- Location
- Canada
Wow. I forgot those.
Derrrrrrppppp...
...though it's in a much heavier weight class, I see. Well, back to the hunt for a British counterpart then for the British part of Normandy...
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Changing Destiny (Kancolle)
- Thread starter Skywalker_T-65
- Start date
Wow. I forgot those.
Derrrrrrppppp...
...though it's in a much heavier weight class, I see. Well, back to the hunt for a British counterpart then for the British part of Normandy...
- Location
- Mountains of Appalachia
The problem is that the US just isn't going to buy British here. Circa 1942, which this would be, Great Britain just does not have any slack heavy industrial capacity to spare to produce them under license (which is why RN ships were getting repaired in US dockyards and the P-51 was being produced in America for the RAF initially in 1940-41 using the licensed blueprints of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine for the powerplant). Which means that in order to use a British design, once the war starts, they would have to get a Bren say, test it and then get the license to produce it and THEN start production in the US. Since at this point in time (November 1941) the LVT is already in production along with the Higgins Boat and the DUKW will soon follow suit in early 1942, what will almost certainly happen is that those companies will get more orders than they know what to do with, set up additional US production lines in the US, and subcontract the design out to other manufacturers (which happened with the Jeep, Sherman Tank, Liberty Ships, and others).
TL;DR: The Brits can't make anything more than they are already making in 1942 and the US has things that work quite well already in small scale production that will soon go into holy-shit large scale production numbers (AKA US industrial numbers circa 1943).
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Skywalker_T-65
Writer with too many ideas.
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- Plural/They/He/Her
All I'm going to say on land warfare is that I'm not going to say if they can 
As for how the aftermath of Pearl goes, well, part of that is going to be in the spinoff. Part of that will be going into with the next proper chapter.
Also, the battleship you don't want to try shooting with a tank is Littorio. We're talking the best belt against side penetrations of any battleship. Her decapping plate- the part that takes off the armor piercing cap of an AP shell -is thicker than the belt's of some cruisers. There's a full BB-grade belt beneath that. Of the best quality armor plate in the war.
PastaBB is not getting penned by any tank through her belt.
Though again, not saying about land warfare. Leaving aside that we only have Utah (or do we?) around.
(don't know when I'll get the next chapter up at this point...)
As for how the aftermath of Pearl goes, well, part of that is going to be in the spinoff. Part of that will be going into with the next proper chapter.
Also, the battleship you don't want to try shooting with a tank is Littorio. We're talking the best belt against side penetrations of any battleship. Her decapping plate- the part that takes off the armor piercing cap of an AP shell -is thicker than the belt's of some cruisers. There's a full BB-grade belt beneath that. Of the best quality armor plate in the war.
PastaBB is not getting penned by any tank through her belt.
Though again, not saying about land warfare. Leaving aside that we only have Utah (or do we?) around.
(don't know when I'll get the next chapter up at this point...)
Mega1987
A TTK somewhere at Kancolle's Iwagawa Airfield
- Location
- somewhere at Kancolle's Iwagawa Airfield
Now we know why italia and roma got those impressive hull armor...All I'm going to say on land warfare is that I'm not going to say if they can
As for how the aftermath of Pearl goes, well, part of that is going to be in the spinoff. Part of that will be going into with the next proper chapter.
Also, the battleship you don't want to try shooting with a tank is Littorio. We're talking the best belt against side penetrations of any battleship. Her decapping plate- the part that takes off the armor piercing cap of an AP shell -is thicker than the belt's of some cruisers. There's a full BB-grade belt beneath that. Of the best quality armor plate in the war.
PastaBB is not getting penned by any tank through her belt.
Though again, not saying about land warfare. Leaving aside that we only have Utah (or do we?) around.
(don't know when I'll get the next chapter up at this point...)
Especially the upper part of heir body. Kappa.
Hehehehehehe.
Then we got bisko, iowa, yamato, musashi, nagato, mutsu, etc in that department.
More kappa.
