WI: No Tiger?

Logistics of a heavy tank is always about twice that of a medium which is twice that of a light tank...and the man hours and cost of building a Tiger could net you 2-3 mediums or and 6-8 lights. The more you stream line production onto fewer chassis the cheaper the cost per unit and the less resources wasted. So any calculation should end up with much more than a sum of the tank masses.

Further the problem with insufficent crews had much more to do with the policy of forming new units instead of reinforcing and replenishing old units. It was much more cost effective to rebuild old units, but Hitler was obsessed with offensive even when their was little or no prospects for operational let alone strategic success. So new formations were formed to be thrown into the meat grinder.

As much as 2-10 times as many armaments and crews went into building new units, instead of those going to reinforce the old units....which goes along way to explaining the chronich shortages expericenced late in the war. Remove Hitler and every thing can change.


The sloped armor argiument is miss understood. In addition to offering more effective fighting space the vertical face hardened armor was better able to defeat the AP projectiles of the early war period. Infact sloped face hardened armor suffered catastrophic failure when hit by overmatching shells. However by mid war the capped projectiles proved to be more effective against vertical face hardened armor than RHA so that advantage diminished and the argument for sloped armor remained.


BTW the quality of German armor had mostly to do with the superior doctrine and training and not the tanks they used. In the last years of the war perhaps they substituted tank mass for crew quality.
 
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