Ok so I registerd after lurking for a few days because the subsight found at http://www.stardestroyer.net/Armour/ShepStuff/Website/DrakaWB/WBindex.htm is realy buging me. I have found several things listed that do not match the books, as an example the Hond III is listed as having a 120mm main gun in the books while the site lists it at best with a 90mm main gun. None of it realy matters, it has just buged me so I thought I would ask about it.

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"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his desserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all."

James Graham, 1st Marquess and 5th Earl of Montrose, 1612-1650
(Common Paraphase: "He Who Dares Wins")

Hi, welcome to the site. While you're a new member, you need a moderator to approve your posts. That's why some of yours have disappeared; you're not allowed to post in a thread if it's not been posted in for over a certain length of time (thread necromancy) and some other things. Check out the rules.

I've edited your thread title to hopefully attract some attention from the actual drakafic guys, but answering on their behalf: Drakafic Draka are de-wanked into something that would actually be possible in the 1940s. The canonical Hond III is basically a Vickers Chieftain; such a thing is beyond any WW2 power to create. They simply can't do it. A 90mm gun is more in line with the famous German eighty-eight of WW2, and the drakafic Hond III is an actual feasible WW2 tank.

In Drakafic, the Draka are stripped of anything they have that's not realistic in their society. Hence why they get their heads stomped in.

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Superior Moderator - BotM - HAB [Drill Instructor]-Writer- Stardestroyer.net's resident Star-God.
"We believe in the systematic understanding of the physical world through observation and experimentation, argument and debate and most of all freedom of will." ~ Stargate: The Ark of Truth

Thanks Necron, that clears up my confusion. it always buged me that the Draka were so far ahead of everyone else with their tanks even though I have argued in the past (on other boards like wesworld and Navalisim) that someone could have made some of the jumps they made, my arguments were generaly based on a naval power deciding to use their 5/45 secondary gun for everything.

I would like to offer to help fill out the rest of the Naval pages, I can even offer drawings of several of the units in a 2 pix = 1 foot scale (aka shipbucket scale where i am a semi frequent poster)

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"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his desserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all."

James Graham, 1st Marquess and 5th Earl of Montrose, 1612-1650
(Common Paraphase: "He Who Dares Wins")

Talk to TimothyC, he's on close terms with many of the original authors (and also a shipbucketeer).

The difficulty is that Drakafic, as a project is, well... very very dormant. Most of the Drakafic writing was done around 2005-07, as I recall; everyone's moved on to other things, and since then, serious creative and personal differences among the writers have emerged that make it unlikely it will ever become a "finished" story, seeing as how all the people involved have day jobs. Often quite demanding ones.

So acknowledging that you'd have contributions to make, the people who set it up really aren't into it any more... you might do better thinking about your own sources of inspiration; the Drakastomp fiction genre has been around for a long time and isn't going away soon.

Similar to the Drakafic, and far more compact, is ChaserGrey's work.

Yeah, I wasn't around during the Draka-stomping glory days, but it has been quite a while since anything new was posted...anything here at least. I've been through the older pages of this forum (what can I say...I was bored) and it was a few pages back before I found any Drakafic stuff.

Of course, if you want to make contributions...nothing's stopping you, just know that it won't revive the older stuff.

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SDNW5: Republic of Arcadia...Sweden in SPAAACE

Didn't stop the US Army from trying, as the T30 heavy tank demonstrates.

I'm assuming it's possible for WW2 powers to manufacture a 120mm gun-armed tank. The difficulty would be manufacturing engines powerful enough to make this tank something other than a mobile pillbox (a problem that plagued the Jagdtiger tank destroyer). High cost would also make it unlikely that a WW2 power could get more than a handful.

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Please do not make Americans fight giant monsters.

Those gun nuts do not understand the meaning of "overkill," and will simply use weapon after weapon of mass destruction (WMD) until the monster is dead, or until they run out of weapons.

They have more WMD than there are monsters for us to fight. (More insanity here.)

