Comments by "bakters" (@bakters) on "Did the Axis have a chance achieving Production Parity with the Allies?" video.
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+Kirothe Avenger - My god, you really believe it! Okay. Throw into google "From the Vault: British Report on Captured Panther Tank" and you'll see how "great" the Panther was, and since you mentioned gearbox problems in T-34, please note that the Panther was tested to be very slow, and the 3rd gear was broken.
Inb4 "That's just one captured vehicle", throw into google "From the Vault: Post War British Report on Panther". That's 5 brand newly assembled AFVs. All of them terrible. Not bad, terrible!
And that's not even half of the problem. Any crappy vehicle can be dealt with by systematic effort to work around its inherent weaknesses. Not so in the case of Panther. They all differed . The parts were not interchangeable. Constant modifications made it into a logistical nightmare.
IOW - if there was such a thing as "the Panther tank", then it could be used, even though it was very bad. Extra care here, more spare parts in stock there, the lot. But there was no such thing. There was no "Panther tank", until post-war. (And even then it sucked...)
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+Kirothe Avenger - I'm not saying T-34 was perfect, but when compared to Panther it very nearly was.
Just read post-war British Panther tests. Somebody already posted a link here, and I don't want to bother the host with personally approving another one, so either find it here or directly in Google. Panthers were not bad. They were terrible. On so many levels.
Regarding T-34 flaws you mention, poor road-trip performance is related to inefficient air filters. That would highly depend on road conditions, basically how dusty it was, and we need a comparison with other tanks to know how it, you know, *compared*. The engine itself was rather brilliant, and I think its direct descendants are still in use.
Not so in Panther. They burned through head gaskets, the connecting rods broke, the oil-pump shafts broke, the fuel pump was just legendary, the pistons overheated - the list can go on.
Poor T-34 gearbox - yeah, that's true. They just exchanged it more often. Although not bad when compared to Panther, which was lucky to survive 150 km between rebuilds in post-war Frech army...
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+Kirothe Avenger - Oh, so early and late Panthers were junk, but the middle is the sweet spot now? Unfortunately, I gave you a test of a mid 1944 Panther with 500 miles on the clock. It was junk too!
Yes, it is possible that some Western or German tank could deal with weather conditions in Russia better than a Soviet design, but I'm inclined to believe it to be unlikely.
Anyway, there are American tests available online of T-34 and KV-1. (I argue against myself here!) I believe that your pitiful numbers for road-march performance of Soviet tanks can be traced to those tests. The thing is, those tests can only be considered as worst case scenarios.
For example, the early T-34 air filter when working in dusty conditions was scheduled to cleaning and oiling every 2-3 hours. The Americans never cleaned them or even oiled them. That the tank failed after 15-hour or so can be considered a success, not really a failure. Its filter was basically not working, and the tank still ran for that long.
There were other problems, but despite that the overall opinion seems very favorable. Even with the failures.
Not so with the Panther. It's great on paper, but junk in the real world. And that's because it was a paper tank pressed into service prematurely. As a result of that, it never matured.
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