Comment by osullivj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by osullivj | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Fascinating. In Britain it's long been recognised that our frequently innovative design engineering is often let down by poor production engineering. Many exmples can be cited: most F1 cars are UK built, but we no longer have an mass market car producer. Everything built by Jaguar and Land Rover! Spitfires took four times as many man hours to build as ME109s. The Rolls Royce Merlin was the best aero engine available to the Allies early in the war, but was effectively hand built. When Packard started building Merlins for the P51 they had to retro fit the production engineering tolerances to the design [2]. So I'm surprised to learn that tank production engineering was so poor. I wonder which models were most affected? Panzer III or IV? King Tiger?

[1] Stephen Bungay - The Most Dangerous enemy. [2] https://www.tested.com/art/makers/492418-packard-merlin-how-...

I only learned this while studying German, but King Tiger is actually a poor translation.

The German nickname for the tank was Königstiger, which is the German name for a Bengal tiger, but if translated literally it would instead be Royal Tiger.

The decision to allow production of Merlin by Packard was a masterstroke. The UKs engineering talent was amazing, and the American production engineering was also amazing. The collaboration of the 2 superpowers was unbeatable.

Another important example seems to be the cavity magnetron in WWII. Developed in the UK, it provided about a thousand times more power than the klystrons the US was using at the time and let the Allies maintain a lead in radar technology: probably an important component of the Allied victory, though under appreciated by the public at large. UK designed, mass-produced in the US. The “Tizard Mission” that this was a part of sounds pretty fascinating and I’ve always told myself I’d pick up a book on it someday.

> So I'm surprised to learn that tank production engineering was so poor. I wonder which models were most affected? Panzer III or IV? King Tiger?

Probably the Pz III and IV, particularly early in the war.

They stopped manufacturing the Pz III in 1943, and around the same time started to rationalise tank production to keep costs down. So a Pz IV produced in 1944 or 1945 would be of a lower production quality standard than one produced earlier in the war.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com