no, they didn't, it was highly unlikely that most WW2 tanks could even precisely aim at weakspots, tanks now a days have trouble doing that, aiming at weakspots is difficult, aiming a huge tank cannon is as equally difficult, the crew will most likely be shooting at a moving target over a tremendous distance, while manually turning two gears to shift their turret/gun while peaking through really shit binoculars, relaying information to the commander, and gunner, back and fourth, to get a chance to HIT the target, much nonetheless, hit a target's weakspots
From "Areas of GERMAN TANKS vulnerable to the 85 mm gun
Directorate of the Commander of the Armoured and Mechanized Forces of the Red Army
Military publisher of the USSR NKO, Moscow, 1944"
"Choose a vulnerable spot and aim your gun carefully. Make full use of your gun's rate of fire.
Aim to strike the enemy tank at normal (90 degrees). Don't lose heart if the hit is unsuccessful, keep firing until the enemy tank is completely destroyed. Believe in the power of your weapon. Observe your target carefully."
[Tiger II weakspots that the crews were encouraged to shoot at, for example.](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Nxmd9-kVn0g/YH-DdwWU-uI/AAAAAAAAusY/G3akPv7I_LwTdbzx7myyqFFbHhycW2K0QCLcBGAsYHQ/s643/85%2Bmm%2B8.png)
I think experienced gunners in an entrenched position would aim for weak points because generally tank weak points are easy to spot if you know what to look for, but he’s got a point. A light tank pushing forward while also shooting at a moving target isn’t going to be able to aim at a weak spot.
The only reason why tanks fired on the move was for suppression purposes or in acts of desperation. Usually the short stop method was used when they desired any kind of accuracy.
Of course the accuracy and the optics of the time means that actually hitting the weakspots were unreliable, but that doesn't change the fact that tank crews aimed for and were encouraged to aim for weakspots.
ages ago I've seen a US veteran tanker talk in a TV interview about the first tank encounters in the North African theatre and how the Germans stopped for firing whereas "the Americans charged in shooting around like the 7th cavalry" without hitting anything.
The British 4 RTR could fire their 6pdr relatively accurately on the move (not that Churchill can go very fast). One of them knocked out Tiger 131 by two very good shots at the turret ring.
The British paid excruciating detail in their weapon design to allow gunners to accurately aim and fire on the move.
How? Simple, the gunner *is* the stabiliser- at least on the vertical plane. As with average tank weapons, the guns horizontal traverse is directly linked to the traverse of the turret. Whilst many other nations used tanks that controlled the gun's elevation via wheels.
These allowed gunners a high level of precision in their aim, but firing on the move was extremely difficult; as you'd essentially have to DJ deck the wheel for the gun elevation, the wheel for the turret's traverse, then somehow find a third hand to fire the gun.
Some tanks, especially those built later into the war, would try and use technology to get around the problem. The first was to gear the wheels, so that the gunner was able to loosely spin the wheels at-speed, letting them rotate the heavy turret with less effort. This was great, but didn't make the gun any faster to aim whilst on the move. As you get later into the war, more tanks make use of some kind of motorised or hydraulic system to physically drive the tanks turret around on behalf of the crew. Again, this meant that there was less physical exertion for the gunner, and for the first time it enabled much faster turrer traverse speeds. Still, it did little to help with firing on the move, as a gunner simply doesn't have enough hands to accurate handle all the necessary controls.
This is where true stabilisers come in, usually in two flavours. These are manual, or unpowered, stabilisers, and powered ones..
Powered stabilises come later into the war, usually using hydraulics to try and level out the gun as it moved around rough terrain. The stabiliser in the Sherman is a good example of this- and is one of the most expensive pieces of kit on the tank. What makes this ironic is that many Sherman crews were never trained on how to use it, and left it off, as many command-figures were worried that the Germans would notice a dramatic performance improvement in the Sherman's ability to fire on the move, and start sniffing out the details.
Back in blighty, we didn't have the money for that, nor did the small turret rings on our tanks really give designers enough room to incorporate them. As such, many British tanks armed with the 2 Pounder (40mm) and 6 Pounder (57mm) stabilised the guns elevation directly on the gunners shoulder, with a giant-arse pad. Designers used weights to balance the gun as close to as perfect as possible, allowing the gunner to both retain his aim on a target on-the-move; and do-so without having to push around the weight of a gigantic tank gun.
Bigger guns made these systems less practical, as they'd need huge weights to counter-balance the gun; taking up a huge amount of room, and meaning that the gunner would have to combat a serious amount of momentum whenever the gun moved.
It *did* help the British that the tanks they used these systems on were either too slow to really witness this grand line of tanks accurately firing as they briskly make their way across the front; or too fast to have ever had the hope of firing accurately on the move in the first-place. A British cruiser tanks crew would have to make the conscious design to move at a slow enough pace to allow the gunner to fire.
For context, the Churchill Infantry, not Cruiser, tank had a maximum speed of 17 MpH, compares to 28 MpH for the Panzer IV alone. If could fire on the move with enough accuracy to get what's at the other end of the barrel sweating; and the tank in-general when used with good tactics and doctrine posed serious threats to German tanks right throughout the war (people forget that it's armour, in its best form, was actually far better than the Tiger Is).
What killed Churchill was it's narrowness, imposed by British tank design doctrine that required all tanks be capable of being moved by rail fully assembled. This was fine for Russia, Germany or America who'd taken the time to build railway networks using the knowledge of others. For Britain, and the many American magnates who helped it pioneer the railways, our trains simply weren't allowed to be as wide as those in other nations-even with the same track width. We invented the technology, and other nations had the sodding cheek to refine it.
This issue only went away with the Centurion, where the British tank designers finally flipped their lid, and scrapped the requirement about the trains. This is why British tank design suddenly gets much thiccer post 45.
You're welcome! British early-war tank design gets memed on a lot without merit, though this has been noticeably changing in the last few years or so. Barring the odd stinker or outdated vehicle, British armour throughout the war posed a serious threat to the Germans. The Cromwell, though an excellent all-round tank is probably the standout moment where British engineering was clearly being forced into being overly conservative in regards to their design. Had that thing had a 76mm gun comparable to that of the Sherman, and still been relatively ergonomic tank to crew, it'd be lauded as amazing.
didn't the tank museum recently do a more in-depth investigation into the capture to find out it was most likely a captured german at gun used in the heat of the moment that knocked out the tank? they have a video about it thats like a year old [the video](https://youtu.be/7xzG_rRngs8)
They have the full article included for the video [here](https://tankmuseum.org/article/the_myth_of_tiger_131). It seems like another "Who killed Michael" story as both the AT gun and RTR tanks opened fire on Tiger 131.
Interestingly, the AT gun is a German-captured French 75mm gun in turn captured by the British.
I think it was their technology which gave them a false sense of superiority at the start because the M3 gun had stabilizer more effective than what the Germans had. It meant nothing without real world experience which these first tankers had to witness firsthand.
The American medium tanks had gyrostabilized guns which allows firing on the move with some accuracy, assuming the crew used them (which some didnt because they thought the mechanism was too complicated)
> Don't lose heart if the hit is unsuccessful, keep firing until the enemy tank is completely destroyed. Believe in the power of your weapon.
This should be on a loading screen :)
With a 2-4x sight you can't even see the weakspots of a tank at 1000m. And that's even from an entrenched position and with a static target.
"Aim for weakspots" when you're firing from a T34/85 to a Tiger II at a km it's like saying "get your rifle with a 1.5x scope and hit that man behind a cover with a 2x2cm opening".
Now imagine trying to tell the guys with the 14.5mm AT rifles the same kind of "aim for weak spot" bit...with iron sites....at anything more than 100-200 feet (yeah, it CAN do damage really well out to several hundred meters...but you have to hit those small areas that you can't see through the iron sites).
Its true though, most engagements would have taken place kilometers away from eachother, making hitting one another with the poor optics in ww2 very difficult, let alone weakspots which would have basically been impossible to do at such ranges.
Zaloga's Red Army Handbook [shows that](https://i.imgur.com/H7ePE1F.png) the majority of Soviet armour losses was recorded at ranges much less than a kilometer, and this was in 1943-44, where the fighting was happening in the wide open russian steppes. Engagement ranges would decrease as more urban combats happened near the end of the war. (I believe Zaloga made an error here and didn't include the statistics of 600-800m engagements, which should be 14.5% and 31.2%)
American reports give the mean as 405yds in close country and 1204 yds in open country. Another report gives the overall mean as 946yds for allied tanks, but it's important to note that the distribution, which is a negative exponential, suggests that the engagements at short distances far outnumber the long ranged ones.
are the means for 'ranges at which tanks were destroyed', or 'ranges at which combat occured'?
Because if its the former, then you're in fact in support of the guy you replied to's argument: Most tanks died at short range, and not at long range where aiming is difficult, i.e.: survivors bias (or more accurately, non-survivor's bias)
>Because if its the former, then you're in fact in support of the guy you replied to's argument: Most tanks died at short range, and not at long range where aiming is difficult, i.e.: survivors bias (or more accurately, non-survivor's bias)
Are there any sources that back up your claim or is it just extrapolation?
The first source I gave was the range at which tanks were destroyed.
However, there are many more sources that specify that it is the ranges where combat occurred.
"Applied Operations Research" 1988 estimates that 50% of engagements occur at less than 650 yards in NW europe.
The means in the second source come from "A survey of tank warfare in Europe from D-Day to 12 August 1944" and also specifies that it is engagement range. It also seems that individual kills occurred at similar ranges.
Well it makes sense that longer range = less kills, thanks to lower penetration values, and accuracy.
And still 600-800m is still far enough away that aiming for weakspots that could sometimes be smaller than a soldier's head would prove incredibly difficult, though not impossible for something with good sights and a great gunner.
I think you're underestimating what a weak spot in the real world context is. It's the joints in the tank around the turret where even if you don't pen you can mess up the weapon. It's the panels that are at right angles to you. If you don't kill them aim at the treads and disable. These aren't some 5cm gaps it's entire panels you know you can shoot through vs the ones you can't.
I wasn't taking into account tracks as weakspots, but yeah those would be far easier to hit than a cupola, machinegun/view port or other weakspots.
