History

A video that I commonly direct people to for a good overview of tank production in WW2 is here.

While the mainstay German tanks like Panzer III and Panzer IVs were not strictly speaking overengineered, they did suffer from the German production pipeline not being properly industrialized or designed for scale.

The Soviets quickly adopted and adapted to copy the American production line concepts, with the modification that factories were centralized rather than relying on very much secondary production. For a nation without a large pre-existing automobile industry, the logistical achievement was impressive.

T-34s, especially wartime production T-34s were not great tanks. They did enough to blunt some of the fighting, but the undersung hero of tank combat in WW2 were old fashioned anti-tank guns, which while far less exciting than tanks battles, took out more tanks than enemy tanks did.

There is really no production choice the Germans could have made in the mid war that would have turned the tide. They simply hadn’t started the war with the appropriate factories and their ability to build those factories continually degraded. There were too many cooks in the kitchen regarding tank production, so even if an individual did come up with a great plan to restructure production, it would be mired in the factional infighting of the German military.

While there are stories of workers T-34s driving straight from sieged factories onto the battlefield, I’ll emphasize the fact that those are stories, and are apocryphal at best. The Soviet Union after WW2 was very eager to spread aggrandizing stories about the great fight.

Meanwhile America questioned whether the crew should even survive firing a shot.

They sure loved their super weapons.

It was probably a factor, but I don’t think a significant one. You could make the argument that if they made more mass-producible armor that they could have put more on the front, but that would have likely further strained the serious supply line issues they were facing. They also were hurting for industrial materials and fuel, so just building more wasn’t really in the cards.

The first time I heard about this thing was when one of the SomethingAwful crew obsessed over it. And I genuinely couldn't tell at the time if it was actual history or if he was just making shit up. Because I didn't hear anything about it for another 20 years. Until this moment.

Good start but needs more legs and more nukes

More like Sniper Elite 3. The last level has you collapsing a secret base to destroy the unfinished prototype of this beast.

Speer was the one who actually vetoed the Ratte supertank. Also, check out this entertaining bit from the discussion of the Maus supertank, of which a couple prototypes actually did get built:

"It had the same design flaw that made the Elefant unsuitable for close combat. In the end, the tank will inevitably have to wage a close combat since it operates in cooperation with the infantry. An intense debate started, and except for me, all of the present found the 'Maus' magnificent." -Heinz Guderian

I liked Guderian and Speer both. They seemed sensible.

The smaller edition which weighed 188 tons and which they did actually build a couple prototypes of, had a for-real problem that it was difficult to find a motor powerful enough to drive the thing but small enough to fit inside it. It wound up going 8 mph.

Depends who you mean by "they" in "they believed they could actually build," I think.