"Why didn't the Tiger 1 have sloped armour? " Topic

Presumably it was harder to manufacture; but they solved it not long after for the Panther.

But the vertical side armour was vulnerable from the get-go even to 6-pounder fire, i.e. a weapon already in wide use. It wasn't that long before weapons like the 85mm and 17-pounder came along, able to defeat it frontally at respectable ranges. A Firefly versus a Tiger I seem to have been an almost even contest, in that each could ventilate the other from the longest plausible battle range.

Why didn't they design the Tiger to have sloping armour? Resulting in something vaguely (very vaguely) like this?

- which seems to be a Panzer IV with sloped armour…

Wouldn't that have been a far more effective and longer-lived weapon?

Ummm because design work start in 1937 long before sloped armour was common, and certainly long before the 1942 AT weapons

Because it wouldn't have looked as cool!

Same reason the PzIV and PzIII didn't have it. They hadn't come up with the idea yet. I know it's obvious in retrospect but hindsight is always 20/20

Irish Marine has it!

Irish Marine +1

The tank shown in the OP looks like a Panzer IV/Panzer III hybrid. The armor isn't sloped either, since the top part of the hull (where the vision port is) is still vertical.

They didn't know about the T34 when design started.

The "improved" model (Tiger II) did.

The tank shown in the OP looks like a Panzer IV/Panzer III hybrid. The armor isn't sloped either, since the top part of the hull (where the vision port is) is still vertical.

Yep, PzIV hull with PzIII running gear. Very unique. I think it's a Geschutzwagen IVb:

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Tiger was made out of rolled homogenus armor. Rolling and forming those sheets is hard, sloping that stuff would require more pieces more cutting more welding etc. Hard and expensive to make and Tiger 1 was designed before all the cool kids started using sloped armor.

Ever see a 222 armored car or a 251 halftrack? The Germans knew all about sloped armor long before the Tiger I was designed. What Petrov said, it's hard to make sloped armor in some cases and often considered unnecessary at the time it was first designed.

Mike Bunkermeister Creek
Bunker Talk blog

You might have well asked why the Cromwell tank did not have sloped armor.

Production of the Cromwell started late 1940, and it replaced the Crusader which DID have a turret with angular features designed to deflect rather than, "take it," like it seems the Cromwell designers had in mind.

You say it wasn't long before the 85mm and 17pdr came along, but in reality, it was a long time. In '42 and '43, the Tiger was a vehicle to be reckoned with, no doubt enhanced by their elite crews.

You would think that the efficient gun and armour on the Panther would have caused production of the Tiger I to cease, with capacity being turned over to Panther production. Perhaps we wargamers are too fixed on official penetration charts and see only that raw data as being being the vindication for design value.

Sloped armor also reduces the amount of internal space which can cause problems when trying to fit everything you want in a design

Perhaps we wargamers are too fixed on official penetration charts and see only that raw data as being being the vindication for design value.

There is no "perhaps" about it. This is exactly true, and a real problem.

Why didn't it have sloped armor? Because it didn't. And that's the end of that.

I do wonder why the Cromwell didn't have sloped armour as well, actually :-) I was at Bovington recently and my mate and I were tut-tutting in bafflement as to why what looks like a Russian design from about 1926 was deployed in 1944 in preference to Shermans.

The point about Tiger design having started in 1937 is IMHO a bit misleading. The 1937 requirement was for a 30-tonne vehicle. What arrived in 1942 was a 57-tonne one. Whatever the 1937 parameters were, clearly they changed, because what was delivered did not resemble the 1937 specs in any material way.

I hear the point about easier to make, but how easy to make were they? They built 1,300-odd Tigers, but 6,000 Panthers over a shorter period. That sounds like Tigers were harder to make.

I dunno. It just seems a bit daft to build a simple steel box, unless there is some advantageous property of simple steel boxes – unrelated to protection from incoming AT fire – that made it a better design choice. Maybe they stood up better to HE and to crashing around on and off Russian roads?

The only other explanation I can really arrive at is that by June 1941, while the thing was obviously obsolescent compared to where the T-34 was headed, neither the T-34 nor indeed the USSR were expected to last long enough for this to be a problem. Therefore all it had to do was beat the Commonwealth's equipment, which wasn't a big ask of a Tiger.

