Comments by "TheThirdMan" (@thethirdman225) on "Why the Trinity of Tank Design is Flawed (featuring Panzermuseum)" video.

  1. Emery Almasy The problem is more the way it’s used, not by professionals but by gamers posing as knowledgeable people or worse, historians. From my armchair, the holy trinity model is simply incomplete and is the basis for spec sheet warfare which ignores any and all tactical and strategic considerations. There is a train of thought on the interwebs which actively discourages people from looking beyond equipment and focussing solely on what they call “tech”, all the while ignoring the human factors and decisions which make for success in warfare.
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  2. airborneleaf Trinity is flawed because it ignores too many other considerations which are, in many cases, at least as important. It ignores industrial capacity, for example. The Germans built these massive tanks in WWII but her industrial capacity meant there would never be enough of them. It ignores the supply chain. It ignores the wants and needs of the army, except from a crew point of view. It ignores affordability and sustainability. Above all, used outside a tank design bureau, it totally ignores all human factors. Trinity is of limited value but the worst thing about it is the way it’s misused, especially by gamers claiming to know something about history.
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  3. @Michael Smith Didn't bother the StuG III crews.
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  4. Irish Rebel You’d be astonished how few people don’t. The holy trinity just encourages people to indulge in spec sheet warfare and draw all the wrong conclusions.
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  5. Jeffrey Fisher Tells you a lot about the importance of initiative. The internet focuses almost entirely on equipment and ignores the input of the people using it or the environment in which it is used. That is what usually wins battles.
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  6. Maverick_CIV 7. Use your brains. Lay an ambush and prosecute it with the utmost ruthlessness. Once you start shooting, you can’t stop until everyone else is dead or captured. 8. Don’t be squeamish.
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  7. @Grundy Malone No it didn't. The King Tiger was a failure. It was also too big to be used in the street fighting in Berlin. the Battle of the Bulge failed because the Germans missed their fuel dump at Stavelot.
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  8. Irobert1115HD They are all multi fuel.
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  9. edi What is far more important is their role as an infantry tank. Tanks don’t just exist to kill other tanks. That’s pointless. They are primarily breakthrough and infantry support vehicles. Destroying other tanks was of secondary importance.
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  10. Karl P No, Bernhard is trying to get people to stop thinking only about equipment.
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  11. H Kone And yet infantry can be extremely dangerous to tanks. See Berhard’s video on German squad tactics.
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  12. The problem with a lot of this - and it doesn't affect either Bernhard or Ralf because they know their stuff - is that people use the Trinity of tank design as a two-dimensional matrix to decide in absolute terms, which is "the best" tank. The limit of the Trinity is that there is no historical component to it. There is no way of knowing how a completed tank, sitting on the factory floor, will perform in combat. You can really only guess. So if you take a tank like the Panther, it fits within the Trinity quite well. However, the Heer needed a medium tank which could do infantry support and this was a heavy tank with a gun optimised for anti-tank. This was the Nazi leadership and Ferdinand Porsche telling the Army what it should have instead of building what the army wanted. The Panther fits the Trinity quite well. But as a medium tank, it could not be deemed a success.
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  13. Michael Smith They can already do that with reactive armour.
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  14.  @bruceparr1678  Like all modern tanks, the Abrams is multi-fuel so it will depend on what fuel you're talking about. As for direct consumption, that depends on output. The Centurion made about 650 hp. The Abrams' gas turbine makes 1,500, so fuel consumption will most likely be higher.
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  15. Carnivorus Makes no difference if you can’t get it to where it’s needed. Read that article.
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  16. Carnivorus Read the article.
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  17. Carnivorus By the way, Germany in WWII. And transporting oil from the Caucasus is a damned sight easier than doing it across oceans. Ever wondered why you haven’t been short of fuel in Iraq or Afghanistan?
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  18. David Briggs That depends on the terrain and how much cover is available.
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  19. Cryptaris Protocol What’s your point?
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  20. Zagskrag Ha!
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  21. Two Tailed Warrior Yeah, absolutely. It’s ridiculous how games like WOT push people towards things like the Tiger II when in reality, that tank achieved very little.
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  22. Two Tailed Warrior ...or be the general who has overall responsibility for winning the battle. People need to learn to think outside the confines of the tank. Tank crews are important but so are other things like the battlefield and who controls it. It might not be the army with the “best” tank. Control of the high ground and the fire lanes is of major importance. So is the weather. Gamers never consider any of this because there’s no reason to. WOT is little more than a FPS game with tracks.
