Headscratchers / Company of Heroes

• Would the destruction of the V2 facility at Sottevast, not, (fridge) logically, have killed KZ inmates working in the factory?
  • Quite possibly. Then again, all those quiet little French towns, and all those quaint buildings you blew the shit off to get to the creamy German filling ? They were most probably still inhabited. War Is Hell.
    • In cases like that, sometimes the civilians panic and head for the hills... sometimes, they don't. War is still Hell, of course.
  • Not to mention its entirely possible that the Allied forces storming the place never realized the factory was staffed by inmates, since they never actually go inside the facility. This leads to a bit of Fridge Horror, but once again: War Is Hell.

• The Panther, slow? It was faster than the Sherman, generally. In particular, all models were in reality faster than the Hotchkiss light tanks by 10-25km/h.
  • One word: balance. Even with the Panther being slow as it is, it is still enough to cause Allied armor commanders to panic. If it were fast enough to outflank Allied tanks, it would be horrendously gamebreaking.
    • But to make the Hotchkiss significantly faster is just absurd. They could have at least chosen some model of Sd Kfz 234 armored car as the German speedy tank. The H39 was a piece of obsolete junk. Better yet, they could have made the Panzer VIE (Tiger) the German heavy tank, the Panzer IV the standard tank, and the Sd Kfz 234 the fast "tank".
    • The Hotchkiss is a reward unit for the Panzer Elite that replaces the Panzer IV Infantry Support Tank. They do use the Puma as the speedy tank for the Wehrmacht.
    • Or a late model Panzer III, armed with the same 50mm gun used as an antitank gun in fact.
  • There's also the fact that, in spite of this relatively high speed, the Panther was generally a poorly-engineered beast. The drive system, transmission, and suspension were notoriously fragile (with one in twenty Panthers needing their transmissions repaired or replaced within the first 100km of travel), the complexity of the design required either removing the turret or ripping apart the track and half the wheels on one side to repair or clean parts, the Panther D couldn't reverse and turn at the same time, and the Panther G would rapidly strip its higher gears, making high-stress operations fairly risky. As a result, the tanks were generally not run at full speed as the transmission breaking down in combat would be a disaster since repairing or replacing it required dismantling most of the driver compartment and front of the tank.

---