Kurganets & Boomerang Discussions Thread #1

GazB do you have a source on this? I haven't been keeping up with the latest developments yet I heard you make this claim before.

Why do you think they are talking about heavy brigades, medium brigades, and light brigades?

Why do you think they will ignore experience in Chechnia where the IFVs were picked off because of their lighter armour leaving MBTs that were much better protected but with weapons unable to elevate to hit targets above or below them except with the external 50 cal with 300 rounds?

The purpose of the heavy brigades is to have a brigade with the same or very similar levels of protection and mobility. To further improve mobility using all the same vehicle types you greatly reduce the logistics tail because you only need parts for one vehicle family instead of 10 or more.

They don't call heavy brigades armata brigades by accident.


There would not be much revolutionary if they just made an Armata MBT, a Kurganets BMP and a Boomerang BTR and a Typhoon BRDM... in fact there would be little to no change at all.

It just seems a little wasteful and extreme if every damn combat vehicle in a heavy brigade will be based on the Armata chassis

It would be if every brigade was a heavy brigade.

Heavy brigades will be for use in urban areas or areas or situations where an enemy is very well equipped to deal with armour. They will be mobile but also the least mobile of the new Russian brigades.

I mean how many technicians and support personnel in the US Army follow around each M1 Abrams for each 100km that it runs? How many gallons of fuel does it consume in that time and how much maintenance is required on one on average for each such distance covered?
Can you imagine the logistical nightmare of an entire brigade made up of M1 Abrams equivalents?

We are talking about diesel engined vehicles that will move large distances via train or aircraft and will make up only a small percentage of a force.

The new chassis will be universal, but there is no chance it will be used for all platforms in a brigade.

The icecream only comes in chocolate, but there is no chance it will be chocolate iceream that we get.

The new chassis will be universal, heavy chassis for heavy brigades and medium wheeled and tracked chassis for medium brigades and light chassis for light brigades... that is the plan.

If... at the end of this, they end up mixing armata MBTs and Kurganets BMPs and Boomerang BTRs then they have wasted their time... they might as well have just upgraded the T-90s, BMP-3s, and BTR-82s and kept the same structures.

When fighting in urban areas the light vehicles will all be picked off and the heavy vehicles "sieged" and destroyed later at their leisure.

With an Armata brigade the BMP/IFV will be as difficult to defeat as the MBTs and most likely the MBTs will have high elevation guns anyway and will be able to defend themselves.

That's true, a lot of such vehicles already use tank chassis, and the Armata will likely be more efficient, reliable and certainly a lot lighter than the M1 Abrams series.

The MSTA 152mm artillery vehicle and several engineer and recovery vehicles already use MBT chassis... they could easily have been designed with lighter chassis.

But still even just the basic chassis without APS/UAVs/Weapons is a very complex, expensive, next-gen chassis with a protected crew compartment, new diesel engine, optics and cameras for full situational awareness of the crew.

No it isn't. All the electronics and sensors and weapons will be largely standardised... all the crew positions will be standardised across the different vehicle families so the screen a Typhoon driver uses will be the same as the commander of that vehicle and the gunner and the driver, commander and gunner of an Armata recon vehicle. All positions will allow each crewman to do everyone elses job if needed.

The difference might be that the Typhoon MBT will have a 45mm cannon and Kornet-EM missiles rather than a 125mm gun but the sensors and systems will be the same as the armata MBT or the kurganets MBT or boomerang MBT.

But still it's a tank chassis, it would require constant maintenance and support - a brigade full of such vehicles would be very demanding.

One set of spare parts, one design to master... don't you think the support tail for a current brigade would be the demanding one... a vehicle has broken down... is it a BMP or a BTR or a MBT or an ACRV or a Tunguska or SA-13 or OSA or TOR or MSTA... how many of them have the same engine? How many of them have related sensors or related electronics? What a nightmare!

I suppose that's why they are going for the wheeled and medium-traced brigades mostly, as opposed to the heavy.

The vast majority of forces will be medium and light and also wheeled because they are cheaper and more mobile and very well armed and equipped. Mixing up the forces only makes things worse because you are adding new designs with different engines and running gear.

a vehicle has broken down... is it a BMP or a BTR or a MBT or an ACRV or a Tunguska or SA-13 or OSA or TOR or MSTA... how many of them have the same engine? How many of them have related sensors or related electronics? What a nightmare!

BTW in a T-90 or T-72 brigade the MSTA and MBT will have different engines... it will only be the MTLB based vehicles with engine and component commonality... ie ACRV and SA-13.

The widespread introduction of APS systems would be expensive, but done correctly it will be an extra layer of protection that will add value and save vehicles and lives.

The effective use of RPGs will likely diminish for a while, but tactics will change to suit.

Different APS systems will use different sensors to operate and in the future enemies will target these directly to try to defeat them... for instance a saturation attack from several angles at once, or jamming the radar detection elements to prevent the accurate tracking of incoming projectiles... or replace the HEAT warhead in the first rocket with an EMP device to disable the electronics of the APS system.

Measure countermeasure... will never end.

Of course most of the time against unsupported third world countries it should make the conflicts more one sided.

