GoforitPanzer said:
Nice eye-candy, Yogi.
But why again are the Germans getting bigger tanks and ahead of time? It's not as if they know what they'll eventually be facing in the SU.
First of all, these upgrades actually
were consistent with what the Germans did historically. The time scale has been moved up, but then the time scale for the entire war is being oved up.
After their experiences in France, the Germans figured out that any tank with less than a 37mm gun wasn't going to cut the mustard (which meant the end of the Panzer II line), and that any new tanks should have enough armor to have a chance of repelling antitank rounds. Historically, the Germans lost a
lot of tanks in France, even if they were later able to salvage most of them. There's no reason to assume that their losses were any lighter here.
That being the case, the Germans have excellent reasons to adopt stronger, tougher panzer designs for future construction, even regardless of what they might run into in Russia.
Moreover, the Russians
don't actually have a large heavy tank force yet, at least not if they were following the historical schedule. The T-34 wasn't put into production until 1941, and the heavy KV series is still in the battlefield testing phase. The Soviet tank corps is armed mostly with BT series tanks and other, lighter vehicles; none of which are dramatically stronger and tougher than the German panzers.
Without large-scale tank combat they're not going to feel the need to replace some of those tanks you mentioned which would have been adequate during the thirties (apart from the Pz I
).
They've already had to deal with large-scale tank combat in France. They know Pan-Asian tanks are light, but they also know more or less where all those designs came from and that they are by no means a representative sample.