Entwicklung series

The Entwicklung series (from German Entwicklung lit. 'development'), more commonly known as the E-Series, was a late-World War II attempt by Nazi Germany to produce a standardised series of tank designs. There were to be standard designs in five different weight classes (E-10, E-25, E-50, E-75 and E-100) from which several specialised variants were to be developed. Design standardisation was envisioned to bring improvements over extreme complexity of previous tank designs that resulted in poor production rates and mechanical unreliability. The E-series designs were simpler, cheaper to produce and more efficient than their predecessors; however, they offered only modest improvements in armour and firepower over the designs they were intended to replace, such as the Jagdpanzer 38(t), Panther Ausf. G or Tiger II; and would have represented the final standardization of German armoured vehicle design. Indeed, nearly all of the E-series vehicles—up to and including the E-75—were intended to use what were essentially the Tiger II's 80 centimeter steel-rimmed wheels for their suspension, meant to overlap each other (as on the later production Tiger and Panther tanks that also used them), abandoning the interleaved Schachtellaufwerk suspension that first appeared on German military half-tracks in the early 1930s.