Panzer Kurskreisel full setup

[Nick Komiya]

Folks at another forum, where I do not have photo upload rights seem to be hungry for the cable lengths involved in a fully set up Panzer Kurskreisel with KU3 Umformer, so I am putting it up here for them to come and see. For those from the WAF, clicking the photos will open an enlarged version as a new tab, and clicking that photo will give you another further enlargement.

For those in this forum, who are not familiar with Panzer navigation on open land, I will first provide a short summary. Basically you needed this when you were departing from an established road and traversing open terrain with few landmarks to navigate by.

You could not use a compass in a tank, because of the magnetic interference of the bulk of steel, so you had to use the compass 20 meters away from the tank. Then you set the moving dial of the gyrocompass to match the watch dial direction of your destination.

Then by disengaging the dial-stop the dial below the one set to the desired direction floated free and the driver just needed to steer the tank to keep the same number aligned on both dials.

German tanks all had this set up by the driver, and it was powered by an dynamotor transformer located behind the driver's seat usually under the floor panel.

For those wanting more tutoring on how to use it, I gave the page from the Pantherfibel.

[Nick Komiya]

Excuse me fellow WRF members, I just realized few of you are probably familiar with the gyrocompass, in which case you'd want to see a picture of the main unit itself. Here it is from my collection.