Chapter 549: Suspension

Soviet Union, Ural Mountains armament factory, codenamed Project 9137, has now completed construction and is holding its production launch ceremony. This project includes the establishment of a series of tank production factories in Chelyabinsk, turning this place into a city dedicated to producing tanks.

The forest of chimneys rising here is a testament to its grand and spectacular scale. Including some of the skilled workers who have been evacuated from Minsk, Kharkiv, and Donetsk, this place has 30,000 employees and can be said to be another industrial heart of the Soviet Union.

Of course, this factory is an important base for the Soviet Union to produce tanks, and the machine tool equipment, set up with the help of American engineers, is also preparing to serve the production of a new type of Soviet tank. This tank is a war monster meticulously designed by Soviet scientists, a decisive weapon on which Stalin has placed high hopes.

This tank is equipped with a 76mm cannon, modified from a Soviet anti-aircraft gun, which is very practical and has greater power than the main gun of the KV-1 tank. And this tank requires less steel than the KV-1. The entire tank, like the German tanks, uses sloped armor plates. The only difference is that this tank has an access hatch on the frontal armor plate.

This tank has seven road wheels. Of course, this is directly related to Germany’s preemptive purchase and classification of the Christie suspension system. The Soviet Union did not obtain the relevant patents and technology, so for a time, they could not come up with any decent shock absorption solution and had to temporarily make do with the technology from the KV-1.

Of course, it must be said that by a strange twist of fate, both the King Tiger tank that Germany was developing and the T-34 tank that the Soviet Union was preparing to produce used a “torsion bar suspension.” And the experience of later generations proved that the torsion bar suspension was the mainstream choice for tank suspension systems. This suspension had many advantages over the Christie suspension that was commonly used on German tanks at the time.

Because the Christie tank suspension was designed based on the principle of spring force, this suspension took up a lot of space inside the hull. This also made the interior space of the T-34 in another timeline, and the German Panther and Tiger tanks produced under Akado’s direction in this timeline, somewhat cluttered, which affected the storage of ammunition and the placement of equipment.

This was also the result of Akado being misled by the “T-34 myth” that he had heard about, leading him to be fooled once. In fact, in terms of structural simplicity and space utilization, the torsion bar suspension was a universally recognized method for tank suspension.

And the ridiculous thing is that the much-criticized suspension systems of the Tiger and Panther tanks produced by Nazi Germany in another timeline were precisely the torsion bar suspension that was commonly used by the American M1 main battle tank, the German Leopard 2A6, China’s Type 99, and Russia’s T-72 and T-80. On the contrary, the Christie suspension used by the mythologized T-34 was completely eliminated.

Why was this so? In fact, this must be explained from the Germans’ own suspension design: German tanks did indeed use a more advanced and simple, reliable suspension system. However, due to their own stubbornness and unavoidable difficulties, they had modified a simple and advanced suspension system into something completely unrecognizable.

To put it simply, a torsion bar suspension must have the road wheels on both sides staggered to accommodate the “torsion bars” that need to run across the entire hull. This created the “flaw” of asymmetrical road wheels on both sides of the tank. Of course, this asymmetry did not affect daily use at all, but for the Nazi German designers in another timeline, this was an unbearable “disaster.”

As is well known, the Tiger and Panther tanks in another timeline used an interleaved road wheel structure. This structure was adopted because the rubber on the edges of the road wheels was not strong enough. In other words, Germany had to find a way to install more road wheels within the limited length of the hull to support the weight of the entire tank. For a torsion bar structure, this required the engineers to install more torsion bars—the Tiger and Panther had as many as 16, which immediately negated the advantage of the simple structure of the torsion bar.

Of course, another reason that made the running gear of the Tiger and Panther even more complicated was of their own making—they could not stand the asymmetry of their tanks’ road wheels, so they used methods to make the complex interleaved road wheels symmetrical on both sides… Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that a surprise? For so many Virgo-like German designers and leaders to appear together in the history of Germany in World War II is truly enough to make one cry without tears.

Coupled with the Tiger tank’s own problem of a small horse pulling a large cart and its gearbox failures, it created a false impression that misled later scholars: the T-34 had a simple structure and few breakdowns, while the Tiger had a complex structure and many breakdowns. This is actually a very wrong argument, at least not an objective and comprehensive one.

If you were to delve into the technology used in German World War II tanks, you would immediately understand that the Germans had actually drawn a strange circle for themselves, falling into a “heretical path” in their pursuit of tank performance.

