Yeah I agree. It has to do with they German Capital model* which is highly risk adverse and iterative, and you still see today; to be fair it is not just the Germans who do this but they are the most famous for it. Basically you keep iterating on the same basic design improving it each time. This can work very well, but it also tends to lead to over complexity, as you require more and more fancy work arounds to deal with problems in the previous iterations. This is why advanced German tanks late in the war tended to be extremely good tanks... when they worked. Especially overcomplicated bits like transmissions and suspensions in the later Panzers and Tigers were notorious for malfunctioning.
This is compared to the Soviet and american model(though I would argue that as capital has become more risk adverse the US philosophy as moved toward the German one in a lot of ways) where, when necessary, you completely scrap a design and start from scratch thereby doing away with all those legacy errors at the cost of a more expensive retooling.
*Note this isn't me wielding calipers and measuring the German risk lobe. It's just an artifact of how German capital developed in the post unification period and is culturally embedded in the governance of all the major corporations that sprang up at the beginning of German capitalism. Companies which all are still with us today, which is why when you go to any German Companies "about us" web page there is a big gap in the timeline from the mid 30's to 1945.
Yeah, thats what happens when your products are over engineered and finicky as shit. Like the Sherman might not have been a 'good fighting' tank, but it was simple and any asshole could slap one together and maintain it.
Huh, I thought it was the other way around. Germans preferred big flashy upgrades that would require re-tooling and mean that two different Panzer IVs would have barely any commonality in parts, whereas the Soviets tended to do small upgrades and spread them in a unified way that would mean that tank production didn't shut down and also having a lot of commonality in parts.
Late war German tanks took this to the extreme, whereas the Soviets snowed them under with iteratively upgraded T34-85s (and the much rarer IS series). Not that this is a total analysis of the war, there were a lot of reasons the nazis lost.
It's not that important until one of us in charge of manufacturing for the Central American Soviet in their war against the Texas Confederacy or whatever.
Yeah I agree. It has to do with they German Capital model* which is highly risk adverse and iterative, and you still see today; to be fair it is not just the Germans who do this but they are the most famous for it. Basically you keep iterating on the same basic design improving it each time. This can work very well, but it also tends to lead to over complexity, as you require more and more fancy work arounds to deal with problems in the previous iterations. This is why advanced German tanks late in the war tended to be extremely good tanks... when they worked. Especially overcomplicated bits like transmissions and suspensions in the later Panzers and Tigers were notorious for malfunctioning.
This is compared to the Soviet and american model(though I would argue that as capital has become more risk adverse the US philosophy as moved toward the German one in a lot of ways) where, when necessary, you completely scrap a design and start from scratch thereby doing away with all those legacy errors at the cost of a more expensive retooling.
*Note this isn't me wielding calipers and measuring the German risk lobe. It's just an artifact of how German capital developed in the post unification period and is culturally embedded in the governance of all the major corporations that sprang up at the beginning of German capitalism. Companies which all are still with us today, which is why when you go to any German Companies "about us" web page there is a big gap in the timeline from the mid 30's to 1945.
The Soviets and Americans were also far better at mass producing equipment. Some German tank models never even had a thousand made
Yeah, thats what happens when your products are over engineered and finicky as shit. Like the Sherman might not have been a 'good fighting' tank, but it was simple and any asshole could slap one together and maintain it.
Chad Sherman Firefly vs Virgin German Kitty Tanks
supplementary material that backs this up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_armored_fighting_vehicle_production_during_World_War_II
Huh, I thought it was the other way around. Germans preferred big flashy upgrades that would require re-tooling and mean that two different Panzer IVs would have barely any commonality in parts, whereas the Soviets tended to do small upgrades and spread them in a unified way that would mean that tank production didn't shut down and also having a lot of commonality in parts.
Late war German tanks took this to the extreme, whereas the Soviets snowed them under with iteratively upgraded T34-85s (and the much rarer IS series). Not that this is a total analysis of the war, there were a lot of reasons the nazis lost.
I could be 1000% wrong, but this is what I was told about German manufacturing.
It's not that important until one of us in charge of manufacturing for the Central American Soviet in their war against the Texas Confederacy or whatever.
So long as we go with simpler is better, I think we can get along comrade.