Hello together.
Is the ISU and the JSU the same vehicle?

regards
Michael

yes

Yep. English: Joseph Stalin. Russian: Ioseph Stalin.

And KW means Kliment Woroszylow

Small correction here: standart English transcription would be Kliment Voroshilov, though Kliment Woroszylow is sometimes used, especially in Poland

You are 100% right - sorry for that i forget that its typical "slavic" transcription

regards from Poland

Also it's Iosef, not Ioseph (a pedant writes).

Ok, just a couple of notes so I sound really smart!

1. No J in the Cyrillic alphabet, so it is properly known as ISU...although there is reason to believe that the Soviets called them something else entirely until post war. Without my notes, I thought it was something like KV-152...I will check up on it, but does anyone else know about this?

2. Whether JSU or ISU it refers to the same type of vehicle. Even the 152 and 122 guns were interchangable as the trunions and mount were identicle.

3. Be wary that the ISU/JSU is NOT the same as just the SU-152 or SU-122. They are different vehicles entirely...the SU-152 based on the KV-1 chassis and the SU-122 based on the T-34 chassis.

su-152(KV-14) based on the kv

ISU-152/122 based on the IS
ISU-152

ISU-122

su-122/100/85based on the T-34
su-100 (left) su-85(right)

su-122

JSU and ISU
be both, but for JS-1 / 2 (Iosif Stalin) JS more correct

Hello,
Many thanks for the many replies. It has helped me a lot.

regards
Michael

The preferred transliteration in english is "IS", so the correct designation would be 'ISU-152' or "122". The letter 'J' is a recent addition to the english alphabet, being the last letter added, and there's often some confusion because of that. Add to this the fact that often the translation path goes from russian to german and only then to english and it makes for a pattern of errors.

Just as a slightly funny aside, although english is a germanic language, in modeling circles it seems to become more so, with frequent panzerenglish terms creeping in here and there. For example, the only english speakers who capitalize words like 'east' and 'west' are modelers who've been exposed to a lot of german !

Marat, I like your user name !

I wish! I used to get a lot of letters in one of my previous jobs and at least half of them would spell most of the nouns with initial capitals. Utterly randomly, too. Even the professionals I work with do it, all the time - I seem to spend half my time proof-reading them out again!