Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

FAN: Discuss various fictional worlds that don't qualify for SF.

Moderator: Steve

User avatar
Elheru Aran
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 13073
Joined: 2004-03-04 01:15am
Location: Georgia

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Elheru Aran »

Given that it would be all too easy for Hitler and company to simply dismiss any Western claims of nuclear weapons as propaganda... yeah, they're probably going to need to actually see one being set off to get the message. I don't think the Nazi ideology is so strong as to stand up against the threat of such destruction and refuse extraditing Hitler and company.

That said, rehabilitating the German population would be a significant challenge. Not only do you have to attempt de-Nazification again (and not cock it up like last time), you also have to bring a few tens of million people up to par on the modern world, run modern communications all over again, hell maybe even modern sewers and other infrastructure...

Might have to deal with the vanishing of companies like Daimler-Benz and whatnot, as well. Probably not as major an economic impact as the removal of say France might be, but pretty significant considering Germany is a major hub of the EU.
It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way.
User avatar
Tribble
Sith Devotee
Posts: 3082
Joined: 2008-11-18 11:28am
Location: stardestroyer.net

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Tribble »

Ya, it'd be pretty difficult for the EU to survive given that it's main member was literally replaced by the Nazis it was designed to prevent from reappearing. The UK will be the first to go given present attitude, and since the Euro-zone will almost certainly collapse without German support other countries would soon follow.
"I reject your reality and substitute my own!" - The official Troll motto, as stated by Adam Savage
User avatar
Batman
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 16329
Joined: 2002-07-09 04:51am
Location: Seriously thinking about moving to Marvel because so much of the DCEU stinks

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Batman »

Hitler doesn't 'need' to get the message, modern day militaries can take Nazi Germany apart with contemptuous ease without ever resorting to nukes.
Archinists' delusions aside they ARE that outclassed.
'Next time I let Superman take charge, just hit me. Real hard.'
'You're a princess from a society of immortal warriors. I'm a rich kid with issues. Lots of issues.'
'No. No dating for the Batman. It might cut into your brooding time.'
'Tactically we have multiple objectives. So we need to split into teams.'-'Dibs on the Amazon!'
'Hey, we both have a Martian's phone number on our speed dial. I think I deserve the benefit of the doubt.'
'You know, for a guy with like 50 different kinds of vision, you sure are blind.'
User avatar
Tribble
Sith Devotee
Posts: 3082
Joined: 2008-11-18 11:28am
Location: stardestroyer.net

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Tribble »

And Archinist, we're not trying to discourage you from posting (well some of us aren't anyways), all we're asking is that you at least do a little research and use some common sense when coming up with scenarios rather than making them so incredibly lopsided than one side literally has to be brain dead for the other to remotely stand a chance. Yes, yes, this is all fictional "what ifs" involving imaginary scenarios, but it's more interesting when one side doesn't have to rely on the other's stupidity in order to win. Or if you want the scenarios to be nonsensical, at least tell us as much from the start.

Or you can keeping ignore our advice, in which case "Dumber than a Parrot" will soon end up being ur nickname... which is actually kind of nice compared to some names we've come up with in the past, now that I think of it.
"I reject your reality and substitute my own!" - The official Troll motto, as stated by Adam Savage
User avatar
Kojiro
Jedi Master
Posts: 1399
Joined: 2005-05-31 06:04pm
Location: Adelaide, South Australia

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Kojiro »


This topic made me think of this. I wouldn't be surprised in the Third Reich could be scared into submission by repeated, full speed supersonic buzzing of Berlin. It'd be terrifying to them to know that enemy aircraft were coming and going more or less at a whim, at speeds they couldn't dream of catching.

I actually wonder, if the modern world were sent a Nazi ambassador (assuming Nazi Germany said hold the fuck on, let's not rush things here...) how would they best demonstrate- what military tech would they showcase- so that when then ambassador went back to Hitler he would be beyond all reasonable doubt any military action was comically doomed to failure.
Dragon Clan Veritech
Simon_Jester
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 30165
Joined: 2009-05-23 07:29pm

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Simon_Jester »