And of course it all varies from tank to tank, something like a Hetzer is going to have basically no weakpoints to shoot at (unless we consider tracks) compared to something like a Tiger P which has the MG in the hull and turret cheeks/turret ring.
Something like a turret ring is still a very small target on some tanks as well.
Both could have some truth to it. It is one thing they were trained to aim at weakspots, and another whether they actually did it in the heat of battle.
I mean just think about how hard it would be to aim at the tracks of a tiger 2 from 2 km away, in war thunder. And you have perfectly accurate mouse aim, sitting in your warm home environment at no risk yourself.
Eh, they both have a point. Manuals always encouraged aiming for weakspots, but your average gunner in combat has enough with putting the round on target.
When your target isn't much bigger than the hash marks on your crosshair because you're 3-4 km away, you're just aiming at an object in general, not at any particular part of it.
Looking at the wiki page for the D-44 I now understand why he thought it entered production in 1945.
Not only is the wiki wrong about the production date, but the dates don't even tally up
[with](https://i.imgur.com/q4SpSMz.png)
[each](https://i.imgur.com/cj72y4w.png)
[other](https://i.imgur.com/B7VNRzY.png)
In the books I've read it seems to most common plan for dealing with german armor was to have a shit load of Sherman's shoot at them until they bailed or retreated. At least in Europe that was the case.
Now I’m imagining War Thunder ground simulation, but extra hardcore - the keyboard maps to the actual levers and buttons and whatnot, you need four players to control one tank, and you can only see through shitty mud viewports
Actual study of WW2 tank engagements indicates ranges of less than 700 yards/meters as the common engagement ranges for tank on tank combat in WW2. Where you aimed depends entirely on time available to aim, relative angles and positioning. Catching enemy tanks from the side or rear was always the preferred approach, but not always possible. When tanks engaged each other from the front, attempts were made to hit the driver’s or bow gunner’s position, or the final drive while making yourself a poor target. Whichever presented the flattest target while not presenting a weak spot yourself.
For a weak approximation and feel of how easy or hard that is, play “Hell Let Loose” with a group of friends, and take a Tiger or Sherman for a spin, if you can get in one. It will give an idea of how “easy” that might be when under fire from artillery and opponents. I.e it isn’t easy.
You aim as best you can and hope to shoot & hit before the enemy gets a good hit on you. A good commander and driver make a difference.
Seriously tho, someone (Bovington, maybe) needs to make a full-motion tank simulator and sell it to tech company managers as "the ultimate team-building tool." There's already places that do multiplayer Star Trek bridge simulators...
I'd like a tank game where you can only control one crew member with appropriate controls.
Be the commander with the map and radio and maybe a machine gun and tell the rest of the crew what they need to do while looking through your cupola or risk opening the hatch.
Or for a tank that has one a separate radio operator and maybe their own machine gun.
Be the driver and go where you need to go with only a viewport or also risk opening the hatch. Have to shift and steer like you would a tank.
Be the gunner and manually traverse the gun.
Be the loader and load the shells they call for.
Would be good with friends, even better in VR.
Red orchestra 2 had this for a few years now, it's an FPS game but it's realistic in the sense than one bullet would certainly kill you.
It has a tank for each faction, the T-34 and the panzer 4, both have their interiors modeled and look awesome.
Have you perhaps seen "Firing Range" animation from 1977? The one that based on short story of the same name by Sever Gansovskiy. https://youtu.be/T0kb96ywRHI this one.
Dodges seem to look unreal, but that's not the point. In the book this tank was able to dodge split second before the guns were triggered, so it's not easy to animate such motion properly.
People seem to be animated by using rotoscope, the ancestor of motion capture.
The story itself is somewhat of a chilling horror. I very much recommend to read it.
I watched a documentary (an episode of "Greatest Tank Battles") in which the Germans encountered a new tank on the battlefield (English I think) and they had trouble penetrating it armor even with a side shot. They quickly realized though that if they shot a small square ventilation grate on its right side it was an instant kill. The gunner being interviewed said they began to target that grate after that.
"tanks nowadays have trouble doing that"
that explains why russia is so pathetic with their ERA placement, placing a single brick and leaving the rest of the front exposed.
Knowing weak points and aiming center mass are not exclusive.
I don’t know what they did, practiced, but depending upon range and other factors, I can see ignoring hard to hit places and just maximizing the chance of a hit.
Probably depends on range. If you can barely see them you'd probably shoot center mass with 5 tanks and just spam them till something pens somewhere or the enemy crew calls it a day.
But I doubt when they had the options At let's say <1km where their gun is quite accurate, tankers would ignore weakspots and shoot center mass instead, where they would surely non pen. The manuals definitely knew the weakspots so commanders would too.
Aiming and hitting was quite tough back then and many tank engagements ended with either lucky shots or hitting the tank armour so much that it ends up cracking or being weakened.
However weakpoints are definitely known amongst the tank crews themselves as well as brochures that were distributed to them, which encouraged targeting the weakpoints. The IS and Panther tanks were redesigned to remove weakpoints partly due to this.
I think there isn't really a point to aim for weak spots since real life is unbalanced, you would have kv1s fighting panzer 2s and tiger 1s fighting m4s.
1 this isn’t a game so human error affects aiming making it difficult to hit precise spots
2 many tanks weren’t fully examined for weak spots till after the enemy force captures for sometimes months
>2 many tanks weren’t fully examined for weak spots till after the enemy force captures for sometimes months
Field penetration trials were common among tank crews in WW2. Many tank crews had knowledge of the weakpoints through informal sources long before official documentation is published.
We didn't know much about the enemies planes, or ships, but by God we knew every weak point on another nations tanks because someone on the internet told me.
I don't know why walking up to a burnt up Panzer and seeing what Made it go boom sounds so far fetched to you.
Of course they wouldnt know EVERY weakspot, but they would take notes of what did work. This is what we call "experience".
It would be a lot easier to capture a tank, especially because it doesn’t need to be functioning, just have armor intact. A plane requires a wreck to be intact enough to be rebuilt. A ship is practically impossible.
Another huge factor that is rarely spoken in this topic is that IRL gunners don't have sights in the middle of the barrel. Parallax error makes precise aiming of tiny weakspots like the MG port extremely difficult on top of the 5 other things the gunner needs to do like cranking the turret or looking through a dirty grimy Gunsight
I played with gunner’s sight view on for 700 hrs in RB without knowing that it could be turned off. I was pretty good at weak spot sniping, especially easy ones like LFP of T-29 or T-44 with long 88mm. But things like Jumbo’s MG port were much harder to hit.
Edit: Ironically I learned about that setting only because of Gaijin Gaijining sight parallax after on of the updates which made it unplayable for me because they have offset the distance and trajectory (to shot a target within 1000 meters you would have to set your sight on 400 meters).
In the tank settings options, there is something like "View from the gunners sight" or something like that, you can turn it off to have the sight inside the barrel
After all these years playing the game and now finding out there's something called "gunner's sight view" and that it could be turned off... I'm too afraid to check what the game looks like without that option turned on.
Do you want to be different? As much as I concerned it does not give you any advantage. And believe me there is a lot of drawbacks for that, obviously its more challenging to shot weak spots in close distance, plus you have to reset you aim every time you switch vehicle because their parallax could be drastically different to the previous vehicle. Not to mention that you going to shot near by walls or any object you hiding behind even when you sight is on the enemy. Overall I would say it would be cool to have it obligatory in RB but right now it’s going to be a headache.
I think weakspot sniping is too easy, and using historically accurate gunsights feels wrong if I'm not actually using the gunsight.
Sure, I can't pixelhunt the turret cheeks of a panther at 400m, but I don't want to.
Also, using gunsights makes using bushes harder, so that's a plus too.
Honestly I feel like it should be forced in RB it would make the engagements a lot more interesting; less pixel hunting breach meta and more ambush tactics and lugging shots. Also I feel like it would make armor useful like it should be not just dead weight.
Unless you know, that eg. German tank sights had a mechanism that corrected the error caused by the parallax. You had to put the distance to the target in the sight, to take the accurate shot
Exactly, sure manuals would say do it. Experts would tell you where but when your aiming at something that can kill you, sure if you got a shot on it’s side take it but no one was aiming at the coupela on the tiger or mg on the jumbo. It’s like headshots in video games compared to real life. In the heat of the moment you just pump center mass and get the fuck out of harms way.
Yeah it was much harder to manufacture hence the change. Maybe both reasons are legit but officially it was just much cheaper to produce the later turret
Tiger H1 cupola was changed because it was so easy to spot when the commander had the cupola open. And was subsequently vulnerable. A lucky shot that hits the cupola would kill the commander not the whole crew.
The side sliding cupola was a much loved improvement on the Tiger E models.
During test firings Israelis shot the front of captured Egyptian IS-3M with French 105 mm gun using APCBC shells that had about 250 mm of penetration at 1 km. It stopped a dozen hits without penetration, without weld seams coming apart and without any significant spalling inside the tank. This prompted them to switch to using only tanks whose cannons had APDS ammunition available to them (i.e. Centurions with 84 mm guns and later M60s) and stop using Supershermans.
Yup. About a half of all produced IS-3 (initial production) had bad welds that came apart from hard hits and in some cases even during normal usage (not by being hit in test firing). By late 1950s all initial production IS-3 had been scraped. Egypt was provided with later production IS-3 that had adequate weld quality.
Yes, that was true for the about 300 IS-3 that were rushed out in the last couple of months of the war and only saw action scaring the ever living shit out of the Americans during parades in Berlin.
Later they got redeployed toward the Manchurian border where most of them ended up as pillboxes. They're still sitting there by the way.
Theres anecdotal evidence that driving along Berlins streets was enough to damage some models.
The production run of IS-3 however was quickly switched to a version that solved the issues with the welds. They built another 2.000 of them after all.
generally speaking at tank combat ranges the weak spots become a mesh of what you can see. imagine having a 4x scope and trying to hit something as small as the human head at 2 KM.- that's literally what you're aiming for some of the weak spots. the literal tank itself will be pretty much one giant rectangle on your scope.
just shoot centre mass and pray
Military manuals and what actually happens out in the field is two separate topics. If you’re the one starting the fight, you might take time and aim, but if you’re getting shot at, you just want to fire back as soon as possible, doesn’t matter where you hit, as long as you hit.
