The “other” Bear (SPG “Medved”)

Hello everyone,

those of you, who follow FTR for longer and/or are interested in the German war industry are probably aware of the Sturmpanzer Bär project, a superheavy assault gun, whose development was however cancelled in favour of what would later become the Sturmmörser Tiger, or – as you know it – the Sturmtiger. It is certainly the best known “bear” out there, but there was one more self-propelled gun project, bearing the same name out there, a Soviet one..

spg_medved_1945

As you also know from World of Tanks, the Soviets had a large number of various heavy self-propelled guns. One of the later ones whas the one pictured above, the heavy SPG called “Medved” (“bear”). It was designed right before the end of the war (Spring 1945) by the combined effort of three design bureaus: the UZTM (Uralmash), No.100 Plant and No.9 plant. The plan was to create a long-range rapid-fire artillery vehicle, the main purpose of which would be rapid artillery fire missions and counter-battery fire. This design was a part of the “Medved” program and for some time, it had quite a high priority.

Unlike in the previous projects, which used usually a heavy tank chassis, here, the designers proposed a completely new chassis, but the “trademark” of this project was the use of a twin 122mm gun. It was planed that when this vehicle would fire one gun while the other gun was reloading, but in real life, this proved much more problematic than the developers thought. A test mockup was made with two 76,2mm guns and it worked fine, but in this case, the 76,2mm guns used single shells, while the 122mm guns used separate shells and charges. The twin-linked setup had to be abandoned and instead, the designers proposed two separate guns on each side of the vehicle by the end of 1945. In the end, a mockup was built in 1946 of the project, but that’s as far as it went, no further development was conducted and the project was cancelled.

It’s worth noting that in the very early stage of the WoT Soviet tree development, the “Medved” was listed as a top tier artillery vehicle. In the end, it was not implemented because there is no hard data on it available, no characteristics, nothing.

Source:

www.aviarmor.net/tww2/tanks/ussr/s51.htm

27 thoughts on “The “other” Bear (SPG “Medved”)

  1. Did they ever considered to implement the 2A3 Kondensator 2P or the 2B1 Oka? Their gold rounds could be nuclear shells…

  2. I would like an artillery with rapid fire and low accuracy. I would also like to control 3 artileries as one, they would fire with extremely low accuracy. I think it would also look more realistic.

    • While at first glance this concept sounds logical, imagine three of the “low accuracy rapid fire” arties in platoon. Instant detracking barrage. Not fun.

      • Ya, you`re right :)

        Another solution would be to have an extremely long shell flight time. You shot now and the shell lands a hit 3-5 seconds later. I would still like to have a 3 arties battery, firing at once, 2 of them allways missing and third one having the accuracy from now-a-days.

        The long shell flight time would punish only the extreme campers *as it is supposed to be* and not the mobile, maneuvering players. Artilerry would do the job as it was intended to be.

        But SilentStalker we`ve been around for to long and we both know that suggestions have 0 potential to be implemented. So why bother?

        • Shell travel time is already at 3 to 5 seconds, depending on artillery and range. And artiller ynot moving is, in part, caused by the numerous nerfs to artilleries before the big nerf bat hit, when they nerfed “turn and burn”-ability, as well as gun depression on them.

      • We already have that right now. Its called FV304. :)

        Although they are not even inaccurate at all.

    • Just platoon with 2 friends all of you in the same tier arty, get on teamspeak or use the in game teamspeak and coordinate your fire on single targets where needed. It’s really fun my friends do it a lot as long as your team doesn’t just let scouts through the lines you can easily turn battles around, oh and if RNG doesn’t decide to troll your arties.

  3. Looks awesome. Crazy russians as always.
    “American basterds have MTLS-1G14 and we have nothing? Mother Russia can’t suffer this any longer comrades. Let’s put two of our mighty 122mm on one tank chassis. Bang. Russian design of MTLS is better than filthy imperialists one. Mother russia stronk now”.

    Side made of juicy ammorack though.

  4. Arty will come in handy over the next couple of days for the Taking of Saipan special event. It was one of the few engagements of WW2 where Americans fought against a sizable number of Japanese medium and light tanks.

    Event and a little historical background detail at; http://tinyurl.com/ojcudvh

  5. It’s worth noting that in the very early stage of the WoT Soviet tree development, the “Medved” was listed as a top tier artillery vehicle. In the end, it was not implemented because there is no hard data on it available, no characteristics, nothing.

    WoTs has tanks that all they was was blue prints none was ever built when has a lack of data stopped them form placeing a tank in game at least this has 1 that was built it did not have the 122mm but 76.2mm so use that.

    • Then consider this:
      The vehicle had not even enough data to be implemented, even in the light of amount of data required to create, let’s say, a WT E100 (which I believe was created from some vague information that western allies believed that E100 chassis could have been used as an 128 FlaK gun carriage, which is the basis of the autoloaded 128mm gun we got ingame ;) )

  6. dual guns is bloody stupid and there’s a reason no tanks were ever built with two large caliber guns.

    For the same weight, you could install one much more powerful gun with more penetration, firepower and range.

    Multi-gun turrets were only used in naval warfare, because at 15″, it didn’t make sense to go even higher, but more shells were preferable. However, those turrets were huge enough, since size was not an issue with warships.

    • It DOES have value when we’re talking about indirect-fire artillery.

      You see, artillery in real life, unlike WoT, is NOT a precision weapon, it’s a saturation weapon that depends primarily on volume of fire to be effective. This means you need to maximize your rate of fire, and the easiest way to do this without sacrificing power or range is simply by having more guns to shoot with. This is the whole principle behind the Medved.

      • “You see, artillery in real life, unlike WoT, is NOT a precision weapon”

        Well nowdays it is.. but in WW2 it was not

        • It’s still not THAT precise – you still need a barrage to actually kill a target at any appreciable range most of the time. Precision attacks are what bombers and helicopter gunships are for.

      • Except they weren’t able to fit the largest guns they had on SPGs. So they would have to considerably downsize the gun size to fit two on them. Unlike warships, where the largest guns possible with contemporary technology were fittable.

    • It did not stop at 15″ my friend there were plans for 18″ on the Montana class that was to follow the Iowa class in the US and the Japanese put 18.1″ on their Yamato and Musashi

  7. No hard data…… WTe100 ….E100arty…….. I love the subjective usage No data found so no tank

    • Like removing an engine for “historical reasons” on a unhistorical (made-up) tank :-D