The German Maus was a good example of that. It had a 128mm main gun, and when all its engines were in good order could move at a brisk walk. That wasn't often. Also had some slight problems with bridges...

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Lt. Brown, Mr. Grey, and Comrade Syeriy on Let's Play BARIS

True enough the Maus was rather a joke for the germans (I blame Hitler honestly). However the Iosif Stalin series tanks used a 122 mm main gun that was in production as early as 1936 (the gun not the tank), and only weighed in at basicly one more ton than the german Panther which was not only superior to the Tiger but weighed somthing like 12 tons less.

I figure that the Hond III would have been hypotheticly possible, I just dont see any driving factors to cause its construction.

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"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his desserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all."

James Graham, 1st Marquess and 5th Earl of Montrose, 1612-1650
(Common Paraphase: "He Who Dares Wins")

Probably for the same reason the Iosif Stalin tanks were made. Officially, they're "breakthrough tanks" that breach enemy defense lines so lighter forces (including medium tanks) can attack the enemy rear, and to engage the enemy's heavy tanks so they don't do the same. Unofficially, the heavy tanks are penile compensators- I mean "shining examples of the technological superiority and manufacturing prowess of the nation of origin."

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Please do not make Americans fight giant monsters.

Those gun nuts do not understand the meaning of "overkill," and will simply use weapon after weapon of mass destruction (WMD) until the monster is dead, or until they run out of weapons.

They have more WMD than there are monsters for us to fight. (More insanity here.)

ok did some more diging, here are the stats on the book version of the Hond III

Armored Fighting Vehicles: Hond III—Draka

Weight: 58 tons, loaded.

Dimensions: length 23ft.. height 8ft 2in.. width 12ft 6m.

Armor: 30mm- 125mm hull. 35mm-150mm turret/ mantlet All surfaces sloped for ballistic protection; fabrication welded and cast.

Armament: 1x120mm cannon. 1x15mm coaxial machine gun. 1x40mm coaxial grenade launcher. 1x15mm bow machine gun. 2x15mm antiaircraft twin-barrel machine gun on turret roof pintle mounting.

Engine: 1200 hp. Kurenwor free-piston turbocompound.

Suspension: Seven road wheels; torsion bar/hydraulic hybrid. Track width 650mm.

Speed, range: 30 mph cross-country. 45 mph road. Range 300 miles on internal fuel; 600 with external drop tanks.

Crew: 5: commander, loader, gunner, driver, and radio operator/bow gunner.

I found several aircraft engines with a similar HP output from the period OTL (even if the first turbo compound I could find wasn't untill 1941). So I have to say it was definetly possible to build it, and if the rest of the world didnt know about it... OUCH

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"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his desserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all."

James Graham, 1st Marquess and 5th Earl of Montrose, 1612-1650
(Common Paraphase: "He Who Dares Wins")

High power aircraft engines in tanks don't work without derating horsepower, otherwise they'll be soon destroyed by the vastly more rugged use, inferior cooling and the fact that they are constantly operating in a cloud of dust. The author of the original Draka stories was plainly not much aware of factors like this. Turbocompounding has never worked out in reality due to various technical issues, and would work very poorly on a tank because of the high additional volume it requires, which must be armored. It was tried out in real life, never made it into service with anyone.

You should not expect a exact match of the books in the work that was done, the books are incredibly stupid and full of utter nonsense. We went with the theme overall, but details of Draka equipment were being changed in some cases to make more sense, such as not jumping to giant guns out of hand in some instances, when nothing existed to demand them, as this would only lead to inferior levels of ammunition storage and less, not more combat effectiveness. We were also required to simply make up entire classes of weapons, like most of the artillery. All of this is a factor in why the damn project was given up, too much work for the reward, at least on my end of things.



