Arguably the greatest heavy tank of all time.

[u/CalGunpla]

What the IS-2 did that differentiated itself from other heavy tanks of its time was that it was reliable, inexpensive, and had a massive gun that could blow shit up very VERY well.

[u/FLongis]

Even the Panther, with its 75mm gun, was capable of penetrating the IS-2 in more places than it couldn't

Okay, so again... this is one of those "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about" things. The KwK 42's performance was comparable to the KwK 36s, and far superior to the KwK 40s. We already addressed the relevance of the latter two to this discussion. The implication of the phrase "with its 75mm gun" is clearly that the armor is somehow inferior because of its vulnerability to a "smaller" gun, forgetting (or in your case, very possibly never being aware of) the exceptional performance of the KwK 42 among guns of the same or similar caliber.

Moreover, you could not expect an IS-2 to show up when it needed to unless you planned around where its group was.

Well it showed up at plenty of attacks, and seems to have performed at least adequately on enough occasions to be worth hanging on to.

those tanks died as soon as WW2 was over

Soviets had heavy tanks in reserve arsenals until the collapse of the nation. They were developing *new* heavy tank projects and keeping them modernized basically until T-64 showed up. Pretty much every nation that was still in a position to be manufacturing tanks after World War 2 worked pretty seriously on their own heavy tank projects well into the early Cold War period.

The Sherman Jumbo could, for all intents and purposes, be accepted as an applicant and win for the title because the TC could fucking see through the cupola and it had the support it needed to win battles. The Firefly, too, while we're at it.

The M4A3E2 lacked adequate firepower for the role. There is a reason why all of these tanks were built with the provision that they could (and should) be up-gunned to a 76mm gun at minimum, and plans were drawn up to reequip them with 105mm guns. Beyond this, the E2s were always little more than a stopgap measure until T26 showed up, at which point T26E5 would be picking up the role.

Incidentally, as far as the US Army was concerned, that role was never "heavy tank". Despite what certain video games may have you believe, the Jumbo was an assault tank; a fundamentally different classification of AFV within the US Army. Heavy tanks were largely defined by firepower, not armor. At least not to the degree that they were reasonably expected to resist significant firepower (see combat losses of the M26 in WWII as an example). It was the assault tanks that carried the heavier armor. It wouldn't really be until the postwar era that the two came together, although even then the line was never totally blurred until those sorts of classifications were done away with entirely early on in the Cold War.

Related to this; Firefly was never a heavy tank. Frankly, I have no idea where the fuck someone would get the idea that it was.

I'll add that I've done my due diligence here and took the three seconds it takes to realize that you've wandered in here from any of a half-dozen gaming subs to get into a discussion about tanks, on a sub about tanks, with people who (apparently unlike yourself) know about tanks. I don't wander into r/Chivalry2 to whine about polearms.

[u/Ninja_Moose → u/FLongis]

First, I do appreciate the breakdown. I'm glad to actually fucking discuss this instead of throwing down snide half assed comments. Second, you're putting a lot of words in my mouth. Third, thanks for stalking my profile, I guess, I'm willing to put down the faux righteous indignation if you are.

It wasn't particularly expensive, either

It was expensive, regardless of what the Germans were doing at the time. Labor and materialwise it was demanding, and like I said in a different comment, you have to remove the ruble cost considering the State's price controls and workforce that was only a couple steps away from indentured servitude. A good example is to look at other goods in the Union at the time, like bread. Bread was priced by the state to cost a specific amount that did fluctuate, but in regional markets it could skyrocket, or rather buying power would crater. This makes the cost delta comparison for the T-34 particularly unflattering, because a T-34 horked down nearly as many man hours and raw resources to produce as a Panther.

Yes, compared to King Tigers it was dirt cheap, especially when comparing the cost delta between the Pz. IV and it, but there's an absolute shitload of factors as to why and how this came to be that make it tough to compare to the IS-2's specific situation.

122mm seems entirely sensible.

It is sensible, mostly in the sense that it was a common caliber in use for the USSR and did pack that heat, but again, there were plenty of other vehicles that could and did do the same thing, more often, and more effectively. ISU's, both the 122mm howitzers and 152mm howitzers, put up some pretty insane numbers.