Tribble wrote:Scenario 2.0: Modern Germany is swapped out by Nazi Germany, but this time they are given equivalent amounts of modern equipment to what they had just prior to the Barbarossa campaign (proportionally a lot more than what the German army has today). They also have modern technological skills / expertise, so that their economy doesn't fall apart due to lack of maintenance. Would a Modern Nazi Germany still try to wage war, or would they realise that doing so is futile given the prevalence of nuclear weapons? Would they perhaps try to grab a few non-nuclear countries before nuclear countries stepped in? How would the rest of the world respond?
An "equivalent amount" of military equipment measured how? If they have enough tanks, rifles, and military planes to replace everything the 1941 Wehrmacht had on a unit for unit basis, they just might outnumber the rest of the world put together. On the other hand, all those weapons would have utterly ludicrous costs to maintain and operate. Modern militaries don't field tens of thousands of combat aircraft and millions of riflemen.

Also, if they have that many hundreds of billions' worth of military equipment, do they have ABM systems? This is not a trivial question; you could invest in a lot of ABM for the price of a few dozen infantry divisions.
This space dedicated to Vasily Arkhipov
User avatar
Tribble
Sith Devotee
Posts: 3082
Joined: 2008-11-18 11:28am
Location: stardestroyer.net

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Tribble »

Simon_Jester wrote:
Tribble wrote:Scenario 2.0: Modern Germany is swapped out by Nazi Germany, but this time they are given equivalent amounts of modern equipment to what they had just prior to the Barbarossa campaign (proportionally a lot more than what the German army has today). They also have modern technological skills / expertise, so that their economy doesn't fall apart due to lack of maintenance. Would a Modern Nazi Germany still try to wage war, or would they realise that doing so is futile given the prevalence of nuclear weapons? Would they perhaps try to grab a few non-nuclear countries before nuclear countries stepped in? How would the rest of the world respond?
An "equivalent amount" of military equipment measured how? If they have enough tanks, rifles, and military planes to replace everything the 1941 Wehrmacht had on a unit for unit basis, they just might outnumber the rest of the world put together. On the other hand, all those weapons would have utterly ludicrous costs to maintain and operate. Modern militaries don't field tens of thousands of combat aircraft and millions of riflemen.

Also, if they have that many hundreds of billions' worth of military equipment, do they have ABM systems? This is not a trivial question; you could invest in a lot of ABM for the price of a few dozen infantry divisions.
Yes, buy "equivalent amount" I mean that they have enough tanks, rifles, military planes, fuel, bullets, replacement parts etc to replace everything the 1941 Wehrmacht had on a unit for unit basis (otherwise if they were just given the amount of weapons the Germans have right now they would be a non-entity.) For them, it's the equivalent of June 20 1941 in terms of preparedness, all their units have just been moved back to the German frontier. The costs of maintaining all that equipment would be enourmous, but at the start they are ready to go.

Their flak cannons and other anti-aircraft weapons are also replaced on a unit-for unit basis. ABM tech is available however it is far from full-proof - like modern ABM's, it might be able to take out a handful of missiles but it would not be sufficient to protect against a full scale attack. The Germans will know this from the start.
"I reject your reality and substitute my own!" - The official Troll motto, as stated by Adam Savage
User avatar
Tribble
Sith Devotee
Posts: 3082
Joined: 2008-11-18 11:28am
Location: stardestroyer.net

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Tribble »

Or if that's too stupid, make it so that Germany is proportionately as strong to its neighbours as it was on June 20 1941.
"I reject your reality and substitute my own!" - The official Troll motto, as stated by Adam Savage
User avatar
Esquire
Jedi Council Member
Posts: 1581
Joined: 2011-11-16 11:20pm

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Esquire »

Either way, they lose - proportionally, they lost quite conclusively in the 1940s and would again, and if they get a unit-for-unit replacement they'll be immediately nuked. Large conventional armies simply aren't world-beaters anymore.
“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb
User avatar
Sea Skimmer
Yankee Capitalist Air Pirate
Posts: 37389
Joined: 2002-07-03 11:49pm
Location: Passchendaele City, HAB

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Sea Skimmer »

France would immediately employ nuclear weapons anyway. WW2 Germany has far too much manpower for them to stop. 140 divisions were used to invade France in 1940. Even if modern French troops could fight 10:1 odds, which is questionable, they would still loose to that. They don't have enough ammunition for the fight. Some of the other Euro forces would be boardline useless they've shrunk so small. Nukes would be used at once to vaporize major German concentrations, bomber airfields and and no doubt where ever the French think Hitler is. Then conventional bombing can wreck the Rhine bridges and every power plant in Germany and NATO can plot what to do next.
"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
Simon_Jester
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 30165
Joined: 2009-05-23 07:29pm

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Simon_Jester »

I fully agree that the French would go nuclear immediately. But if the Germans have their historical 1941 armament levels, only with every piece of equipment converted to its modern analogue... that might not actually work. The French only have so many nuclear missiles, and by 1941 Germany was liberally slathered in air defense sites which, in modern terms, would translate into high-performance SAMs and probably a respectable ballistic missile defense system.

