The BMP-3 is an odd vehicle to choose. It's engine would be placed under the turret, rather like the French EBR Armoured Car. That was considered a maintenance nightmare - you had to remove the turret to work on the engine.
Alternative History Armoured Fighting Vehicles Part 3
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Didnt know that. Just judged the outer visual. Kind of sticking by original design proposition.
I was wondering how German tank development would have evolved without the outside influences of WW2 and the inside influences of Hitler's "mhh, big tank..." mindset till then end of the 40s.
Did the Reichswehr and more sane designers of Nazi Germany had any long future plans of tank designs after the Panzer 4?
Did the Reichswehr and more sane designers of Nazi Germany had any long future plans of tank designs after the Panzer 4?
That's a good question.
The German tanks weren't bad really. Panzer 1 wasn't a great tank but was very useful for finding out how to make and use tanks, and a pair of MGs in a mobile metal box is pretty effective against a lot of targets.
The Panzer 2 was a decent light tank, especially for when it was introduced, and the 3 and especiall the 4 were good main tanks
The Neubaufahrzeug was a bit of a mistake but overall they did OK to start with.
Even the Tiger wasn't bad as a heavy breakthrough tank, though the need for it was limited.
How about the vk30 developed as intended, without the bloating, as a medium panther which is fast, more or less as reliable but doesn't have tiresome interleaved wheels so can be maintained by humans.
With the 4 maxed out at the J ( unless the mythical K with sloped frontal armour is actually buildable, which is likely too much trouble to adapt production lines for even if possible) we would then get a Vk40 which is adapted from the now-proven Vk30, thus more reliable than the Panther, easier to make and maintain.
Then a Vk50 which would be a bit King tigerish, and slow but as an upsized Vk40 would at least have some working system, especially if some tiger technology is adapted for this.
I could see the light, normal and heavy Panthers (Vk 30, 40 and 50) being reasonably successful due to improved reliability over OTL.
I'd hope to see a jagd vk30, 40 and50 emerging - the jagdpanther is cool and looks good.
So basically slightly lower Tiger production, lighter Panther style tanks introduced a bit earlier and typically 10 tons lighter than OTL panther, simila to OTL panther and 10 or 12 ton lighter king tiger.
And the 150 ton Maus series - Maus, Maus SP 170mm, Maus assault with 280mm howitzer and extra frontal armour, and the Flak Maus with twin 128 turrets and a twin 20mm turret fore and aft like the Neubaufahrzeug layout. And the Ingenieurmaus which is the mobile repair shop (one per platoon). These of course reserved solely for SS and Luftwaffe panzer divisions.
They'd still lose because their logistics sucked their supply convoys were shot up and they were out-produced and out fought, but slightly larger number of more reliable tanks from 1943 on would give the allies in both east and west a few more problems.
Well the Vk30 project started because the Wehrmacht and the government realizing that the Soviets had the likes of the KV and T-34 tanks. Thus the more "Russian" design of the Daimler-Benz version. Or at least the Vk-30 project that would result to the Panther.
Without Barb, or not even WW2 to begin with. The Heer wouldn't get the knowledge from the war. Both experience and enemy vehicles being studied.
As far as I know the earlier 30 ton heavy tank project and it's designs started before the war.
So we could have had a Reichswehr Panzer 4 for a medium tank and something like the VK 30.01 (P) or VK 30.01 (H) for a heavy breakthrough tank.
Duo to smaller spending, more careful eyes towards Versailles restrictions and no war in 1939, I could see the Panzer 4 entering later into service, like 1939? With the "Panzer 5" following shortly after.
I imagine this depends quite greatly on the PoD, and starts getting very theoretical very quickly. If this is a PoD where Weimar Germany just happily chugs along and we never see such things as the invasion of Czechoslovakia, then that's going to have different repercussions compared to one where Adolf gets hit by a car or something on the eve of war with Poland. It seems to me that the best place to look here to figure out what Germany might be doing would be to not look at what Germany was doing, but what it's counterparts were doing next door in France - if Tank Encyclopedia is right, even as early as 1935, there were efforts inside Germany to construct tanks that might be effective against French designs. Without the war, that'd probably maintain being the current priority, which means that we need to look at French designs of the era to know where German tank designs might follow to try and counter said French designs; strictly theoretical, as neither side is actually on the battlefield to take any of the actual lessons of the war.
