Manhour required to produce armament

[masqqqq]

I have question about Manhour required to produce different kind weaponary: tanks, small arms, artillery, airplanes etc.

[Paul Lakowski]

I have question about Manhour required to produce different kind weaponary: tanks, small arms, artillery, airplanes etc.

Whats the question?

[mescal]

I found the following figures :
Tiger I : 300000 hours
T-34/76 : 10000 hours.

However, I have no idea of the reliability of these values.

[Dave Bender]

The Tiger tank costs about twice as much as the Panther and T34. You'll have a tough time convincing me that the Tiger required 30 times as many manhours to build.

[Paul Lakowski]

Man hour figures are useless information unless they include other info , since they change all the time and never remain constant.

When cost plus contracts are employed , there is no incentive to speed up production since they are paid for all hours and resources and the profit is always guaranteed. But under 'fixed price' contracts the profit is what evers left after you pay wages resources etc. So the more corners you can cut to make weapons, the faster you can make the items and the more profit you make.

For example the first 100 Me-262 averaged out to 24,000 manhours each, while the production in the 1000 region was about 10,000 manhours. It was expected that when the Me-262 reaches mass production these figures would drop to the 3400 manhour region , compared to 4300 manhours for each Me-109 mass produced. Since Me-109 hit the 30,000 mark in production I would not expect the Me-262 to reach the expected 3400 manhours until the accumulated production reaches the 20,000 mark.

[bf109 emil]

The Tiger tank costs about twice as much as the Panther and T34. You'll have a tough time convincing me that the Tiger required 30 times as many manhours to build.

unsure of 30 times the man hours but source shows 2x as much for a Tiger as a Panther

The Tiger I (PZKPFW VI AUSF E ) was built by Henschel. and a total of 1354 tanks were built in its two year production period. August 1942 until August 1944. This very large and heavy tank (57 tonnes) took 300,000 man hours to build which was twice the man hours it took to build a Panther.

http://www.tank-art.com/german_tiger_tanks.htm
only wikipedia but showing the time needed to build a tiger

Generally speaking, it took about twice as long to build a Tiger I as another German tank of the period. When the improved Tiger II began production in January 1944, the Tiger I was soon phased out.

The German designs were expensive in terms of time, raw materials and Reichsmarks, the Tiger I costing over twice as much as a contemporary Panzer IV and four times as much as a Stug III assault gun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_I_tank
not showing man hours but cost in rubles to build a T-34-85 tank again from wikipedia

The cost to produce a T-34-85 tank was initially about thirty percent higher than a Model 1943, at 164,000 rubles; but by 1945 it was down to 142,000 (Harrison 2002:181). During the course of the war, the cost of a T-34 tank had been reduced by almost half, from 270,000 rubles in 1941 (Harrison 2002:181), while in the meantime its top speed remained about the same, and its main gun's armour penetration and turret frontal armour thickness both nearly doubled

as well as searching this i came across a transport vehicle of sorts i think for the Tiger Tank which caught my eye and wonder if anyone has scene or knows the name of this transporterfromhttp://science.howstuffworks.com/panzer ... ger-i2.htm

[nebelwerferXXX]

November 1942 monthly production figures:
---25 Tiger tanks
---1,000 T-34 tanks

[Guaporense]

According to data posted before by your fellow user Hanny, a Panther tank took 55,000 hours to make, including the hours to make each piece of the vehicle, not just the assembly part of the process. While according to the same source, a Sherman required 48,000 hours to make.

The 300,000 hours figure is probably correct, but it only is right for perhaps the first Tigers, when large scale production started to roll, the manpower cost decreased significantly.

[Jon G.]

The Tiger I never really entered large scale production. There was only one factory (Henschel, check out the Wiki link) building it, and they had two of their three production lines devoted to building locomotives also after they started building Tigers. With just one production facility building the Tiger, that probably contributed to the long per-unit construction time.

The building of turrets for the Tiger II was outsourced for the earlier variants, but that was it, the main hulls were still built at Henschel only.

[bf109 emil]

thanks jon G as i was going to ask guaprense for a source to his earlier claim along with the number of hours saved or did he mean the manpower costs decreased as a result of German slave and forced labor now being employed (thus reducing costs not man hours to produce)

[LWD]

In some accounting of such things GFE is included in others it isn't. GFE can include radios and guns as well as other componets so it is not necessarily inconsequential. Anyone know if the above numbers include it (in part or in whole) or not?

[scruffy]

how can somebody judge accurately or estimate the full cost of tank production ?
when virtually all statistics ignore the fact that most of Nazi Germanys arms industry utilized slave labor ?
forced slave labor from concentration camps, is ,..essentially free ,.....
i wonder how many thousands of humans died while involved in the production aspects of the German military machine ,
and how does one place an accurate value on those lives ?

[Jon G.]

You're right that slave labour was used in much of the German arms industry, but that doesn't make it free - hours put in building Tiger tanks, or airplanes, or whatever, are still man-hours spent, whether by slave workers or by volunteer native workers is irrelevant for a per-unit hour cost calculation.

Also, slave workers (or at least those slave workers originating from SS-run KZ camps) weren't 'free' as such in terms of labour cost; they were treated and rented out to interested parties as commercial assets. See this thread http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=143404 for examples of approximate prices of slave labour.

Off the top of my head (but I could well be mistaken), Henschel didn't employ any slave workers at its Kassel plant.

[masqqqq]

how can somebody judge accurately or estimate the full cost of tank production ?
when virtually all statistics ignore the fact that most of Nazi Germanys arms industry utilized slave labor ?
forced slave labor from concentration camps, is ,..essentially free ,.....
i wonder how many thousands of humans died while involved in the production aspects of the German military machine ,
and how does one place an accurate value on those lives ?

Jon G you are right. Part of employers were foreigners ( most of them are slave labourers). See atached dokument below - additionally many slaves worked in subcontractor companies. From other side production in allied cuntries, especially Soviet Union was more concentrated and this had influence on total cost.
Every country had own level of taxes, salery per hour, cost od transport, material etc.
I attached intersting document about Panther calucaltion cost. (source : W.J. Spielberger - Panther & Its variants)

[masqqqq]

I think that level of complication for example Sherman and Panther was similar ( in the case of T-34 difference was big).
What was reason so great difference in total quantity produced tanks among allied and axis- quantity and size of factories, machine park, concentration of production, supplies of mineral sources. What do you think?
For me would be interesting to compare philosophy of production process in other countries - level of production automation, similarities and differences in machine park etc. Anybody has such materials, pictures, films?