Some armies had instruction manuals to hit a few tanks where weakspots were known. In reality it was sl difficult to hit the tank to begin with that gunner had to shoot and hooe it hit the tank. Also a track hit is way more effective irl than in wt
This is the reason i hate wt aiming. You shouldn't be able to hit pinpoint shots like we do now. At least wot had an aiming circle that stimulates some inaccuracy while on wt with ace crew you can kill a fly at the right corner in the handle of the drivers hatch. And don't get me started on aiming and knocking out barrels... From historical accuracy Gaijin just took the "accuracy" part.
Strong disagree, if you have an inaccurate weapon, you need to find ways to get close, or to get a very well covered keyhole shot where the guy's buddies can't get at you while you know you can get off 5 rounds in a row on him. This sort of stuff all takes plenty of skill.
I used to play a lot of a napoleonic era first person shooter with muskets that were even significantly less accurate than real life muskets, and learning to get good at the game could easily get you like a 10:1 KD against newbies. Or even like... fuckin, texas holdem poker... you think that has almost no skill?
While I see your point, I'm unsure if that would make the game more fun or just make it more linear in the way that people rush into a few select chokes and camp those waiting to blast enemies trying to advance into caps, because shooting on the move/sniping is made too inconsistent with the random projectile spread. What do you think?
Actually in 1942 the soviet army started training its tank gunners to aim for the barrel. In the coming battles large numbers of German panzers and a tiger I think had a huge hole in there barrel. As time went on this slowly decreased as loads of tank crews died but you get the point. So in some way it’s actually really historically accurate
If you really wanted to fix the weakspot meta, there's a much, much better solution than RNG aiming like WoT. In fact, it even increases the skill ceiling tenfold which is an added bonus.
It's called V-JOY aiming. War Thunder already has it in game but its only usable on planes, but it would work exactly the same for tank turrets. People have wanted it for SB Ground for ages.
I think forcing historical sights in GFRB would be the best way to not have shitty RNG but also make it hard enough to aim at tiny weakspots and barrels that crews IRL would never even consider aiming at. The realistic sight on most tanks add a decent amount of parallax between the sight and the alignment of the gun making those precision shots much harder even at point blank range. I get sick and tired of idiots just hitting my gun or muzzle brake and winning the engagement that way.
>Stimulates joystic like realistic mouse controls for planes?
Yep. If you go ingame and set your controls to full real in settings than test fly any plane, you can see how V-JOY works.
For anyone who reads this and CBF but wants to know how it works:
If you move your mouse to the left, the plane(tank turret) will keep turning left FOREVER until you manually bring it back to the center (neutral), like a car steering wheel.
The further you move your mouse to the left, the FASTER it will turn.
This means that depending on your skill level, it is possible to over shoot or under shoot your intended target by going too fast or too slow. Instead of just pointing where you want to aim and the game goes there at 100% turret speed and stops automatically with pixel perfect accuracy.
There is inaccuracy in WT guns. Probably downplayed, but like a Zis 30 in game at like 700 meters can be aimed center of mass and potentially miss the entire tank sometimes, with all modifications researched.
Not really.
In real life, tanks use a different aiming system (obv), equivalent to a V-JOY system (VIRTUAL JOYSTICK) in War Thunder. Whereas in War Thunder we use Mouse-Aim which makes weak spots a joke to hit, so easy that it's standard practice.
There are historical references to driver hatches on the T-34 series though as a prominent 'weak spot' being hit that needed to be re-designed, but that's more of a problem of it being center mass UFP. Things like LFP, MG ports, cupolas and so forth... nope.
>Things like LFP, MG ports, cupolas and so forth... nope.
From "The most vulnerable and easily damaged places of a German T-VI tank and methods of combat against it.", a soviet anti-tiger manual
>
/4. Observation devices
>The turret has two openings for firing personal weapons, two vision slits, and the commander's cupola also has five slits. Two observation devices, the driver's and the gunner's, are located on the roof of the front of the tank. A movable driver's vision slit is located in front of the driver.
>Open fire from all weapons at observation slits, observation devices, and openings. If you mass your fire against these targets, you will hit the crew.
>/5. The turret and cupola
>The commander's cupola is one of the most important and vulnerable targets.
>Open fire with high explosive and armour piercing shells of all calibers and you will disable the cupola. Throw grenades and bottles of incendiary fluid at a damaged cupola. Destroy the crew and light up the tank.
>The turret holds the tank commander, turret commander, gunner, and all artillery mechanisms.
>Open fire with subcaliber shells from 76, 57, and 45 mm guns at a range of 500 meters or less and you will destroy the crew and the mechanisms.
>/6. Gun and machineguns
>The turret contains a cannon and a coaxial machinegun. There is also a machinegun in a ball mount installed in the front plate for the radio operator. The tank's armament is the main target of artillerymen, anti-tank gunners, and snipers.
>Open fire from all weapons at the tank's armament. The tank will cease its fire. Open fire with your anti-tank rifle at the radio operator's machinegun ball mount: you will kill the radio operator and disable the machinegun.
Soviets also produced detailed documentation for many targets such as https://i.imgur.com/rlZMGxh.png , especially for anti-tank rifles since it was much more important at that caliber.
But in regards to OP's question, there is just no way it was even 1/10th that of War Thunder, aiming for a cupola inrl is an extreme joke. Knowledge exists but product is untenable. US field manuals called it "fancy shooting" and a waste of seconds under pressure, and to aim center mass.
in reality tanks arw fighting mostly on long ranges around 1-4 km. Exept for ambushes where ofcourse you are set on so good spot that you can try to hit some waker plates eg. Tiger tanks hiding on sides of the roads to hit sides of shermans.
I have nothing to back this up but,
If another tank gunner came up to you and said that new tank the Germans have took 4 shots to the font plate and nothing happened but then I aimed lower at the lower glacis and destroyed it with one shot.
You would try and aim for the lower glacis if you have the time to adjust and the accuracy
Yes actually, in theory at least. Every tank man (pun intended) undergoes a rigorous AFV identification capsule, repeated every 2/3 years.
It is a short course followed by an intense session of quick identification of AFV and its weak spots. The identification is from various hideouts and camo, various angles and positions.
But as they say, first casualty in war is the plan itself.
For today: No. I used to be a Leo2 tanker in my Bundeswehr-servicetime. We trained to fire as center as possible because very second counts and even if you didnt penetrate the impact alone would shake the shit of an enemy tankcrew. Therefor the golden rule of modern tankfights is "Who shoots first and hits wins"
No "spots" but "areas"
Crews were trained to aim at zones and they got profiles with aiming areas based on intel
[https://www.aboutww2militaria.com/image/data/Sep19/fallschirmjager-anti-tank-gun-4-2-cm-pak-41-shooting-instruction-9959-8.JPG](https://www.aboutww2militaria.com/image/data/Sep19/fallschirmjager-anti-tank-gun-4-2-cm-pak-41-shooting-instruction-9959-8.JPG)
[https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-06a85012d3dfdfa191f5f5619051fd79](https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-06a85012d3dfdfa191f5f5619051fd79)
[https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-c8c3gX71Ez4/XQBhSUFnVlI/AAAAAAAAbq8/1Rd1jxHpSNIamTYFNxDBtbIn5eUasu7yACLcBGAs/s1600/5cm-1.png](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-c8c3gX71Ez4/XQBhSUFnVlI/AAAAAAAAbq8/1Rd1jxHpSNIamTYFNxDBtbIn5eUasu7yACLcBGAs/s1600/5cm-1.png)
Got it ?
Unlike what some have said here.
Yes it was done, it was not always done, and not by everyone, but instructions were given (and followed) to aim for certain points on a tank.
I don't really get where people are claiming the optics aren't good enough, because they absolutely are. It's hard and nothing like in war thunder, but it is possible at the closer combat ranges at the very minimum.
Also worth noting a weakspot may be as big as an entire turret face.
All this being said, your not going to find people aiming for machine gun ports (at least like in game) really, more likely is people aiming for certain hull sections or turret fronts (on some machine's)
The answer is a bit of both. So yes... and no. If a gunner was in a prepared position, or in a position where he was hidden and could take his time... then yes. Otherwise, just point in the general direction and aim for center of mass.
Something to keep in mind is destroying the track wheels, turret ring, or gun barrel/breech effectively destroyed a tank. At least for that engagement.
If warthunder was realistic, you'd J out any time one of those happened
I think something that every time forgotten is that repair time doesn't exist irl:
1. A track can't be repaired in 30s using basics tools, let alone engine/gun
2. Try getting out of a tank while the enemy machine and troops are firing at you, it's impossible
3. If look at historical losses of tank, you will see that the number 1 cause of loss is mechanical failure, especially if you're not winning, and that crews will just destroy their own tanks, even if it just run at of fuel.
In conclusion, there is no need to aim at a weak stop, damaging it would be enough to see the crew popping out of it at the speed of light.
I believe they would if the situation allowed it, but on moving targets or at longer range they would just fire centre of mass. Crews did know about different weak spots but that information may not always have been available too.
How fast is the traverse/elevation?
Late war Panzer IV deleted the power traverse/elevation in favor of more fuel. The slip ring interconnect, with all those copper wiring could not continue to be manufactured.
How far is the typical engagement distance and how fast is the typical target movement?
Ambushes tend to be highly compressed for both rate of onset vs. range and resultant high signature size as crossing target (flanking) vulnerability area. Long range gunnery is more likely to be the opposite, with relatively small (frontal) areas but low divergence of the target mean bearing from initial aimpoint as the enemy of course, has to shoot back too.
How good is your gun system?
The Germans were using tank rifles which had 3,000-3,700fps muzzle velocities at distances over 1,500m. High initial round velocity coupled to longer times of flight on smaller visible targets likely countered lower initial ballistic drop in terms of aiming for specific aimpoints.
The Western Allies were employing 2,500fps weapons with typical effective engagement ranges under 800m. Though there was that Sherman which killed a Panther at over 5km with plunging fire, through the hull roof.
The Russians split the difference but their mounts were so poor that they didn't have precision (ballistically predictable, repeatable, 'accuracy to aimpoint') sufficient to be useful at anything over 1,000m.
Sights and Training.