Considering that France was designing tanks well before the war started, albeit with the pressure of said impending conflict looming over them, we've got two good ideas as to where they probably thought tank designs were heading: the AMX 40...
quack
...which needs little introduction for most people in this thread (the Venn-diagram of who's in the World of Tanks thread and this one might as well be a circle), a design that was sort of inspired by the British Cruiser III and could be thought of as trying to take that concept and marry it with French industrial techniques, practices and general vehicular construction. Where WoT differs from the actual design, though, is that Tank Encyclopedia lists that the vehicle was actually meant to have a 160 hp engine, with a 220hp considered for replacement (considering that the tank was meant to have a planned top speed between 45-and-50km/h, nearly 30mph, at 10hp/a ton, that strikes me as a bit optimistic, so they'd have probably gone for the larger engine if this did enter production). Generally speaking, the AMX-40 is a tanky-tank, which is to say it's quite survivable for a vehicle of the era:
In regards to firepower, TE again proves fruitful:
Our second candidate of note is the DAC1 by Renault, a tank of which we know very little other than what it might've looked like:
This one didn't really get off the ground before the fall of France killed the project, it was one of the potential candidates to replace the S35 (of which basically everyone wanted a piece, including Somua themselves, who were eagerly heading towards the S40) and we don't know all that much about it other than that it had a rearward powerpack, had a planned weight of 16 tons and probably would've had a 47mm gun, sloping frontal armour plates and a high suspension run...and all that with the "traditional" three crew members that was so popular in French tank designs of the time.
Where this loops back around to Germany is that, without war to provide actual experience, they're probably still going to be measuring themselves up against French tank designs, with ideas cross-pollinating here and there (ie, taking inspiration from the Czech factories, and potentially still from Soviet designs depending on where things at Kama go), but without the big leap that the war allowed for. Personally, I'd expect tank designs to head along using the same kind of concepts that existed at the time. That's a large post in its own right, but Tank Encyclopedia basically sums it up:
Without war to actually put theories into practice and shake up the design room with actual experience in the field, that kind of split probably remains dominant inside German tank design theory for quite a while - you'd have your tanks for destroying tanks (the historical Panzer III) and then your tanks to support infantry and blow up bunkers and the like (the historical Panzer IV), a split sort of similar to the infantry-cruiser tank one...but also sort of different at the same time, as both were intended to be pretty similar in regards to speed. Combine that sort of doctrine with the desire to keep up with the metaphorical Joneses in France and their tank designs, and you'd probably get the general "trend" of tank designs that might've been developed: a tank-killer tank with heavier armour and a gun with better penetration, a fire support tank with a bigger gun for lobbing big HE shells, both travelling at similar speeds, and eventually with a heavy tank derived from the Durchbruchswagen to serve as a breakthrough vehicle and punch holes for the first two types to exploit. These would be designed to at least match the various French designs if possible, and ideally to outperform them. Where that goes starts to get harder to predict, but if I had to take a guess, you could potentially see something like a pseudo-Tiger derived from the DBW to serve as a sort of heavy tank role, and then the Panzer III and IV continuing down their respective paths; the Panzer III would probably get phased out still due to the general size of the chassis being a limiter, but its sequel might be more Panther-esque (though lacking certain lessons from fighting the Soviets and probably being a more "dialed down" conventional version), and the Panzer IV could instead evolve into a sort of AVRE-esque vehicle, perhaps being phased out for a chassis more suitable for that role as a big-shell lobber, or maybe even taking a bit of inspiration from the British and use something like a 20cm or even 38cm mortar to nail fixed positions, trading armour for speed enough to keep pace with whatever takes over the role of the Panzer III.
Of course, this is just one take on the concept - there's probably more ways for tank development in Germany to branch at that point in time and ways for it to be interpreted than there were actual tank designs in WW2-era Germany
In general prewar German design philosophy prioritised mobility over firepower with armor in third place. Always with a reserve margin , thus the relative success in upgrading III and IV compared to other nations prewar models. (In a way that is the same design philosophy as postwar Germany). I' d say without the pressure of war that same general approach will be taken with the next generation.
