Someone just now hearing about the ratte again?
checks link
Yep. Vehicle who’s value was less than the paper they wasted writing it on.
Meth. Not even once.
Metal gear?
Good start but needs more legs and more nukes
More like Sniper Elite 3. The last level has you collapsing a secret base to destroy the unfinished prototype of this beast.
The Nazis had a thing for gigantic stuff - just look at the ways Speer wanted to transform Berlin…
Speer was the one who actually vetoed the Ratte supertank. Also, check out this entertaining bit from the discussion of the Maus supertank, of which a couple prototypes actually did get built:
“It had the same design flaw that made the Elefant unsuitable for close combat. In the end, the tank will inevitably have to wage a close combat since it operates in cooperation with the infantry. An intense debate started, and except for me, all of the present found the ‘Maus’ magnificent.” -Heinz Guderian
I liked Guderian and Speer both. They seemed sensible.
I liked Guderian and Speer both. They seemed sensible.
As sensible as war criminals can be
Bro I’m from the US. If I stopped supporting people just because they were war criminals, I’d never be able to vote or talk politics ever again.
(Also, Speer actually talks about this in his book – he said at his trial in Nuremberg, his lawyer wanted to bring up that he tried to kill Hitler as a factor in his defense. He said, no, by that point in Germany you could just walk up to any random person on the street and say “I’m working on a plan to kill Hitler” and if they had courage, they’d say “Thank God how can I help.” Basically, he was happy laying out some good things he did late in the war, but said yeah maybe I am a war criminal, I don’t want to weasel out of any of my earlier conduct. But, also, according to his Wikipedia page which I just read, he took pains to present himself as more blameless than he actually was, made specific revisions to how things were presented in his English-language autobiography as compared with the German one, and was in general definitely a POS of the highest order.)
Keep in mind, that’s Guderian telling you Guderian was smart, and everyone else was an idiot.
Next you’re gonna tell me Speer’s book where he explained that he had no idea about all that holocaust stuff, and just liked building fancy buildings and getting hang out with this bunch of snappy dressers, was a little bit self serving.
Warhammer 40k has entered the chat…
Now that’s a landship! I wonder what kind of fuel economy you’d get in that thing. Not great in the city probably.
The smaller edition which weighed 188 tons and which they did actually build a couple prototypes of, had a for-real problem that it was difficult to find a motor powerful enough to drive the thing but small enough to fit inside it. It wound up going 8 mph.
They probably would have gone with jet engines in the end.
Accordingly, some historians believe the P.1000 Ratte diagram to be either a hoax, or alternatively a speculative engineer’s sketch made for personal amusement.
I’d be inclined to believe this. There’s no way the Ratte was ever a serious concept that they believed they could actually build.
Depends who you mean by “they” in “they believed they could actually build,” I think.
Its arguable that a significant part of the defeat of the Germans on the Eastern Front was due to the Germans loving to over-engineer things. Especially tanks. And had an obsession with having big guns on them. To the point they could only go 5-10 mph and if anything broke on it it would have to go back to Germany because the design was so weird/complex. Cant remember if it was the Rat or not, but there was even a tank where if you wanted to shoot the cannon somebody had to get out and unbolt it from the hull because it was so big it made it unwieldy to drive.
Meanwhile Soviets just said “Haha T-34 factory go brrrr”, and was easy enough to make and use that there are stories of workers completing the tanks and driving them straight to the front. Illiterate farmer Vasily from the Urals could help weld on parts and then go take part in the fight.
It was probably a factor, but I don’t think a significant one. You could make the argument that if they made more mass-producible armor that they could have put more on the front, but that would have likely further strained the serious supply line issues they were facing. They also were hurting for industrial materials and fuel, so just building more wasn’t really in the cards.
It was, especially by mid-war a no win scenario for German tank production. They could mass produce only Panzer IIIs and run out of material and importantly crews, or they could swing heavy into making super tanks and not have enough of them to do anything of value.
Both were bad choices that couldn’t be fixed by engineers.
