The Superior King Tiger

"Chad Irby" wrote in message
m...
In article ,
(B2431) wrote:

From: Chad Irby
Date: 5/7/2004 6:36 PM Central Daylight Time
Message-id:

In article ,
(robert arndt) wrote:

http://www.achtungpanzer.com/pz5.htm

Better than any mass-produced piece-of-**** Sherman (except the
Firefly British conversion).

...as long as you didn't mind that it had to pretty much sit there and
not go very far, due to high ground pressure and very high fuel
consumption (a King Tiger in mud became a landmark). Add in the very
high maintenance problems, and you had a really tough, sorta-mobile
fortress. The Allies did the obvious and ran around the KTs,
destroying
their support structure, then captured and destroyed a lot of them
after
they ran out of gas.

Definitely follows on the German habit in WWII of coming up with a
really cool design that turned out to be a problem to build and
support.

Did you happen to notice the article teuton offered as proof of what
a wonder weapon King Tiger was actually describes what a flop it
really was?

Yeah, but I've known about the weaknesses of the King Tiger since some
time in the early 1970s, when I started getting interested in WWII. You
might note that the problems with the King Tiger were mirrored quite
often with most of the things the Germans tried to build in the 1940-45
time period. Too expensive, hard to maintain, and used up too much time
and resources that they needed in other places.

A lot of the Ballantine War Books covered the problems the Germans had
with overengineering their machines. The Maus was one of my favorites
(the coaxial 128mm and 75mm guns were a bit much, not to mention the 188
tons of weight in the damned thing.

Then there was the seldom-mentioned Krupp P1000 Rat. One THOUSAND tons.
Two 280mm main guns. Or the P1500 variant with an 800mm mortar(!) and a
couple of 150mm cannons... (I still have trouble believing that they
were really thinking of building something like this, even early in the
war).

http://www.achtungpanzer.com/p1000.htm

I wonder what the rough field performance was? Max speed for mobile warfare?

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