Beyond that there are various factors that may influence things. E.g. the Reichswehr tended to go for specialist equipment over general purpose designs - like many other armies at the time, but maybe more so given the constraints in actual procurement and the resulting willingness to experiment. Thus the light tank next to the medium infantry support role, next to the medium anti armour role and heavy breakthrough role. There were advocates for a greater standardisation though and with no war and a saner rearmament at slower speed and lower budget they might prevail earlier than otl. So it is possible that the next generation is a single design in the 20-30t range, maybe initially with different variants for different roles. Especially with the way III and IV otl turned out much closer in spec's than initial requirements demanded as an example. Then again maybe with lower overall numbers the economies of scale may not get enough traction and we still get 2-4 parallel tanks in the next generation.
For various individual design features there are also variable possibilities, most notably the suspension: The army initially favoured normal torsion bars, but the industry otl opposed it and ultimately only the III was after some delays equipped with it. Krupp favoured leaf spring suspension, as they had plenty of experience with it from their railway business. Some of the other manufacturers and a lead designer at the Waffenprüfamt really pushed the interleaved design, which was already proven with the halftracks and iirc Rheinmetall experimented with hydraulic suspension in the early 30s. So who wins? Limited procurement funds might help Krupps case, inertia and the actual advantages within 30s tech might favour the interleaved designs, but with less pressure the army might stand firmer on its opinion with torsion bars.
Similar discussions would happen over other parts, e.g. the gun. OTL the III was originally equipped with the 3,7cm gun despite knowing its usefulness was approaching the end, but it was already developed and cheap. Probably a factor in atl decisions as well. A successor certainly would have a heavier gun, but would that mean a 5cm one as was otl put into development? Or do timing and circumstances mean they go straight for a longish 7,5? And if so, does that make the infantry support gun unnecessary or does doctrine lead to an infantry support tank with e.g. a short 10.5cm gun?
So there are a lot of possibilities. My gut says that with III and IV turning out more or less as otl (already an assumption) a hypothetical V would likely be a bit below 30t, try out the interleaved roadwheels against the previously used suspensions, increase protection to fill the heavy role while maintaining comparable mobility and initially be planned in variants with a long 5cm and short 7,5cm, but with an eye towards upgunning both in the medium term. Depending on timing that might happen before serial production even starts.
OTOH depending on the exact POD and development that next tank could also be completely different. For example Germany might decide it first needs a tank to bull frontally through fortifications and go for a heavy bunker busting design next. Or a jump in AT gun size ( e.g. the relevation of the T34) might persuade them that a sufficiently mobile tank can't be fully armoured against coming developments and thus any protection against guns above 20/40mm is unnecessary, a fast tank with large gun is the way to go.
Be careful because if you add too much weight to a BMP hull, it won't float anymore.
This is basically an Object 685 from War Thunder.
The BMP-3 has its engine at the rear of the hull. It interferes with the dismounts, but wouldn't be a problem for a larger turret in the middle of the hull.
So something like a Panzer III/IV?
So basically I can imagine a Panzer III/IV-VK 30.01 fusion with tank tracks that look like the Panther's and the 7.5 cm KwK 40 of a Panzer IV H after the roles of infantry support and break through tanks are combined?
Pretty sure operational range was over armor as well.
Hitler didn't force interleaved wheels on the German engineers. It was their idea. While the interleaving might be abandoned in a more prolonged development process, overlapping wheels like were used for the King Tiger are still pretty likely, and dare I say it, probably a good idea since they significantly increase ground pressure, improve obstacle coping ability, and reduce wheel removal down to a manageable amount. Plus, the wheel design consumed less rubber, which is a major strategic resource.
The Germans wanted to introduce a torsion bar suspension for the Panzer IV, but due to production demands they dropped the idea. In an ATTL where there is no major war, they'd probably go all in and use it.
I think a Panzer IV with a King Tiger-style overlapping (not interleaved) large wheel & torsion bar suspension is quite likely if there's a longer development period.
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There's definitely advantages to the concept. You've listed quite a few, but to add onto the list, there's also this one, which is more apparent on the Panther than it is on the Tiger II...
