Quote Originally Posted by Brenus View Post
"Dating back to the highly vaunted yet completely terrible T-34," So terrible than the German Engineers wanted to copy it, and did in fact, with the Panther...
Myth. MAN's Panther design was an evolution of existing German tank design principles, and was in no way a copy of the T-34. The only similarity was the sloped armor, I suppose, but the idea of sloped armor was well known and was to be incorporated into future AFV designs long before the Germans encountered the T-34. It is true that encountering the T-34 did greatly fast track the Panther's design and acceptance. Interestingly, during the sourcing competition, Daimler put forward a prototype that was much closer to the T-34, but it was rejected.

Of course, everything surrounding the T-34 is myth. It's quite amazing how possibly the worst tank of the war has become known as the best. It was not reliable, it was not fast, the armor was brittle, the gun had low velocity and subpar penetration, was far more prone to catastrophic burnout than its piers, and it's awful design and layout led to such a poor showing in the "soft factors" (visibility, optics, communication, etc) that are just as important as the armor/speed/gun combo that is traditionally used to compare tanks that it was virtually unusable against enemy tanks, or really anything other than infantry without adequate AT systems. Like I said... junk.