A better Panther tank

Deleted member 1487

...
The truly weak spot of the Panther is its final drive, which is of too weak a design and has an average fatigue life of only 150 km

http://worldoftanks.com/en/news/21/chieftains-hatch-french-panthers/
IIRC the French were using surplus late war final drives, which were complete garbage; besides being a weak design by the late war they were using inferior metals and slave labor to make them, which generally meant they tended to be trash. Of course the French were just temporarily using war booty to tide them over as they rebuilt their military until their own post-war designs were ready, so it's not like they really were making quality spare parts themselves, nor really that familiar with using/maintaining the weapon system, they just were using it temporarily in a very low risk post-war international environment.
 
IIRC the French were using surplus late war final drives, which were complete garbage; besides being a weak design by the late war they were using inferior metals and slave labor to make them, which generally meant they tended to be trash. Of course the French were just temporarily using war booty to tide them over as they rebuilt their military until their own post-war designs were ready, so it's not like they really were making quality spare parts themselves, nor really that familiar with using/maintaining the weapon system, they just were using it temporarily in a very low risk post-war international environment.

besides quality issues, they were underdesigned for that panzer. Had it stayed 30 tons, it would have been better, but they were straight cut, not like what the everyone else was doing with tanks of that weight.

Here's a snippit from a WoT discussion I saved

The final drives are what transfer power from the transmission to the sprocket wheels, and were the weakest link of Panther's entire design. French postwar experience operating the tank produced a mean service life of just 150 kilometres – the average final drive would not last as long as a tank of petrol. The reason for this has been touted as everything from sabotage at the factories to poor materials. The real reason, as with so many things on Panther, is plain bad engineering.

In an effort to save production time, the gears inside the drives were straight-cut. Straight-cut gears are something you might use in a car; they're something you might even use in a light armoured vehicle. They are absolutely not something that should ever be used on a 45-ton tank intended to operate in a total war environment. The Germans learned from their mistake, and used double herringbone gears on the Tiger II, significantly improving the service life of that particular part.



Since the war, those with access to Panthers have examined the drives closely. Sabotage has indeed been found in some, with an example being gear teeth cut off and weakly reattached; another tank was found to have handfuls of metal shavings thrown into the housings. In fact, thanks to Germany's severely outmoded production methods, sabotage was not as damaging as would be expected from a system more like what the United States or Soviet Union used. Because workers stayed with a tank on the assembly line, rather than processing a specific part in a mass production system, one or two saboteurs could not ruin an entire batch of drives destined for many tanks themselves. In the case of the Panther at the Military Vehicle Technology Foundation, no signs of sabotage were found. In fact, the quality of the steel used on the gears was also tested in order to confirm or allay suspicions about that, and it was found to be of appropriate quality. It is clear, then, that neither sabotage nor the supposed use of scrap steel were the cause of Panther's final drive issues – it was simply a bad design, shoehorned into a tank it was not designed to support.
 

thorr97

Banned
One general comment about Hitler being "responsible for everything that went wrong" in Germany, I think there's a lot of post-war myth making and propaganda about that.

Hitler was quite like Stalin in that he developed a cult of personality and was a mass murdering ruthless dictator.

Hitler was quite unlike Stalin in that he was loyal to his subordinates and didn't play paranoia based power games with them where the losers got sent to the Gulag or to Lubyanka's basement and a bullet in the back of their heads. Hitler trusted his subordinates and had faith in them that they were loyal to him. Well, at least his NSDAP subordinates. He never trusted the Heer and rightly so.

Hitler was a micromanager and was indecisive. He would demand involvement in all decisions and do so right down to an absurdly low level for such a chief executive. He would conceive of some grand plan, demand it be implemented and then get a case of the nerves and countermand his orders. And then he'd countermand his countermanding. Hitler's subordinates could, at times, talk him out of otherwise bad decisions or talk him out his his constant countermanding. Plenty of his subordinates realized that a man who insisted on being involved in everything was a man who really couldn't be involved in anything. So, they took it upon themselves to implement "the Fuhrer's will" as they saw it. They operated on that "better to ask forgiveness than permission" doctrine. And they repeatedly got away with it.

Actions which would've wound up getting them shot - or worse - under Stalin got them just yelled at and held out of favor, for a while, under Hitler. And that was largely only if things didn't work out. If they proved useful instead, they were congratulated and left to carry on.

Two good examples of this are the StG 44 and the Me 262. Hitler was absolutely opposed to the production of the Sturmgewehr 44 figuring it to be a waste of production capacity and ammo. He forbid its production. Hitler was also so greatly impressed with the potential of the Me 262 that he ordered it into production over the opposition of the Luftwaffe and demanded that it be produced as a fighter bomber only.

In both these cases Hitler's subordinates made their own interpretation of "the Fuhrer's will" and directly violated his stated orders. The StG 44 went into production and the Messerschmitt company got their Me-262 lines running by churning out only pure interceptor versions of the Me 262 with no "jabos" - fighter bombers - being produced at all.

In each case, Hitler "flew into a rage" when he learned how his subordinates had violated his orders. And then those same subordinates talked enough reason into Hitler that he "came 'round" and accepted the reality.

Even outright failure would not get a subordinate put to death when it came to Hitler. Just look at Goering and what happened to him after his vaunted Luftwaffe first failed to break the RAF and then failed to beat the Soviets and then failed to defend the skies of the Reich. Yes, it cost him his status and position in Hitler's inner circle but Goering long outlived the Fuhrer despite falling from his graces. I don't think there's anyone in Stalin's top staff who could have boasted the same sort of treatment.
 
