Well first of all who would have to change tooling? Its not likely that those that companies that were about to start producing the M3 would accept orders.
It was restarted in 1942 but renamed into the T-43 and modified to be easier to put in production
No it wasn´t the the T-43 was basicly an uparmored T-34 with torsion bars it only shared design bureau with the T-34M
Canada starts offloading all their Ram tanks to the Soviet Union.
It's more complex than that:
I think there's another couple of components to consider too.... First, filling the airborne role requires aircraft with significant weight carrying capacity and end-loading capability, which didn't really exist very well till post-WW2 (I'll allow the Hamilcar and Me Gigants as halfway steps during the war). Second, every single time the US has ventured down the road to air-transportable tanks, mission-creep takes over and the weapon goes on a high-fat diet, and soon it no longer fits the original mission profile.
No M24 & M41 probably means that those that got them gets M4s instead, ofcourse I wonder if the French would be able to disassemble Shermans and fly them into Dien Bien phu like they did with the M24
The Pz3 and 4 have plenty of room to improve the ease of production.More difficult to manufacture than one imagined.
If you notice the sides, they're not flat but slightly sloped
That's a lotta machining to be done.
And it had 8 roadwheels and 4 idlers compared to 6 roadwheels and 3 idlers of the Panzer III
Tracks were too thin, hence the Ostketten later in the war.
The whole tank was underpowered and it started to show in the later Ausf. H, weighed down by heavy armor, a heavier gun, and other specs it was never designed for.
Panzer III/IV was a much better choice. Too bad it was only started (and cancelled) in 1944.
looks like an adapted version of the SS11 solution on the AMX13, but with missiles moved to the sides
It's the same concept of putting the missiles and guidance modules separately rather than integrating the guidance modules in a periscopic sight like Jaguar 1. The former solution was used on AMX-13 for testing:looks like an adapted version of the SS11 solution on the AMX13, but with missiles moved to the sides
from wiki:
Photos like that makes me wonder how effective light tanks would be against heavier vehicles if they were fitted with likes of Trophy.
So I found a saved page on the Internet Archive, which states:
If this applies to tanks, then the material reduction in construction man-hours would not occur in any specific areas, but rather the more manpower-intensive tasks would be replaced by multiple smaller ones, and some of those smaller ones would be reduced.
Some alt. Japanese AFV's.
The idea here is that Japan is now located in the Mediterranean and is fighting Great Britain and the Germans have helped the Japanese to re-arm some of their tanks to take on the larger and better armored AFV's of the British and some have been repurposed for the infantry support role..
Ideally I would have used Japanese guns but I couldn't find any decent line drawings of Japanese guns.
I was thinking of using Russian guns but not sure if that would be feasible vis a vis the ammunition.
Not related to the tanks themselves, but interesting: the UK and Canada did test depleted uranium alloy APDS cores out of the 20pdr, 105 and 120mm guns, the latter in 1963.
Compared to W-Ni-Cu tungsten alloy and tungsten carbide, DU was way better against a 100mm plate at 53°, being able to penetrate it at 3870 yards instead of 2000m for tungsten alloy and 1500m for carbide, out of the 20pdr.
Out of the 105 and 120, the allegedly later trials showed that DU performed worse than tungsten alloy against homogenous steel but as well against spaced targets, although with few shots fired in trials.
DU seemingly performed worse due to less well understood manufacturing processes and lower length-to-diameter ratio (higher density for the same APDS weight for proper stabilization, so shorter).
The British also tested a W-Ni-Fe alloy, which the US used for all of their late 60s tungsten APFSDS, the Germans for all of their APFSDS (testing in 60s too), and the Soviet Union in BM-26 125mm APFSDS cores (France too).
Weirdly enough, the British kept W-Ni-Cu for their APDS and L23A1 APFSDS but tested W-Ni-Fe for it. W-Ni-Fe is vastly superior due to much greater elongation of 18-20% which means it breaks up far less. W-Ni-Cu is almost as brittle as tungsten carbide (elongation 2-3%), but softer so worse against vertical targets than carbide.
One can only wonder how much better would further developped W-Ni-Fe or DU APDS and L23A1 be...
Maybe L15 120mm APDS with these alloys would really threaten T-64 in the 1970s...
