[Is It Overrated?] The Tiger Tank

 The Tiger Tank: possibly history's most famous tank. It's historical reputation is one of a hulking giant, beaten only by drowning it under waves of inferior quality tanks or aircraft. But is it deserving of these fearsome reputation, or is it overrated?

Armor: The Tiger is often cited as having very thick armor, having 120 mm of armor in the front. But this is unimpressive compared to other heavy tanks. The Tiger's cousin in the Panzer arm, the Panther, may have had just 80 mm of armor, but many forget that this armor is slanted, giving it effectively 140 mm worth of protection.

In fact, many other, lesser well known tanks and armored vehicles have better armor. The IS-2, built to combat the Tiger, had 130 mm of armor, unslanted. The Ferdinand, known for lacking any kind of close range guns, had an astonishing 200 mm of armor, 250 mm slanted.

Gun: The Tiger is armed with the 88mm gun, considered on both sides to be the best of the war. But is the gun overrated? tl:dr, no. The earlier IS-2 tank i mentioned was armed with a D-25T, which had a maximum round load of 25. The Tiger had 92 rounds which it could fire back in retaliation.

The Tiger's gun had excellent penetration(dont laugh). A report published by the STAVKA noted that while their t-34s needed to be within 500m to penetrate one, the Tiger's sometimes penetrated their armor at over 3000m, and tests showed it could still manage to pireces its own armor at 2000m.

Quality of parts: The Tiger was over complicated. While Russian and American tanks were being churned out like crazy German factories were carefully assembling one of history's most cumbersomeness tanks. When a tank division arrived at Kursk with 60 Tigers they only had 47 by the time fighting started three days later.

In conclusion, the Tiger is overrated, and certainly not worthy of the awe in which we give it.

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