- Location
- Pacific NW
Looks like I'll have to get going on the North Africa snippet I've been knocking around in my head then. At least to satiate some folks need for tanks.
Nicholas
No longer teaching battlethings on a battleship
- Location
- Ashore again
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Fun fact: the Army actually did offer some weapons to the Navy. Both Army and Navy embarked on a project to replace the Thompson; the Army went with a stamped parts design based on the MP40, the Navy a design with tight specifications called the M50 Reising.
Both were utter disasters. The Reising was a great design... on the drill field. In the mud of Guadalcanal it jammed constantly and the Marines literally threw them away. The Navy looked for a solution, and turned first to the Army's design.
The Army's design was the M3, and got its nickname from its resemblance to a grease gun. But designed as a cheap alternative to the Thompson, it succeeded too well and fell apart all the time. So much so that even when the Navy considered it, the Marines flat out refused to take them. Ergo even as the Army stuck through fixing the Grease Gun, the Navy dropped submachine guns altogether and issued Carbines instead.
...I set out to say that this is a level of interservice cooperation unthinkable for many countries at the time, but wound up on a weapon trivia dump. Oh well.
- Location
- Nashville
Now, now, the M3 wasn't quite that much of a disaster, I mean they were still being issued to tankers as late as the First Gulf War. So it had to do something right.
- Location
- Central Standard Time
... after the kinks have been worked out. But until then?
- Location
- Meycauayan, Bulacan, Philippines
And still in use as silenced submachine guns nowadays by the Philippine Army. Or in storage facilities.
Well, the Garand and M14 are still in play here in Pinoy land.
- Location
- Pacific NW
And all sorts of 1911 variants. Love my Rock Island Armory 1911 in .38 Super by Armscor. Now if they started making new M1 Garands, (especially a Tanker version in .308, yes please!) for export to the US, shut up and take my money.
esseresse
R'lyth Power Make-up
- Location
- divorceville, state of depression
- Pronouns
- They/Her
I don't know why but I thought you were talking about the M3 Lee
witch lead to an ODD mental image
- Location
- Meycauayan, Bulacan, Philippines
They don't look odd. The M3 Grease guns used looked cool.
The Philippine Militarys Suppressed Grease Guns - The Firearm Blog
- Location
- Europe
I think he meant the idea of soldiers using a medium tank as a submachine gun.
- Location
- Barcelona, Catalunya, EU (for now)
Actually, the British Purchasing Comission wanted a batch of licensed P-40, built by NAA in the US, but NAA convinced them than rather than licensing the P-40, they wanted a new, better design (so NAA didn't have to pay royalties, among other things). So they gave them the P-51, with a smaller version of the Allison V-170 engine (the one in the P-38). Problem is that the engine sucked. It worked well enough to pass the tests, but in actual deployment was not up to snuff.
Then they tested the frame with the Rolls-Royce Merlin, and it was awesome. That's the P-51B/C. But they realized that RR could not provide the engines needed to cover the production of the P-51 (so yes, Brit industrial capacity was taxed at its limits), specially because by that point the US government was also interested in the P-51. So the soultion was to license the RR Merlin to Packard, labeled as "Packard V-1650-7". And that is how came the P-51D.
- Location
- Mountains of Appalachia
Thanks for the clarification. The point is that in 1941-42, British manufacturing is already running at maximum capabilities since about 1940 with no real room to expand thanks to the shortage of labor and raw materials/unused facilities. The US economy has a lot of slack in it in 1941 (although that changes in a big, big way by 1943) so any British designs would therefore have to be produced under license in the US (like the RR Merlin/Packard V-1650-7), which complicates things in terms of getting the ball rolling. Since the US is already producing landing craft and amphibians that fulfill the needs of the service, they are going to keep doing that and produce 'good enough and can be turned out in bulk' rather than 'perfect but we will take time to get them'.
To pivot back to amphibious landings, the adoption of the LVT was spurred on by their performance at Tarawa where the Marines realized that these things worked and we could use a lot more of them. Without the mess with the neap tide at Tarawa they would probably have been adopted much much later if at all.
