Chapter 238: Thunder Run
Engines roared, both among the 3.5 ton transport trucks which carried troops, supplies, and field guns. Along with those on board the armored scout cars. Scout cars, which were more or less assembled from an e-10 chassis that had been modified for use with 6x6 large off-road tires.
The initial Spähpanzer, as it was called was modeled on a design from the cold war of Bruno's past life. But as wartime demands increased, and assembly lines were put to their limit, it was revealed that simply modifying the e-10 chassis for a wheeled base was a more efficient use of resources.
The E-10 Standardpanzer, or simply the Panzer 1 as it was known in this life while having been in production for years, had yet to be see service and was instead being reserved for the final days of the war when the German army pushed into Paris.
However, necessity was the mother of innovation, and there was no better time for such a thing in regards to military technology than during an armed conflict. Much to Bruno's surprise engineers employed by his arms corporations came up with a way to make an armored scout car off of the E-10 chassis.
Until now the Light Tank Chassis, which made the foundation of this timeline's tank on the Panzer I housed both a 5cm semi-automatic turret, and a 7.92x57mm Mauser MG-34 machine gun. It was a traditional tank design, albeit with lessons having been learned during the brutal battlefields of the Second World War during Bruno's past life.
And Bruno had made this his basis for the Panzer in this life. If scaled up, it could produce even more powerful tank designs, as well as armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery and anti-aircraft, infantry fighting vehicles et cetera. All with the same production lines and resources.
As brilliant as Bruno was, which was compounded by his access to weapons technology from his past life which had occurred nearly a century in the future, he was not beyond his faults. He was, after all still a mortal man. And as a man, he was prone to biases, which were displayed with his initial creation of the Spähpanzer.
Even so, men in his employment who were of near equal brilliance were capable of looking past his biases, and instead producing an equally capable armored car, yet was far more cost productive and less wasteful.
This meant that after months of field testing in the war, the realization that the E-10 chassis could be modified to accept an 8x8 wheeled base, and a 2cm autocannon with limited alterations was a wake-up call to Bruno that sometimes an alternative perspective was needed to understand that just because something had been the best design in his past life, did not mean it was the most suitable design during this new timeline.
Because of this, the armored cars which advanced beyond the transport trucks acting as the spearhead of Bruno's blitzkrieg were a mixture of what Bruno called the Spähpanzer Ausf. A, and Ausf. B models.