Hmm, the drive train was not exactly the same as in the Tiger I - you can't really imagine they just stuffed the same thing into the Tiger II ?
Now as for the armor quality, they note two things iirc. Decline of molybdenium content and replacing it with vanadium, plus decreased plate hardness.. sounds bad?
Well... most alloys in metallurgy can be replaced by another to get the same properties (japanese were masters in this), and basically more alloys do not mean better qualities, just easier manufacturing to get the same qualities, ie. the process is more error-tolerant. Now as far as vanadium goes, it's one of the best alloys existing for armor, so it was actually an improvement. The reason they don't use it much is because it's expensive, cost was not an issue for the germans since they had vanadium, but less molybden, and they had a good metal industry that introduced better mechanical-working of the plates, so they had equal quality - flawed examples got more numerous though, since the production process was more sensitive now. The Russkies used a lot, and came up with very hard plates - which often cracked even when they'd easily reject smaller projectiles, T-34 plate tests done by the Germans showed this vs. 50mm gun.
And as for armor hardness 'decline' goes, it's really a sand in the eye. Thicker plates are always 'softer' than thin ones because they resist then better without cracking... that's a general rule. As for the shooting tests, I don't really need to comment, just look at the pictures, they kept it shooting until it fell apart, what's the surprise in that? If hit repeatadly on the same spot, any armor would fail sooner or later. The frontal armor shots are of suspect as well, they claim 88, 100 and 122mm penetrations. But on front of the turret there's only two : the 88 and probably the 100mm one, both capable AT weapons of this; the 100mm one is a bit of a 'cheat' tough, they removed the gun mantlet which protected the aiming slit, and hit the armor at this opening, where it naturally weaker. Probably the russkies got one early example that still bear it's child diseases, plus they couldn't maintain it properly, fixed it with cannibalized spare parts and stuff..
And I ask again, if they penetrated the armor so easily, why did they tell the troops different, ie. do not attack it from front, only from sides with special tungsten ammo and close range? Perhaps because the 'shoot the tiger to pieces and document with sad photos' was to make the high brass (and today's russian nationalists) happy, whereas troops on the front needed real information?
BTW, the battlefield.ru site had at a time posting pictures of 'destroyed german afvs'. Some of these were very poor fakes, with little black dots retouched onto the abandoned tanks as 'penetrations'. There was one clear case where a 'knocked out by soviet fire' Tiger was montaged from two different photos (turret and hull). The site owner was probably innocent, he bought the book with the pictures in russia, but this gives some idea how much welcome is the idea in Russia to rewrite things into something nicer..
