Look at photographs of the first King Tigers and you will see a turret with a rounded, curved front and a bulging commander's cupola on the left side. Almost every book, museum caption and model kit box calls it the Porsche turret.
Porsche did not design it. Krupp did. And the reason the wrong name stuck is a small story about how a tank gets built when two companies are competing for the same contract.
Two chassis, one turret supplier
In 1943 the German Army wanted a heavy tank to follow the Tiger I. Two firms submitted designs: Henschel, which had built the Tiger I, and Porsche, whose founder had already lost the Tiger I competition and wanted the next one badly.
Turrets were a separate business. Krupp built them for both proposals, and it started building them for the Porsche version first, before the decision was made — fifty of them, on the assumption that Porsche would win.
Porsche lost. The Henschel chassis was chosen, largely because Porsche's design used a petrol-electric drive that needed copper the German war economy could not spare.
But fifty finished turrets were sitting in a factory, and there was a war on. So they were bolted onto the first fifty Henschel hulls. The earliest King Tigers therefore wear a turret designed for a tank that was never built — and the name of the losing company followed the part it did not design.
The flaw in the curve
The rounded front looks purposeful, and in one sense it was: a curved plate deflects better than a flat one of the same thickness. But the curve, combined with the gun mantlet above it, created a pocket.
A shell striking low on the mantlet could be deflected downwards rather than away — straight into the hull roof, which was thin. Gunners on the other side learned to aim for it.
From the fifty-first tank onward, the turret changed. The new one had a flat face, a wider interior, more ammunition stowage and no shot trap. That is the turret most people picture when they think of a King Tiger, and it is the one on the vast majority of the 489 built.
Which makes the early turret the rarer of the two by a factor of ten.
The tank in Bovington
The Tank Museum in Bovington, England, holds what is generally regarded as the oldest surviving Tiger II — an early production vehicle with the curved turret, captured during the war and kept ever since.
It is one of the few places in the world where you can stand in front of the thing and see what the fuss is about: a 70-tonne tank with 180 mm of sloped armour on the nose, an 8.8 cm gun that could kill anything it met at ranges most tanks could not even see, and a drivetrain that broke down often enough that more King Tigers were lost to mechanical failure and abandonment than to enemy fire.
The model
COBI's Tiger II King Tiger (KTV2), set 2686, is a 1:28 model of that specific tank, built from 1,572 blocks. The turret traverses, the gun elevates, the hatches open, the tracks run, and every marking is printed onto the blocks rather than applied as a sticker.
It is currently available to pre-order. The expected shipping month is shown on the product page, and you can cancel any time before it ships.
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