The Theatre of History Episode 5: The ZiS-3

I watched the effort that Fichten and Lummel put into this.

I have learnt more about the background to the Zis from their efforts,than I would have ever have picked up by casual reading

Great effort, guys!

25 Shots per minute??? Holy cow. That would be one super bad ass AT gun in the game.
Nice OP ability for 60 munitions: "get real", lasts 30 seconds.

Relic needs to rebalance this gun ingame.

Really enjoy ToH! Would be cool if you did it on types of infantry, or regiments or something

I consider doing this but at first I have to plan and figure out how to do this

This is awesome, thank you for the work put into it!

Awesome, thanks editors

Nice reading. Thanks guys.

http://youtu.be/ZiqX2p4WVes?t=2m14s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67XyWWlDjJA

Oh bro,the images are dead,I can't see them

http://youtu.be/ZiqX2p4WVes?t=2m14s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67XyWWlDjJA

Where's the 6-man crew?

Where's the 6-man crew?

its after Soviet buff game patch. cooming soon

Gaming: the most inspirational history teacher I've ever had.

From Age of Empires, to Civilization, and now Company of Heroes; my desire to hit the history books started with them.

Nice work!

Sorry about all of the missing images. They should be fixed now. Pls hit ctrl-f5 to reload the page and check them out. *OUR BAD*

Once again

25 Shots per minute??? Holy cow.

This number is missleading.
You propably thought they really did fire 25 rds in one minute or 100 rds in four minutes. Wich is not the case.
Its not even possible. The barrel, recuperator and recoil breakes would heat up to a point were they loose function and get damaged.

The sustained ROF for the Zis-3 is about that of any field gun in the 75 mm/3" class. As a rule of thumb one shot every five seconds. The 25 rds per minute is in artillery mode from a prepared position, firing a single mission with a fixed number of shells. With time to cool for the gun and reorganising after. 25 spend cartidge cases in the firing position are pretty disturbing.

Like all manually loaded guns the maximum ROF that can be achieved for short times is much higher. Its as fast as the loader can ram the shells and the assistant loaders can bring new ones to him. In prepared rapid fire field and AT guns in is caliber can fire one shot every second. Wich would be 60 per minute. But this is theoretical since it can't be kept up for a minute. Maybe for 10 seconds. About 15 max. As a modern example: a manually loaded 120 mm smoothbore tank gun as used by most NATO countrys can achieve a burst ROF of 5 shots in 10 seconds. But is official ROF is 12 per minute.

In addition the effective ROF in AT mode is not so much limited by the loading team but by the ability of the gunner and leader to observe the fall of the shot and adjust fire. This usually takes several seconds. If the target is 500 m away the shell is in flight for ~1 second. Longer ranges increase the TOF. The smoke and dust kicked up by firing obscures the target etc. So in most cases the effective ROF in AT mode will be in the one shot every 4-5 seconds range.

P.S.: I found a nice movie on this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkCMWe_NrcA
Its in russian but the voiceover is not important. There is lots of original, historic footage. On these the factors limiting the RoF are immediatly apparent.

^^ great post. Thanks for the info and details.

Indeed thank you!

thank you schnuersi!

before your post, if Relic had introduced an "AT gun burst fire" with 5 shots for 50muni I would have considered it pretty unrealistic.
Having seen this Russian ZIS movie I have to confess I am impressed how fast these monsters can actually fire a few rounds if there is no repositioning necessary. Thank you. Very educational for me.

Nice read! Thanks!