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The railway constraint was because of British railways and the need to transport tanks from the factories in the home country - not across Europe.
The fighting compartment refers to the area the crew uses which includes the turret but in the British design did not "flow over" the tops of the tracks
as in have sponsoons as the T34 and Panther. This kept the hull height down.
The British may have had many designs but again most were not able to be refined due to budget constraints.
Medium Tank Mk.II was not transported by continental railways, but by British railway(s). Seems like nobody said to the designers of the tank to keep the height down, either.
No tank with a rotating turret, of any country ever, had the fighting compartment that was only as high as the 'returning' tracks before.
British have designed 10 (ten) separate types between 1935 and 1940 - 3 types of light tanks (V, VI, VII), 4 types of cruisers (II, III, V, VI) and 3 infantry tank types (Matilda I and II, Valentine). That's double the number of types Germans designed in the same time (NbFz, Pz-I to IV).
I keep saying that all the time - the wide Medium Mk.II was transported across the UK by British railways.
Matilda II, the best British tank before the Churchill was debugged, have had the sponsoons. Hull of the Matilda I was much higher than the returning tracks.
In many instances it is not easy to make a silk purse from sow's ear.
Not much better if as good as getting the 6pdr AT gun into production when the design was ready.
A prototype gun was supposed to have been fired at some point in 1939, after which the the design was "sealed" and put into a drawer to await it's day of need.
An order was placed in June of 1940 for 400 guns but they had to wait while 2pdrs were built to re-equip the forces Dunkirk and to equip the rapidly expanding British army, a 2pdr gun was figured to be better than no gun. First guns are not made until Nov of 1941 but by May of 1942 1500 guns a month are being built. 17,854 guns were built in 1942 in the UK alone.
400 guns in NA in 1940 might have seen some rather different results to more than one battle.
The regular 6pdr AT gun was about 300lbs lighter (barrel and Breech) than the coast defence gun and fired at about 300fps higher velocity.
Of course you still have the British self defeating shoulder control of the elevation screwing up long range gunner in the dessert.
There were other problems with tank design / procurement as the earlier covenanter post shows. A tank ordered before it was even built mainly because
it was cheaper (around 1938 I think).
The first problem was the engine which was a Meadows flat 12 designed for the tank. Inexperience with tank design showed as the cooling system didn't fit and had to go outside on the hull. As a result the tank always had heating problems. Later tanks had the Nuffield Liberty engine which was a very old design. The Rolls Royce Meteor was the version of the Merlin with cast iron pistons and no supercharger. This engine type was investigated early on (1939 ?) but the need for aircraft supply meant it was a no go till much later in the Cromwell. The Churchill used a Bedford engine which was also underpowered and got worse as more armour was added. In other words there wasn't a decent engine to power a heavier
vehicle at a reasonable speed in the early years.
Cost and speed of production played a part as well. Building tanks without the larger turret ring capability was faster and cheaper which was politically expedient at the time and especially after Dunkirk even though it wasn't a good long term solution. The other factor in this was that the Char B1 and Matilda had been able to withstand German tank guns but the quicker moving enemy units made an impression (lots of themgetting around flanks etc).
Part of this problem was the requirement itself, which in time became meaningless. They wanted a certain amount of power per ton of tank which, as you say, the Kestrel could not provide. however as things turned out that amount of power was rarely used.The Kestrel was evaluated at the time the Meteor was looked at and found to be unable to provide the required horsepower per ton that the Meteor could.
The Kestrel was evaluated at the time the Meteor was looked at and found to be unable to provide the required horsepower per ton that the Meteor could.
The Meteor was trialled in a Crusader in April 1941 and was found to be highly suitable. Leyland were asked to produce the Meteor as Rolls Royce were
to concentrate on the Merlin. 1200 engines were to be produced in1942 but Leyland never got to the stage of production.
The first prototypes of the Churchill A22 were not produced until the end of 1940 with the first production models being built in mid 1941.
Again, fitting a bigger gun in quantity wasn't able to be done in those years. The tank procurement program was only allocated 1% of the
military budget in those years so costs were a big factor.
Tactical use was definitely incorrect but so was integration with air support, something which also had to be relearned. The core of the problem is not so much the guns and armour but the steadfast opposition from many to the tank in the first place. This lead to the tank corps being pushedto the bottom of the pile in the early 1930's with the lessons already learned being totally ignored.
The combined power of aircraft and tank use was missed by Britain and France even though it had been shown to be effective as far back as the First World War. It was not missed by Germany. Guderian had been a transport officer in WWI and had noted the importance of communication thus German tanks and command vehicles were well equipped and trained when it came to radio comms.
Kesselring was an artillery officer who noted the potential power of air observation and bombing (close support), again in WWI.
Germany had this combination.
Britain and France were expecting a more static front system. It didn't happen that way.
Whatever way this is looked at incomes down to a lack of forward thinking. Bigger, heavier, more powerful engines, bigger guns should have been considered earlier than they were.
From the other side of the coin once the war was on Germany actually slipped back by building bigger. From 1943 on the combination of larger tanks with a significant lowering of reliability and range coupled with an ever dwindling capacity for air support meant no more successful offensives could be carried out. Although the larger German tanks were hard to kill they were also harder to manufacture (materials and time) which allowed British and American types to do what they were made for - move with and protect infantry.
Much is made of British design faults but ultimately they weren't alone. It must also be remembered that no one had all the answers when it came to how to build and use a good tank. Mistakes were made all round with the Panther being a good example.
Any thread like this is predicated on comparisons - what could have been done to take on the opposition ?