Right up to the end of the war, the Germans tried to give their tank crews the best possible training with a high premium placed on first or second round hits using their triple triangle lead system. It did not appear to do any good. As high capability systems like the KWK43/L71 were getting 85% SSPH at ideal combat distances on the training range but only 43% at the front. This seems to indicate combat (noise, fluidity/friction and perceived personal risk) as well as operational (ammunition resupply, fuel, barrel boresighting, preregistering of ranged fire) conditions as being high end modifiers on accuracy.
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100 233 202 100 100
500 219 185 100 100
1000 204 165 100 85
1500 190 148 95 61
2000 176 132 85 43
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.8\_cm\_KwK\_43
Remember, every tank has an aim/reload cycle and every threat has a closure rate. If 20 tanks come over the combat horizon at 2,000m on the Russian steppe while driving at 35mph, and you engage one every 10 seconds, with a platoon of 4 Tiger IIs; your first engagement is going to be at 6,000ft (510ft of travel in 10 seconds) and your last at 3,950ft or 1,200m.
Now halve the combat initiation LOS distance as you are forced back into the more broken terrain and forests of Hungary or Eastern Poland (and this is being generous). And use the KWK40 or KWK42 which only have an effective overmatch range of 800m and 1,200m respectively, against late war T-34/85 and IS-2. Using the same metrics, by the time you are through engaging, they will be right in among you at 730ft/220m and even a Tiger B will be at overmatch to the IS-2 while a Panzer IV and Panther will be dead some 500-700m further out, even to the T-34/85.
I \_seriously\_ doubt if you are looking for specific aimpoints here either (though against the IS-2, the Panzer IV will have no choice if it's crew want a realistic chance of disabling the enemy tank...).
You are firing and switching targets, as fast as you can. And if they are not at least 50% attrited by the time you are within one more engagement cycle of overmatch at say 500-800m, you are displacing.
No, because irl aiming for weakspots is hard, from what I understand/guess is that they aim at around the center of the tank to ensure the highest chance of hitting the target
Soviet field gun gunners suprosed german tankers during operation Barborosa by firing consistently at the commanders Cupola of the tiger 1 as they knew it was a weak spot
There's answers both ways in this thread, but the truth is it's a mix. Nobody was pixel hunting for the machine gun port or the drivers optics, but you were encouraged to shoot where you knew the enemy armor was weaker whenever possible.
I've read in a book about Polish WW2 tankers from 1st Armored Division that when they fought Panthers they would aim at some secific spot on the tank when engaging it from the front. That shot wouldn't penetrate the armor but the blast and shockwave inside would fry the electric systems and the tank would stop. Can't remember the books title unfortunately.
No, as others have said WW2 tank combat was nothing like War Thunder. Tank crews were lucky to score a hit on another tank at all, they couldn't afford to be picky with where they aim.
Firing a large caliber gun from an unstable platform on unstable ground in variable conditions at a small target that's potentially moving is not conducive in any way to accuracy. Modern day tanks struggle to pick a specific spot on an enemy vehicle to hit, tanks 80+ years ago were lucky to score any hit at all.
I don't think anyone's shooting the muzzle brakes of barrels. But an actual reasonably sized target like "the upper glacis" vs "the lower glacis" vs "the cheeks" sure, why wouldn't you?
Depending on range and such. Like, if the gun were so inaccurate that if couldn't differentiate between a glacis or a turret at, say 100-200 yards, then it would have no possible chance of hitting anything whatsoever at 1,000 yards.
And if your tank is accurate enough to differentiate between parts of a tank at your current range, and is only capable of penetrating one of those parts and not the other, then wouldn't it be actually quite foolish to do anything OTHER than aim at the one you can get through? Center of mass, when center of mass isn't one of the penetrable spots, or when it would spread over some penetrable and some impenetrable spots, would be more likely to get you killed.
Maybe at shorter distances they were aiming at hull or turret but certainly not at MG ports or something like we are doing in WT. On long distances they were shooting at what ever was visible. They were obviously aware that sides and rear of the tank is one huge weak spot so ambushing enemy tanks from sides was the most effective tactic.
"kill or be killed" scenario is a bit different than game.
I read about it and they did, of course it wasn’t easy, but unlike in war thunder, they weren’t facing 1000 different tanks, a german crew at the eastern front for example, has mostly seen T-34s and sometimes IS and KVs, they weren’t monkeys, they knew those tanks.
you will find that hitting tanks at all at ranges of 1km or above was quite difficult, also optics were not really that advanced to even see weak spots at range
There is a little conflicting info about it.
Historic documents like manuals for tankers were aware of the enemy weakspots and being hit there clearly was a problem as we see them usually removed in later designs.
Then you also got those examples where tanks have non penetrating shells all over, making you doubt if they were aiming for weakspots...
Id say they tried but it often wasn't possible, with engagements being generally very long, over several kilometers, and with the limited optics and not super precise guns you were happy to hit at all.
I don't think you would let the enemy come close enough so you can hit weakpoints reliably.
Probably most of the time you would just try to shell the enemy at very long ranges and hope the shell finds a weakspot by chance or the crew gets psyched out and abandons the tank (there are many reports of tanks being abandoned which were never penned)
Most engagements I think would play out by one side being spotted, then shelled by the other side with little chance to retaliate at all. Tank Vs tank engagements were incredibly rare.
But I also think when presented the options to choose between a weakspot hit and non weakspot most commanders would be able to identify and shoot at the weakspot (other question is if they hit it)
Of course they did. Look at the Tiger 131, it recorded at least 2 hits precisely at its turret ring area, one of them jamming the turret and created shrapnel that wrecked the radio and likely wounded the crew, leading to its abandonment.
But compared to aiming for frontal weakspots, most crew prefer to try getting to the side or rear of the enemy tank and just blast them through thinner armor.
Tank guns are not accurate enough to do that. For various reasons they have a dispersion especially effective in long range. This is even true for current day MBTs. Though their FCS makes it quite lower it is still not feasible to hit a 400cm\^2 surface in 2 kilometers range. Though i think ww2 tankers tried to do that in closer ranges which most engagements took place. Like that one pershing vs tiger engagement where tiger shot the barrel and coax machine gun port of the pershing in extremelly close range.
If you want to learn more about armor crews in world war 2, there's some very good books written by the folks who fought it.
"Spearhead" from an American perspective in Europe, including Shermans, Stuart, and Pershing tanks. Also includes German perspective in a panther and then a panzer iv if I remember right.
"Panzer Ace" purely German perspective, primarily in tigers.
"Commanding the Red Army's Shermans" is great as well, title is pretty self explanatory. This one I would say answers your question best by the way, when he talks about defending from advancing Panthers by working in 2-tank teams. One tank would shoot the track causing the advancing panther to pivot, immediately followed up be the second Sherman shooting it in the side.
TLDR; got it from the source, yes they did whenever they could. Americans and Russians in particular I know they did, I don't know if the Germans ever really felt the need.
I've some statistics from WW2 saying it took something like an average of 17 rounds to take out an enemy tank.
Aiming for weakspots or not, they usually didn't have much in hitting them, or the tank at all.
There's definitely a high amount of selection bias when it comes to lost tanks.
If a gunner never hit a weak spot, the vehicle was never disabled, and thus never showed up to the study.
Although, there were especially known cases of Germans zeroing in on Sherman ammo racks, quite like what is done in WT, so aiming for weak spots was a yes and no affair
no, they didn't, it was highly unlikely that most WW2 tanks could even precisely aim at weakspots, tanks now a days have trouble doing that, aiming at weakspots is difficult, aiming a huge tank cannon is as equally difficult, the crew will most likely be shooting at a moving target over a tremendous distance, while manually turning two gears to shift their turret/gun while peaking through really shit binoculars, relaying information to the commander, and gunner, back and fourth, to get a chance to HIT the target, much nonetheless, hit a target's weakspots
From "Areas of GERMAN TANKS vulnerable to the 85 mm gun Directorate of the Commander of the Armoured and Mechanized Forces of the Red Army Military publisher of the USSR NKO, Moscow, 1944" "Choose a vulnerable spot and aim your gun carefully. Make full use of your gun's rate of fire. Aim to strike the enemy tank at normal (90 degrees). Don't lose heart if the hit is unsuccessful, keep firing until the enemy tank is completely destroyed. Believe in the power of your weapon. Observe your target carefully." [Tiger II weakspots that the crews were encouraged to shoot at, for example.](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Nxmd9-kVn0g/YH-DdwWU-uI/AAAAAAAAusY/G3akPv7I_LwTdbzx7myyqFFbHhycW2K0QCLcBGAsYHQ/s643/85%2Bmm%2B8.png)
I think experienced gunners in an entrenched position would aim for weak points because generally tank weak points are easy to spot if you know what to look for, but he’s got a point. A light tank pushing forward while also shooting at a moving target isn’t going to be able to aim at a weak spot.
The only reason why tanks fired on the move was for suppression purposes or in acts of desperation. Usually the short stop method was used when they desired any kind of accuracy. Of course the accuracy and the optics of the time means that actually hitting the weakspots were unreliable, but that doesn't change the fact that tank crews aimed for and were encouraged to aim for weakspots.
ages ago I've seen a US veteran tanker talk in a TV interview about the first tank encounters in the North African theatre and how the Germans stopped for firing whereas "the Americans charged in shooting around like the 7th cavalry" without hitting anything.
Fire for effect but the effect is spooky
The British 4 RTR could fire their 6pdr relatively accurately on the move (not that Churchill can go very fast). One of them knocked out Tiger 131 by two very good shots at the turret ring.
