So getting back into this steel wheel Panther F kit. I am intending to incorporate the end war modifications and omissions. I need to find or scratch some turret spare wheel brackets, for instance.
AI is insisting that Daimler-Benz omitted the raised drum crew heater in April, 1945.
Of course, Panzer Tracts illustrates this in line drawings.
AI is telling me to use part D22, which are a disk of pie wedges.
“The part that replaces the drum is the flat, circular armored grille ring with the classic pie-wedge slots (Part D22).
“To clear up the confusion once and for all: There is no third part.
“On a late-war Daimler-Benz hull, you do not put a drum over that fan, and you do not use the old-style early cover. Instead, the flat pie-wedge ring (D22) is the entire cover.
“The Daimler-Benz Style (The Pure Flat Ring): Daimler-Benz engineers realized the drum was a dangerous shot-trap. They re-engineered the engine deck so that the heating mechanics were moved entirely below the armor plate, inside the hull. Because the mechanism was hidden underneath, the top of the engine deck stayed completely flat.”
I would be extremely careful with this. The current generation of information synthesis programs are often not very good at presenting nuanced research because the necessary documents are not accessible to their information retrieval algorithms. They often rely on pulling bits and bobs from secondary, tertiary, or oh goodness gracious, Reddit. (Reddit is the Mos Eisley of information.)
After a quick look, the updated version of Panzer Tracts 5-3 and Panther: External Appearance & Design Changes seem like good sources for verifying this sort of thing. I do not own either book.
I am going to go with Hillary Doyle on this rather than something pulled from some random redditor.
AI is also insisting on resedagrun rather than olivgrun, but I am unaware of any such orders for factories. That said, based on the photo evidence, it seems D-B did their patterned camo just up about to the very end.
And the famous photo of the three-color Schmalturm makes me believe turrets were painted separately from hulls, particularly as the turret has a horizontal pattern.
This is a sound advisory. The AI freely available can’t reach into notes and archives unless freely available, much remains not yet. A good course to follow is to curate the AI report, run down the references, see if they make sense to you. And always, look for errors and false positives. Wishing you good hunting.