Quote Originally Posted by Pannonian
They should have done what the troops on the ground told them to do in 1941, reverse engineered a captured T-34 and given them large numbers of a good, reliable tank and let superior German doctrine do the rest. Up until the end of the war captured T-34s were a favoured prize for panzer crews, powerful, reliable, fast, easy to use.
Well, that is all good and well, but the T-34 had what in German eyes were glaring mistakes. I won't number them, but they are truly horrible. And Germans don't like to repeat mistakes, they like to make their own mistakes.
The T-34s captured were always retrofitted with German sights and had a lot of the glaring faults field-fixed. Some even had the gun replaced with German 75mmL48 gun... But all this was done in the field.

Anyway, they could never copy the engine of the T-34 properly. It just went wrong whenever they tried. And that just shows the true impressive nature of the T-34, it couldn't be copied, even by tech-savvy Germans.
The copycat tank that came out of it, looked a great deal like the T-34, but it was dropped in favour of the Panther (well it would have been named Panther too). The reasons for this was the unbalanced design (turret far ahead) and the increadible overhang of the gun, making it more succeptable to obstructions.