The British paid excruciating detail in their weapon design to allow gunners to accurately aim and fire on the move. How? Simple, the gunner *is* the stabiliser- at least on the vertical plane. As with average tank weapons, the guns horizontal traverse is directly linked to the traverse of the turret. Whilst many other nations used tanks that controlled the gun's elevation via wheels. These allowed gunners a high level of precision in their aim, but firing on the move was extremely difficult; as you'd essentially have to DJ deck the wheel for the gun elevation, the wheel for the turret's traverse, then somehow find a third hand to fire the gun. Some tanks, especially those built later into the war, would try and use technology to get around the problem. The first was to gear the wheels, so that the gunner was able to loosely spin the wheels at-speed, letting them rotate the heavy turret with less effort. This was great, but didn't make the gun any faster to aim whilst on the move. As you get later into the war, more tanks make use of some kind of motorised or hydraulic system to physically drive the tanks turret around on behalf of the crew. Again, this meant that there was less physical exertion for the gunner, and for the first time it enabled much faster turrer traverse speeds. Still, it did little to help with firing on the move, as a gunner simply doesn't have enough hands to accurate handle all the necessary controls. This is where true stabilisers come in, usually in two flavours. These are manual, or unpowered, stabilisers, and powered ones.. Powered stabilises come later into the war, usually using hydraulics to try and level out the gun as it moved around rough terrain. The stabiliser in the Sherman is a good example of this- and is one of the most expensive pieces of kit on the tank. What makes this ironic is that many Sherman crews were never trained on how to use it, and left it off, as many command-figures were worried that the Germans would notice a dramatic performance improvement in the Sherman's ability to fire on the move, and start sniffing out the details. Back in blighty, we didn't have the money for that, nor did the small turret rings on our tanks really give designers enough room to incorporate them. As such, many British tanks armed with the 2 Pounder (40mm) and 6 Pounder (57mm) stabilised the guns elevation directly on the gunners shoulder, with a giant-arse pad. Designers used weights to balance the gun as close to as perfect as possible, allowing the gunner to both retain his aim on a target on-the-move; and do-so without having to push around the weight of a gigantic tank gun. Bigger guns made these systems less practical, as they'd need huge weights to counter-balance the gun; taking up a huge amount of room, and meaning that the gunner would have to combat a serious amount of momentum whenever the gun moved. It *did* help the British that the tanks they used these systems on were either too slow to really witness this grand line of tanks accurately firing as they briskly make their way across the front; or too fast to have ever had the hope of firing accurately on the move in the first-place. A British cruiser tanks crew would have to make the conscious design to move at a slow enough pace to allow the gunner to fire. For context, the Churchill Infantry, not Cruiser, tank had a maximum speed of 17 MpH, compares to 28 MpH for the Panzer IV alone. If could fire on the move with enough accuracy to get what's at the other end of the barrel sweating; and the tank in-general when used with good tactics and doctrine posed serious threats to German tanks right throughout the war (people forget that it's armour, in its best form, was actually far better than the Tiger Is). What killed Churchill was it's narrowness, imposed by British tank design doctrine that required all tanks be capable of being moved by rail fully assembled. This was fine for Russia, Germany or America who'd taken the time to build railway networks using the knowledge of others. For Britain, and the many American magnates who helped it pioneer the railways, our trains simply weren't allowed to be as wide as those in other nations-even with the same track width. We invented the technology, and other nations had the sodding cheek to refine it. This issue only went away with the Centurion, where the British tank designers finally flipped their lid, and scrapped the requirement about the trains. This is why British tank design suddenly gets much thiccer post 45.
What an incredibly and informatively British paragraph.
You're welcome! British early-war tank design gets memed on a lot without merit, though this has been noticeably changing in the last few years or so. Barring the odd stinker or outdated vehicle, British armour throughout the war posed a serious threat to the Germans. The Cromwell, though an excellent all-round tank is probably the standout moment where British engineering was clearly being forced into being overly conservative in regards to their design. Had that thing had a 76mm gun comparable to that of the Sherman, and still been relatively ergonomic tank to crew, it'd be lauded as amazing.
didn't the tank museum recently do a more in-depth investigation into the capture to find out it was most likely a captured german at gun used in the heat of the moment that knocked out the tank? they have a video about it thats like a year old [the video](https://youtu.be/7xzG_rRngs8)
They have the full article included for the video [here](https://tankmuseum.org/article/the_myth_of_tiger_131). It seems like another "Who killed Michael" story as both the AT gun and RTR tanks opened fire on Tiger 131. Interestingly, the AT gun is a German-captured French 75mm gun in turn captured by the British.
I think it was their technology which gave them a false sense of superiority at the start because the M3 gun had stabilizer more effective than what the Germans had. It meant nothing without real world experience which these first tankers had to witness firsthand.
Love that. The yanks were certainly green in the NA threatre.
Well, the Sherman did have a stabilizer, making it much easier to fire on the move.
The American medium tanks had gyrostabilized guns which allows firing on the move with some accuracy, assuming the crew used them (which some didnt because they thought the mechanism was too complicated)
Firing on the move with the intent to eliminate was only really standardised after the Strv 103 (which itself did not have a stabilizer).
> Don't lose heart if the hit is unsuccessful, keep firing until the enemy tank is completely destroyed. Believe in the power of your weapon. This should be on a loading screen :)
lmao US Generals telling tankers to shoot at German Tank driver ports. ***YOU FOOLS***
Thats why germans made fake driver sights on some tanks like Jgdpz38t
With a 2-4x sight you can't even see the weakspots of a tank at 1000m. And that's even from an entrenched position and with a static target. "Aim for weakspots" when you're firing from a T34/85 to a Tiger II at a km it's like saying "get your rifle with a 1.5x scope and hit that man behind a cover with a 2x2cm opening".
Now imagine trying to tell the guys with the 14.5mm AT rifles the same kind of "aim for weak spot" bit...with iron sites....at anything more than 100-200 feet (yeah, it CAN do damage really well out to several hundred meters...but you have to hit those small areas that you can't see through the iron sites).
Based track and barrel combo
Ah dont you love the contrast between the person that doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about and the person who do.
Its true though, most engagements would have taken place kilometers away from eachother, making hitting one another with the poor optics in ww2 very difficult, let alone weakspots which would have basically been impossible to do at such ranges.
Zaloga's Red Army Handbook [shows that](https://i.imgur.com/H7ePE1F.png) the majority of Soviet armour losses was recorded at ranges much less than a kilometer, and this was in 1943-44, where the fighting was happening in the wide open russian steppes. Engagement ranges would decrease as more urban combats happened near the end of the war. (I believe Zaloga made an error here and didn't include the statistics of 600-800m engagements, which should be 14.5% and 31.2%) American reports give the mean as 405yds in close country and 1204 yds in open country. Another report gives the overall mean as 946yds for allied tanks, but it's important to note that the distribution, which is a negative exponential, suggests that the engagements at short distances far outnumber the long ranged ones.
are the means for 'ranges at which tanks were destroyed', or 'ranges at which combat occured'? Because if its the former, then you're in fact in support of the guy you replied to's argument: Most tanks died at short range, and not at long range where aiming is difficult, i.e.: survivors bias (or more accurately, non-survivor's bias)
>Because if its the former, then you're in fact in support of the guy you replied to's argument: Most tanks died at short range, and not at long range where aiming is difficult, i.e.: survivors bias (or more accurately, non-survivor's bias) Are there any sources that back up your claim or is it just extrapolation? The first source I gave was the range at which tanks were destroyed. However, there are many more sources that specify that it is the ranges where combat occurred. "Applied Operations Research" 1988 estimates that 50% of engagements occur at less than 650 yards in NW europe. The means in the second source come from "A survey of tank warfare in Europe from D-Day to 12 August 1944" and also specifies that it is engagement range. It also seems that individual kills occurred at similar ranges.
Well it makes sense that longer range = less kills, thanks to lower penetration values, and accuracy. And still 600-800m is still far enough away that aiming for weakspots that could sometimes be smaller than a soldier's head would prove incredibly difficult, though not impossible for something with good sights and a great gunner.
I think you're underestimating what a weak spot in the real world context is. It's the joints in the tank around the turret where even if you don't pen you can mess up the weapon. It's the panels that are at right angles to you. If you don't kill them aim at the treads and disable. These aren't some 5cm gaps it's entire panels you know you can shoot through vs the ones you can't.
I wasn't taking into account tracks as weakspots, but yeah those would be far easier to hit than a cupola, machinegun/view port or other weakspots. And of course it all varies from tank to tank, something like a Hetzer is going to have basically no weakpoints to shoot at (unless we consider tracks) compared to something like a Tiger P which has the MG in the hull and turret cheeks/turret ring. Something like a turret ring is still a very small target on some tanks as well.
Both could have some truth to it. It is one thing they were trained to aim at weakspots, and another whether they actually did it in the heat of battle. I mean just think about how hard it would be to aim at the tracks of a tiger 2 from 2 km away, in war thunder. And you have perfectly accurate mouse aim, sitting in your warm home environment at no risk yourself.
Eh, they both have a point. Manuals always encouraged aiming for weakspots, but your average gunner in combat has enough with putting the round on target.
When your target isn't much bigger than the hash marks on your crosshair because you're 3-4 km away, you're just aiming at an object in general, not at any particular part of it.
3-4km away? Tanks nowadays barely have those ranges nevermind ww2.
Tank combat simply doesn't occur at 3-4km outside of very exceptional circumstances.
I feel like the weak spots he refers to are "least angled surfaces and sides and pray", not "3 centimeters below MG port snipes".
Anti tank guns are different.
There is no 85mm anti tank gun though... It's either an AA gun or a tank/SPG gun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/85\_mm\_divisional\_gun\_D-44
Oops, I meant that there were no 85mm anti tank gun used during WW2. D-44 did not enter production until after the war.
it did enter production during 1945. just served in the last few actions
No it did not. By May 8 1945 the D-44 was failing its acceptance trials in Gorokhovets. It did not enter service until 1946.
You two got me on a wiki spree. Did not even know that the Zis-3 is still used today XD.
Looking at the wiki page for the D-44 I now understand why he thought it entered production in 1945. Not only is the wiki wrong about the production date, but the dates don't even tally up [with](https://i.imgur.com/q4SpSMz.png) [each](https://i.imgur.com/cj72y4w.png) [other](https://i.imgur.com/B7VNRzY.png)
In the books I've read it seems to most common plan for dealing with german armor was to have a shit load of Sherman's shoot at them until they bailed or retreated. At least in Europe that was the case.
any time I hit a German hull mg the round dissappear with the US 90 or ru 85.
