Just curious. Is the M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank completely dominant in all modes or could superior strategy win the day for the Panzerkampfwagen VI Ausf. B Tiger II?
Big question is whether the Tiger’s 88 can penetrate the M1A1’s armour in any facing. If not, it’s thank you and goodnight. Even if it can, ya gotta get some kind of lucky.
What Mal said. I was under the impression that the Abrams’ armor was pretty tough and that WWII vintage guns, and especially their ammunition, wouldn’t have much of a chance of penetrating it.
I must look up the ASL rules on armour concealment. 
ISTM that the Tiger’s best hope might be to shoot off a track and then ping the Abrams a few times until the crew of the immobilized vehicle lose their nerve and abandon it. I’m not sure if Tigers ever had APCR ammunition, if it comes to that.
In addition to the above statements concerning armor penetration, the M1A1 is vastly superior in terms of manuverabillity and speed, as well as targetting equipment that the designers of the Tiger II could never have imagined.
And at night, the Tiger has no chance. None.
One technique of tank-kiling invovles smacking the outer hull and knocking off a chunk of the interior wall into the cockpit (scabbing). I’m certain the M1A1 is immune to this, but could WWII ammo have this effect on a modern tank? Otherwise my money’s on the M1, even if it got hung up in the trees. If for no other reason than it can call in GPS guided air to ground weaponry of a level unavailable to any Tiger II crew.
The Tiger would not stand a chance.
While we commonly say that the tank that shoots first wins, this rule-of-thumb would not apply in this situation. Even if the Germans shot first, odds are it would not damage the Abrams much.
Primitive fire control, low rate of fire and high possibility of a hit. Primitive shell, low probability of damaging the M1. Primitive gun, low velocity.
Further, the Tiger not has to stand ready to take a shot from 120mm gun of the Abrams. The only question would be how far the ruined wreckage would fly.
It wouldn’t fly anywhere. It would just sit there with two nice, neat holes in it. The armor on the Tiger II was rolled homogenous plate and would be a warm pat of butter as far as the APFSDS rounds of the M1. Further, even if the german 88 had HESH rounds for spalling off chunks of armor on the inside of the tank (which it didn’t), the M1 has an internal liner desinged to prevent the spalls from ricocheting around inside the turret.
This is called “spalling” and the Abrams has a kevlar liner inside the armor to prevent or at least mitigate this sort of thing.
I have no idea if that would be a concern in this situation.
I think the Tiger’s best bet would be to be dug in (by which I mean pretty much buried up to the turret) and heavily camouflaged, then ambush the Abrams from the side. This is assuming that there’s a particular road or path through these hypothetical woods that the Abrams would be sure to take. The object here is to damage the tread so the Abrams can’t move.
If the position is on a slight rise and the hole is made so the Tiger can back out, it might be able to then escape, as the hill would block any direct fire. At that point, they should consider the Abrams disabled and declare victory.
The one problem with this is that to back out quicky you’d need the engine running, and if the engine’s running then you’ll have an obvious heat signature for the Abrams crew to notice.
Yes. Spalling. It’s been a while.
The Tiger, if given the opportunity to fire first, undetected, might hope to knock a tread off the M-1. After accomplishing that, I think the Tiger is then toast. IIANM, I believe it is not unheard of today for the M-1 to occasionally be immobilized by enemy fire.
Didn’t Iraq show that the Abrams is vulnerable to ground troops with RPGs?
Yes, it has happened. As I understand it, numbers of RPG-armed foot soldiers fire at the M-1. This increases the chances of “getting lucky” against that particular tank and also means that the tank doesn’t have a single discrete target against which it can return fire. I believe, though I may be mistaken, that several M-1’s have been immobilized in this fashion, though I can recall hearing of only a single instance where one could be said to have been destroyed.
If memory serves, I recently read a thread on SDMB about this topic, though it could have been a Brit message board.
The prevailing view was that the Tiger II is good, the Abrams M1A2 better and the Brits’ newest tank–Challenger 2–best. I found it hard to believe, but that was the argument.
A related thread saw people arguing that the Eurofighter can smoke anything the US currently has in its inventory, and suggested parity (in terms of aircraft performance) between the US and Russia. The posters pointed to a recent “competition” between the Eurofighter and an F-15, though one mock encounter is hardly the final word.
Again, hmm…
So this tank can beat an M1A1?
The consensus seems to be yes. The Challenger 2E is newer and has the latest-greatest technology so it looks like the venerable M1 will have to keep up with the Jones for now.
That sentence is sort of like saying “When it comes to fighter planes, the Sopwith Camel is pretty good, the F-15 is better, and the F-22 is the best.”
The Tiger II was an impressive looking thing and it gives WWII geeks major boners, but it wasn’t by any meaningful standard even the best tank of its time and it simply cannot be compared to a modern tank. Even assuming the damn thing works properly - which, with Tigers, was not a sure bet on any given day - it’s going up against a tank that routinely vaporizes enemy vehicles from two miles away in the dark and that has been known to have 125mm shells bounce off its front armor.
The Tiger’s main gun is much smaller than modern tank guns. It’s slow, unreliable, clumsy, has a slow turret traverse and has all the external visibility of a wooden crate. The Tiger would be blown off the field by an M1, by a Challenger, by a T-72, by a Merkava Mark 3, by a Leopard II, and for that matter by any of the previous generation of tanks, like a Leopard or an M-60 or an AMX-30 or a T-64. Putting a Tiger up against those tanks would be similar to asking a Spitfire to go up against an F-18 or a Mirage 2000; you can construct wild-ass theoretical scenarios where the Spitfire wins, but in a real war he’ll never see it coming.
It can, indeed. So could a German Leopard II. Honestly, the differences between a Challenger, an Abrams or a Leopard are fairly small and it would really just come down to a) the crew, and/or b) luck. This isn’t like going up against an old Russian T-72 where the Abrams had decisive and extensive advantages in every single department.
And, of course, going against a French LeClerq, South Korean T-88, Israeli Merkava 4, or a Japanese T-90 (to name a few other good modern tanks) wouldn’t be a sure thing, either.
What if the Tiger were equipped with the Existential Blue Crayon Gun?