Comments by "Moop" (@joeis18) on "The Lethal Tank Destroyers (Not Tanks) of World War II" video.

  1. And that's what we got! The British were kinda ahead of us on that concept, this the Centurian.
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  2. Yup. I'm losing my fucking mind right now, bro.
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  3. Oh my god, the SU-155 WAS NOT A TD. It was an assault gun, NOT a TD. Nobody makes a TD that can only kill one tank every 2 or 3 minutes on a good day. It had special concrete-busting shells. It didn't even have AP shells bc it wasn't supposed to engage anything remotely tank-like! It just happened that 155 HE shells will destroy whatever is vaguely in it's general proximity. That doesn't make it a TD. To be a TD, it needs to say, "This is a TD in the doctrine."
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  4. American TDs: Gotta go fast! German TDs: Doomgun-Fortress Soviet TDs: Yeah, so we have this gun, right, and we kinda already use it for pretty much everything, so I was thinking that we just put it on whatever we can find. We have all of those bullet-resistant lawnmower chassis we weren't gonna use so I figure if we could just duct tape the gun up and, like, just keep sending them out there, ONE if them is BOUND to kill SOMETHING. (Late-War)
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  5. Ugh, are you forgetting the Germans? They had assault guns, yeah, but they also made purpose-built tank destroyers. Three of them come to mind, immediately, and I'm sure you know what they are.
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  6. Simon, you fucked up the M10, too. Stop using the War Thunder wiki as your only source. First of all, you say it didn't have a powerful gun like the 3-inch was absolutely overkill for the tanks it would face during during its production period. And yeah, maybe it wasn't an 88 or 17 pounder, but it doesn't need to be. You're saying it couldn't pierce the heavy armor of German tanks and I'm wondering: which ones, Simon? Surely, you couldn't be talking about the most numerous tanks: Panzers I–IV, so are you referring to the Tigers? Well, there weren't a whole lot of them left by 1944, and the short 75 could get through those, no issue, bc it is a relatively early war design, and it only got the rep it has by seal-clubbing illiterate Soviet farmers in the most primitive Soviet designs during in the early days of Barbarossa. Once the soviets got their shit together and US/UK were involved, the Tiger was damn near obsolete. It was only designed to be resistant to the guns of the early 40s (45mm, 2-pounders, 30mm, etc). But okay, let's say you're not talking about the Tigers and you're referring to the brick-tanks like the KT or Jagdtiger. Well, nobody is getting through those, but it's not an issue, because they were pretty much unicorns. If you mean the Panthers, well, the M10 was phased out by the time those were the tanks legend makes them put to be. And the M10 wasn't what the TD board wanted. It was a shitty stop gap that they hated. They just took the biggest gun the had and put it on a slightly longer M-4 chassis. It was slow, not fast, and it wasn't made up paper. That was the problem. It was resistant to most of what it'd come up against at the time if hull-down. The mantlet was very thick and everything was sharply angled. Nothing about the M10 was mobile. The turret was hand-cranked, it had too much armor, it couldn't turn in place, it wasn't stabilized. It was just bad. And it got a bad rep bc boot majors kept using them like tanks bc they looked like tanks and surprise-surprise, they don't do well in a brawl. Nobody liked them, except the crew maybe, bc they actually could survive someone firing a pistol at their vehicle. The M18 was the only TD the TD board EVER WANTED. Everything else was a distraction. It was so good that it got more kills than any other TD of the war, relative to losses. But it came very late and the Germans barely had enough tanks to justify keeping such a specialized weapon on hand, especially when doctrine stated that if an advancing unit encounters a tank, literally everything except a TD should destroy that enemy tank.
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  7. Not right away. The M-26 wasn't ready. It was only about halfway into Korea that the second of the three Pattons started to make a name for itself, but imo, still didn't compare to anything the soviets made. Our tanks were just not comparable to the latest Soviet designs until the M1 Abrams, and of course, I think the case can be made that they've overtaken us again with their most modern T-72 and T-90 variants, to say nothing of the T-14, which will be years ahead of any western tank if it's even half as good as it advertises.
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  8. Simon, you fucked up. The Stugs were never built to be tank destroyers. They certainly could, but it wasn't their primary function. They were assault guns. They used the short 75 until the allies started using medium tanks, and since the Panzers we're never with the infantry when they needed them, the infantry just started putting the long 75 on the Stugs. Not intended to be tank destroyers at all. The infantry also never had any tank destroyers organic to their units. The Jagdpanzer, Better, and Jagdtiger are the first German TDs built from the ground up to do nothing except BRAWL with tanks. Ideally, yeah, they'd ambush, but nobody puts that much armor on something if they don't expect to use it. The Elefant doesn't count; it only exists because they had all of the Porsche Tiger chassis with transmissions that didn't work and they're like, "well, I guess we can put a gun on it and make it even heavier, right? Yeah, and let's just add armor until it stops moving. Let's send them to Italy, too." ITALY. YOU KNOW, THE PLACE WITH THE MOUNTAINS. Ironically, American doctrine said that if an advancing unit comes across a tank, literally anything except the TDs are supposed to engage it. Those were held in reserve for when the Panzers punched a hole, then they would be able to move and ambush them. Russian doctrine was...different. they made one proper tank destroyer, but it was still much closer to an armored assault gun than a tank destroyer. See, the Russians hated variety, and everything they ever built was on one of three chassis. Most used the same guns (45, 76, or 85), too. The British never really bothered with it bc they insisted that EVERY gun they had was going to be VERY good at killing tanks and nothing else. Well, sort of. Their doctrine was just so wildly different than any other nation that tank destroyers never really found their niche; they had cruisers and infantry tanks, and any of their allies TDs would fill a role very closely. they also had the RAF which although not actually scoring many kills on tanks, did the job well enough. Like, I love US planes, but the RAF pilots were just much more experienced than the USAAF pilots in the same theatre. I think the case can be made for USN/USMC pilots becoming just as good in the Pacific, but by the time the USAAF got to the war, the Luftwaffe was pretty much gone. Anyway, mad respect to the RAF and (pre-midway) IJN pilots, who were probably the best of the war.
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