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Nicholas
No longer teaching battlethings on a battleship
- Location
- Ashore again
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Pretty much after the most serious kinks had been ironed out. A full list of failures would be way too long, but the most serious (and one of the most common) was that the Grease Gun would literally disassemble itself. See originally, all the weapon internals were held in place by a single weld at the front. When that weld failed -- and it failed often -- the barrel, action, and all of the internals would detach and fly down range.
They fixed it by mid 1944 by attaching an internal spring from the action to the rear of the housing (the M3A1) to relieve most of the pressure on that one weld, but by then it was irreversibly known as unreliable. It would take being issued to an entirely new generation of soldiers in Vietnam for the Grease Gun to get any respect.
But by then the Marines had actively refused to have anything to do with it, which in turn forced the Navy to pass on it. There's a scene in The Pacific miniseries where Sledge's unit relieves another unit on Okinawa, and a shot of someone in that unit firing his Grease Gun. The fact that the unit being relieved is part of the Army is a very deep detail that so many get wrong: the Marines never issued the Grease Gun in WW2; only the Army would have them.
Spectre
eternal servant to the Fire/EMS gods
- Location
- NY
didn't even most army grunts still prefer the tommy gun?
Trace Coburn
BattleTech Starfighter Analyst
- Location
- NDBBM, New Zealand
A lot of troops were leery of the M3/M3A1 because they'd heard the horror stories about the thing's tendency towards spontaneous self-disassembly, but by the same token, the Tommy gun was bulky and 'heavier than Kelsey's burgers', to quote Kelly's Heroes. Most of the guys who used Grease Guns were stuck in cramped quarters for a lot of their duties — tank crewmen, truck drivers, paratroopers — and needed an SMG that was relatively light and compact. Even so, the Thompson was the battle-proven incumbent and troops were often reluctant to part with them, so the two were often found together, rather than the Grease Gun completely replacing the Tommy Gun as originally intended.
- Location
- Canada
On the subject of the Grease Gun vs Thompson, let's not forget that HOI 3 loading screen...
Yeah, faith in the GG was not all that high...
Yeah, faith in the GG was not all that high...
Small note here regarding how much slack was in the US economy. All of the belligerents in World War Two, except for one, shifted to a full war economy, with 90% or more of their industrial capacity dedicated to production of war materiel. (You can't realistically go 100% war production because you still need to put some amount of industry towards feeding the civilians building the war materiel.)
That one exception was the United States, which peaked at about 30% of industrial capacity dedicated to the war effort, in late 1944, before the military started to pull back the reins and start the process of ending ongoing production contracts, as it realized that it was going to have enough equipment to complete the war and remain strong even without further production (and a large percentage of what was being produced wouldn't arrive until after the end of the war, anyway--witness all the factory-fresh airplanes with only an acceptance flight on their logs being delivered directly to storage/disposal depots to await scrapping, for example).
That's right. The US, if need be, could have turned out twice as much shit as it did IOTL without even breaking a sweat. While going to 90% war production might not have been feasible (due to the US's lower population density, wide open spaces that need transportation across, infrastructure limitations, and how much the American public complained about OTL wartime rationing all conspiring to require more civilian production), American industry could have certainly made 2.5 times as much war materiel (75% war production) easily, while still supporting its civilian population sufficiently.
I'd say to try playing one of the HoI games as the US to get a feel for it... except that those games deliberately nerf US industrial capacity for gameplay balance; even in 1939, with US industry still at fairly low ebb thanks to the Great Depression, the US had more than 50% of the entire world's industrial capacity, meaning that, gameplay-wise, "America vs. The World" would be the only fair fight...
- Location
- Nashville
And a good word or two for the LVT might be able to reduce some of the causalities on D-Day, even if only a smidge. Though I worry about Thompson's politics-fu...
- Location
- Cali
Yes. We call this 'indirect fire'. Two battleships could duke it out with an island between them and never even touch the island, barring some freak circumstance where shells collide in mid-air. There's this little thing called "the horizon" that is between a ships guns and what a ship can actually fire at. It's not direct fire, that's for sure. Even if in theory the range can close enough for direct fire to become a thing (Guadalcanal anyone?).
