No, they were not German tracks or designs.

For give me If i am wrong, but looking at these  pictures I can see some similarities between the tracks and i believe the Germans may have inspired the allies 

So then by that logic, any steel track was inspired by the Germans?  the British had all steel tracks on many of their WWII tanks.  Look at the US T-66 track on an M-4 - it also looks similar, does that mean it was inspired by a German design?

Yeah I think the similarity is just coincidence more than anything. 

My jaw dropped open when I saw the kit right inside the cover of my new FSM. Will have to get one of these for sure, only will wait a year or two and try to catch one on sale.

Cliff

Bronto

So then by that logic, any steel track was inspired by the Germans?  the British had all steel tracks on many of their WWII tanks.  Look at the US T-66 track on an M-4 - it also looks similar, does that mean it was inspired by a German design?

The British had all steel tracks on all their indigenous tank designs. Most every country did. Only the US had had widespread use of rubber in tank track designs. At first glance, to my eye, the track design bears far more resemblance to that of the Centurion whose design work started at roughly the same time in 1943. Of course, there were also probably design influences from the Russian T-34 and KV tanks as well as the German Tiger and Panther tanks for the concept of wide tracks to lessen ground pressure.

One of the lesser known things about German track development is that they originally experimented with rubber tracks (think of designs like those seen on the 250/251 half-track family) on tanks but found that they couldn't stand up to the wear and tear at any kind of spped due to the weight of the vehicles and limitations of the designs. As stik points out, the use of steel "skeleton" tracks was a common design feature in virtually every design of the period. Once you start dealing with tracks of a certain size/width (driven in turn by the size/weight of the vehicle and ground pressure resulting), there's going to be inevitable similarities just due to the physics involved in the  casting of the links and the traction required to produce them and have them work effectively.

I don't think that it's in any way unreasonable to assume that engineers and designers of the time period had a look around at what everybody else was doing and said "Hey, check out what Hans and Franz used on THEIR big baby!" The Germans themselves designed the Panther after the T-34; which was itself designed from a British design, the Christie.

It's just like all the darned cars seems to look the same today. People use what works, and copy and imitate everywhere.

What Bill said also makes a lot of sense, but then again, he knows literally everything about tanks, so quite naturally, it would.

UM Doog.....never thought I would ever have to correct you, but Walter Christie was an American and his design was American before showing it to the British or the Russians. WOW did I just do that?

MECHTECH

UM Doog.....never thought I would ever have to correct you, but Walter Christie was an American and his design was American before showing it to the British or the Russians. WOW did I just do that?

if you look at the Tiger I and Tiger II tracks and the A39s, they do look very similar to each other, wheather or not anybody else believes so i do think the british used german track designs as a basis for the track design on the A39, steel tracks were used by many countries but you cannot deny the uncanny resemblance between the two here. Bronto  yes the Germans, British, and Russians all used metal tracks, but none of them looked even close to as similar as these do...i mean the raised cleats look nearly identical to the Tiger I tracks.