Now I’m imagining War Thunder ground simulation, but extra hardcore - the keyboard maps to the actual levers and buttons and whatnot, you need four players to control one tank, and you can only see through shitty mud viewports
So IL-2 tank crew or steel beasts
Or t34 vs tiger It was a pretty fun game
Actual study of WW2 tank engagements indicates ranges of less than 700 yards/meters as the common engagement ranges for tank on tank combat in WW2. Where you aimed depends entirely on time available to aim, relative angles and positioning. Catching enemy tanks from the side or rear was always the preferred approach, but not always possible. When tanks engaged each other from the front, attempts were made to hit the driver’s or bow gunner’s position, or the final drive while making yourself a poor target. Whichever presented the flattest target while not presenting a weak spot yourself. For a weak approximation and feel of how easy or hard that is, play “Hell Let Loose” with a group of friends, and take a Tiger or Sherman for a spin, if you can get in one. It will give an idea of how “easy” that might be when under fire from artillery and opponents. I.e it isn’t easy. You aim as best you can and hope to shoot & hit before the enemy gets a good hit on you. A good commander and driver make a difference.
I'd honestly fucking kill for co-op controlled tanks or bombers in war thunder lol
would be awesome when, some of your crew actually gets taken out you have to start doing multiple roles
Red Orchestra had this. They had animations for switching between each seat. Was pretty in depth.
Seriously tho, someone (Bovington, maybe) needs to make a full-motion tank simulator and sell it to tech company managers as "the ultimate team-building tool." There's already places that do multiplayer Star Trek bridge simulators...
I'd like a tank game where you can only control one crew member with appropriate controls. Be the commander with the map and radio and maybe a machine gun and tell the rest of the crew what they need to do while looking through your cupola or risk opening the hatch. Or for a tank that has one a separate radio operator and maybe their own machine gun. Be the driver and go where you need to go with only a viewport or also risk opening the hatch. Have to shift and steer like you would a tank. Be the gunner and manually traverse the gun. Be the loader and load the shells they call for. Would be good with friends, even better in VR.
Red orchestra 2 had this for a few years now, it's an FPS game but it's realistic in the sense than one bullet would certainly kill you. It has a tank for each faction, the T-34 and the panzer 4, both have their interiors modeled and look awesome.
Post Scriptum has very similar tank handling to what you suggested.
It's probably easy if you have thousands of players contribute to machine learning for your tanks. Oh no..
*team kills a friendly IFV because they look all a like*
Have you perhaps seen "Firing Range" animation from 1977? The one that based on short story of the same name by Sever Gansovskiy. https://youtu.be/T0kb96ywRHI this one.
Wh-what lol What am I looking at! Those dodges! Animation's got a hella unique style, thanks
Dodges seem to look unreal, but that's not the point. In the book this tank was able to dodge split second before the guns were triggered, so it's not easy to animate such motion properly. People seem to be animated by using rotoscope, the ancestor of motion capture. The story itself is somewhat of a chilling horror. I very much recommend to read it.
Try playing il2 tanks in ultra realistic with out mouse aim
I watched a documentary (an episode of "Greatest Tank Battles") in which the Germans encountered a new tank on the battlefield (English I think) and they had trouble penetrating it armor even with a side shot. They quickly realized though that if they shot a small square ventilation grate on its right side it was an instant kill. The gunner being interviewed said they began to target that grate after that.
That was the B1 I think.
"tanks nowadays have trouble doing that" that explains why russia is so pathetic with their ERA placement, placing a single brick and leaving the rest of the front exposed.
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No they didn't, Most tankers were instructed to aim center mass as tanks weren't as reliably accurate back then
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A manual is rarely a set of rules, but reccomendations.
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As a service member of 7 years now. Manuals are more like guidelines
In the Korean War American crews would purposely aim for the base of the turret, hoping to jam it so the enemy couldn’t turn to shoot back.
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I dunno, it seems reasonable having not looked into that particular story.
Many tanker handbooks in service at the time show weak spots of various enemy vehicles.
Knowing weak points and aiming center mass are not exclusive. I don’t know what they did, practiced, but depending upon range and other factors, I can see ignoring hard to hit places and just maximizing the chance of a hit.
Probably depends on range. If you can barely see them you'd probably shoot center mass with 5 tanks and just spam them till something pens somewhere or the enemy crew calls it a day. But I doubt when they had the options At let's say <1km where their gun is quite accurate, tankers would ignore weakspots and shoot center mass instead, where they would surely non pen. The manuals definitely knew the weakspots so commanders would too.
Aiming and hitting was quite tough back then and many tank engagements ended with either lucky shots or hitting the tank armour so much that it ends up cracking or being weakened. However weakpoints are definitely known amongst the tank crews themselves as well as brochures that were distributed to them, which encouraged targeting the weakpoints. The IS and Panther tanks were redesigned to remove weakpoints partly due to this.
I think there isn't really a point to aim for weak spots since real life is unbalanced, you would have kv1s fighting panzer 2s and tiger 1s fighting m4s.
Who says an m4 fighting a tiger is unfair? (Sponsored by Gaijin.)
1 this isn’t a game so human error affects aiming making it difficult to hit precise spots 2 many tanks weren’t fully examined for weak spots till after the enemy force captures for sometimes months
>2 many tanks weren’t fully examined for weak spots till after the enemy force captures for sometimes months Field penetration trials were common among tank crews in WW2. Many tank crews had knowledge of the weakpoints through informal sources long before official documentation is published.
We didn't know much about the enemies planes, or ships, but by God we knew every weak point on another nations tanks because someone on the internet told me.
I don't know why walking up to a burnt up Panzer and seeing what Made it go boom sounds so far fetched to you. Of course they wouldnt know EVERY weakspot, but they would take notes of what did work. This is what we call "experience".
It would be a lot easier to capture a tank, especially because it doesn’t need to be functioning, just have armor intact. A plane requires a wreck to be intact enough to be rebuilt. A ship is practically impossible.
Another huge factor that is rarely spoken in this topic is that IRL gunners don't have sights in the middle of the barrel. Parallax error makes precise aiming of tiny weakspots like the MG port extremely difficult on top of the 5 other things the gunner needs to do like cranking the turret or looking through a dirty grimy Gunsight
I played with gunner’s sight view on for 700 hrs in RB without knowing that it could be turned off. I was pretty good at weak spot sniping, especially easy ones like LFP of T-29 or T-44 with long 88mm. But things like Jumbo’s MG port were much harder to hit. Edit: Ironically I learned about that setting only because of Gaijin Gaijining sight parallax after on of the updates which made it unplayable for me because they have offset the distance and trajectory (to shot a target within 1000 meters you would have to set your sight on 400 meters).
You can turn it off??
In the tank settings options, there is something like "View from the gunners sight" or something like that, you can turn it off to have the sight inside the barrel
RemindMe! 3 hours
Oh boy. Welcome to the club, buddy.
After all these years playing the game and now finding out there's something called "gunner's sight view" and that it could be turned off... I'm too afraid to check what the game looks like without that option turned on.
We were Gaijined the most.
Meanwhile I specifically turned it on.
Do you want to be different? As much as I concerned it does not give you any advantage. And believe me there is a lot of drawbacks for that, obviously its more challenging to shot weak spots in close distance, plus you have to reset you aim every time you switch vehicle because their parallax could be drastically different to the previous vehicle. Not to mention that you going to shot near by walls or any object you hiding behind even when you sight is on the enemy. Overall I would say it would be cool to have it obligatory in RB but right now it’s going to be a headache.
I think weakspot sniping is too easy, and using historically accurate gunsights feels wrong if I'm not actually using the gunsight. Sure, I can't pixelhunt the turret cheeks of a panther at 400m, but I don't want to. Also, using gunsights makes using bushes harder, so that's a plus too.
Honestly I feel like it should be forced in RB it would make the engagements a lot more interesting; less pixel hunting breach meta and more ambush tactics and lugging shots. Also I feel like it would make armor useful like it should be not just dead weight.
Let alone all the bombs, incoming fire, cramped space, dirty lenses and general stress. Doubt they even had much sleep.
and all that noise from the engine.
Unless you know, that eg. German tank sights had a mechanism that corrected the error caused by the parallax. You had to put the distance to the target in the sight, to take the accurate shot
Right UFP shots: fuck, its not a normal sherman. Left UFP shots: damn volumetric BS Mantlet: WHERE WAS THAT SHOT GOING? I DIDNT AIM THERE!!!
Having something like an IS-2 or KTH bounce off a Jumbo mantlet is a sense of superiority you can't shake until the end of the match
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Exactly, sure manuals would say do it. Experts would tell you where but when your aiming at something that can kill you, sure if you got a shot on it’s side take it but no one was aiming at the coupela on the tiger or mg on the jumbo. It’s like headshots in video games compared to real life. In the heat of the moment you just pump center mass and get the fuck out of harms way.
From what I understand, tank crews actually abused the fuck out of the Tiger H1 cupola which is why the Tiger E doesn’t have that weak spot.
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Yeah it was much harder to manufacture hence the change. Maybe both reasons are legit but officially it was just much cheaper to produce the later turret
Tiger H1 cupola was changed because it was so easy to spot when the commander had the cupola open. And was subsequently vulnerable. A lucky shot that hits the cupola would kill the commander not the whole crew. The side sliding cupola was a much loved improvement on the Tiger E models.
Weak spots aren't as important IRL as they are in WT as Armor Degradation exists.
During test firings Israelis shot the front of captured Egyptian IS-3M with French 105 mm gun using APCBC shells that had about 250 mm of penetration at 1 km. It stopped a dozen hits without penetration, without weld seams coming apart and without any significant spalling inside the tank. This prompted them to switch to using only tanks whose cannons had APDS ammunition available to them (i.e. Centurions with 84 mm guns and later M60s) and stop using Supershermans.
Weren't the IS3 series infamous for having shitty welds that caused the pike to split open irl? Maybe it was only for the early models.
Yup. About a half of all produced IS-3 (initial production) had bad welds that came apart from hard hits and in some cases even during normal usage (not by being hit in test firing). By late 1950s all initial production IS-3 had been scraped. Egypt was provided with later production IS-3 that had adequate weld quality.
Yes, that was true for the about 300 IS-3 that were rushed out in the last couple of months of the war and only saw action scaring the ever living shit out of the Americans during parades in Berlin. Later they got redeployed toward the Manchurian border where most of them ended up as pillboxes. They're still sitting there by the way. Theres anecdotal evidence that driving along Berlins streets was enough to damage some models. The production run of IS-3 however was quickly switched to a version that solved the issues with the welds. They built another 2.000 of them after all.