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  23. Jinseual Why be resourceful when you can moan about equipment?
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  24. The_Chieftain Much of this can be neutralised by human ingenuity. If we ignore the equipment for a minute (sacrilege!!), tactics and the presence of other elements will make a huge difference to the outcome. Laying an effective ambush, controlling the fire lanes and the high ground and the presence of infantry will all influence the result. But as you rightly point out, terrain has a massive influence.
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  25. @Nathan Peterson
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  26. Ruhrpottpatriot Those are not armchair generals. They are armchair tank crews. The aims of generals, while cognisant of their troops, are very different. Ergo: their measurements are completely different.
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  27. Ruhrpottpatriot Generals don’t talk at that level of minutiae. They don’t have the time so they delegate it to battalion or squad level. It doesn’t mean they ignore it if it’s brought to their attention but generals mostly concentrate on how an army can function in the field. See Bernhard’s video on the differences between tactics and strategy.
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  28.  @tigara1290  No point in worrying about the stealth properties of antennae if your radiating.
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  29. chrisi237 It’s not a part of the trinity. Infantry are trained to deal with tanks (see Bernhard’s video on German squad tactics) and it makes little difference how big the tank is.
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  30. Karl P Again, if you think only in terms of equipment then you ignore how it will be used. If you think only about equipment then it would be natural to assume that only the best equipment can win battles. But what if you lack the industrial capacity to build the best tank? What if your army wants something different from what the designer assumes it needs? What if you can’t support it, supply it or integrate it? What if your tank is designed for a different war from the one you are fighting? Trinity is only useful to designers and even then, they must work within the parameters I just mentioned.
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  31. Karl P His video; he can talk about whatever he likes.
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  32. Karl P Okay, it’s Berhard’s video. If Berhard didn’t like what he said, he could edit it. The point being that it’s their decision and not yours. Now, given that I think these guys know what they’re talking about, I think it’s probably also a fair assumption that they knew what point they wanted to make before they made the video. It’s pretty obvious to me.
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  33. The Trinity only encourages people to spend their lives comparing. It's not a useful value set for measuring a tank's success. How would the King Tiger fit with the Trinity? Well, by the standards of the day, very well. But what did it actually achieve? Very little. It was too expensive, too heavy (despite the relative ground pressure), too large for rail carriages, did not fit the needs of the Heer, unreliable and never available in sufficient numbers. Compare that with the M3 Stuart. Why would anyone design a tank like that at all? It doesn't fit the Trinity values, except for mobility. So, in fact, all the Trinity does, as far as anyone but designers is concerned, is to lock people into a mindset of "bigger is always better", even if bigger is not what the army wants or not what the country can build or meet the needs of the war that is being fought.
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  34.  @foxymetroid  A good precis of what the trinity is but there's one rider that needs to go over this "How the tanks can effectively be used in war depended fairly heavily on how the tank's design balanced the Trinity." The design of the tank is dependent on its envisioned use, not, as some people seem to think, the other way around. Trinity is subordinate to that. If you put the trinity too far up the scale then there is no logical reason for certain types of tanks to exist. Why, for example, did the allies continue to have a need for the M3 Stuart tank? Trinity tends to encourage people to simply compare without considering the design requirements. I realise it's just a subset of tank design but it cannot and should not be the ultimate arbiter. The Germans built a lot of super heavy tanks (even the Panther was a heavy tank, despite the German designation) but so much of that was dependent on the triumvirate of Hitler, Speer and Porsche, who refused to listen to the needs of the Heer and produced the tanks they wanted. You end up with something looking for a function. That was an example of the trinity being too dominant in the overall equation. The PzKpfw III and IV were both designed at the behest of Guderian who was building a highly mobile tank force to operate in a combined arms strategy. The trinity might have been part of the tank design process but it was definitely subordinate to envisioned need.
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  35.  Carnivorus  Not the point. Let's look a bit closer. I know what people will say: this is about aircraft, not tanks. No it isn't. It's about fuel supply. https://warontherocks.com/2016/11/logistical-fratricide-the-cost-of-fast-jet-tacair-measured-in-purple-hearts/ And yes, the US can easily run out of fuel. Maybe you'll still be driving your Humvees at home but that's no guarantee of anything much.
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  36.  @Karelwolfpup  Or don't get involved in the first place.
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  37. C B What could you tell us?
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  38. john bunyan What about tactical considerations?
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