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I woke up this morning with the strangest thought in my head.

We know how by war's end the Germans had designed a new small turret to correct problems with the Panther. The new 'schmalturn' (forgive the spelling) was given a coincidence rangefinder a narrow pigs-head type gun mantlet. This mantlet corrected a serious shot trap problem with the Panther's original wide barrel-shaped gun mantlet.

Now to the M26 Pershing. You could say this was the U.S. Army's Panther. It even included a similar looking barrel-shaped gun mantlet with the same shot trap problem. A few years later the the borrowed T42 tank turret appears appears on the M47 (formerly M26/46) chassis. Like the German schmalturn this turret mounts a coincidence rangefinder, a much reduced frontal area with roughly triangular gun mantlet, and even a Panther-like raised commander's cupola!

What's to keep us from concluding that designers had got a look at the German schmalturn and had purposefully produced an Americanized version? A U.S. version would be cast, not welded. A U.S. version would be given a power traverse, and a turret bustle to act as a counterweight to the gun. If you look you can still see a lot of the original schmalturn inspiration in the M47 turret design... can't you?

Am I dreaming? Am I the only one who's seeing this?

Interesting thought. When I saw the subject line in the index My first tought was 'what the????' Then I thought I wonder if he is going to suggest that the narrow M-47 turret was based on teh German turret.

As a firm believer in any good designer 'borrows' features from everyone else (especially competitors) I think the idea has a lot of merit.

We constantly hear about how the Allied aircraft designers borrowed all sorts of features from the Germans why not armor features. While some of the ideas can be laid down to just plain common sense based on battle experience there is always the process of validating your ideas based on what you found out that they were working on

Hi Mike! Hi Folks!

- mike_Duplessis

What's to keep us from concluding that designers had got a look at the German schmalturn and had purposefully produced an Americanized version? A U.S. version would be cast, not welded. A U.S. version would be given a power traverse, and a turret bustle to act as a counterweight to the gun. If you look you can still see a lot of the original schmalturn inspiration in the M47 turret design... can't you?

Am I dreaming? Am I the only one who's seeing this?

I would think that after looking at the combat results on the gun mantlets of the Sherman and Pershing tanks, that US designers would have came to the conclusion that narrower was better. The schmalturn never made it into combat and I would think that it had very little if any impacted on US designers. As for the rised Panther type TC cupola, we already had all round vision like that on the later model Shermans and the Pershings. The M47 went passed that with the addition of a gunner's sight for the TC.

Sorry Mike, I just don't see it.
Sgt, Scouts Out!