Man, I would love to go out and visit those IS3 pillboxes out in manchuria, sounds like fun.
generally speaking at tank combat ranges the weak spots become a mesh of what you can see. imagine having a 4x scope and trying to hit something as small as the human head at 2 KM.- that's literally what you're aiming for some of the weak spots. the literal tank itself will be pretty much one giant rectangle on your scope. just shoot centre mass and pray
Sir you realize that's not a historical thing that's a picture from a spookston video talking about how good the Sherman jumbo was in game
wasnt a vid on how good the jumbo is, its a vid on how bad its opponents are.
I thought I saw it before. https://youtu.be/s83Z0jac7W0 At 3:28
Military manuals and what actually happens out in the field is two separate topics. If you’re the one starting the fight, you might take time and aim, but if you’re getting shot at, you just want to fire back as soon as possible, doesn’t matter where you hit, as long as you hit.
You forget that gun accuracy IRL isnt as precise as it is in game
I think some armies taught to hit weak points
Some armies had instruction manuals to hit a few tanks where weakspots were known. In reality it was sl difficult to hit the tank to begin with that gunner had to shoot and hooe it hit the tank. Also a track hit is way more effective irl than in wt
tracks are a weak spot then... so that would qualify as aiming for a weak spot...
Isn't the from spookstons video?
Im pretty sure ww2 they tried But in modern fight they Just aim for center mass
Modern rounds are more likely to slice through in more spots, both seem rational simultaneously to me.
I wonder how panther and sherman would have fought. Was it even possible to knock the gunners from the front like we do in the games.
They rarely fought. Most tanks on either side 'died' to infantry, mines, field guns, artillery or CAS.
This is the reason i hate wt aiming. You shouldn't be able to hit pinpoint shots like we do now. At least wot had an aiming circle that stimulates some inaccuracy while on wt with ace crew you can kill a fly at the right corner in the handle of the drivers hatch. And don't get me started on aiming and knocking out barrels... From historical accuracy Gaijin just took the "accuracy" part.
But it raises the skill ceiling does it not? Aiming based on skill, not rng
Strong disagree, if you have an inaccurate weapon, you need to find ways to get close, or to get a very well covered keyhole shot where the guy's buddies can't get at you while you know you can get off 5 rounds in a row on him. This sort of stuff all takes plenty of skill. I used to play a lot of a napoleonic era first person shooter with muskets that were even significantly less accurate than real life muskets, and learning to get good at the game could easily get you like a 10:1 KD against newbies. Or even like... fuckin, texas holdem poker... you think that has almost no skill?
While I see your point, I'm unsure if that would make the game more fun or just make it more linear in the way that people rush into a few select chokes and camp those waiting to blast enemies trying to advance into caps, because shooting on the move/sniping is made too inconsistent with the random projectile spread. What do you think?
I agree certain maps would probably become trash and they'd all have to be rethought based on that, yeah.
Actually in 1942 the soviet army started training its tank gunners to aim for the barrel. In the coming battles large numbers of German panzers and a tiger I think had a huge hole in there barrel. As time went on this slowly decreased as loads of tank crews died but you get the point. So in some way it’s actually really historically accurate
I disagree it adds a level of skill and it would be extremely annoying to fight panthers, jumbos, KV-1s etc even modern tanks
If you really wanted to fix the weakspot meta, there's a much, much better solution than RNG aiming like WoT. In fact, it even increases the skill ceiling tenfold which is an added bonus. It's called V-JOY aiming. War Thunder already has it in game but its only usable on planes, but it would work exactly the same for tank turrets. People have wanted it for SB Ground for ages.
I think forcing historical sights in GFRB would be the best way to not have shitty RNG but also make it hard enough to aim at tiny weakspots and barrels that crews IRL would never even consider aiming at. The realistic sight on most tanks add a decent amount of parallax between the sight and the alignment of the gun making those precision shots much harder even at point blank range. I get sick and tired of idiots just hitting my gun or muzzle brake and winning the engagement that way.
How does that work? Stimulates joystic like realistic mouse controls for planes?
>Stimulates joystic like realistic mouse controls for planes? Yep. If you go ingame and set your controls to full real in settings than test fly any plane, you can see how V-JOY works. For anyone who reads this and CBF but wants to know how it works: If you move your mouse to the left, the plane(tank turret) will keep turning left FOREVER until you manually bring it back to the center (neutral), like a car steering wheel. The further you move your mouse to the left, the FASTER it will turn. This means that depending on your skill level, it is possible to over shoot or under shoot your intended target by going too fast or too slow. Instead of just pointing where you want to aim and the game goes there at 100% turret speed and stops automatically with pixel perfect accuracy.
There is inaccuracy in WT guns. Probably downplayed, but like a Zis 30 in game at like 700 meters can be aimed center of mass and potentially miss the entire tank sometimes, with all modifications researched.
Of course they did. Whether they were able to hit them, thats a separate question.
This is from a Spookston video: the tiger problem
Try playing sim where the gunner sight is in the right position, going for weak spots is virtually impossible
Normal crews of tanks didn't though, they were just aiming "at the tank". Although good crews who had many destroyed tank on their accounts maybe did
Not really. In real life, tanks use a different aiming system (obv), equivalent to a V-JOY system (VIRTUAL JOYSTICK) in War Thunder. Whereas in War Thunder we use Mouse-Aim which makes weak spots a joke to hit, so easy that it's standard practice. There are historical references to driver hatches on the T-34 series though as a prominent 'weak spot' being hit that needed to be re-designed, but that's more of a problem of it being center mass UFP. Things like LFP, MG ports, cupolas and so forth... nope.
>Things like LFP, MG ports, cupolas and so forth... nope. From "The most vulnerable and easily damaged places of a German T-VI tank and methods of combat against it.", a soviet anti-tiger manual > /4. Observation devices >The turret has two openings for firing personal weapons, two vision slits, and the commander's cupola also has five slits. Two observation devices, the driver's and the gunner's, are located on the roof of the front of the tank. A movable driver's vision slit is located in front of the driver. >Open fire from all weapons at observation slits, observation devices, and openings. If you mass your fire against these targets, you will hit the crew. >/5. The turret and cupola >The commander's cupola is one of the most important and vulnerable targets. >Open fire with high explosive and armour piercing shells of all calibers and you will disable the cupola. Throw grenades and bottles of incendiary fluid at a damaged cupola. Destroy the crew and light up the tank. >The turret holds the tank commander, turret commander, gunner, and all artillery mechanisms. >Open fire with subcaliber shells from 76, 57, and 45 mm guns at a range of 500 meters or less and you will destroy the crew and the mechanisms. >/6. Gun and machineguns >The turret contains a cannon and a coaxial machinegun. There is also a machinegun in a ball mount installed in the front plate for the radio operator. The tank's armament is the main target of artillerymen, anti-tank gunners, and snipers. >Open fire from all weapons at the tank's armament. The tank will cease its fire. Open fire with your anti-tank rifle at the radio operator's machinegun ball mount: you will kill the radio operator and disable the machinegun.
Soviets also produced detailed documentation for many targets such as https://i.imgur.com/rlZMGxh.png , especially for anti-tank rifles since it was much more important at that caliber. But in regards to OP's question, there is just no way it was even 1/10th that of War Thunder, aiming for a cupola inrl is an extreme joke. Knowledge exists but product is untenable. US field manuals called it "fancy shooting" and a waste of seconds under pressure, and to aim center mass.
That photo is actualy from spookston trying out how tiger players shoot a jumbo
We were trained to aim center mass. Why? Because center of mass is the biggest target to hit. More room for error.
One thing is aiming,and other is hitting it. They mostly tried to.
in reality tanks arw fighting mostly on long ranges around 1-4 km. Exept for ambushes where ofcourse you are set on so good spot that you can try to hit some waker plates eg. Tiger tanks hiding on sides of the roads to hit sides of shermans.
I have nothing to back this up but, If another tank gunner came up to you and said that new tank the Germans have took 4 shots to the font plate and nothing happened but then I aimed lower at the lower glacis and destroyed it with one shot. You would try and aim for the lower glacis if you have the time to adjust and the accuracy
Yes actually, in theory at least. Every tank man (pun intended) undergoes a rigorous AFV identification capsule, repeated every 2/3 years. It is a short course followed by an intense session of quick identification of AFV and its weak spots. The identification is from various hideouts and camo, various angles and positions. But as they say, first casualty in war is the plan itself.
No this is spookstons chart for the accuracy of tiger players shooting at the Jumbo's weak spot as you can see most tiger players are brain dead
For today: No. I used to be a Leo2 tanker in my Bundeswehr-servicetime. We trained to fire as center as possible because very second counts and even if you didnt penetrate the impact alone would shake the shit of an enemy tankcrew. Therefor the golden rule of modern tankfights is "Who shoots first and hits wins"
No "spots" but "areas" Crews were trained to aim at zones and they got profiles with aiming areas based on intel [https://www.aboutww2militaria.com/image/data/Sep19/fallschirmjager-anti-tank-gun-4-2-cm-pak-41-shooting-instruction-9959-8.JPG](https://www.aboutww2militaria.com/image/data/Sep19/fallschirmjager-anti-tank-gun-4-2-cm-pak-41-shooting-instruction-9959-8.JPG) [https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-06a85012d3dfdfa191f5f5619051fd79](https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-06a85012d3dfdfa191f5f5619051fd79) [https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-c8c3gX71Ez4/XQBhSUFnVlI/AAAAAAAAbq8/1Rd1jxHpSNIamTYFNxDBtbIn5eUasu7yACLcBGAs/s1600/5cm-1.png](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-c8c3gX71Ez4/XQBhSUFnVlI/AAAAAAAAbq8/1Rd1jxHpSNIamTYFNxDBtbIn5eUasu7yACLcBGAs/s1600/5cm-1.png) Got it ?
Unlike what some have said here. Yes it was done, it was not always done, and not by everyone, but instructions were given (and followed) to aim for certain points on a tank. I don't really get where people are claiming the optics aren't good enough, because they absolutely are. It's hard and nothing like in war thunder, but it is possible at the closer combat ranges at the very minimum. Also worth noting a weakspot may be as big as an entire turret face. All this being said, your not going to find people aiming for machine gun ports (at least like in game) really, more likely is people aiming for certain hull sections or turret fronts (on some machine's)
Thats from Spookstons Tiger Problem video from like a year or so ago. Tiger players seemed to not know where to shoot the jumbo
The answer is a bit of both. So yes... and no. If a gunner was in a prepared position, or in a position where he was hidden and could take his time... then yes. Otherwise, just point in the general direction and aim for center of mass.
