonwealth, and Dutch) pilots didn't know how to fight them properly. Once the gap in pilot skill and experience closed, Wildcats and P-40s could and did engage Zeros on at least an even basis. And of course once P-38s, P-47s, F6Fs, and F4Us, all significantly faster than Zeros, started appearing int he second year of the war the Zero was obsolete and doomed. "Yes they could run away, but that's not really an option if you protect say squadron of SBDs." Which is why American fighter pilots learned to cover the bombers from above so they could dive down and break up incoming attacks rather than flying close escort where they'd get bounced by intercepting enemy fighters.
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@Perkelenaattori That wasn't a design flaw, it was a deliberate design choice, for exactly the reason you mentioned - carriers with unarmored flight decks could carry many more planes, and American and Japanese designers both decided that air superiority was a better defense than an armored flight deck. It's worth noting that not a single American fleet carrier was lost in the war to bombs or kamikazes coming through the flight deck - all four American CVs lost in the war were lost to damage by torpedoes.
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@yulusleonard985 Before the war, the pilots were the ones clamoring for faster and especially more maneuverable aircraft at the cost of armor, self-sealing tanks, etc.
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@allangibson2408 Hasty conversions of land-based aircraft for carrier use often have fatal problems, and with the Germans having zero experience building or operating carrier aircraft, and the 109's biggest weakness being the weak and narrow landing gear (which is the most frequent point of failure in carrier operations) I'm betting that naval 109 would have been a failure in actual use.
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@rcwagon The TBF Avenger, which entered service only six months into the war, was superior to the B5N Kate in almost every respect - most importantly, in terms of defensive armament and survivability, which are absolutely vital for a plane that has to fly slowly and on the deck for its primary attack method.
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@mvfc7637 "how are oxygen fueled torpedoes stupid??" Ask the crew of the Mikuma - but don't expect much in the way of answers, most of them went down with her when her torpedoes exploded.
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@bakters How many of the pilots who took part in the Pearl Harbor attack were still alive 18 months later - one fourth, maybe? It wasn't so much that they were doing poorly in combat as that so little effort was made by the leadership to preserve their lives. Putting them in flimsy, highly combustible planes was part of that equation. Your point about operational losses is a fair one, but American plots were a LOT more likely to survive ground looping an F4U than Japanese pilots were to survive losing a wing in a dive or taking so much as one incendiary bullet to their gas tanks. And the Americans always had more planes and more pilots, the Japanese did not.
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@Happy Carnivore The Sherman was not a death trap, it was just undergunned in mid-1944. Early Shermans proved extremely capable against Panzer IIIs and IVs in North Africa and later Shermans with 76mm guns were more than a match for T-34/85s in Korea. Early models were more likely to have ammo fires when hit but that problem was fixed with wet stowage.
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@mvfc7637 I never claimed the Allied ships or crews were flawless. The Japanese optimized their cruisers and destroyers for night surface battles, which made them extremely strong in that context but led to problems elsewhere. Their cruisers were almost useless as AA protection for carriers and their destroyers woefully inadequate for ASW warfare. Their designs for ships, planes, and just about everything else showed a preference to sacrifice any notions of survivability in favor of the maximum possible offensive capability, because survivability was for cowards. Torpedoes that had superb performance but also had a habit of blowing their own ships straight to Hades (or the Yasukuni Shrine) were another such design choice that was probably unwise. I don't think Japan won a single surface engagement after mid-1943, partly because such engagements became vanishingly rare
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@bakters Re: your last statement: pilot loss rates in 1942 and the first half of 1943, before American industry titled the field so heavily against Japan, indicate to me that the Japanese made the wrong choices. They compounded those bad design choices with unwise practices like leaving pilots in combat indefinitely because only weaklings and cowards would want to rotate out for rest and recovery, trying to fight from bases 600 miles from the combat zone so that any wound or damage was likely to result in the loss of plane and pilot, and making recovery of downed pilots a much lower priority than the Americans. Yes the war was won through numbers, and one of the most relevant numbers was that within two years of Pearl Harbor probably 90% of the Japanese pilots who had made that attack were dead, and there had never been any plan to replace them.
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The FG 42 was advanced from an engineering perspective and had some very influential design elements, but overall it wasn't that good at its job - it was too heavy and high-powered to be a good assault rifle and was too light and had too little ammunition to be a decent LMG.
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@bakters The sources I'm going by generally look at pilot losses logged by each side, not victory claims. Japanese records are incomplete, but it's still pretty clear that most of their veteran naval aviators were dead within two years of Pearl Harbor.
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@bakters Yes, the numbers for Japan are vastly different. I can't give you a comprehensive bibliography without putting a lot more work into this than it's worth, but for a general picture of the Solomons Campaign see Ian Toll, The Conquering Tide; for Midway see Parshall and Tully, Shattered Sword; for a first-person account of the very lopsided aerial fighting in the later Solomons campaign see Blackburn, The Jolly Rogers (those are the ones I have in front of me as I write this). I pulled the figures for Santa Cruz from Wikipedia, you can check the sources they cite for those numbers if you care to. I've read dozens of books on the subject over the last 40 years or so and they all add up to the same picture: Japan suffered terrible aircrew losses in the first two years of the war even when they were winning the battles, for reasons I've already mentioned.
