WI non-overweight Panther?

There have been a few interesting threads recently discussing various proposed alternatives to the Panther tank. The idea here is the simplest possible divergence from OTL, what if Hitler didn't think of or was talked out of ordering the increase in armor thickness during the design phase which resulted in the vehicle being completely unreliable when introduced and substantially heavier than necessary?
 

Deleted member 1487

Depends on how much weight that actually added. I raised the armor issue on another forum once and the calculation I got back was that it only added a bit of 1 ton of weight to add the additional 20mm of frontal armor on to the chassis. So that would leave the initial model as 42 tons all the mechanical issues and the later models at 44 tons and 60mm of frontal armor. Now perhaps that calculation was off and it was in fact say 2 tons, still that is not going to change that much at 41 tons instead of the initial 43 tons of the original production Panther. It would need to really be more in the range of the Hungarian knock off of 38 tons to really reduce the issues:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44M_Tas
This tank was underpowered compared to the Panther, but it was also lighter. Not sure how you're going to reduce weight much further without getting into rear drives, reduced height, a different turret, etc. which gets into major delays in production.
 
If the layout of the Panther remains as in OTL, the weight saving might backfire. The saving can come just from having a thinner armor, and that means it can be pierced by things Allies have deployed in wide scale, like the 6pdr or any of the 75-76mm they have. Being a bigger target than the plain vanilla Pz-IV, it will be an awarding target for the gunners.
On the other hand, if the weight savings can go to, say, 5 tons while the armor protection is in the range of Sherman/T-34, the reliability would've probably go upwards. Everything is a trade-off.

I doubt that Tas was a knock off.
 
Depends on how much weight that actually added. I raised the armor issue on another forum once and the calculation I got back was that it only added a bit of 1 ton of weight to add the additional 20mm of frontal armor on to the chassis. So that would leave the initial model as 42 tons all the mechanical issues and the later models at 44 tons and 60mm of frontal armor. Now perhaps that calculation was off and it was in fact say 2 tons, still that is not going to change that much at 41 tons instead of the initial 43 tons of the original production Panther. It would need to really be more in the range of the Hungarian knock off of 38 tons to really reduce the issues:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44M_Tas
This tank was underpowered compared to the Panther, but it was also lighter. Not sure how you're going to reduce weight much further without getting into rear drives, reduced height, a different turret, etc. which gets into major delays in production.

I was under the impression that the weight increase didn't come from just the armor directly, but also from other components which themselves had to be made heavier to accommodate it. According to Speer, the effect was more than just a few ton increase. "...we decided to develop a new thirty ton tank whose very name, Panther, was to signify greater agility. Though light in weight, its motor was to be the same as the Tiger's, which meant it could develop superior speed. But in the course of a year Hitler once again insisted on clapping so much armor on it, as well as larger guns, that it ultimately reached forty eight tons, the original weight of the Tiger." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_tank
 
If they'd designed the Panther from the start to be 48 tons, they would have developed the correct power to weight ratio.
 

Deleted member 1487

I was under the impression that the weight increase didn't come from just the armor directly, but also from other components which themselves had to be made heavier to accommodate it. According to Speer, the effect was more than just a few ton increase. "...we decided to develop a new thirty ton tank whose very name, Panther, was to signify greater agility. Though light in weight, its motor was to be the same as the Tiger's, which meant it could develop superior speed. But in the course of a year Hitler once again insisted on clapping so much armor on it, as well as larger guns, that it ultimately reached forty eight tons, the original weight of the Tiger." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_tank
Speer said armor and gun changes were the weight increases mostly. The problem was the components didn't fully increase to deal with the 10 ton bump, especially the final drive. Originally the armor was supposed to be 50-60mm and have a mid-range 75 instead of the long Panther gun. That wasn't the full increase, as the Panther gun was less than 500kg heavier than the Pz IV L48 gun. The turret was over heavy and poorly laid out for the long gun though. A Pz IV turret plus the L48 gun probably would have been 2-3 tons lighter.

If they'd designed the Panther from the start to be 48 tons, they would have developed the correct power to weight ratio.
45 tons, I think Speer meant 48 'short' tons. The problem is the design then wouldn't enter production until 1944 if they took the time to design it the right way, i.e. with the proper development cycle. Which is exactly what they should have done.
 
Nobody in the 'metric Europe' used short tons as a term. So many tons meant so many 1000 kg. Short ton is 2000 lbs, a fully Anglo-American term.
 

Deleted member 1487

Nobody in the 'metric Europe' used short tons as a term. So many tons meant so many 1000 kg. Short ton is 2000 lbs, a fully Anglo-American term.
Perhaps that was the fault of the translator then, because even at it's heaviest the Panther was not 48 tons, nor was the VK45, the Tiger project, 48 tons. He also misquotes the Tiger I's weight too. I really do think the metric tons then were translated into imperial by the translator.
 
I raised the armor issue on another forum once and the calculation I got back was that it only added a bit of 1 ton of weight to add the additional 20mm of frontal armor on to the chassis.

Armorplate is about 500 pounds for a cubic foot. 6'x'6x3.15" is 6300 pounds. going down to the thinner plate is 4720 pounds

Problem was, weight added to weight, like you need heavier roadwheels, tracks, and suspension components for that couple extra tons. These were scaled up, while the final drives and transmission was not.

Now the Sherman was overbuilt, able to handle Jumbo levels of armor with little loss of reliability while using the same tracks(with duckbill) suspension and the only change in running gear, a different drive ratio, so was slightly slower
 
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