...in that the road wheels basically cover the side of the hull. The reason for why this is important is written right above them in the existence of the tank's side skirts. When the Soviets pushed into Poland from the east, they actually lost a fair few tanks to Polish anti-tank rifles, particularly the Model 35 (you can read about that particular weapon here), but the critical part there is that examining captured pieces helped push the development of the PTRD-41, a superb Soviet anti-tank rifle. Cheap and easy to produce (so much so that about 450k of them were made, and that's without counting the units made of its sibling, the PTRS-41 which was a semi-automatic anti-tank rifle), that thing was a monster of a gun and could blow through 30mm of steel at five hundred meters. That might not seem like much, til you see images like this coming out of the early days of Barbarossa:
That's an early Panzer III with a hole in the front (many of the earlier production models like the E through to the H only had 30mm frontal plates) of its armor, which should be one of the most well protected points on the tank - although the hole isn't very large, that shot could still kill or injure a crewman, and the terror effect of suddenly seeing daylight inside your metal box is definitely triggered. They learnt that particular lesson very quickly (the J upgraded the front plate to 50mm and future versions had stand off plates that, even if penetrated, would cause the bullet to tumble and malform, preventing penetration), and we start to see their tanks upgraded one after the next with additional armour on the front, and the rest in that regards is history.
But the sides of tanks remained enormously vulnerable, and it's at that point that we see the arrival of the schurzen - the armored skirts that make tanks start to look like this:
Protecting the sides of a tank from anti-tank rifle fire was easier said than done, but a critical task; hits to the side of the tank there could range from hitting the front side where the driver was, the side of the turret where the gunner or commander might be, all the way to fuel tanks and the engine bay, any one of which is a serious problem. Armored skirts were a very effective solution for the time - much as the stand off plates could do, the armored skirt was extra armour to either defeat anti-tank rifle fire from a long distance outright, or to cause a closer round that could penetrate the plate to tumble and lose penetration before hitting the side of the tank and thus be rendered ineffective. For the weight, this is a pretty damned effective solution, and stops camouflaged teams of soldiers from blowing holes into the side of your vehicles.
Where this leads back to interleaved road wheels, then, is that they actually help to protect the sides of the tank. Against actual cannon fire it isn't going to be any help whatsoever, but against anti-tank rifles and similar weapons (and designers of vehicles model their vehicles for what they're facing now, not necessarily for what they might be facing when the thing rolls off the lines), it can be that critical difference - even though they're meant for mobility, a road wheel is still a hefty piece of steel plate to punch through. Extending armored skirts all the way to the bottom invites the risk of maintenance issues (dirt and mud can get stuck behind the skirts and thus into the suspension, impacting mobility) or time consumption (you can remove the plates but every second counts when it comes to taking them off or putting them back on), but if you already want to put interleaved road wheels on for reasons of ground pressure and the like, then this is an added bonus on top. Combined with smaller skirts above to protect the area above the suspension, the interleaved road wheels can effectively render the otherwise vulnerable sides of the tank immune to anti-tank rifle fire, as a gunner would need to either shoot through the skirts, or through what is basically an interlocking plate-wall of wheels stacked in front of one another.
If you're bored, you can actually see this effect in action in War Thunder, where its WW2 tanks have realistic armour layouts and collision meshes. Although that game doesn't have anti-tank rifles, there are various autocannons around where this does show - the 37mm 61-K used on various Soviet SPAA units, for example, gets up to some 68mm of penetration at 100 meters, or a more practical 56mm at 500 meters; the Panther D's side plate is only 40mm strong, so if you were hit in an ambush, that should be a clean penetration into the crew compartment...but if you hit the road wheels, which are 20mm thick on their own and another 20mm in the interleaves, then what you're effectively facing is an 80mm plate of steel that can and will stop that shot, giving you precious time to react. The same logic goes for anti-tank rifles.. It might not be a good enough reason to take interleaved road wheels on their own, but it does add a factor to the logic as to why you might want to use them
Well, the reason I was thinking more about the Tiger II is because the Tiger II's road wheels weren't in a dovetail arrangement where you would have to remove massive amounts of road wheels to get to a single one in the back. Instead there were only 2 wheel layers, so you'd only need to remove two wheels max to service one further in. Which removes a lot of the maintenance headache present with the Panther and Tiger I's schachtelaufwerk arrangement pictured below, while retaining the other advantages.