Plus, like the inadequate 2-pounder, it might not as good ad the next thing, but at least it's available right now.

Standing in front of a Tiger and a Panther, there is no question in my mind that the latter is the more imposing vehicle. The other thing you notice much more at eye level than from wargame altitude of 1,000 scale feet is how much of any tank's aspect the wheels and lower hull take up.

The gap between the top of a King Tiger's tracks and the bottom of the side sponson is huge, and the obvious aiming point, with the advantage that if you've aimed low, the shot will at least chew some wheels and immobilise the target. I wonder, therefore, if the obviously well-armoured part of a tank was the part you routinely didn't bother to aim at; and if the most vulnerable part – that you did aim at – couldn't be protected by sloping armour anyway?

By the time you figured out how to make tiger with sloped aror you are going to realize that you will wind up with what looks exactly like king tiger.
Tiger is square because of massive final drive and transmission components. Oh and by the time you made that armor sloped due to room requirments it would push the weight up to 71 tons. Pretty much what King Tiger became.
Germans were working on a heavy tanks design in 41, but after utter shock and frustration of dealing with "heavy" T-34 and "superheavy" KV-1 Germans REALLY needed a countermeasure. Tiger was put out there soon enough.

Dear List

Petrov has it essentially correct. You don't make this stuff out of balsa wood. All such modern weapons as we are speaking of are process' not of the concept engineers flightly and soaring imagination, but the manufacturing Engineers who have to get it through the tools, machines, lathes, rolling mills, forming shops and the whole complex of Industry to make every part. How can this be made, and in what size and in what difficulty or even if it can be made at all- ESPECIALLY under the fervid press of wartime events, is the real factor. It's nice for the German Generals to say "This is what we want" and hand the German Engineers a captured T34, but I have no doubt that to reverse engineer a T34 would have mean't reverse engineering the whole German industrial system.

Let's take another example. From the other side.

Why were Americans not able to come up with the matchless performance of the Rolly Royce Airplane engines? Simple-- up till then Curtis Wright had been the supplier of engines which by 1940 were clearly underpowered and could never be upgraded. It's why Rolls Royce is still around today and Curtris Wright is making fire safety equipment.

Want another example? Look in any Jane's fighting Ships prior to WWII at the ADVERTISEMENTS! It is a compendium of the showcase of the industries of the early 20th centuries as to what countries could produce torpedoes, valves, the huge and complicated forgings for propellers, barbettes, armor, etc., and who could build you a complete battleship (or a lifeboat) if you wanted.

Modern War is so much a contest of the industrial and engineering capacities of countries, and the tools that each sends off to the battlefield simply the best they can do.

Which is why, in 1939, when the Poles tried a little saber rattling against the Germans, the problem was that they were really rattling sabers.

It was an old design (1937 at its inception) and based on other models (PZI-IV). The thicker (4") armor made it a heavy tank and a mobile platform for their 88mm gun. Nuff said.

It was all about space, armor thickness, and and tooling. Really even at the end of the war how many weapons could kill one with a front through the armor shot or even 45 deg shot along the sides ????

and really how often do you think a shot would hit a target at square 90 deg for best armor penetration?? from what I read about them most were taken out but engine problems and track or wheel hits and not by a shot punching through the armor.

Several posts have it right, in that it was all about the industrial ability of the German state.

The ability to cast complete turrets, hulls, etc., or to cut and weld plates, all depended on the industrial ability avaliable to each country, not on designs made on paper.

The Soviets and US seemed to have mastered and used cast armor, while others struggled. Rolling, cutting and welding or riveting was a more time consuming process, but easier to do than casting huge multi-ton parts.

As suggested, internal spaces drove much of the designs. Where an engine or transmision was placed, ammo racks or fuel tanks, radio, etc., all drove the final design.

Big gun, then one has to account for recoil space needed.

Size of turret ring was a major factor.

All engineering considerations that had to be accounted for, prior to actually building the final design.

