what was so different about the Royal Tiger tank, i can see the gun is bigger, or is that just me? where was it used, and how long did it remain in action? i havnt heard to much about these tanks

Shain
If you want to find out a bit about the King/Royal tiger look here

Achtung Panzer

Pete

and for pics and a video of a Henschel King tiger go here

Henschel

Pete

they're the same, i always thought they were different, i guess its just you hear the name King Tiger used more than Royal tiger. i've always noticed that there were so many turret designs, and never found out why, were there different purposes, or did they just want to see which one worked

Stormbringer what language is that webpage in that you linked to?

Royal Tiger....King Tiger.....or Tiger 2. They are all the same. The variation is in the turret which was initially made by the Porsche factory. Henschel came out with their version which was much more blocked. The Henschel was much easier to manufacture so the predominence of King (Royal) tigers have the Henschel turret

The difference can also be seen in the front of the turret, while one is round the other is flat, also on the left side of porsche's turret there is a bulge for the commander's hatch

The language on that site is Polish.For another site with loads of panzer pics but polish text try here

Panzers

Pete

As explained above, King Tiger and Royal Tiger are one and the same thing.

For the record: King Tiger = KönigsTiger = Royal Tiger = Tiger II = Tiger ausf B = Sdkfz 182.

A number of changes were introduced to the Tiger II during it's production.
Two companies offered designs in the race for the contract, namely Porsche and Henschel. In the end Henschel's design won the contract, one of the reasons being that the porsche design used a lot of copper for it's electric drive train, which was in very short demand.
By the time Henschel got the contract, around 50 turrets for the Porsche design were already constructed. Rather than scrap these, they were used on the first hulls to come off the assembly line. These Tigers are often refered to as the Porsche turret Tigers, whereas the later types were often called the Henschel turret Tiger.
Both types of turrets were by the way designed and built by Krupp...

The Tiger in your picture is one of the vehicles delivered to Schwere Panzer Abteilung 503, which were involved in the Normandy fighting. Most of these vehicles were lost during the closing of the Falaise pocket or the subsequent route across France. At least one of these vehicles made it into the winter though, as a few pictures of a whitewashed tank named Anneliese exist.
If you pay close attention to the picture above, you will notice that the Tiger has the early version of the KWK43 with the so called monobloc barrel, which was also seen on early Jagdpanthers and the Elefant. The tank in the rear of the picture has the stepped barrel, which was more common on Tiger II's with Porsche turrets (the monobloc barrel was never used on a Henschel turret).

The reason the Porsche turret was not used after the initial 50 were used up is simple:
A) The tank's hull needed to be adapted to fit the turret, which was not the case with the Henschel turret, as this was designed specifically for the Tiger II's hull.
B) It had a weakspot where the bulge for the commander's cupola was welded to the side armour of the turret. The Hensche turret did not have this bulge, the side armour was one massive slab.
C) The rounded front of the turret created a dangerous shot trap, deflecting incoming rounds into the thin roof of the driver's compartment.

thats a lot of good information, which turret was more expensive to produce? Was the tiger the only tank to have different turrets?

Definitely the Porsche turret was more expensive and difficult to produce. It requird bending of an armor plate to form the front side of the turret which was difficult to make. Also the bulge on the left side of the turret needed to be pressed into the armor plate and required a lot of work.

The Porsche turret was designed for the Tiger II version of this company which was never produces. However, as their project was cancelled, they had already produced 50 turrets. This is why two or three of these turrets were used for the prototypes and test vehicles and the rest (46 or 47) were fitted to the first Tiger IIs produced and delivered to combat units.

The modification that was required to fit the Porsche turret to the Tiger II was due to the fact that, Porsche Tiger II was planned to have an electric drive to rotate the turret while Henschell designed its turred to be rotated hydraulicly. This required certain modifications to the first 50 turrets produced by Porsche.

Hope it helps. This is all from memory.

Happy modeling...

Ahmet Yazal

it would also be more expensive because it used too much copper, and copper was priceless by the end of the war