Diesel is generally considered safer than Petrol because it doesn’t form vapour easily. If heated enough it’ll burn or even explode, but getting the right conditions is actually pretty difficult. In some circumstances it is possible to put out a match by dunking it in a pool of diesel (NOT all, so don’t try this at home!). Petrol on the other hand forms a vapour layer pretty easily at room temperature, and this vapour layer is typically explosive. You regularly get people dying of burns when trying to light a bonfire with petrol - they put the petrol on the fire, and don’t realise that the pool of vapour extends for several feet outside the edge of the fire. When they light it, they get very badly burnt.
The net result is that while Diesel has a lower fire point and more energy per unit volume than Petrol, it is less likely to explode or burn in practice because getting the right air/fuel mix is much harder.
Oddly, Le Mans racers have started to go Diesel though. Diesel engines get better fuel efficiency (the cycle allows much higher pressure ratios than the Otto cycle since the fuel won’t pre-detonate, and that means relatively cool exhaust gas and hence lower exhaust pipe losses). However, this (and the heavy flywheel needed to keep it turning) mean the engine has to be built much heavier than a similar power Petrol unit. That will always mean a poorer power to weight ratio than Petrol - hence F1 and motorbikes sticking with Petrol, while car engines (in Europe at least) are rapidly changing to Diesel.
Heavy tanks are naturally unbalanced. However, comparing the KV1 to the Tiger is a little unfair - the Tiger was in large part designed to beat the KV1. It would be fairer to compare it to contemporary tanks such as the Panzer III or Char B1. There, it comes of rather more favourably.
The cynic in me says that for 200 tanks produced and transported to the battlefield, the Germans managed to knock out 269 Soviet tanks. Given that the production cost of a Panther was several times that of a T-34, I’d suggest they weren’t getting very good value for money (and they were in a resource limited war).
) is not a crime, but being a fan you still need to see the context and the limits of the impact of a simple tank design. Tigers are simply one hell of a nice tank to build in model for example and ye sthey have the myths… No one argues that. Telling that winning the war with 6000 more tigers is another thing however… I love WWII armour and panzers… but hey, Germany had its best moments with the Luftwaffe. Saying that any tank would have done the job is not that stupid. The main assets of the Panzerwaffe was discipline, doctrine and big turret/large crew.