Dan

You would think that the efficient gun and armour on the Panther would have caused production of the Tiger I to cease, with capacity being turned over to Panther production.

The same could be said for the Pz IV or even the Pz III, which weren't in the same league as the Panther and Tiger, but which stayed in production until the end. The reason is simple – it takes time to convert over a factory from producing tank A to tank B. And during that time (several months, usually) the factory is producing no tanks at all. As the war went on, and casualties mounted, the Germans simply couldn't afford to take factories off-line for months at a time to re-tool.

Especially when the US and British air forces were so happy to do just that for them.

The cromwell/crusader comparison illustrates the point very well – the more slope you incorporate, the bigger the end product has to be and you end up with a behemoth like Tiger II that can't cross a rural road bridge without collapsing it into the river.

Slope was uncommon on tanks in the early days of the war. The Soviets were obsessed with making a "shell-proof" tank and they figured that sloping was the cheapest and most effective way to give T-34 better protection. T-34 is a very advanced "low tech" design, well-thought out, but very simple.

Tiger was designed with very thick armour in mind, and it would ideally be used to stand off enemy tanks using its big gun. At longer ranges it would be almost impervious to anything the Allies could throw at it. Also it used sloped armour, the Tigerfibel shows diagrams that indicate that if you present one of the front corners towards the enemy shots will glance off more easily. This trick was used by Tiger crews when engaging the enemy.

Tiger was expensive and difficult to make, Panther was a cheaper, easier alternative.

that picture isn't even a tank, it is a self propelled gun,and not a very good one at that.
The Heuschrecke 10 (German: Grasshopper 10) was a prototype self-propelled gun and Waffenträger (German: "Weapon carrier") developed by Krupp-Gruson between 1943 and 1944. The official designation of the vehicle was 105 mm leichte Feldhaubitze 18/1 L/28 auf Waffenträger Geschützwagen IVb and was to be built in Magdeburg, Germany. The Heuschrecke featured a removable turret which could be deployed as a pillbox or towed behind the vehicle as an artillery piece.
Krupp produced only three prototypes from 1942–1943. The Heuschrecke initially made use of a shortened Panzerkampfwagen IV (Panzer IV) chassis, but it was later switched to the Geschützwagen IV chassis, developed for the Hummel self-propelled gun. Mass production of the Heuschrecke 10 was scheduled to start in February 1945, but never eventuated.

Yeah, that was a cockup. I meant to link a different picture. link

This rather undermines the argument that with sloped armour the tank would have needed to be significantly bigger. As configured here, there is very little difference between this and a standard Panzer IV. The front actually looks roomier.

Yes, the Tiger I was an old design from the late '30s. Like the Pz III and IV it's basically a rectangular hull on top of tracks … Built many in my youth … as well as a model of the Grasshopper. Thought it was an "un-needed" design … Instead of designing a removable turret, just dig in/go hull down … Who would have thought !

Dont forget that shells travel in a half arch so often depending on the distance and the elevation of shooter and target the shell would still hit head on.

As they say there is no replacement for displacement.

It needs to be significantly bigger if your going to put a turret with a bloody great 88mm flak cannon on it.

Hrm…

First problem was that the Germans didn't optimize their designs for mass production. None of them. Had the Germans created a mass-production version of the PzIV (like the Sherman or T34), things would have been very different.

Second problem would have been shutting down the factory for a couple weeks to a month to re-tool. Now you're making already scarce tanks even harder to get to the front lines.

And we're also getting into the technical limitations. It's one thing to cut 1" or even 2" plates. Trying to cut 4" face-hardened plates for the proper mitre angles is a nightmare today, with 80kpsi water cutters. I'm pretty sure you'd have to re-harden the plates after all the cutting and welding you'd need to do to make an angled-armor tank.

First problem was that the Germans didn't optimize their designs for mass production. None of them. Had the Germans created a mass-production version of the PzIV (like the Sherman or T34), things would have been very different.

They'd still have no fuel for them though. Just more well armoured pillboxes.

The reason for the near vertical plates was driver visibility. Nearly all armored vehicles utilized direct vision and it was not until late war that it was decided that armor protection should take precedence over the driver's ability to see what is ahead.