A massed ICBM attack by Russia or the US is about the only thing I'm sure would get through.

Historically, by 1941 the British, French, and Soviets had all been mobilizing their war industries for years. In real life, everyone has a proportionately tiny peacetime military with only 1-2% of GDP being devoted to actual war production. This means that nobody really has the numbers to deal with the ludicrous swarms of magically conjured modern tanks and planes the Germans would be throwing around.

Going nuclear is the only option and how well it works depends on context.
Tribble wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:
Tribble wrote:Scenario 2.0: Modern Germany is swapped out by Nazi Germany, but this time they are given equivalent amounts of modern equipment to what they had just prior to the Barbarossa campaign (proportionally a lot more than what the German army has today). They also have modern technological skills / expertise, so that their economy doesn't fall apart due to lack of maintenance. Would a Modern Nazi Germany still try to wage war, or would they realise that doing so is futile given the prevalence of nuclear weapons? Would they perhaps try to grab a few non-nuclear countries before nuclear countries stepped in? How would the rest of the world respond?
An "equivalent amount" of military equipment measured how? If they have enough tanks, rifles, and military planes to replace everything the 1941 Wehrmacht had on a unit for unit basis, they just might outnumber the rest of the world put together. On the other hand, all those weapons would have utterly ludicrous costs to maintain and operate. Modern militaries don't field tens of thousands of combat aircraft and millions of riflemen.

Also, if they have that many hundreds of billions' worth of military equipment, do they have ABM systems? This is not a trivial question; you could invest in a lot of ABM for the price of a few dozen infantry divisions.
Yes, buy "equivalent amount" I mean that they have enough tanks, rifles, military planes, fuel, bullets, replacement parts etc to replace everything the 1941 Wehrmacht had on a unit for unit basis (otherwise if they were just given the amount of weapons the Germans have right now they would be a non-entity.) For them, it's the equivalent of June 20 1941 in terms of preparedness, all their units have just been moved back to the German frontier. The costs of maintaining all that equipment would be enourmous, but at the start they are ready to go.
That's my point. They have a massive, staggering force, which is both proportionately larger than that of any of their enemies (because they're a fully mobilized nation fighting peacetime nations that haven't expected a serious war in a generation or more), and even further enlarged because it's the product of WWII conscription and mass production of 'dumb' technology rather than expensive production of 'smart' technology.

If that massive force is armed with modern weapons that replace 'dumb' munitions one for one with 'smart' ones, the volume of conventional weaponry becomes absolutely insane.
Their flak cannons and other anti-aircraft weapons are also replaced on a unit-for unit basis. ABM tech is available however it is far from full-proof - like modern ABM's, it might be able to take out a handful of missiles but it would not be sufficient to protect against a full scale attack. The Germans will know this from the start.
If they had as many batteries of THAAD or Patriot or other comparable systems as they did flak gun batteries in 1941... they actually might be able to stop literally every missile that could be launched by Britain or France. Certainly every missile fired by Israel. Not so sure about the US or the Soviet Union, though, if either party decided to go for a single massed ICBM launch against the German heartland. It depends on how the big heavy fortified AA installations and radar facilities translate into modern warning radars and launch sites.

The thing is... sometimes we don't quite grasp just how BIG WWII conscript militaries were, compared to their modern counterparts. Or to the sheer scale of industrial production devoted to arming them in a country undergoing war mobilization.

All told, during the war Germans produced a million machine guns, seventy thousand cannons, twenty thousand heavy and several times more light AA guns, sixty thousand tanks, something in the neighborhood of sixty thousand fighters and thirty thousand bombers, and so on.

The flip side of that is that modern weapon systems are produced in numbers something like ten or a hundred times smaller, and are dozens or hundreds of times more expensive, because they are dozens or hundreds of times more capable.

