How to fix it?

Absolutely. There was an emphasis at the time on protection over mobility, as we can see with battleships, fortifications and such other designs. The German probably expected their tanks to be on the offensive, so they saw it worth to double up on the armor protection at the cost of mobility and economy. Even SPGs had more armor than needed. Engineers and military theorists just thought that fighting vehicles should have the thickest armor possible because that's what the tank was invented for, and maybe also because they weren't ready to afford putting good guns and armor-piercing ammunitions on fragile frames that could be easily disabled.

>muh superior German steel
All it needed was sloped armor.

Too heavy. Just slope the armor, you didn't have to increase its mass so much.

The problem is that the 88 is overkill for most of armor's primary targets, if you use the sort of doctrine that the Germans were using early war; the tank is an exploitation weapon, not a frontal assault weapon.

The Tiger's design, and the levels of armament and armor, were principally conceived because the Germans were now on the defensive, and wanted a tank for defensive warfare, without considering if the tank is the sort of weapon you want at all for that kind of defensive warfare.

That's not really true, especially with the earlier war German tanks, the 1-3, they were all fast, relatively under-armored tanks. And moreso, successful ones, despite their lack of brute power and often running into trouble if they bumped into other tanks.

The shift to a more bunker-like tank was precisely because they weren't on the offensive.

sloped armour isn't magic that fixes everything though

It's better than flat armor.

Also, stop memeing about sloped armor as a catchall solution. Overmatching isn't just a WoT mechanic; it's what made the T-34 penetrable at ranges far in excess of what the T[E] of it's glacis would imply.

yes, but it doesn't suddenly make your tank invurnerable to every projectile

>When making war machines, it's better to make a fuckton of just average tanks at dirt cheap than to make only a few thousand superb tanks at high costs.
With what crews?

>1,800 Tiger I's are not going to tip the balance when they're up against 35,000 T-34's
And you're going to beat 35,000 T-34s with 3,600 Pz.IVs which are roughly equivalent to T-34s and outnumbered almost 10:1, or 7,200 turretless Stug.IIIs and hope for the best? What is your endgame? I'll take the wunderwaffe gamble if those are my odds with conventional weapons.

>With what crews?
The ones you train as tankers instead of infantry.

>were principally conceived because the Germans were now on the defensive
>In service 1942
>Based on a 1937 requirement
>VK 45.01 prototype design submitted in May 1941

lolnope

No one is claiming this though, it's just objectively better at the time and it's a big oversight by German engineers to ignore this development until so much late in the war. It wouldn't win the war by itself by any means, but it's still a major fail for supposedly superior German engineering.

I think you have it the other way around. Tank crews were retrained as infantry because of a shortage of the latter in the late stages of the war.

>training infantry

Did the Soviets initially use sloped armour because of the better protection or was this a coincidence?

Sloped armour is objectively better than flat armour though. The only time it's an advantage to have flat armour is when your tanks need to be packed together into a small space, like the Shermans which needed to be shipped to Europe having flat side armour. I mean sure sloped armour is not a catchall solution but against a shot fired at a flat trajectory, a 45 degree slope is effectively 41,42% more tgick than flat armour of the same thickness. Now that's obviously less true against high explosive shells where the effective thickness is irrelevant and only the true thickness matters, and against high arcing shells (or just AP shells with a higher arc due to longer range) but it's still very very rare that a flat vertical plate will be more effective than a sloped plate of the same thickness.

>it's another sloped armour increases thickness episode

Non-sloped armor has some advantages though.

No one gives a shit if armor is sloped in the rear because if your rear is showing you're going to get penetrated anyways.

Sloped side armor limits turret ring size and ammo stowage and crew capacity and creates the potential for overmatching.

Sloped frontal armor on small tanks requires the hatch to be on the front plate on smaller tanks, which compromises frontal armor, and usually bad ergonomics as the driver has to hunch over and scrunch his legs to press his face to the view ports unless you have periscopes. Especially if you have a front transmission.

You also have shell penetration angle normalizes somewhat on impact, meaning a vertical plate actually protects a little more than the equivalent weight sloped armor.

The main advantage of sloped armor is ricochets. It's not magic. Sloped armor really isn't that great.

>41,42%
And 41.42% heavier. You know what else is 41.42% heavier? Flat armor that is 41.42% thicker.

