I hope everyone in here is having a good start to a new year!
Now, getting to business, I've found out something actually rather interesting about the Jagdpanzer IV. Quote from Tank Encyclopedia:
Here's a picture of a Jagdpanzer IV in Syrian service:
And someone made a really good model of the thing
here, but that's not what I want to mention, instead, what I want to talk about is how these tanks were apparently still in the arsenal of Syria at least into the 90s, with some unconfirmed mentions on the internet about them actually still being in service as late as
2009...and that makes me wonder. Let's say you are an officer of a cash strapped Middle Eastern army that has just ended up in a civil war or what have you at the start of the 2010s and you don't have that many vehicles to choose from, so you've got to use the Jagdpanzer and get it into at least a usable condition. It might be horrifically outmatched when compared to a modern tank or anything like that, but as an armored box to lob shells at dugin infantry from far away it probably still works fine.
That said, what could be done to give this seventy year old hull even a snowball's chance of being useful? Logically you'd want to replace the gun (and hull MG), as I can't imagine you'd be able to find that many 7.5cm shells just lying around nowadays and you might have a more modern tank that's too badly damaged to be repaired which might be able to serve as a donor for a main weapon, but what about protection and other areas? I can imagine welding on some kind of slat armor to the frontal arc and maybe to the sides to give a little protection against shaped charge attacks (ie, an RPG) and maybe something like an ATGM launcher could be affixed to the commander's hatch atop a pintle mount similar to the way the launcher is fit onto a BMP just in case the poor sods inside happen to be unfortunate enough to encounter something like, say, a T-54 or Type 59 that'd otherwise make quick work of the thing. It'd probably help to give someone a pair of night vision goggles, too
Alternatively, would it be better to try and improvise the thing into a kind of SPG like the Panzer IVs that became Hummels? Cut off the roof of the hull and convert it into a sort of Jagdpanzer-Hummel hybrid? I can scarcely even imagine what that thing would look like, but apparently both the D-1 (152mm) and D-30 (122mm) are common enough in the Middle East so they could potentially be put used as a main weapon without too many concerns about ammo, so it should be possible to convert the thing into a poor man's SPG.
I know it is a pretty implausible thing, but thoughts? It makes a decent mental exercise if nothing else