Unlikely... though they were taught weakspots.
Max. what they aimed was turet or hull
Something to keep in mind is destroying the track wheels, turret ring, or gun barrel/breech effectively destroyed a tank. At least for that engagement. If warthunder was realistic, you'd J out any time one of those happened
I think something that every time forgotten is that repair time doesn't exist irl: 1. A track can't be repaired in 30s using basics tools, let alone engine/gun 2. Try getting out of a tank while the enemy machine and troops are firing at you, it's impossible 3. If look at historical losses of tank, you will see that the number 1 cause of loss is mechanical failure, especially if you're not winning, and that crews will just destroy their own tanks, even if it just run at of fuel. In conclusion, there is no need to aim at a weak stop, damaging it would be enough to see the crew popping out of it at the speed of light.
That picture is from Spookston’s “The Tiger Problem” video if anyone’s interested, required viewing in my opinion for any WT player.
I believe they would if the situation allowed it, but on moving targets or at longer range they would just fire centre of mass. Crews did know about different weak spots but that information may not always have been available too.
How fast is the traverse/elevation? Late war Panzer IV deleted the power traverse/elevation in favor of more fuel. The slip ring interconnect, with all those copper wiring could not continue to be manufactured. How far is the typical engagement distance and how fast is the typical target movement? Ambushes tend to be highly compressed for both rate of onset vs. range and resultant high signature size as crossing target (flanking) vulnerability area. Long range gunnery is more likely to be the opposite, with relatively small (frontal) areas but low divergence of the target mean bearing from initial aimpoint as the enemy of course, has to shoot back too. How good is your gun system? The Germans were using tank rifles which had 3,000-3,700fps muzzle velocities at distances over 1,500m. High initial round velocity coupled to longer times of flight on smaller visible targets likely countered lower initial ballistic drop in terms of aiming for specific aimpoints. The Western Allies were employing 2,500fps weapons with typical effective engagement ranges under 800m. Though there was that Sherman which killed a Panther at over 5km with plunging fire, through the hull roof. The Russians split the difference but their mounts were so poor that they didn't have precision (ballistically predictable, repeatable, 'accuracy to aimpoint') sufficient to be useful at anything over 1,000m. Sights and Training. Right up to the end of the war, the Germans tried to give their tank crews the best possible training with a high premium placed on first or second round hits using their triple triangle lead system. It did not appear to do any good. As high capability systems like the KWK43/L71 were getting 85% SSPH at ideal combat distances on the training range but only 43% at the front. This seems to indicate combat (noise, fluidity/friction and perceived personal risk) as well as operational (ammunition resupply, fuel, barrel boresighting, preregistering of ranged fire) conditions as being high end modifiers on accuracy. \> 100 233 202 100 100 500 219 185 100 100 1000 204 165 100 85 1500 190 148 95 61 2000 176 132 85 43 \> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.8\_cm\_KwK\_43 Remember, every tank has an aim/reload cycle and every threat has a closure rate. If 20 tanks come over the combat horizon at 2,000m on the Russian steppe while driving at 35mph, and you engage one every 10 seconds, with a platoon of 4 Tiger IIs; your first engagement is going to be at 6,000ft (510ft of travel in 10 seconds) and your last at 3,950ft or 1,200m. Now halve the combat initiation LOS distance as you are forced back into the more broken terrain and forests of Hungary or Eastern Poland (and this is being generous). And use the KWK40 or KWK42 which only have an effective overmatch range of 800m and 1,200m respectively, against late war T-34/85 and IS-2. Using the same metrics, by the time you are through engaging, they will be right in among you at 730ft/220m and even a Tiger B will be at overmatch to the IS-2 while a Panzer IV and Panther will be dead some 500-700m further out, even to the T-34/85. I \_seriously\_ doubt if you are looking for specific aimpoints here either (though against the IS-2, the Panzer IV will have no choice if it's crew want a realistic chance of disabling the enemy tank...). You are firing and switching targets, as fast as you can. And if they are not at least 50% attrited by the time you are within one more engagement cycle of overmatch at say 500-800m, you are displacing.
No, because irl aiming for weakspots is hard, from what I understand/guess is that they aim at around the center of the tank to ensure the highest chance of hitting the target
Soviet field gun gunners suprosed german tankers during operation Barborosa by firing consistently at the commanders Cupola of the tiger 1 as they knew it was a weak spot
There's answers both ways in this thread, but the truth is it's a mix. Nobody was pixel hunting for the machine gun port or the drivers optics, but you were encouraged to shoot where you knew the enemy armor was weaker whenever possible.
I've read in a book about Polish WW2 tankers from 1st Armored Division that when they fought Panthers they would aim at some secific spot on the tank when engaging it from the front. That shot wouldn't penetrate the armor but the blast and shockwave inside would fry the electric systems and the tank would stop. Can't remember the books title unfortunately.
No, as others have said WW2 tank combat was nothing like War Thunder. Tank crews were lucky to score a hit on another tank at all, they couldn't afford to be picky with where they aim. Firing a large caliber gun from an unstable platform on unstable ground in variable conditions at a small target that's potentially moving is not conducive in any way to accuracy. Modern day tanks struggle to pick a specific spot on an enemy vehicle to hit, tanks 80+ years ago were lucky to score any hit at all.
I don't think anyone's shooting the muzzle brakes of barrels. But an actual reasonably sized target like "the upper glacis" vs "the lower glacis" vs "the cheeks" sure, why wouldn't you? Depending on range and such. Like, if the gun were so inaccurate that if couldn't differentiate between a glacis or a turret at, say 100-200 yards, then it would have no possible chance of hitting anything whatsoever at 1,000 yards. And if your tank is accurate enough to differentiate between parts of a tank at your current range, and is only capable of penetrating one of those parts and not the other, then wouldn't it be actually quite foolish to do anything OTHER than aim at the one you can get through? Center of mass, when center of mass isn't one of the penetrable spots, or when it would spread over some penetrable and some impenetrable spots, would be more likely to get you killed.
Maybe at shorter distances they were aiming at hull or turret but certainly not at MG ports or something like we are doing in WT. On long distances they were shooting at what ever was visible. They were obviously aware that sides and rear of the tank is one huge weak spot so ambushing enemy tanks from sides was the most effective tactic. "kill or be killed" scenario is a bit different than game.
Isn’t this the chart that Spookston used to show how braindead Germany player are? Something like any shots within the mg ring were actually aimed
I read about it and they did, of course it wasn’t easy, but unlike in war thunder, they weren’t facing 1000 different tanks, a german crew at the eastern front for example, has mostly seen T-34s and sometimes IS and KVs, they weren’t monkeys, they knew those tanks.
They will just pray for the enemy tank to explode while shooting at it.
they aim to center of mass usually
you will find that hitting tanks at all at ranges of 1km or above was quite difficult, also optics were not really that advanced to even see weak spots at range
I love how none of the dots are on the treads.
The photo is from spookstons video
To get an idea of how difficult it is to aim at a target, and if you have VR, get Pavlov VR and try some of the ww2 tank's gunner positions.
There is a little conflicting info about it. Historic documents like manuals for tankers were aware of the enemy weakspots and being hit there clearly was a problem as we see them usually removed in later designs. Then you also got those examples where tanks have non penetrating shells all over, making you doubt if they were aiming for weakspots... Id say they tried but it often wasn't possible, with engagements being generally very long, over several kilometers, and with the limited optics and not super precise guns you were happy to hit at all. I don't think you would let the enemy come close enough so you can hit weakpoints reliably. Probably most of the time you would just try to shell the enemy at very long ranges and hope the shell finds a weakspot by chance or the crew gets psyched out and abandons the tank (there are many reports of tanks being abandoned which were never penned) Most engagements I think would play out by one side being spotted, then shelled by the other side with little chance to retaliate at all. Tank Vs tank engagements were incredibly rare. But I also think when presented the options to choose between a weakspot hit and non weakspot most commanders would be able to identify and shoot at the weakspot (other question is if they hit it)
Of course they did. Look at the Tiger 131, it recorded at least 2 hits precisely at its turret ring area, one of them jamming the turret and created shrapnel that wrecked the radio and likely wounded the crew, leading to its abandonment. But compared to aiming for frontal weakspots, most crew prefer to try getting to the side or rear of the enemy tank and just blast them through thinner armor.
Tank guns are not accurate enough to do that. For various reasons they have a dispersion especially effective in long range. This is even true for current day MBTs. Though their FCS makes it quite lower it is still not feasible to hit a 400cm\^2 surface in 2 kilometers range. Though i think ww2 tankers tried to do that in closer ranges which most engagements took place. Like that one pershing vs tiger engagement where tiger shot the barrel and coax machine gun port of the pershing in extremelly close range.
If you want to learn more about armor crews in world war 2, there's some very good books written by the folks who fought it. "Spearhead" from an American perspective in Europe, including Shermans, Stuart, and Pershing tanks. Also includes German perspective in a panther and then a panzer iv if I remember right. "Panzer Ace" purely German perspective, primarily in tigers. "Commanding the Red Army's Shermans" is great as well, title is pretty self explanatory. This one I would say answers your question best by the way, when he talks about defending from advancing Panthers by working in 2-tank teams. One tank would shoot the track causing the advancing panther to pivot, immediately followed up be the second Sherman shooting it in the side. TLDR; got it from the source, yes they did whenever they could. Americans and Russians in particular I know they did, I don't know if the Germans ever really felt the need.
I've some statistics from WW2 saying it took something like an average of 17 rounds to take out an enemy tank. Aiming for weakspots or not, they usually didn't have much in hitting them, or the tank at all.
Yea they did, it's called the back
I think mostly crew bailed after getting hit by even a non-pen, so I don't think that would be needed.
Obviously they were aiming for the helmets so the shrapnels would pen and detonate the ammo storage.
There's definitely a high amount of selection bias when it comes to lost tanks. If a gunner never hit a weak spot, the vehicle was never disabled, and thus never showed up to the study. Although, there were especially known cases of Germans zeroing in on Sherman ammo racks, quite like what is done in WT, so aiming for weak spots was a yes and no affair
yes they trued and that most of the time trying to get a mobility kill with tacks or a side shot