A few years ago the series Tank Overhaul had an episode on restoring a Panther. Usual stuff - some good technical details, separated by much too much inaccurate guff on kill ratios, and the "mystery" of how a particular vehicle was lost (clue: 45 tons, bottom of a river, thin ice).

Full programme (wrongly titled) is here: to avoid wasting time, because I've done that for you, go to:
  • 25 mins: information on the torsion bar suspension, the 20" suspension travel giving stability and a smooth ride.
  • 26 mins 30 secs: Maybach engine - engine block too light; connecting rod & gasket failures; stack fires.
  • 32 mins 10 secs: the neutral steer capability - first AFV to have an effective system of this type?
  • 33 mins 30 secs: final drive and transmission: straight spur gears, teeth overstressed; comparison with M4 double herringbone system; problem of utilising a system designed for a 32-35 ton vehicle on something that turned out 45 tons.
  • 35 mins 13 secs: transmission final drive failures/damage, and the difficulty of repairing them.
I've also read something - can't remember where - about the problems with the traversing mechanism - apparently too feeble to defy gravity and work on a slope.
 
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The turret was unbalanced and couldn't be traversed on anything more then a gentle slope.

The Panther also could not be backed up a slope w/o stripping the final drives.

ETA-
Another video on a US tank plant
 
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Interestingly, while the Germans still produce main battle tanks today (like the new Leopard 3), the USA has entirely given up production of Abrams, and instead resorts to rebuilding tanks from the 1980s and very early 90s. If a land war was at risk somewhere, I think the Germans would ramp up MBT production much faster than the Americans.

 
Split: disconnect GAF from transaxle. You now have a more reliable drive unit. Most M26 failures were from overheating, not drive failures
m26_engine.gif

You leave engine in the rear.
You leave the drive shaft.
You yank all the crap ahead of that, and adapt that drive unit in the front.
M26snl_10-12a.jpg

Now adjust M26 output shafts to match with the final drives with the proper drive sprocket

So you take out the reasonably reliable and compact 700hp Maybach V12 and fit in its place a reasonably reliable but only 500hp Ford GAF engine and keep the POS transmission which is geared for a 700hp engine. So now the Panther will still break down about as often but it will go a lot slower between breakdowns and the poor driver will be changing gears so often he will be a puddle of sweat.
 
Interestingly, while the Germans still produce main battle tanks today (like the new Leopard 3), the USA has entirely given up production of Abrams, and instead resorts to rebuilding tanks from the 1980s and very early 90s. If a land war was at risk somewhere, I think the Germans would ramp up MBT production much faster than the Americans.


I am not so sure - the Lima tank factory in Ohio is only ticking over a the moment as the US armed forces actually have more tanks than they need (+4000 in storage) - that being said my understanding is that they are still building 'new' foreign export variants of the M1, modifying existing tanks to M1A2 standard as well as building other AFVs such as the improved stryker and the IDFs Namar Chassis.

Funding exists to bring the entire factory back to full scale production - which as far as I am aware was about 120 tanks a month.

How does that compare to the German factory?
 
My understanding is (from reading about this over the years on the Internet... So take it for what it is worth....)

The final drives in the production vehicles were of a simplified design that could be mass produced in the quantities required, with that available machinery and materials.

Conceivably a post war rebuild program that didn't have the constraints faced by Nazi Getmany in WW2 might have been able to change to a more reliable design but that is pure speculation on my part. I doubt any such program would be very cost effective.

Re the hull issues I've read confliciting accounts about the changes in quality of German steel as WW2 progressed. That being said I'm inclined to believe that the worsening position of Nazi Germany in the later stages of WW2 can't have been helpful in this area.

Assuming the hulls are too compromised by inferior quality metal then a Panther rebuild is a dead-end. In fact Panther seems an interim design overall, at least for central Europe, but I could see a new final drive being installed using superior gear teeth, a diesel as was first proposed, and other upgrades as the OP suggests, perhaps so far as the new Narrow turret. Looks like an improved Ausf. F or even Panther II as a stop gap or perhaps better as export to Spain, Turkey, Italy, Finland, etc. in a different post-war without surplus American tanks for whatever reason.

What I see is how Panther had many pointers to what would become Leopard I with the E50 stepping stone. It appears the Panther was from its inception supposed to rely on maneuver versus armor to protect it on the battlefield, in this I see how the German armor force was moving to a battle tank for armor versus armor combat in contradistinction to American doctrine and akin to British Cruiser tank theory. The threads show how the T54/55 is where the USSR took the similar lessons. Would this path from Panther to E50 give us a Leopard a few years earlier?
 
So you take out the reasonably reliable and compact 700hp Maybach V12 and fit in its place a reasonably reliable but only 500hp Ford GAF engine and keep the POS transmission which is geared for a 700hp engine. So now the Panther will still break down about as often but it will go a lot slower between breakdowns and the poor driver will be changing gears so often he will be a puddle of sweat.

You aren't paying attention. Maybach stays or replaced with the V12 version of the GAA, while the rest of the drive train is replaced by the Torqmatic, that was adequate enough for the 64 ton T29 heavy tank

And gearchanging was a delight, given it's a torque converter and automatic transmission
 
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