The A-19 was in production.. as a towed field gun yes, it was never well suited to tank use and the Stalin tank could carry only 28 rounds of ammunition for it, and it only then fired about two rounds a minute. That is why the Stalin tank could be so light and yet well armed, it had almost no space inside of it for ammo or the crew. The main reason it was mounted was because of a shortage of far more suitable 100mm weapons, while the A-19 was being built like crazy as the standard Soviet divisional medium gun. No small measure of its anti tank effect came from battering heavy German armor with HE rounds until it cracked apart, making it effective at ranges it could not pierce Tiger tanks outside. Effective, but hardly efficient. This was of course all forced by the war emergency, rather then any detailed planning or study. The A-19 killed Nazis in the field role, so they put it on a tank.

In comparison a Panther had 79 rounds of ammo, and a Tiger I had anything from 80 to 120 depending on the model, amounts far more suitable for major battles. Both could fire about as rapidly as the gunner could aim. The Germans also put more emphasis on flank armor which drove up weight of all the late war designs they came up with. This is why the Maus was so silly heavy. The Germans also insisted on proper amounts of space for the crews, and radioes which made the vehicles they produced highly efficient in action, but hardly compact and thus easy to armor.

In fact the Soviets did have some pre 1941 projects for 122mm weapons on tanks, but they used short barrel howitzers intended to attack heavy fortifications. This is what also led to the KV-2 with a 152mm howitzer in 1940. But such weapons were much different then high velocity tank guns, and all used separate loading ammo as did the A-19.

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

Wikipedia notes working turbo-compound engines were and are in production- admittedly, long after WW2 ended.

Do you mean they tried to use turbo-compounding in a tank engine? What examples are there?

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Please do not make Americans fight giant monsters.

Those gun nuts do not understand the meaning of "overkill," and will simply use weapon after weapon of mass destruction (WMD) until the monster is dead, or until they run out of weapons.

They have more WMD than there are monsters for us to fight. (More insanity here.)

Yeah a handful of aircraft engines did use it, none was a great success and as I said, aircraft engines are much less demanding then tank engines in terms of operating conditions. They run for long periods in a narrow RPM band in clean air with only wind induced stresses on the driveshaft, rather then say, shock of a fifty ton tank slamming into a ditch or a stone wall and then immediately being thrown into reverse to get clear. They also blow up if you keep them stationary on the ground for too long, cooling limits are simply accepted with aeroengines, especially WW2 piston engines. Can't have that on a tank on a 115 degree F day.

I really can't think of what could be more abusive to an engine then powering a tank, except powering in a tank in ever worse terrain with worse quality of fuel/oil/filters. Anything you drive more violently is probably a damn lot lighter and not tracked, anything heavier is bound to be road/rails only or else very slow.



Various experimental tank engines mainly in the 1950s. End result was everyone on earth uses either a diesel with or without some form of supercharging, or a pure gas turbine for the M1 Abrams and certain T-80 models only. Turbocompounding besides its inherent added complexity adds massive amounts of back pressure to the engine, increasing stress on every single component and thus reducing reliability of the entire system. Meanwhile a turbine will only ever work well in a narrow RPM range, while a diesel engine on a tank will be throttled up and down constantly. Joining the two together is not the greatest idea.

The idea is trying to make a comeback now for truck engines, but in very mild forms, like 5% power/economy kind of boost, alongside a whole slew of other expensive and difficult to maintain ideas to improve economy on internal combustion engines. Such small economy gains can be useful, but that's not really what was in mind for the Drakfic designs, nor for any of the actual uses for aircraft and tank power plants. Its also... use for long haul trucks, a very mild operating environment. Tank engine designers have opted to just increase compression ratios, and not even go very far on that, because reliability in action counts for more then saving a few gallons of fuel. Tanks waste huge amounts of fuel idling anyway, and turbocompounding will actually make your idle worse unless you have a wastegate to bypass the turbine at low power, but this requires yet more plumbing volume in the engine compartment. Of course for the modern comeback, well, lots of stuff will work acceptably today that wouldn't have a chance in hell in working fifty or sixty years ago. The Draka stories ignored this to a completely comical degree. The more rejected and unworkable a technological idea was, like say, compressed air power transmission, the more the Draka were given it and somehow became a global superpower in the process. With slaves no less. I don't even want to think about it anymore.

