First things first, you had to pitch the GBA-16 from the contest. The armor deficiencies made it too much of a liability, and it failed the RFQ requirements. On the advice of one of your staffers (you still got surprised when you had permanent staffers, even though you'd known Lt. Baum for about three years now) you sent testing data and materials over to the new Armed Reconnaissance Vehicle Testing Board.
The fact they shipped you back a keg of Emu Bitters told you all about their opinion of the vehicle, including the requirement for the 7,5cm gun which according to Major Sommer, the head of the other Board, was an absolutely ridiculous requirement for a tank under forty tons, much less twenty, and he attempted to publicly lambaste you in der Zeitung des Funkers, the neue Techniken press papers that circulated fairly regularly. Last you'd heard he'd ordered a new turret, scaled for a 3,5cm gun, and was going about his business at the Ravensburg Proving Grounds.
Speaking of turrets, Commorate Casting Company was quite unhappy at your insistence on a new turret. Testing results had proven more than adequate versus your requested parameters, so they felt rather attacked by the demands for a new turret. Nonetheless, they still delivered a turret ausf. B, which had the gun moved forward about eight centimeters to lengthen the turret cheeks, flared armor skirts on the turret to encourage ricochets, and an extra ten millimeter sheet welded to the front. The extra weight did affect speed to an uncomfortable extent, but they didn't have time or a better engine to re-engine the tank with.
The retesting of the KW-12's armor went better this time, and by better you meant not utterly disastrous. With the now rather proud Dragoner Haas up to shoot his anti-tank rifle again, you got ready for some rather dramatic work. After he'd blown out the vision block in the side hatch and taking out the radio box hanging off the back of the turret, he got to work poing around the ass end, at which point a bullet got in via the side muffler pipe and fucked something up. Frontal tests resulted in more blasted-out vision blocks and in one memorable shot through the muffler and into the exhaust port causing massive issues. 20mm testing on the front and the angle was passed with flying colors, but on the side of the tank there were four penetrations in the lower hull below the track base. The 3,5cm didn't penetrate the front on it's shots, although examination proved that spalling would likely have been fatal judging by the heavily pockmarked slabs of beef serving as crew stand-ins. A 5,5cm gun took out the front of the tank in one shot, plowing through the upper hull and careening through the tank, eventually exiting the rear of the tank mostly intact.
While you were cleaning up, the Ulm Commandant offered you a chance to watch the testing of the new anti-tank gun concept over on another range, and you accepted. The gun in question was a 3,5cm/60 based on the classic battalion field gun, equipped with a new pneumatic tire and split-trail carriage. The targets today would be a number of scrapped W-5s behind canvas covers, so as to ensure the gunners could actually find them on the shooting range. Instead of the normal slug shell, however, they were using a new "super hard" shell design which included a unique "windscreen" component to increase aerodynamic coefficients and reduce the spin rate of the gun so as to keep projectile behavior on track at longer ranges. Normally, a 3,5cm/50 Model 788 gun firing slug could reliably penetrate a W-5 at four hundred meters or closer, penetrate about half the time between four and six hundred yards, and lost all hope of penetrating or striking true at seven hundred yards.
To your amazement, the new gun proved to be very much an improvement. Accuracy was maintained well out to about twelve hundred meters, at which point the Commandant explained they'd need different training gear on the carriage and a windage calculator, and more importantly the gun was scoring reliable penetrations on the W-5 to about sixteen hundred meters. It might take five shots to hit the thing, but when it did hit the range referees indicated every hit was a clean penetration.
It was clear your new tanks had high standards to meet!
The next day rolled around, and it was time to do maintenance trials. This, of course, meant breaking things. To test the ease of repair, you had the 'good' tanks driven out to their wrecked counterparts from the armor testing, with crews from Ulm instructed to replace as much of the drive system with parts from the ruined hulks as they could and still drive back to the garages in an hour. Standby tractors inevitably were used to 'recover' the tanks after they had finished plowing into trees, fences, and each other, and the sounds of screaming woke you when the test started after you'd been inspecting your hat lining for holes from the back seat of the staff car.
The first tank done was the MANN CO/Commorate entry, having had most of the pistons deliberately fucked, the transmission pulled, drained, and had several broken gears inserted, as well as several road wheels replaced or shot with service pistols. After about half an hour to jack the tank up and swap the road wheels, the work team pulled the top armor off and promptly pulled and scrapped the transmission (it legally being a writeoff at this point) and re-shafted and piston'd the engine in another two hours. New crankshafts took a little longer, and once the engine was repaired and ran clean, the transmission was installed fresh and hooked back into the drive train. After a by-the-book check of the control mains and the turret power rotation system, the tank was checked out as clean after a combined six hours of work.
