• SSTF@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Honestly it’s something that should be solved by tactics not engineering. The Germans in WW2 seemed hyperfixated on engineering to chase some sort of ever shifting ideal instead of settling for a “good enough” in terms of a standard design or baseline and running with it in production. Excellent academic video on the subject.

      Directional charges mounted on armor as an anti-infantry defense measure have never really been anything I’m aware of having been institutionally adopted. It’s the kind of equipment that armor crews shouldn’t be putting themselves in positions to use. (Yes, I’m aware of the M113 MCCM carrier- totally different application than defense of the vehicle in combat.)

        • SSTF@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          The impression I’ve gotten from both past reading, and the video is that they had not at that time shifted to a modern assembly line industrialized kind of mindset. America had things like it’s automotive industry, which had pushed that earlier than in Germany.

          Everything Germans made had a larger amount of handcrafting in it as a necessity of the workflow, and because of that handcrafting there was pride by the individual workers to make really fine quality. The “IDGAF, it meets spec, send it.” mentality of an American lineworker who was running more automated systems or compartmentalized parts of the work was more suitable.

          On top of that, in the Nazi government, individual military leaders were jockying and sending all their own requests for modifications right to the factories. The US had a centralized system for modification requests that prevented that. I don’t think that was an intended feature by the Germans, but a situation that rose organically out of their lack of experience with production at scale.