On a random note, one or two railway locomotives, and a Swedish cruiser used a hybrid of gas turbine and diesel engine which was sort of like turbo compounding, basically the diesel engine spun freely generating lots of exhaust gas, and this gas was piped into a completely separate power turbine. In this way each engine ran at its own speed, and the transmission could be simpler. The idea worked but it sure wasn't very efficient as an overall means of powering anything.

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

Six stroke engines make more sense than turbocompounding for a tank.

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The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. -- Wikipedia's No Original Research policy page.

In 1966 the Soviets find something on the dark side of the Moon. In 2104 they come back. -- Red Banner / White Star, a nBSG continuation story. Updated to Chapter 4.0 -- 14 January 2013.

Also just a pure opposed piston design makes fair bit of sense, and have in fact been used successfully on the T-64 and BMP-3. Not much except higher costs would have stopped one in the 1940s, though overall performance gains are limited.

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

How does a six-stroke engine compare to a turbosteamer? Or do you think a turbosteamer is needlessly complex, compared to a six-stroke?

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Please do not make Americans fight giant monsters.

Those gun nuts do not understand the meaning of "overkill," and will simply use weapon after weapon of mass destruction (WMD) until the monster is dead, or until they run out of weapons.

They have more WMD than there are monsters for us to fight. (More insanity here.)

Note I dont disagree on any of the points made, im not an Eng. what I am is a Marine with a Deg. in History. As to the engine I couldnt find a single Turbo Compond I would consider in the period, heck the only ones I could find at all were for aircraft (somthing I tryed to point out but aparently wasnt clear enough on). I honestly agree with most of the Decisions on downgrading the hardware, Its almost as bad as some of Ringos work (Shiva anyone although that was admitedly an anti lander system to start with). That said lets keep the discusion going and I will continue to act as devils advocet ~.^

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"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his desserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all."

James Graham, 1st Marquess and 5th Earl of Montrose, 1612-1650
(Common Paraphase: "He Who Dares Wins")

The SheVa is at least... technologically possible? If we really wanted to build a giant nuclear-powered mine crawler with a 16" gun turret mounted on top, we probably could. It'd be stupid, but we could do something like it with roughly modern technology.

Tanks with performance parameters comparable to the Abrams using 1940s (or variant 1940s) technology are a whole different matter.

I am aware. The Hond then crawls all over europe in vast numbers, instead of say, breaking down every six miles (exaggeration) as similar vehicles actually did, though.

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Superior Moderator - BotM - HAB [Drill Instructor]-Writer- Stardestroyer.net's resident Star-God.
"We believe in the systematic understanding of the physical world through observation and experimentation, argument and debate and most of all freedom of will." ~ Stargate: The Ark of Truth

A turbosteamer requires improved metallurgy to make the turbine resistance to the exhaust gasses for longevity. In the WW2 era the Dyer-type six-stroke engine with water injected into the cylinders after the ignition and expansion portion of the cycle to both cool and cause steam to expand for a second driving portion of the cycle makes far more sense. It also gives you your horsepower in low-down RPMs which is very nice for a tank since it increases effective torque for horsepower. For example it would have made a lovely engine for the Churchill infantry tank and its successor the Black Prince. Not so much for high speed tanks, but if you want a reliable King Tiger it would help a lot.

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The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. -- Wikipedia's No Original Research policy page.

In 1966 the Soviets find something on the dark side of the Moon. In 2104 they come back. -- Red Banner / White Star, a nBSG continuation story. Updated to Chapter 4.0 -- 14 January 2013.

