By Zarax

Disclaimer: 
This is a purely speculative article that takes into account WOT german tech tree and uses historical tanks to speculate possible new tank additions.
While trying to keep the articles faithful to history some room for inaccuracy is allowed within these rules:

1) No tank or tank part will be 100% made up, at least a mention about tank role and vague specs are needed

2) Components not planned for the tank are allowed, provided it wouldn’t create grotesque inaccuracies like putting a gun that would obviously cripple a tank under its weight

3) This will be limited to WWII plans, anything post war risks to be too arbitrary to properly balance

No serious expectation of anything listed to appear in WOT as described is applied, but as we’re discussing about implementing history into an arcade game some items will be controversial.
This is unavoidable as WOT tech tree rules need a tank to be better than the previous one and ergonomics are not exactly cared about, meaning that most designs are over-performing their real counterparts.

Although Porsche is best known for the Ferdinand and the Maus, he worked on a plethora of lesser known designs, although most of them never left the paper stage.
Starting from 1943 and as the war material situation worsened he focused on lighter designs, some of which were tank destroyers.

By using the best sources at our disposal we’re now able to attempt to reconstruct a Porsche TD line.
Beware, some designs are quite exotic but all of them are based on “Panzer Tracts 6-3“, “Panzer Tracts 20-1“, “Panzer Tracts 20-2”  or “Special Panzer Variants“.

Due to a lack of early designs, this tree will start from tier V, in my mind branching from either the Hetzer or the Panzer 38 Neuer Art:

Tier V: Porsche Typ 245/2

Based on the Porsche Typ 245 light tank design, this light assault gun was meant to double up as recon tank and use belt-fed weapons, eliminating the need for a loader.
Designed to be fairly well armored (60mm sloped frontal armor), it was planned to be fast with a 250HP air-cooled  Porsche engine, which pushed its 15 tons at a top speed of 58 kilometers per hour, granting a pretty good 16HP/ton.

At around 1.5 meters of height and being shorter than the Hetzer, it was pretty short and hard to detect, making it a potentially great ambush tank.
Its planned armament was a 55mm Rheinmetall M112 autocannon with a traverse of 5° on each side, coupled with a light MG in the cupola.

We could estimate as upgrades that the tank could receive a Porsche Typ 100 engine variant, and keep relatively light armament.
I initially thought about 55mm Gerat 58 but it would look ridicolous on the tank, as well as its early relative 5cm Flak 41.
Considering larger guns, the 75mm L/48 would look quite big on the tank already, so it’s likely we’ll have to be limited to howitzers and short guns.

An autoloading variant of the 5cm L/60 cannon could be used with a 5 round drum, although lackluster penetration would not improve the situation by much.
105mm L/28 would match the tank pretty well, but it will likely mean giving up most traverse.

Stretching up a bit more, one could consider the 8cm PAW 600, which would give slightly better HE damage than a 75mm gun, however gold ammo is limited to 140ishmm HEAT penetration.
Alternatively, the 30mm MK103 or an autoloading 37mm with the uranium rounds could be considered, but this is borderline with history.

All in all, an excellent “flanking TD” useful for hunting scout tanks and protecting artillery but not exactly a pleasant grind.

Tier VI: Porsche Schwerer Kleiner Panzer

Sometimes confused with the E-25, this 1944 design was the ultimate “light” tank destroyer by Porsche.
Roughly the same size as its tier VI predecessor, it was designed to sport 120mm frontal armor, 4 man crew and a semi-automatic (mentioned as “belt-fed”, likely an auto-loader) cannon plus a 30mm MK 103/108 in the small turret above.

A 500HP V-12 engine was supposed to push its 27 tons of weight to a top speed of 57 kilometers per hour, which at around 18HP/ton would have made the vehicle quite agile, although it’s likely the weight was under estimated.

Weapon-wise, Spielberger states that the 105mm L/28 was originally planned, but later to be replaced with a semi-automatic 10.5cm cannon of higher performance.
In this case, one could assume we’d end up with a similar armament as the WOT Jagdpanther, although given the better chassis specs gun would inferior in performance, with in my opinion a final choice between a drum loaded version of the howitzer and the 88mm L/71 or 105mm L/47 if the 10H64 is not picked.

Engine-wise, we could maybe expect the same choice as Ferdinand or a bit lower in HP as the initial mobility is already quite good, with the possibility of the historical engine being the top one.

Tier VIII: Ferdinand

As the tank is already in WOT and no tier changes are expected, only minor adjustments are foreseen.
WOT already upgrades this tank above historical plans so not much could be said.
If one wanted to improve slightly historical accuracy an 88mm L/100 or 105mm L/68 could be used instead of the 128mm L/55 as they would be more plausible as upgrade but still fictional.

Tier IX: VK 70.01 (P)

The biggest historical stretch of this tree, but necessary to find a proper design for the tier, this was supposed to be Porsche proposal for the Lowe tank, dated 11 may 1942.

Coinciding with the “Schwerer Lowe” specifications, it was a 90 ton tank design, with 120mm front armor, 80-100mm side and armed with a 15cm L/40 (likely E-100s L/38) cannon.
2 Porsche engines of unknown power were supposed to push the tank at 30 kilometers per hour.

Now, for the speculative part:

A chassis length of over 7.7m is given, making it likely rear turreted, something that is to be expected by a Porsche design.
A width of around 3.8m is given, touching slightly above 4m with what is expected to be side skirts, or possibly with tracks mounted.

This would give it a pretty familiar look, one that WG took for tier X:

The image above is of course NOT historical and it’s merely speculation on how the Schwerer Lowe turret would look with a chassis similar in size to the Porsche design, in this case the Sturmpanzer Bar.