From here, it can be seen that the German armored forces have seriously distorted the technology tree: when the weight of the tanks is the same, the Germans can only make tanks that are one level worse than out. Pen % fun % Pavilion www.biquge.info

The Tiger tank is more than 56 tons, but its main performance is about the same as that of Stalin 2. And the Leopard tank, which weighed about the same as the Stalin 2 tank, did not have the performance indicators of a heavy tank.

This creates a very interesting phenomenon, that is, if you simply compare the tanks of one class on both sides, you will find that the German tanks crushed all the competitors at that time.

The problem was that the German tanks seriously wasted their own tonnage, exchanging this weight for an asymmetric advantage between tanks of the same class.

In other words, the Tiger tank and the Tiger King are behemoths that do not compete with the same type of tank armored vehicles in the Allied armor sequence.

The Soviet heavy tank Stalin 2 was a weapon used against the Tiger tank, similar to the Leopard tank, with enhanced armor protection and artillery power.

Looking at it this way, it is not difficult to conclude why the German armored forces achieved such amazing results and brilliant results in World War II.

Because they've always been playing opponents who are one level lower than themselves.

When the Allies had weapons of the level of the Stalin 2 tank, the Germans were playing with super tanks like the King Tiger.

Unfortunately, such tactics could give the Germans a huge tactical advantage, protecting their valuable armored units to the greatest extent in the worst possible combat conditions.

However, this one-sided effort to increase the combat capability of the bicycle is actually a typical uneconomical investment.

Because of the limitations of scientific and technological development, the performance improvement of a single weapon system is not without an upper limit.

For example, if in the development of modern military weapons, it is not difficult to make your missiles reach an error of 100 meters in radius.

Missiles with a radius error of 100 meters are relatively low in cost because of mature technology and cheap parts.

And if you want to reduce the error to the level of 10 meters, which is the level of the current sophisticated weapons of the military powers, the cost of weapons at this level is quite expensive.

Further, if you want a missile with a radius of 1 meter, can you produce it? It should be possible! It's just that the cost is the same as the cost of the Shenzhou spacecraft......

In the same way, it is possible to make a tank have high performance, but whether it is worth the price is worth it needs to be considered by the designers.

For example, adding a ton of armor is something that can be easily done, but for the sake of this 1 ton of armor, it is a bit painful to have to equip a more expensive and complex engine.

This is just the beginning, if the engine is powerful, without the supporting transmission system, wouldn't it be a tyrannical thing?

A better engine, a more advanced drivetrain, overweight, and a little more reinforcement of the body and suspension.

It sounds like all of this is not bad, and if you continue to think about it, this is equivalent to paying a full 3 tons or even 5 tons of weight for one ton of armor protection, is it worth it?

On the other hand, the added weight and the new engine will greatly increase fuel consumption, and in order to ensure the travel of the tank, it will need to carry more fuel.

More fuel means more volume, is the original volume of the tank enough?

Isn't it necessary to have more armor to protect this fuel, so that once the tank is penetrated, it will cause a martyrdom and destroy the entire tank?

After such a large circle of adjustments and changes, a tank has 1 ton of armor protection compared to the design time, and it seems that the price has been paid exponentially while ensuring balance.

Larger volume, more complex powertrain...... It is not clear how much the protection has actually increased, but the price to pay is already clear.

Expensive construction, inflated weight, and already slightly weak firepower that seemed to mismatch the entire vehicle...... Is this tank really as good as everyone hoped it would have been before it was improved?

After such a trade-off, many people have to put a question mark on this evaluation, right?

For example, the Leopard tank, weighing up to 45 tons, carried only one 75 mm gun.

The contemporaneous Soviet Stalin 2 tank weighed 46 tons and used a 122 mm caliber gun.

And the T-85-34, which used a gun of 85 mm caliber, weighed 32 tons, which was the most classic medium tank of its time.

The British improved Firefly tank of the same era, an improved version of the American M4 Sherman tank, was armed with a powerful 17-pounder gun and weighed more than 33 tons.

What did the Leopard tank get for 10 tons? In exchange for a slightly higher protection capability!

Isn't it worth it? 4 Sherman Fireflies, eighty percent can't beat 3 Leopard tanks!

There are historical records that prove that the German army of 3 Leopard tanks will indeed not be defeated by 4 or even 5 Shermans.