A hybrid turbosteamer would be very complicated for a tank,. Steam turbines have low efficiency unless they exhaust into a vacuum, which means you need condensers, which means lots of volume and extra powered pumping and cooling to make all of that work, and you need very high purity water. Meanwhile like the wiki article is nice enough to point out, they work better at higher, sustained speeds that produce lots of waste heat. This is not the case for a tank. BMW is also exploiting the fact that the catalytic converter on a car greatly increases exhaust temperature, which in turn improves steam conditions, but no WW2 vehicle had or would want a catalytic converter. They rob power from the engine in the first place.

Its worth considering that steam turbines were a near complete failure on railroad locomotives, and yet this is a far more demanding and less appealing operating environment. The best idea for improving economy on a WW2 tank was to go to an electrical transmission. Then while weight goes up and complexity rises, you can counter balance that to a point by removing the need for a complicated mechanical transmission steering system. You gain economy, and you gain a low speed torque from using drive motors, and the engine leds a less rugged life. You also can decouple the location of the engine from the location of the drive sprocket which is what the Maus did. But even for this, reliable electrical tank propulsion proved beyond the means of anyone in WW2, the US spent a dangerously huge amount of time on it and still failed, and already had the best electrical engineering in the war. Hell, even today people don't really want to mess with it for armored vehicles, it contributed to the failure of Future Combat System, in spite of no small amount of trying postwar.

In the end much of this is pointless anyway, because nobody really gave damn about fuel consumption in a WW2 tank nor should they, operating ranges on almost everywhere were realistically under a hundred miles. The point was getting enough power out of the engine in the first place, and all these complicated concepts don't accomplish that. They are meant for economy, power gain is only to that end. You want more raw power, you spend the weight and volume to build/cool a better main engine. Engineers had more then enough to do trying to make these engines work at all without throwing lots of extra pieces at them.

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

Does Duchess have a point about six-stroke engines? High horsepower, low RPM sounds consistent with what you're talking about. Or would that just be similarly pointless?

Depends on the six stroke, they'd don't all work even remotely the same way to the point that the term isn't that useful. The water injection/steam stroke type is supposed to have the same horsepower as a four stroke but at a lower RPM, however it also consumes all its cooling water as it operates. This raises a more then slight question about what happens when you try to start such an engine in winter, and can it use anti freeze for cooling? Even if it can, you are now burning up your anti freeze as you operate, I doubt anyone would accept that in a military vehicle.

Some of the opposed piston ideas might work okay, because they aren't increasing cycle time but rather counting movements of a second smaller piston as the extra strokes and are basically doing it to increase compression ratio. However a military engine designer is as likely to just add a bigger turbocharger, or use a conventional four stroke opposed piston engine with two equal pistons. Other ideas would reduce the overall power of the engines purely in the quest for fuel economy. Anything that is based on six strokes from one piston is likely to be a fail, since even large increases in economy and power recovery are just not going to equal the power lost from increasing cycle time per fuel burn 50%.

The fact that many of these ideas have been around since world war one, and even the newer ones tend to be decades old, without being adapted, is not a hearty endorsement.

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

I'd use menthol as antifreeze in the water tank for the six-stroke steam cycle. It can prospectively add expansion power (so you need to calculate the ratio carefully), though likely not. The residue won't do bad things since it could be found in gasoline anyway. But again, this engine has the primary advantage of increasing torque relative to horsepower; it is an engine for a very large, very slow tank that is crossing rough terrain: A Churchill, an infantry tank, a tank basically designed to fight WW1 again. If such an engine had been adopted for tanks I suspect the last one it would be used in would have been the Black Prince and it would have been primarily a feature of British infantry tanks. Which doesn't make it very useful for making a Hond super-powerful. The British infantry tanks would probably have twice the armour thickness so that 88mm fire bounces off like punches on a riot cop but still a 2pdr...

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The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. -- Wikipedia's No Original Research policy page.

In 1966 the Soviets find something on the dark side of the Moon. In 2104 they come back. -- Red Banner / White Star, a nBSG continuation story. Updated to Chapter 4.0 -- 14 January 2013.

I'd think even the Brits would have upgunned to something with a decent exploding shell, under those circumstances.