WWII: For those who thought it was nice, but too short...

[Watchman]

Compare the King Tiger with the Sherman, and you'll see the difference.

Entirely different class of tank, cannot be compared. The Königstiger was a special-purpose heavy assault and lineholder monster, massively armoured, heavily armed, expensive as Hell, slow, and was lost due to mechanical failures even more frequently than the gearbox-busting Tiger. Total numbers produced during the whole war don't add up to even 500, if Wiki is to be believed.

The Sherman was an all-purpose medium grunt tank. Cheap and cheerful if not terribly impressive, but given that over 50,000 of the boxy things were made (Wiki again)...

If those designs were to be compared to something, it'd have to happen within their own class. For the Sherman that'd be Panzer III and IV, and maybe V (better known as Panther, although if it can be regarded as a "grunt" machine is another thing given the total production run of feeble circa 7000). For the Tiger, I don't think there's an equivalent in the Western Allied arsenal - you'll have to go to the Soviets and their "heavy metal" assault and breakthrough tanks like the IS series. Which, if I've understood correctly, pwnz0r the Tigers.


Over-engineering their better equipement (especially given the state their war industry was in) was a recurring and characteristic German trait, and duly tended to gimp the gear due to sheer lack of numbers. A feudal Japanese warlord reputedly once observed that for the price of one masterpiece sword you could buy several hundred simple but serviceable spears, and on the battlefield it was those hundred spears that won...