m1b@sgfb.ssd.ray.com (M. Joseph Barone) (06/05/90)
From: m1b@sgfb.ssd.ray.com (M. Joseph Barone) In article <16013@cbnews.ATT.COM> milano!fugate@buckaroo.sw.mcc.com (Bryan Fugate) writes: >One feature in particular made the Soviet tanks outstanding compared >to the Germans; they burned diesel fuel instead of gasoline. It is >hard today to understand why the Germans made this fundamentally bad >decision since they themselves had invented the technology. Along the same lines, why did the Germans use interleaved road wheels on the Panthers and Tigers? The maintenance on them must have been horrendous. I would think that battlefield repairs on the inside wheels would not have been possible, suggesting that they would have had to abandon these expensive pieces of hardware. What advantage did interleaved road wheels have? [mod.note: The one I hear most often cited is that the interleaved technique was supposed to be better at distributing the weight across the tracks, lowering the stress on each component. The great weight of the Panther and Tigers supposedly made this necessary. - Bill ] -- Joe Barone --------------------> m1b@rayssdb.ssd.ray.com {gatech, decuac, sun, necntc, ukma, uiucdcs}!rayssdb!m1b Never draw what you can copy, never copy what you can trace, and never trace what you can cut and paste.