But if we consider it from the other side: in key battles, such as the Battle of Kursk, the Germans invested 300 more modest No. 4 modifications, will it rewrite history?

Although locally, the record of 3 counter-kills and 4 tanks abounded in the German army, but this also caused a result that made people laugh and cry.

As a result, the German Army won almost all their battles, but lost the war!

When the Germans complicated and strengthened their weapons, all the pressure was passed on at this time, to the logistics department and the production chain.

As a result, the logistics department was overwhelmed and had to endure a catastrophic complex supply; And the factories in the rear also have to endure the huge production capacity occupied by those complex weapons.

The 1,000 Tiger tanks that the German army spent three years crafting, if they still can't achieve those successes on the battlefield, it only proves that the Germans are more stupid than they seem!

Similarly, the Germans endured the miserable production of more than 200 units a month at most, and the Leopard tanks they got were of course much better than the Shermans used by the Yankees.

You know, Sherman produced 50,000 units in just 3 years, an average of more than 1,000 units per month......

We cannot rely on this gap to extrapolate the actual gap between German and American tanks, but we can see the problem from one side.

The United States and the Soviet Union both had tanks that could produce hundreds or even thousands of tanks a month, while Germany could only produce 100 or 200 tanks a month.

On the one hand, this is due to the gap in resource capacity, but on the other hand, it is directly related to the complex design of German tanks and the numerous manufacturing links.

It is this link that Li Le wants to improve, and he wants Germany to simplify the production of tanks, planes, and other weapons and equipment while increasing its own production capacity.

He did not simply learn from the model of the opponent and produced a large number of cheap tanks, because that model did not suit Germany and did not need to be learned.

Germany's elite tanks needed to be protected, and on the other hand, the size of the German armored forces did need to be rapidly expanded.

Li Le's idea was to increase production capacity to produce a simplified version of the No. 3 assault gun and the No. 4 improved tank. to sufficiency the number of armored units of the German Army.

On this basis, the slightly advanced No. 5 tank was developed, and the elite was selected to build an elite armored corps that was not afraid of attrition.

In the process, numerical superiority was maintained by a large number of medium tanks and the German armored corps base was raised to a higher level.

Among these ordinary armored soldiers, selecting and cultivating real elites to form that formidable elite tank force is Li Le's plan.

Li Le did not need a heavy combat vehicle such as the Tiger tank, but hoped that the structure of the Tiger tank would be simplified, and on the basis of ensuring combat power or slightly weakening some combat power, the production process would be greatly improved, so that it could become a real main battle tank that could be mass-produced.

He needed the kind of tank that could appear on a large scale and decide the outcome of the battle, not the kind of bulky and scarce field firefighters.

"The No. 4 is now a simple and improved model, and production continues to expand." Li Le instructed Brauchitsch and said, "Don't worry about the funds, we have a lot of money now. ”

What Li Le said was not wrong at all, Germany had already found neutral countries and domestic consortia to continue to lend money, and expanded its war machine production.

These loans were able to be disbursed mainly because of the good news of Germany's oil discovery in Libya.

Although the oil fields there are still only in their infancy, this does not prevent some venture capital firms from squeezing their chips on the Third Reich.

There has been so much good news lately about the imminent victory of the Third Reich in the war, even to the point of being dizzying.

There was inside information that the Germans had succeeded in bombing Britain, and even the British Air Force, which had already fought it, did not dare to meet it at all.

Coupled with the success of the Malta operation, the heavy damage to the H fleet was exposed, at this time if you don't lend money to Germany to earn some interest, do you still wait for the other side to win the war and then make up for it?

"Thank you to the Führer for your support of the Army, we will repay your trust with victory!" Brauchitsch smiled and nodded, a smug look on his face.

"By the way, how are the preparations for the new tank production plant? Those Jewish engineers, they're cooperative, aren't they? Li Le suddenly asked a question that didn't seem to be very relevant to military operations.

As the secretary of the Führer, Bowman was clear about this matter, and hurriedly lowered his head and lowered his voice and said to Li Le: "My Führer, this matter is going quite smoothly, and I will send the specific report to your office." ”

Li Le glanced at him and nodded to show that he understood. Then he stood up and ended this war meeting against the British.