The IS-3

steampunkkaja (52)in #tanks • 5 years ago

Well, it took long enough, but I finally finished the IS-3 and IS-3M models. NOW I can move on to the VC Firefly before going back to ships for a while. I still have a tremendous number of tanks to make for one customer alone, but I need a break. I spend more time searching for decent blueprints and then wondering what the bloody hell I'm looking at than I do actually rendering most of these models. Anyway, enough whinging!

The IS-3 first appeared in 1945, before the end of the War, but not in time to see combat. Instead, the rest of the world first saw this radical new tank design at the victory parade in Berlin:

(Photo taken from Tanks-Encyclopedia, source Wikimedia Commons)

As I mention in the product description of my IS-3 model, the pike nose was neither uniquely Russian, nor even a Russian invention, but the IS-3 was the first effective tank design to use it. The frying-pan turret, however, was a uniquely Russian design, hence my nickname for it, the Soviet Skillet. The profile was so low and the angles so severe, especially from the front, that no contemporary tank could expect to do much against it. The unfortunate part of the turret geometry is that it's really hard to duplicate, as I explain in my CAD tutorials where I make two different versions.

Since the differences between the IS-3 and IS-3M, a modernised version that began development in 1951, are so slight, I decided to finish them together. Here is a comparison of the two:
IS-3 and 3M 1.PNG
IS-3 and 3M 2.PNG
IS-3 and 3M 3.PNG
In this bottom picture, you can see that the nose of the IS-3M is farther forward, as is the gun mantlet. As I explained in both my BitChute videos and the product descriptions, the turret on the modernised version is slightly different, and the gun is mounted lower, to improve gun depression and provide more room to work. Although the trunnions are mounted farther forward on the gun, the gun itself isn't moved farther forward, as you can see in the drawing below:
IS-3 and 3M gun comparison.PNG
It's a terrible picture, I know.