>the tank is an exploitation weapon, not a frontal assault weapon.
Heavy tanks were frontal assault weapons and the Tiger had relatively thick side armor as a result.
Sloped armor gives the same LoS thickness as non sloped armor for the same weight. However, until you got to APFSDS, rounds didn't normalize toward armor, giving sloped armor more protection than their LoS thickness would imply.
Overmatch only occurred for German guns 75mm and up and those guns weren't exactly mobile either.

>tfw the IS-3 never saw combat

just look at this beauty

>until you got to APFSDS, rounds didn't normalize toward armor
That's not true and you know it.

>Overmatch only occurred for German guns 75mm and up and those guns weren't exactly mobile either.
It became the standard armament on German tanks.

I'm pretty sure they knew what they're doing.
This is all true, yet overall sloped armor totally worth it, even Germans realized it by the end of the war.
>Sloped side armor limits turret ring size and ammo stowage and crew capacity and creates the potential for overmatching.
Yeah, the original T-34-76 turret was a disaster, but it isn't inherited problem for slope armor, see T-34-85.

>your post
"No"
Are you actually retarded? I explicitly stated that this was comparing two plates of the exact same thickness.

>couldn't make a beter war machine
>what is anything with a russian 85mm gun and up
>what is anything anything with 17pounder

Thickness times length times width times density is mass.

AP/APCR/APDS were partially deflected by armor. The only rounds that "normalized" toward armor were greatly overmatched armor and those meme 122mm blunt nose AP rounds.

>It became the standard armament on German tanks.
>tanks only fought tanks
Tanks fought against primarily infantry and the infantry towed AT guns that can penetrate the T-34 at range had virtually no mobility.
>creates the potential for overmatching
High calibre creates the potential for overmatching

>AP/APCR/APDS were partially deflected by armor.
No. Sloped armor made is more likely they would ricochet, but that doesn't mean angle normalization didn't take place. If the angle wasn't great enough to ricochet, then shells would generally normalize a bit.

>Tanks fought against primarily infantry and the infantry towed AT guns that can penetrate the T-34 at range had virtually no mobility.
And overmatch is just one of the disadvantages, not the only disadvantage. So you can stop acting like just because it's only sometimes a disadvantage, it absolves sloped armor of all it's other disadvantages.

>High calibre creates the potential for overmatching
Relative to armor plate thickness. Sloping armor for the same weight makes the plate thickness thinner.

>If the angle wasn't great enough to ricochet, then shells would generally normalize a bit.
Shells, especially APCR/APDS would "normalize" the other way. The only AP rounds that tended to "normalize" were the ones overmatching the armor or meme rounds like the 122mm blunt nose.
Sloping armor gives higher ballistic protection unless the enemy uses a much larger calibre gun. T-34 was one of those tanks that fell into the gap of being designed to be protected against 50mm guns and not understanding about overmatch.

Sloped armor is superior than flat armor for the same weight in terms of ballistic protection. The big downside is having the volume required as sloped armor is less volumetrically efficient. You can see it in virtually all the tanks that were designed post war until you got into composite armor which had to be laid out in certain angles to be effective.

Yes but you're forgetting the top plate. If there was literally no top plate and you just wanted to slope the armour while retaining the same height, the armour would be 41% heavier at 45 degrees for the same absolute thickness. But with a to plate of the same thickness as the front plate the sloping actually reduces weight by about a quarter with the same absolute thickness of the front plate. Just 41% more effective thickness. Sure the top plate won't be as thick, so let's say half as thick. In that case the sloped arrangement weighs just slightly less than the flat arrangement. At a quarter as thick the sloped arrangement is about 15% heavier. Still a decent trade I'd say.

I know you're just being contrarian but please stop. There's the potential for a good discussion here.

It's not objectively better. You run into overmatching against shells with a greater diameter than the thickness of the plate like the ubiquitous 75mm shells. So, a 40mm plate at 30deg from horizontal with a T[E] coefficient of 2.5 has an effective thickness of 100mm

The overmatching formula is as follows in this case

40mm * [1 + ((2.5 - 1) * (40mm/75mm)
40mm * 1.8 = 72mm

This is the difference between almost guaranteed penetration out to 1500m and perhaps 500m by a Stug with the long 75mm gun

>half as thick
Who are you kidding m8?