A modern tank costs six or seven million dollars, whereas a WWII tank probably wouldn't cost that much more to build than a bulldozer- something like 100 to 200 thousand. But the modern tank is quite literally worth that many WWII tanks in many kinds of fighting (though not all).

A modern surface to air missile launcher probably costs as much as a hundred of the old flak guns- but it can provide just as good an air defense system, or better. Because it has more than ten times the range of a flak gun, and so can defend an area 100 times larger, while also being more accurate and more effective against fast or high-flying planes.

If you equip any nation with a quantity of equipment comparable to that of a major power in World War II, but a quality of equipment compared to the present day, they will outgun the world.
This space dedicated to Vasily Arkhipov
Micro-Balrog
Redshirt
Posts: 22
Joined: 2016-03-29 10:57am

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Micro-Balrog »

I apologize in advance in posting images, but they had to be posted: Spoiler
Image
Image
User avatar
Sea Skimmer
Yankee Capitalist Air Pirate
Posts: 37389
Joined: 2002-07-03 11:49pm
Location: Passchendaele City, HAB

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Simon_Jester wrote:I fully agree that the French would go nuclear immediately. But if the Germans have their historical 1941 armament levels, only with every piece of equipment converted to its modern analogue... that might not actually work. The French only have so many nuclear missiles, and by 1941 Germany was liberally slathered in air defense sites which, in modern terms, would translate into high-performance SAMs and probably a respectable ballistic missile defense system.
Unless you grant them a large fixed site ABM system, aka either the US GBI or Russian Moscow system, nothing deployed today has any tested capability against something the size and speed of the French M51. The batteries would just never fire unless the missile warhead was coming down literally on top of them, which is difficult in its own right. SM-3 Block II will eventually have some limited capability in this field on a mobile platform as might S-500 with rather less range.

I'd suggest that for WW2 a system like GBI is basically on par with using 15in turrets for anti aircraft fire in where costs would stack up. Germany being Germany they did have two different 240mm AA gun projects and one 203mm project...

Big limitations of WW2 forces with modern weapons though would be how absurdly much fuel they eat. 8-20 times as much depending on the details, modern armies and air forces are simply much more physically heavy then those of WW2. This would become a big problem for the Germans here since they'd have no access to north sea or Russian oil reserves, nor huge imported natural gas supplies. Just moving the fuel forward would be a fast crippling problem if they tries to employ everything they had.
"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
User avatar
U.P. Cinnabar
Sith Marauder
Posts: 3845
Joined: 2016-02-05 08:11pm
Location: Aboard the RCS Princess Cecile

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by U.P. Cinnabar »

Sea Skimmer wrote:France would immediately employ nuclear weapons anyway. WW2 Germany has far too much manpower for them to stop. 140 divisions were used to invade France in 1940. Even if modern French troops could fight 10:1 odds, which is questionable, they would still loose to that. They don't have enough ammunition for the fight. Some of the other Euro forces would be boardline useless they've shrunk so small. Nukes would be used at once to vaporize major German concentrations, bomber airfields and and no doubt where ever the French think Hitler is. Then conventional bombing can wreck the Rhine bridges and every power plant in Germany and NATO can plot what to do next.
That would be the Reich Chancellory and associated bunker, the Wolf's Lair, and Berechtsgaden. The French would probably also take out the Berlin flak towers for good measure. They'd also target infrastructure and industry as well.
"Beware the Beast, Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone amongst God's primates, he kills for sport, for lust, for greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him, drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of Death.."
—29th Scroll, 6th Verse of Ape Law
"Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.”
---Doctor Christine Blasey-Ford
User avatar
U.P. Cinnabar
Sith Marauder
Posts: 3845
Joined: 2016-02-05 08:11pm
Location: Aboard the RCS Princess Cecile

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by U.P. Cinnabar »

Sea Skimmer wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:I fully agree that the French would go nuclear immediately. But if the Germans have their historical 1941 armament levels, only with every piece of equipment converted to its modern analogue... that might not actually work. The French only have so many nuclear missiles, and by 1941 Germany was liberally slathered in air defense sites which, in modern terms, would translate into high-performance SAMs and probably a respectable ballistic missile defense system.
Unless you grant them a large fixed site ABM system, aka either the US GBI or Russian Moscow system, nothing deployed today has any tested capability against something the size and speed of the French M51. The batteries would just never fire unless the missile warhead was coming down literally on top of them, which is difficult in its own right. SM-3 Block II will eventually have some limited capability in this field on a mobile platform as might S-500 with rather less range.

