well unfortunately the american tanks simply didn't have rangefinders, you have to manually move the barrel up and down and use the markings to estimate the distance.
are you starting to understand why they say american tanks were so inferior to german and russian tanks?
Don't think he's being patronising Nagels. Alot of people don't really get the difference between the Axis & Allies tanks & how inferior they really were. Had it not been for sabotage during manufacture, fuels supplies, Allied air supremacy & bad workmanship from Captured workers then the Axis tanks would have been virtually unchallanged unless the were bogged down or trackless. The range finder lacking in the Shermans gave them a huge disadvantage against the more accurate Axis tanks. Add to this the firepower over that long range & it's Tommy cooker time again.
Cheers.
Rob
Welllll...you're kinda right if you guys mean the
RO method of rangefinding in the coding of the reticle views and how the guns are laid. But if you mean that the german main sight telescopes had an advantage in that they were actual "rangefinders" then I part ways with that description.
The German TZF telescopes (as halfway represented by the models in RO) were not rangefinders nor were they designed to be. They executed a task that was completely separate than those done by actual 70 cm base and larger rangefinder devices. These were carried along by tank commander's or in forward observation vehicles, etc.
The TZF's were designed as range "estimators", turning the range collars and selecting the various range settings along the perimeter of the view served only to bring the vertically moving reticle marks to a position that correlated with the proper ballistic height(vertical) angle of the cannon that the cannon
SHOULD be positioned against the selected target. The estimation was made by the gunner by using the triangles as visual measurement tools, then he would turn the wheel causing the triangles to move. It was still the job of the gunner to
manually move the cannon elevation up to the spot recommended by the newly positioned triangles. But it was still a best-estimate guess, and not a true range feedback system. In RO the player moves the triangles to lay on a target, but it's more a ballistic exercise in that the range circle above is not connected to the action of the reticle itself.
Again, in RO, this action is not represented accurately, and gives the perception by many players that actual automatic rangefinding is occurring like in more modern armor, since a numerical value automatically appears in the screen near the bottom.
Only later optics, like the WZF 2/1 in the Jagdtiger, and some others provided the start of a singularly integrated sight and rangefinder application.
The Russian types were similar in execution, except the verticle scales on the right and left would move against a fixed line or arrow, or the fixed lines would move against the fixed scale, and in some models the vertical deflection line would move left and right, but again, it was estimation, not range finding.
The US non-moving (ballistic) reticles required memorization of firing tables of which when estimation was made, the mental computations dictated the correct elevation hash mark to put against the target.
So, in RO, the sights may act as rangefinders, yes, but historically, the real activity occurred as two separate optical functions, and by two separate items of equipment.