Skoda's 105mm Tiger (P) turret

[ArmchairSamurai]

Hello all.

Not a lot of information on this one, but Škoda apparently modified (redesigned?) the Krupp turret meant for the Tiger project and intended to mount it on the Porsche variant at 105mm rather than 88mm. This turret had an internal loading mechanism and a crew of 3. This is of course a napkin design as it never left the drawing board. I cannot find a good photo of the blueprint, but I did find two different exposures of the same bad photo. I also found a Russian interpretation of what that would have looked like. Thoughts?

 

[Zinoviy Alexeev]

They also had a proposal to rearm Tiger I with 76 mm gun.

 

[ArmchairSamurai]

Found another

 

[Wurger]

The loading mechanism is like the German 10,5 and 12,8 cm AA guns, not the Skoda loading tray. Fantastic finding! Thanks for sharing.

 

[riggerrob]

They also had a proposal to rearm Tiger I with 76 mm gun.

That is logical when we consider that the long-barreled 75 mm guns on Panzer IV and Panther were good enough to punch holes in all of the WALLIED tanks. Standardizing on 75 or 76 mm would ease logistics bottle-necks for Western Wehrmacht who were struggling to move beans and bullets to battlefields in Western Europe.

 

[Ravinoff]

Would that be using the 105mm sK 18 or something similar to it, like on the Pz.Sfl. IVa (aka Dicker Max)? That did apparently show some good characteristics on the Eastern Front for antitank use, not that Germany needed more tank gun models. As pointed out already they'd have been better off just standardizing on the Panther's 75mm L/70...well, until they started meeting Pershings on the Western Front.

 

[Mephito19365]

Exciting news! On Friday, Yuri Pasholok published a drawing of the Skoda turret on his dzen, which is more detailed than what we have known.This turret basically just keeps the horseshoe shape of the original tiger turret, and most of the parts are new. In addition to the obvious differences (gun mantlet, roof, commander's cupola, etc.), there are several details worth noting: the firing port on the left side of the rear of the turret is replaced by a complete machine gun ball mount; there is a hatch that opens to the left at the rear of the turret, and the hinges are on the outside, which means that this turret cannot use the standard storage box of the tiger H, and it seems that only the side storage box of the tiger tank No. 100 will fit. I don't know if they kept the side observation port, it's not clear from the drawings.