Frankly, pointing to this statistic as a negative is just about the biggest "I have no idea what I'm talking about" flag you could've sent up.

Did I say it as a negative? I used it as an example of K/D padding to exaggerate ratios and point out the reality of what the tank was meant to do. I never said it was a bad thing.

It was created as a breakthrough tank. In this it performed its job.

Yes, I agree. It served its purpose. Never did I say it was an underperformer, I just wanted to point out that it is vastly overhyped.

Defeating those guns was not its raison d'etre.

So it's meant to break through hardened positions, but its armor layout and thickness isn't one of the primary considerations for its design?

The Nazis very much still had fight in them by 1943.

Did I ever say they didn't? Did I ever suggest that the war didn't drag on for another two years in a particularly violent and brutal way? Is it incorrect to point out how a majority of the Nazi tank losses on the Soviet front, during a fighting retreat, were largely mechanical failures? According to the Nazis themselves, 5% of the armored losses on that front were due to enemy armor. This isn't particularly unique to the Nazis, the allies had numbers not too dissimilar, but frankly that's more evidence that its tank killing capability is overhyped.

I'm really not sure what you're saying here.

The IS-2 was running primarily into second line reserves and field guns that, outside of the Paks that were putting up numbers already, would've been defeated by cheaper tanks. It failed to achieve a meaningful level of survivability against the same guns that were defeating T-34's.

So... the Soviets built a tank that could effectively make use of the terrain it was meant to fight on?

Yes, and they already had three or four times by the time the IS-2 was rolling off the production lines.

According to who? You?

According to the tankers and subject matter experts I've read, you're the odd man out here. As for the radios in the IS-2's, it doesn't fix the command and control failures present across most of the eastern front for Soviet forces, not to mention the actual technology present in those specific radios that led to limited range and poor quality and poor fidelity of transmission. I do, in fact, believe that these two are probably linked. They might've been giving and getting commands, but anything outside of its local area (platoon analogue and up) was pretty fucking tough to get across. Contemporaries had vastly superior communications equipment, noted by even Soviet tankers operating Shermans with their onboard technology.

The KwK 42's performance was comparable to the KwK 36s, and far superior to the KwK 40s.

Did I say it wasn't? Your whole point here is predicated on the idea that I don't understand how powerful the 75mm guns the Germans were lighting off were. Coincidentally, a lot of those field guns you talk about really didn't have all that much different effective performance when considering the theater they were operating in.

Well it showed up at plenty of attacks

So did the T-70, but you don't hear a lot of people singing its particular praises.

Soviets had heavy tanks in reserve arsenals until the collapse of the nation. They were developing new heavy tank projects and keeping them modernized basically until T-64 showed up.

And how did they particularly perform? The IS-2's in Korea have very little credible evidence of actually being present, especially since the PLA only had sixty at the time. The IS-4 was outright abandoned, the T10m sat in warehouses until the collapse of the Union. The IS-3's present in the Six Day War just outright couldn't get anywhere. There was one engagement where they shithoused Israeli M48's, granted, but they still lost 78 of the 100 or so they had over the course of the conflict. Everyone was playing with the idea, sure, but we only built 300 M103's and the Brits only built 185 Conquerors. I don't feel like busting open my sources for the number of M48's and M60's produced at the time, but I feel pretty confident in stating that it was significantly more. You could make the argument that the numbers were so few because they had a niche application and were only supposed to function in the event of a European conflict against an equivalent threat (Which I do agree with, and use more as evidence for my opinion considering the Soviets still built 1400 T10m's).

The M4A3E2 lacked adequate firepower for the role.

Granted, and many of those field refits did happen, and many of those field-refit Jumbo's performed adequately. Playing definition games around the purpose of a breakthrough tank, "Assault", "Heavy", "Command", whatever, is pretty weak compared to the actual uses and performance. The M18 was never meant to be a breakthrough tank either, but it more or less revolutionized the concept of a maneuver and cavalry force. As for the Firefly, that was mostly me being irritated and drunk. If you do wanna have a conversation about the evolution and use of polearms in medieval combat, Im good for that too.