I'd suggest that for WW2 a system like GBI is basically on par with using 15in turrets for anti aircraft fire in where costs would stack up. Germany being Germany they did have two different 240mm AA gun projects and one 203mm project...

Big limitations of WW2 forces with modern weapons though would be how absurdly much fuel they eat. 8-20 times as much depending on the details, modern armies and air forces are simply much more physically heavy then those of WW2. This would become a big problem for the Germans here since they'd have no access to north sea or Russian oil reserves, nor huge imported natural gas supplies. Just moving the fuel forward would be a fast crippling problem if they tries to employ everything they had.

Nor will they have the Ploesti oil fields.
"Beware the Beast, Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone amongst God's primates, he kills for sport, for lust, for greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him, drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of Death.."
—29th Scroll, 6th Verse of Ape Law
"Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.”
---Doctor Christine Blasey-Ford
User avatar
Lord Revan
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 12211
Joined: 2004-05-20 02:23pm
Location: Zone:classified

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Lord Revan »

Just a quick question (and this seemed like the right place to ask it.) did the germans field guns bigger then 88mm during WW2 on tanks that is.
I may be an idiot, but I'm a tolerated idiot
"I think you completely missed the point of sigs. They're supposed to be completely homegrown in the fertile hydroponics lab of your mind, dried in your closet, rolled, and smoked...
Oh wait, that's marijuana..."Einhander Sn0m4n
Simon_Jester
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 30165
Joined: 2009-05-23 07:29pm

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Simon_Jester »

There were a handful of tank destroyers with 128mm guns, but the Germans never built more than about seventy of that model.
This space dedicated to Vasily Arkhipov
User avatar
Sidewinder
Sith Acolyte
Posts: 5466
Joined: 2005-05-18 10:23pm
Location: Feasting on those who fell in battle
Contact:

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Sidewinder »

The Maus was designed with a 128mm antiaircraft gun as its main gun (its coaxial gun was a 75mm gun, the same model found on the Panzer IV), with Hitler pressing the designers to replace the weapon with a 150mm gun. Of course, it never entered production.
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.)
User avatar
Elheru Aran
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 13073
Joined: 2004-03-04 01:15am
Location: Georgia

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Elheru Aran »

WWII era AA guns would be pretty useless against modern aircraft, flak bursts scoring random hits aside.

If you're thinking anti-tank, something the size of a 128mm would probably shake up a modern tank pretty damn well, but I'm not sure WWII ammo would penetrate modern armour. Might not NEED to at that size though. Hitting a modern tank before it shot up the WWII tank would be another question, of course.
It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way.
User avatar
Rhadamantus
Padawan Learner
Posts: 382
Joined: 2016-03-30 02:59pm

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Rhadamantus »

Elheru Aran wrote:WWII era AA guns would be pretty useless against modern aircraft, flak bursts scoring random hits aside.

If you're thinking anti-tank, something the size of a 128mm would probably shake up a modern tank pretty damn well, but I'm not sure WWII ammo would penetrate modern armour. Might not NEED to at that size though. Hitting a modern tank before it shot up the WWII tank would be another question, of course.
The M1 abrams has a 120mm gun already, and it's better than a WWII 128 mm. It's armor is also supposed to defend up to 600mm.
"There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky.

But they don't have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US!"

"There is no destiny behind the ills of this world."

"Mortem Delenda Est."

"25,000km is not orbit"-texanmarauder
User avatar
Batman
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 16329
Joined: 2002-07-09 04:51am
Location: Seriously thinking about moving to Marvel because so much of the DCEU stinks

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Batman »

Um-128mm isn't actually all THAT much. The Leo2/M1 gun is 120mm and they need APDS rounds to reliably kill contemporary tanks. I don't see a WW2 128mm doing much beyond maybe blowing off a track or some sensors.
'Next time I let Superman take charge, just hit me. Real hard.'
'You're a princess from a society of immortal warriors. I'm a rich kid with issues. Lots of issues.'
'No. No dating for the Batman. It might cut into your brooding time.'
'Tactically we have multiple objectives. So we need to split into teams.'-'Dibs on the Amazon!'
'Hey, we both have a Martian's phone number on our speed dial. I think I deserve the benefit of the doubt.'
'You know, for a guy with like 50 different kinds of vision, you sure are blind.'
Simon_Jester
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 30165
Joined: 2009-05-23 07:29pm

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Simon_Jester »

Honestly, armor piercing ammunition from World War II just isn't very effective compared to modern ammunition, which modern armor is correspondingly designed to resist; that has more to do with it than anything else.

