As you rode the train into Ulm, you looked over the hot mess that was the full schematics of the W-5 and W-6. The W-8 didn't have a true set of specifications aside from a note on the W-6 that read "upsacale" and a few unintelligible Polski gibberish lines. What you were finding out, though, didn't look good. The thickest plates on the tank were twenty-five milimetres, with the majority only being seventeen ot ten. A good number of notes went into the fact that they were using cemented steels to increase durability and slants to increase ricochet likelyhood, but you weren't sure how that would stand up to testing. Folgers was unconvinced it would meaningfully help, but Folgers also believed that twenty five to seventeen milimetre plates would be fine on their own.
Once you got to the testing ground, you had to put your head in your hands. The conscripts for the Wanderer-tanks had figured out that a 3,5cm gun could in fact fire a properly modified potato (you used a tin cup as sabot) and had decided that the crew of the SzW-1 needed some tender love and bombardment, so the besieged had naturally decided the only way to retaliate was with vicious application of soap bullets and rocks. Once the combat was cleared up, you got right into testing.
The first test, the speed and endurance trials, was going to be flatly conducted as a race. The course was a twelve-kilometer circuit over the road, main field, entrenching field, artillery field, a shallow scree slope, and then one of the maintenance roads. Each tank had a two minute difference in start times, and it then they'd be off.
Starting with the KW-1, you had a stiff failure to complete the course as the driver got hideously lost in the entrenching field before putting the machine in a fortified ditch halfway by running parallel to it and causing the trench to collapse, eating the tank. Recovery teams got it out with only three maimed conscripts and mass closed head injuries, but it wasn't gonna finish the race. At it's fastest, it had clocked in at seven and a half kilometers per hour, and hadn't had any major terrain crossing difficulties until the accident.
The SzW-1 failed to finish for an entirely different reason, humorously enough. Equipped with an utterly massive set of two ten-cylinder radial engines by Jumond, the Skoda designers had apparently not figured out what their prototype's fuel consumption looked like since it had gone down the scree slope, trundled a few meters further, and promptly ran out of gas. While the refueling team came out, you sighed and made several angry notes in your book. Clocking in at three kilometers an hour on the road with both engines running flat out, it had tried to creep higher before a track threw itself and shredded a road wheel.
The GK-2 edged out the GK-3 by about a minute, and both had roughly the equivalent number of stoppages, mostly thrown tracks. The top speeds had been about nine kilometers per hour, and over the most broken terrain they'd kept to two and a half kilometers an hour. It had taken both tanks an hour and twenty to cross the entire course, but both had finished- without crew injury or fatalities, either!
Naturally, of course, the Wanderer tanks smoked the race section out of the park. With times of fifty four, fifty six, and sixty nine minutes for the W-5, W-6, and W-8, they all managed to cross in less than fifteen stoppages. Their top speeds were all roughly eleven kilometers an hour, and the most problematic issue that happened was the scree slope. Everyone had trouble with the scree slope, honestly, but the sight of the W-6 hitting a tree and going into a flat spin to loose both tracks had been a bit of a moment.
As you got to lunch, informal surveys went out. Remarks were varried, but not often positive. The KW-1 was a nightmare to ride in, with only three compartments and a tendancy for the exhaust system to backfeed into the cabins. The GK- series was much more peaceful, however the turret crews on the -3 felt that in combat they couldn't use their carborundum signal lamps to keep the driver's compartment informed reliably enough. The GK-2 didn't have its sister model's erratic visibility issues, but instead it had balance problems from the sponsons which might require lightening the guns. The SzW-1 was stable as a house, and caused about as many coniptions as one until it ran out of gas. Apparently, the gasoline tank gauge only connected up to one tank, not the entire network, so when the main distribution tank hit a quarter it was like the bottom fell out of the gauged tank. The W-series was universally uncomfortable, with tight sling seats and poor hatch placement requiring assistance getting into and out of, along with poor communication by the driver and gunner-commander. The W-8 also had the dubious honor of being the hardest to start without outside help, due to a sticky clutch and stingy choke.
Transportation-wise, you saw all the tanks were here, ergo they had rail transportability, somehow. You were busy writing Anne-Marie a letter, so that was that.