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@bakters Armor was "fragmentary" because it is heavy, weight is a huge consideration for aircraft, and a lot of thought was put into where it was most needed and where it could be dispensed with. The TBD wasn't a deathtrap because of any particular design feature or philosophy, it was a deathtrap because it was terribly obsolete by 1942. Both pilots and planners were aware of that and a much better replacement was in the pipeline, it just hadn't been built in sufficient numbers to replace the TBDs at Midway. You go to war with the weapons you have. By contrast, the Zero (and the Betty it was designed to escort) was a deathtrap because of a design philosophy: putting all priority into speed, range, and maneuverability at the expense of survivability. It was not obsolete and waiting replacement in 1942, it was the newest and best design the Japanese had for a naval fighter until 1944. Many planes, including the F4U-1A and the Merlin-powered P-51s, had some self-sealing tanks and some that weren't. The idea was to use the fuel in the non-self-sealing tanks before reaching the combat area (and in the case of the F4U, jettison any remaining fuel in them and purge them with CO2 before commencing combat, I'm not sure if the Seafire had this feature or not). The Japanese did eventually realize the folly of trying to fight with non-self-sealing tanks full of fuel and added self-sealing tanks (as well as pilot armor) to many planes including the later Zero variants. But again, the early Zeros lacking any self-sealing tanks was not a matter of their not being available, it was a deliberate design choice, and, as it turned out, a very bad one. They felt range was more important, and their pilots paid the price. (Also, I'm in this discussion with several people and I don't remember whether it was you or one of them who pointed out that many of these defects were inevitable due to the limitations of Japanese engine technology, which may deflect some blame from the designers, but saying the Zero suffered from being underpowered for a 1942 fighter, which it was, kind of negates the idea that it was technologically superior. it just means its technological inferiority had a different cause. Having 30% more engine power, as the F4F-3 and P-40E both did, was a form of technological superiority.) You asked for sources, I gave some to you. I can't read them for you. Let's put the shoe on the other foot: cite me a source to support your claim that Japanese aircrew losses were not much worse than American from mid-1942 to the end of 1943. As for feudal death cults, if you have any account of any Allied pilot declining to wear a parachute because bailing out and possibly being captured was dishonorable, I'd love to hear it. Japanese pilots having that attitude has been documented in too many sources to even begin to list them. It's been ages since I read Suburo Sakai's book, and I don't have it with me, but I'm pretty sure he mentions it.
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@rcwagon I think of Midway as the end of the beginning - the beginning being the phase when Japan was on the offensive.
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@johnburns4017 British aircraft were superior to German aircraft largely because they were able to use American aviation fuel. Late model 109s and 190s with MW-50 injection could easily outperform any Spitfire using 91-octane fuel, but even as early as the BoB Spitfires weren't using 91-octane fuel. Other Merlin-powered planes like the Lancaster could likewise take advantage of the higher compression ratios made possible by American 100-octane avgas. (To be fair, American production methods for 100+ octane avgas were developed in part by a French expat engineer, but attracting the best and brightest from other countries has always been America's greatest strength.)
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@silentbob5566 The D3A had an edge in speed and range, but the SBD was vastly superior in the qualities that really mattered for a dive bomber, payload and toughness. And the range was somewhat irrelevant since the limiting factor on raid range was the range of the escorting fighters.
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@christianlibertarian5488 Modern technology in the west has a limitation that WW2 technology did not: the need to keep casualties at an absolute minimum, far beyond purely military concerns, because flag-draped coffins are bad for the re-election of politicians. Better to have 100 planes and lose two pilots than 500 planes and lose five pilots, because pictures of the five will be plastered on the front page of every newspaper in the country along with headlines demanding answers on why the pentagon considers our pilots expendable.
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@allangibson2408 It was theoretically carrier-capable, but given how accident prone they were in landings on grass fields it probably would have had a horrific operational loss rate in actual carrier service. As the Navy has been trying to convince landlubbers for the better part of a century now, there's a huge difference between designing a plane for carrier use and slapping a tailhook on a land-based fighter and calling it carrier-ready.
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Another technological area everyone seems to be ignoring in favor of weapons: medicine. The Allies had a huge advantage here with discoveries like penicillin (discovered in England, methods to produce useful quantities invented in the US), blood plasma transfusion and preservation of red blood cells for transfusion (the Axis had to rely almost entirely on troops near the front donating blood), atabrine, and DDT (more soldiers and Marines were lost to disease, especially malaria, than to combat on Guadalcanal, but the Americans learned to reduce these losses substantially with mosquito control).
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@johnburns4017 No, I just have a more realistic measure of what makes a good tank than you do. A tank that is armed and armored like a battleship but breaks down every 10 miles and wears out after two weeks is a bad tank. A tank that has middling armor and armament that accomplishes its mission 90% of the time is an excellent tank.
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