pattoncommander

Hey Jose,,

Glad you chimed in on this...anyone knows Tigers, it's you. I have had to hand crank around turrets on many tanks, the M-41 and E-8 Sherman being the easy ones. The Russian T-55 and 62 are very smooth and easy. The M-48 and 60s were very slow and awkward to manually traverse, but US tanks were engineered for balance on less than level ground. I couldn't immagine manualy traversing a KT turret with all the weight of that long, heavy gun as well as the extremely heavy turret. Just the design alone tells that it is not balanced. Traversing to a target on a higher elevation must have been a strain on the ring gears and turret motor, but had to be pretty miserable manually. At speeds of 19 seconds, to suddenly stop on a target from full traverse speed must have been a real strain on the turret ring clutch, so I assume the mechanism was as much prone to breakdown as everything else on the KT.