Next up was the Armid's, which had the engine repeatedly beaten by tensioner wrenches for the tracks, both tracks stripped off, several suspension struts destroyed, the transmission shredded by repeat abuse, the fuel and oil tanks being holed, and the driveshaft heavily sabatoged in an act of spite. Repair work started with jacking the tank up and pulling off all the damaged volute spring suspension units, which was fairly simply done by unbolting them from the hull and throwing them in the scrap pile. The internals was then worked on by acquiring a one-ton shop crane normally meant for engines, unbolting the rather heafty armored cover, carefully lowering it out of the way, and then by simply pulling the transmission and forward drive shafts with it. On finding damage in the control mains, the repair crew elected to remove the entire bottom of the tank, which was done by leaving it on the jacks, pull all the control lines, and replace them. The engine was then pulled, and basically rebuilt from the ground up due to the camshaft being torqued, and the top of the cylinder heads being all badly dented, Once repaired and reinstalled, the armor went on fairly easily, and the tank was checked out as clean after seven and a half working hours.
The next tank was the KW-12, which had been about as thoroughly and systematically wrecked as the last, with the addition that someone had pried up the turret and gotten it to rest cockeyed. At this point, roadwheel damage and power train damage were both par for the course. Maintenance teams started with pulling the roadwheels after the tank had been jacked up, and promptly learned the suspension springs were shot, and not from intentional damage. Pulling those took about two hours, since numerous cuts in the hull had to be made and an oxyacetylene torch scrounged up. Once the suspension springs were fixed, the suspension was checked out with another hour of work, and the crew got to work. Pulling the drivetrain was fairly easy, since the engine and transmission were permanently mated together and locked together on a rolling cage for easy removal. Being a flat eight, the engine wasn't too hard to reassemble, but separating the transmission from it was a hassle. More difficult was getting the module back in, which took the one ton crane and a lot of poking and prodding and water displacing lubricant formula forty to make fit. Then came the turret, which was a very complicated proposition. After getting the artillery crane (used to remount gun barrels) out, they managed to pull the turret off, and then discovered they'd have to cut out and re-weld part of the turret ring. After discounting them the hour it took to build the replacement ring section out of stock, it took about an hour and a half to weld it in, fill it with ball bearings, and then re-mount the turret. All in all, it was a eight and a half hour job.
Then there was the LSkW-24, which had at this time been sworn at to the degree you think no other piece of equipment here had ever been sworn at. With the standard course of damage (roadwheels, tracks, transmission, engine) and a rather notable bit of extra damage in someone wrecking the radio set. The roadheels weren't a hard fix, but once internal work needed to be done it turned out that there was only three ways to get into the damn tank- through the turret, through a top panel that would need the crane, or through the front glacis getting entirely removed. A vote on the crew elected to get the artillery crane to pull the front glacis to get the transmission out, which lead to two hours of pulling bolts to get the four ton forward armor portion removed from the tank. After disassembling the driver's position and pulling the transmission and radio, the question of reattaching the forward glacis came up, which resulted in a three hour session of finagling the damn thing back into place so the nice gentlemen with pneumatic wrenches could get the damn bolts back in. The top hatch was even more troublesome, and getting the engine out for work was an incredible pain, since it had to be rocked to the side and pulled up and out at a stiff angle. All in all, it was fourteen hours to complete work on the LSkW-24.
After this, the repair crews got a day's leave so they wouldn't consider rolling a grenade under your bunk.
For more… commonplace… repair work, your plan was to run the tanks over the same road course you used for the Kettenkrad testing. When you re-tested the Kettenkrad on it by the Ulm Motor Cavalry Regiment, you came up with an average time of six hours, compared to the seven and a half in the previous competition when you were initially testing the Kettenkrad.
The LSkW-24 barely completed the course as written, taking fourteen hours and two refuellings when it had to call for someone to bring them a tank of gas. Standard maintenance and repair work done after changed out one road wheel and topped off the oil for the engine, and then involved a long washdown.
The KW-12 completed the course as written in ten hours and one refuelling call, as it had some severe trouble with it's tracks in the thick mud on the river road. Standard maintenance was to replace the right track after a number of it's linkages were wrecked from multiple detracking incidents, to replace two road wheels (one of which had a casting flaw they should have caught before mounting it) and a good wash-down.
The Armid's completed the course in about eight hours, and didn't need to whine to a Kettenkrad crew to bring out some spare gas, an automatic advantage in your book. Standard maintenance involved working on both tracks and changing one of the volute spring suspension modules, which had lost it's compression unusually quickly, as well as topping up on oil and radiator fluid.
The MANN CO/Commorate entry finished the course in six hours, easily keeping pace with the Kettenkrad assigned to go with them to make sure they didn't get lost. With no refuelling or major incidents to get stuck in, they had a nice, uneventful trip. On returning to the proving grounds, all they needed was oil, radiator water, and a good wash-down.
With most of the testing done for the week, you had another four days in Ulm if you wanted to do any last minute emergency testing.
VOTES
plan vote y'all know the drill. Vote for any testing you want to do, last drops, nominations for contract, etc.