We know a lot more about how armor penetration actually works (thanks to computers and better material physics), which makes it easier to design successful armor piercing shells.
This space dedicated to Vasily Arkhipov
User avatar
Imperial528
Jedi Council Member
Posts: 1798
Joined: 2010-05-03 06:19pm
Location: New England

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Imperial528 »

Batman wrote:Um-128mm isn't actually all THAT much. The Leo2/M1 gun is 120mm and they need APDS rounds to reliably kill contemporary tanks. I don't see a WW2 128mm doing much beyond maybe blowing off a track or some sensors.
Minor nitpick: APDS existed during WW2 and is basically firing a sub-caliber round through a larger bore gun to get a high velocity projectile. Modern tanks fire APFSDS, which is a fin-stabilized dart usually made of tungsten or depleted uranium or other dense alloys, which compared to bog standard AP and APDS go through RHA like butter.

An M1 Abrams firing at a Maus has a good chance of a partial over-penetration, depending on where the shot lands, and basically any shot will penetrate and cripple or knock out the Maus. I doubt even APCR or APDS from the Maus' 128mm would manage to do any major damage to the Abrams. If they aim well they may immobilize it or disable the gun but I doubt they'd penetrate the frontal armor.
User avatar
Vendetta
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 10895
Joined: 2002-07-07 04:57pm
Location: Sheffield, UK

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Vendetta »

Elheru Aran wrote:WWII era AA guns would be pretty useless against modern aircraft, flak bursts scoring random hits aside.

If you're thinking anti-tank, something the size of a 128mm would probably shake up a modern tank pretty damn well, but I'm not sure WWII ammo would penetrate modern armour. Might not NEED to at that size though. Hitting a modern tank before it shot up the WWII tank would be another question, of course.

WWII ammunition would have no chance of penetrating modern tank armour. The 128cm PaK 44 would penetrate just over 200mm of armour at 30 degrees at 1km. The M821A1 Sabot round of the Abrams can penetrate twice that at four times the range, and that's not considered enough to reliably penetrate a modern tank (The M821A1 is three generations out of date).

The best it could do is achieve some internal spalling, but modern tanks have spall liners and well protected fighting compartments as well because they're expected to survive nonpenetrating hits.

It probably wouldn't be fun to be in a tank taking hits from a 128cm gun, but the tank wouldn't be destroyed (a hit to the gun barrel might render it inoperable, but that doesn't destroy the tank.

Let alone the ability of modern tanks to actually find a target. Gun performance was largely secondary in WWII tank combat to the ability to see the target in the first place, and the tank that fired first tended to win. Modern tanks have far more ways to detect and accurately engage enemy vehicles, at much longer ranges. (Average engagement range for tanks in WWII was ~700m, irrespective of the accuracy or penetrating ability of guns.)
User avatar
Batman
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 16329
Joined: 2002-07-09 04:51am
Location: Seriously thinking about moving to Marvel because so much of the DCEU stinks

Re: Modern Germany is replaced by WW2 Germany...

Post by Batman »

APFSDS is a subset of APDS but fine. The point remains that even modern day 120mm guns need specialized ammunition to defeat modern tank armour,
WW2 128mm rounds are likely going to do bupkis was what I was getting at.
'Next time I let Superman take charge, just hit me. Real hard.'
'You're a princess from a society of immortal warriors. I'm a rich kid with issues. Lots of issues.'
'No. No dating for the Batman. It might cut into your brooding time.'
'Tactically we have multiple objectives. So we need to split into teams.'-'Dibs on the Amazon!'
'Hey, we both have a Martian's phone number on our speed dial. I think I deserve the benefit of the doubt.'
'You know, for a guy with like 50 different kinds of vision, you sure are blind.'
Post Reply