And you're right, it's not the *only* reason, but it puts pretty severe limits on the velocity of striking rounds. Larger, slower rounds aren't great at penetration unless they have a HEAT warhead (admittedly, the idea of a 16in HEAT round scares me). Throw in the fact that they're really just HE filled murder balls, and you get even less penetration. It's a bludgeon that explodes. Compare to HEAT rounds, Explosively Formed Penetrators, and APFSDS rounds. They each do the same thing, just somewhat differently. Hit a small area with a shit ton of force. What you need to kill/mission kill a tank is a great deal less than what you need to do so to a ship, hence a MUCH greater primacy on filling that shell with explosives, instead of just punching a hole through a ship.
Because there is no point to it. First, the extreme ranges, as we've both pointed out, would make it pointless. And second, as I've pointed out multiple times, because AP rounds are stupid for anti-ship duties.
They do, compared to tanks, because they have different roles. It's an unfair comparison though, because it's comparing mostly HE rounds with a hardened cap to mostly AP rounds with a bit of explosive filler. They're simply designed for different purposes.
That's...not particularly impressive for that kind of ridiculously large cannon. For easy reference to tanks, a 5" cannon is a 127mm cannon. A 127mm HEAT round would go through even more. For example, a 122mm HEAT round that the Soviets used would do 200mm of armor (Or a little bit under 8 inches) at...well, any range you could hit a target at. Admittedly, the platform had low odds of hitting outside 2000m. The Soviet L/46 100mm gun could punch an AP round through 96mm, or just under 4 inches of armor. At 2500m. That 5"/51 is out performing tank cannons on range, and that's about it. Even then, there's a huge problem of finding 3200m of ground with nothing to obstruct direct fire. Your target really fucked up if they let themselves be caught in the open for that.
Minor addendum, these numbers are for armor with a 30 degree slope, so you can add....15%ish to those penetration numbers. And keep in mind, these are much more limited platforms. Ships are simply bad at AP compared to tanks, because penetration is less important. It was the design trade off. The hilariously ridiculously over-penetration power of an 88KwK on a Sherman didn't make the round less effective after all.
Let me solve that puzzle. A 37mm AT gun was sufficient for most enemy tanks until the Cats showed up. 57mm AT guns could actually handle those for the most part. Despite running jokes about the Sherman, the cannon on the Sherman can, and did, penetrate the Tiger's armor from the front. We simply had no need for a super heavy tank or assault gun. Slapping a 127mm cannon on a pair of treads would be more about public masturbation than fulfilling an actual military need.
- Location
- Canada
I was referring to the T28/T95 project and the T29/T30/T34 project.
The T30 mounted a 155mm gun, in a goddamned turret.
CV12Hornet
Riter.
- Location
- Tacoma, Washington
I will remind you that we're talking WWII, and that most antitank rounds were those "HE filled murder balls" you so denigrated. Explosively formed penetrators aren't a thing. Neither is APFSDS. HEAT is in its infancy and nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is today.
But I see you do talk about WWII-era guns. Good.
First point. I bring up the range because penetration does not drop off linearly with distance (something you conveniently snipped out of my post and ignored), with the implication that the 5"/51 would penetrate significantly more armor at closer ranges (I don't have hard numbers, since the naval penetration table doesn't go that close). At 2000 yards, I'd expect a penetration of more than 5" of armor. Granted, that's not super impressive by the standards of contemporary antitank guns, but it's not "shit".
Second point. Did the Soviets even have a 122mm HEAT round in common use during WWII? My cursory research does not turn up such a round. So that's a red herring right there.
Look. All I'm objecting to is the characterization of naval guns having "shit penetration" compared to WWII-era antitank guns. Compared to modern antitank guns, yes, the penetration is shit. They are also irrelevant. Do not bring them up.
CompassJimbo
Where’s Your North?
- Location
- The former Rubber Capital of the World
Guys, this involves warboats. Not tanks.