What’s Armata?
Nuthin’ much, what’s Armata with you?................
I suppose there is a role for tanks still but how they did in the Iraqi campaigns seems to show they are very vulnerable to smart munitions from above.
I believe that once a significant form of rail gun technology gets moved into the ground forces, tanks will go the way of the horsed cavalry.
Even a small tungsten penetrator, going at 15% of the speed of light, will destroy any vehicle, and cannot be stopped by any system of defense.
The battlefield will once again be owned by the foot soldier.
Hope it scares the EU into paying for its own defense.
I would say yes, this is concerning.
It’s the first modern Russian tank with the gun depression to fight like a Western tank - hull down behind a hill with just the turret exposed. It’s got a tried and proven active protection system to ward off most missiles or RPGs and a secondary function of being able to slew the gun onto the party that fired the missile at it; it can even automatically track and lead a helicopter gunship. The crew sit in the front of the hull in a heavily armored cell so if the tank is fighting hull down and the exposed turret gets hit, the crew are far less likely to be injured or killed and the tank is more likely to be able to motor off back to somewhere it can be repaired with no loss of crew, only a ruined turret.
Even if such a complicated APS works reliably, there are ways around it. It won't make Ivan invincible, just have to work at it a little bit.
Interesting. The tank is relatively light - I assume because the crewless turret needs less armor. Many self proclaimed experts in the U.S. have pushed to make the next generation of tanks with a crewless turret, which I believe is a bad idea.
The US has been relying on its 1980s Abrams and 1990s Javelin designs way too long...
According to Freepers tanks and A/C carriers are obsolete. Nothing to see here, move along.
Checkmate.
So looking at this design, I would just take out the 3 cameras and they would be blind.
I remember stories being told of automatic loaders in the 70s and 80s reaching over and grabbing the leg/thigh of the gunner and trying to feed him into the breech of the main gun ... also speaking to the rumors of where the Red Army Chorus got its high tenors.
So now you've got an automatic loader in a compartment with no human involved. When it misfeeds and comes up missing the ammunition being presented, you've got a main gun with nothing in it in a face-off with another tank which doesn't have the same problem.
Sorry, but I just don't believe that the Russians .. or anybody for that matter .. could come up with an automatic feed mechanism that could be trusted to function in combat.
I do have a question about that. It would seem to me that it would take a missile far longer to clear a long-barreled smoothbore cannon than it would a shell that was fired. You have the tank on the move, bouncing over battle-torn fields and forests; it would seem to me that a missile would be bounced around inside the barrel of the cannon long before it was able to exit. What would be the accuracy of a missile, still under boosted power, being shaken down the barrel like a pea in a straw. When it finally exited, goodness knows what direction it would be facing, still under boost-power.
And if you're back to the situation where you have to come to a stop to fire, you're dead meat on a battlefield anyway, especially if these are wire-guided missiles and you have to remain stationary for guidance. If they're fire-and-forget, they're roman-candles. If they're laser guided, bouncing around the designator as you tool cross-country is not going to make for very good accuracy either.
Something about this just brings to mind a device that sounds good, but won't work.
NATO is more concerned about it’s Carbon Footprint in Brussels.