German smelting technology was advanced, and they had discovered a process called surface hardening. This process raised the quality of the German tanks’ armor to a new level. But the price was that this German surface hardening process would increase the weight of the metal—similar to the hundred-times-refined steel mentioned in martial arts novels, a different density would naturally affect the weight.

So while improving protection, the weight of German tanks rose to a new height. Coupled with the weight bonus from the interleaved road wheels and the double torsion bars, German tanks at that time basically all had an incredible weight. Of course, the benefits of the double-row interleaved road wheels were also beyond doubt; the comfort and stability of the tank were simply unparalleled.

I don’t know if everyone has noticed, but all these performance improvements are good things: the tank’s armor is thicker, the running gear is more effective, and of course, if you add in the consistent reputation of the German tank guns and Germany’s far-leading aiming systems, we will find that this tank is infinitely close to one word: “perfect.” So now a new question arises—the armor is stronger, the running gear is more comfortable, the firepower is also unrivaled, does this tank really have no weaknesses?

The Achilles’ heel, of course, was in the engine and gearbox of the Tiger and Panther tanks. To give the tanks extraordinary mobility, the engines equipped on these two models were naturally powerful and excellent in performance. But in that era, an increase in performance brought a straight-line drop in reliability, and the problem of a high failure rate followed. Another fatal problem was fuel consumption; the nickname “gas guzzler” was not for nothing.

Suppose you buy a car. The driving feel is great, the safety systems are perfect, the interior is beautiful, and the appearance is enough to show your noble taste. Is this car really perfect? Is it expensive to repair? Did you spit blood when you bought it? Is the fuel consumption per hundred kilometers tear-jerking? You may be rich and not care about these shortcomings, but have you ever thought about what kind of a disaster it would be if you owned tens of thousands of these cars and had to use them every day? At that time, Hitler and his logistics department were facing just such a disaster, so their defeat was not unjust in the slightest.

In this timeline, the Germans had not fallen into a terrible vicious circle. The weight of their tanks had always been kept very well. A good ballistic shape had, to a certain extent, compensated for the thickness of the armor. At this time, the German tanks were steadily advancing towards the concept of a main battle tank, and not down the road of no return that was the heavy tank.

Akado had unhesitatingly jumped into the pit that Hitler had dug. He had purchased the patent for the Christie suspension system and had strictly kept it secret, using this actually very backward suspension on the new German Panther and Tiger tanks, and was quite pleased with himself, thinking that he had simplified the German tanks and reduced their failure rate.

When the German engineers no longer had to worry about such boring things as “left-right symmetry,” when they no longer had to sigh over the quality of the rubber on the edges of the road wheels, they naturally found a tank suspension system that was more suitable for war, which was the torsion bar suspension whose advantages had been proven by time.

Akado, this layman, was also stunned by the later calculated data. Only then did he know that the so-called T-34 myth was sometimes not all true. He admitted his mistake and ordered that the next generation of German tanks, the King Tiger, would decisively use the more advanced torsion bar suspension in its design.

Now, the most advanced T-34 tank in the Soviet Union also used a torsion bar suspension and, even more progressively, a rear-mounted transmission. This tank also had sloped armor plates, possessing an excellent ballistic shape, and its 76mm cannon could also threaten the early-production Panther tanks at a range of 500 meters, making it fully capable of competing with the equipment of the German panzer forces.

Today, Stalin arrived here, inspected the production situation of the entire factory, and personally applied the last coat of paint to the first T-34 tank to roll off the production line. Amidst a wave of applause, the first advanced T-34 tank of the Soviet Union officially entered service and was immediately loaded onto a train to be sent to the Ukrainian front to participate in the new counter-offensive.

This time, the Soviet Union had mobilized 500,000 troops from the Far East and had committed all the forces it could spare to the main front. It could be said that they were quite well-prepared. The Soviet high command was well aware of what the result would be if Ukraine were to remain out of their control for a long time. The anti-Soviet wave there was stronger than imagined.

With battle-hardened soldiers and newly equipped weapons, the Red Army had made a considerable investment this time. Stalin had decided not to let the politicians interfere this time. He had prepared a true military commander for the million-strong army at the front.

Published: 2025-09-04T04:12:14.000+00:00
Last Edited: 2025-12-23T15:33:38.000+00:00
URL: https://www.patreon.com/caleredhair/posts/mtr-c549-138089731

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