It was the next afternoon that weapons testing came up, much to everyone's joy. First up came accuracy from the still tank, and you sighed. For this test, there'd be two parts- a Known Range test at a hundred meters, followed by an Unknown Range test. Targets would be wooden cutouts of a W-2 broadside silhouette, since that was a fairly nice size for shooting at (and the Anti-Tank gunners that had been trained to handle the enemy's A9 tanks with them last week) and then things would get started.
Naturally, the minute you said this, things went to shit. Aside from an alternating heavy mist and heavy rain, your crews got added experiance in weapons malfunctions from wet rounds. Taking this into account in the staff car, you started tabulating results.
First up was the KW-1. On known distance, it took the 5,5cm gunner four shots to come onto target, and the 7,5 needed three. On unknown distance, the 5,5 took twelve shots to clip the target, and the 7,5 needed ten. Machine gun accuracy wasn't tested, due to the ammunition expenditure costs and the time consumption involved.
Next was the GK-2. On known distance, the 3,5cm rotary took seven shots to hit the target, while the 5,5cm guns took nine shots on the right broadside and ten on the left. On unknown distance, the 3.5cm rotary took eight shots to hit the target, while the 5,5cm guns both took an average of twelve.
The SzW-1 went after that in the thick fog. On known distance, it destroyed the target in one hit with the 10,5 via shrapnel (you doubted it hit, but the target was gone and honestly you wanted a warm furnace and so did they) and the 3,5cm took six shots to hit the target. On unknown distance, you had them perform the second shot to make sure the little wooden cutout was dead and gone even though it was Swiss cheese after the first shot, and the 3,5cm took fifteen shells to hit the damn thing. At this point, you called off for the day due to low light and dinner.
With a new dawning day and agravating drizzles and more fucking fog, you got on with the GK-3. The fore 5,5cm took five shells to get on target, and the aft took six on the known distance range. On the unknown range, though, the tank commander requested some additional time. Within five minutes, both guns opened fire and hit the target. When asked, it turned out that the officer in question was a budding engineer, and had done the trigonometry to figure out how to determine the distance from a target the tank was perfectly broadside to by determining the angle of his two different turrets to come in line to the target. After giving the boy a slap on the back and writing his name down in your notebook (Adrian Handel) you told him to go back to blind shooting without some excellent math backing him up. After he'd shifted the tank around to get a new fire vector, it took seven and eight shots from the front and rear guns to successfully hit the unknown distance target.
Next up came the W-5, armed with the 2cm autocannon. A gas-operated tilt-locking open bolt design, it fed off a gravity pan to the gun's right, and was loaded via feed strip. On the known distance target, it only took a short burst to destroy the W-2 wooden model- maybe five rounds. On the unknown distance, it was about four short bursts, probably about thirty rounds total. Considering the tray only held fifteen rounds, it was a good showing.
The W-6 with the short 3,5 came up next, with the weather starting to hail for some reason and much shouting being done about it. On the known distance range, it only took two shots for the short gun to hit the target. On the unknown distance range, however, things became far murkier. After twenty shots without confirmed hit, you were ready to call it quits. Still, they persisted until the last round in the magazine of the tank, expending forty shells attempting to hit the unknown distance sheet. Damage assessment couldn't tell if the damage was shrapnel or the hail, so everyone drove back to the mess for lunch.
Post-lunch with the hail changing itself for pounding rain and occasional lightning, you had the W-8 driven out. The known distance target took twelve shots to engage accurately, but you were willing to forgive some lax marksmanship due to the fact both the W-8 and your staff car were rocking like mad. The unknown distance shoot was much harder, taking twenty-five rounds, but at the end it was destroyed by shellfire or lightning strike. Either way, it was time to leave the range.
Before dinner came around, you got a rather irate telegram from High Command. Your funding had been slashed, and the Ulm Prooving Ground needed to serve as the muster point for the 57. Erstazregiment to serve as a training area for anti-armor and anti-fortification options. The High Command needed advice and a possible purchase recommendation now, before the realities of a tightening financial crisis hit.
((This is a PLAN VOTE. You need to present a formation, a unit buy, or a comprehensive recommendation to High Command or else your test unit may very well be shut down.))