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OTL, Hitler's impact on German tank design was primarily the creation of any tank beyond 70t (Maus, E-100, Jagdtiger) plus heavy TDs( Jagdpanther to some degree, Elefant) and the uparmoring of the Panther and Tiger II, the premature production of Tiger (P) and Panther II's front armor . Everything else had been asked for or approved by German officers or procurement offices.
On the early side, Pz I, II, III and IV either were ordered as successors to a given concept (Pz III and IV being successors to the Leichttraktor and Grosstraktor to some degree) or followed preliminary studies done in 1930-32, so all of these were likely to exist in the event of a continued Weimar/non-Nazi government. Kniepkamp, the most instrumental engineer in the (automotive) design of German tanks of the day, was already in position since 1926 so the automotive trends in particular would remain.
Basically, the two key differences to OTL would be that some actors wouldn't enter the field of tank design, or would only do so later than OTL (namely Porsche), leaving mostly the main historical companies of Daimler-Benz, MAN, Adlerwerke and Krupp; and that the performance creep may be slower than OTL with less urgency and less funding to do too many protos at once or in a short period.
For the latter part, that's dependent on how big of an arms race there is in this new timeframe. If we follow OTL trends up to WW2, the biggest driver of weight, armor and firepower would be France due to the G1 program which had already morphed to a pseudo Sherman by 1939. The USSR was too difficult to get intel on to be a big driver of tank development, though the increase in armor and firepower on their side may be slowed down if the Germans don't field AT weapons in Spain and aren't as threatening. The UK would drive weight up, but given their lack of interest in the 6pdr until very late and the fact their peacetime tanks wouldn't have been too heavily armored, they wouldn't have changed that much.
Overall, it is likely the trends followed with the VK 20. and 23. series would be enough for now, but if the French follow their plans the Germans will start increasing firepower quickly after 1942.
On the early side, Pz I, II, III and IV either were ordered as successors to a given concept (Pz III and IV being successors to the Leichttraktor and Grosstraktor to some degree) or followed preliminary studies done in 1930-32, so all of these were likely to exist in the event of a continued Weimar/non-Nazi government. Kniepkamp, the most instrumental engineer in the (automotive) design of German tanks of the day, was already in position since 1926 so the automotive trends in particular would remain.
Basically, the two key differences to OTL would be that some actors wouldn't enter the field of tank design, or would only do so later than OTL (namely Porsche), leaving mostly the main historical companies of Daimler-Benz, MAN, Adlerwerke and Krupp; and that the performance creep may be slower than OTL with less urgency and less funding to do too many protos at once or in a short period.
For the latter part, that's dependent on how big of an arms race there is in this new timeframe. If we follow OTL trends up to WW2, the biggest driver of weight, armor and firepower would be France due to the G1 program which had already morphed to a pseudo Sherman by 1939. The USSR was too difficult to get intel on to be a big driver of tank development, though the increase in armor and firepower on their side may be slowed down if the Germans don't field AT weapons in Spain and aren't as threatening. The UK would drive weight up, but given their lack of interest in the 6pdr until very late and the fact their peacetime tanks wouldn't have been too heavily armored, they wouldn't have changed that much.
Overall, it is likely the trends followed with the VK 20. and 23. series would be enough for now, but if the French follow their plans the Germans will start increasing firepower quickly after 1942.
Yeah Hitler's interest in heavy tanks started with the Tiger and was a response to the French Char and British Matilda but after the Germans encountered the KV-1 a heavy tank race commenced between the Germans and the Russians and Hitler just became obsessed with having the biggest tank with the biggest gun.
It's like he was trying to compensate for something.
It's worth noting that it was Guderian who requested big gun tanks, when he talked to the Panzer Commission about what would be needed in new tank designs. I'm skeptical that Hitler was the source of the big gun mania of late German tanks.
Yes, the long 75s (including L70) and the long 88 were requested by the Army proper.
And frankly, hot take here, I don't think having a big gun was a bad thing. The problem was more the overemphasis on armor.
But Hitler did become obsessed with big tanks after Kursk.
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