With good communications and C4IR equipment a small force should be able to dominate a large area with heavy, powerful and accurate weapons, plus even heavier firepower available on call 24/7... from direct fire 125mm smoothbore guns and 45/57mm cannon and 40mm grenade launchers and HMGs and also 120mm gun/mortar support and of course 152mm artillery able to hit point targets with guided shells out to 70km or so... and then you can call in CAS in the form of Su-25SM and its replacement and also Ka-52 and Mi-28M plus a range of strike aircraft... right up to the Father of All Bombs...

It is a huge undertaking and requires careful planning and very careful choices over what forces to deploy where so we don't have a modern equivalent of the charge of the light brigade vs heavy anti tank defences, but it should be revolutionary in terms of armoured warfare.

Such problems in WWII where Soviet Tank units with T-26 light tanks, T-34 medium tanks and KV-1 heavy tanks where the T-34s arrived first because of their mobility, the T-26s tended to arrive later, and then some KV-1s arrived while the vehicles that had broken down often didn't arrive at all.

The result was a mess.
Now they will have forces with similar levels of armour, similar levels of mobility and similar performance in terms of cross country ability.

But it is not just the armoured force... the sharp metal bit at the front of the spear, but the logistics tail that will be greatly improved as it will need one set of engine parts for the engine family being used. One set of transmission and gears and clutches because it is using the same method of mobility (tracks or wheels) with the same engines with similar weight vehicles... even just having to carry spare wheels OR spare tracks but not both is a weight and space saver and job simplification.

The shorter the logistics tail the more mobile and flexible the unit... and resupply becomes simpler as well as you don't need to anticipate which vehicles parts you will need because they mostly all use the same compatible parts.

You wont get to a large river and realise that half your vehicles can float across but you can't find an area where the riverbed is solid enough for your heavy vehicles to cross so your force is split... all the armata vehicles will snorkle and all the kurganets and boomerang and typhoon classes will float across... with some obstacles bridging equipment might be needed for the armata brigade, but it is better than the current state where every division has tanks so whether it is a motor rifle or tank division a bridging unit would be needed. Under the new system only heavy brigades... a heavy tank brigade or a heavy motor rifle brigade will need bridging units in support as all the other brigades will be totally amphibious.

For non army units there will suddenly be a selection of vehicles you can choose from... for instance a VDV unit is deployed to Syria... they wont be parachuted in... they will go as a landed elite force, they could trade in their BMD-4Ms for Armatas and enjoy protection and mobility and serious firepower and operate in fairly rough terrain. Equally if there is a lot of urban patrolling Boomerang would give them speed and also armour and firepower.

For use in places where enemy anti armour capabilities is not good but IEDs will be a problem then Typhoons will likely be the best choice.

I suspect they might make them available for export because any sensitive module can be removed and replaced with a generic export component or foreign weapon/sensor to the customers tastes.

Certainly Boomerang would be a popular export item, with its better troop exit arrangment and much better armour levels than the BTR.

In current divisions Tanks and IFVs are included in scout units.

You have to keep in mind that the different weight class brigades will have different uses. On the open rolling plains against a lightly equipped enemy you might decide not to use heavy brigades at all and just use mobility and speed and fire power.

For a Heavy brigade mission scouts will still be needed but will likely trade speed for armour and firepower... remote control BMPTs anyone?

Another factor to consider is that just because a vehicle is tracked does not mean it can just drive anywhere. A small light wheeled vehicle is even more restricted as to where it can or cannot go.

It just makes sense not to introduce a different vehicle type into a brigade because that different type wont have the same mobility and wont have the same protection and will introduce new parts and new engines and new transmissions and gearing etc etc and for what?

A "light" as in reduced weight scout model could be made from any of the vehicles... give it the biggest most powerful engine in each engine family but dont make it the heaviest vehicle and its performance will be very good... add extra radios and extra optics and give it basic armament and a few UAVs and unmanned land based vehicles it can use for looking around corners and over walls.

The Rys scout based on a BMP-3 but with only a 30mm cannon and optics is a good example... an Armata IFV with reduced armament with extra optics and sensors and communications equipment and the rear troop area replaced with control stations of UAVs and ground unmanned vehicles but the same armour and a big engine and it would be an excellent "scout" vehicle.

BTW Nice find TheArmenian... pallet based rocket artillery... I just hope they don't make the same mistake as the west and try to replace tube artillery with rocket based artillery.

Yes... even specialist optics/sensors/radars mounted on long articulated arms that could raise the sensors 7-8m into the air to see over buildings or trees or whatever... fitting a PKM means you could engage light targets too... the enemy see your sensors and come charging over expecting to see a light truck or recon unit and find a platoon of armata vehicles with a variety of weapons.

Ideally scout vehicles should be diesel electric hybrids operating on electric in a stealth mode, but you could just as easily attach an IFV with troops or a BMPT vehicle to support your scouts incase they find the trouble they are looking for...  

I suspect a central tire pressure regulation system would also be standard too, as most previous Russian military wheeled vehicles have had such systems to reduce tire pressure over soft surfaces like mud or snow or sand. For moving over hard surfaces high pressure offers max speed.

I think the BTR-152 had an early model with external pressure hoses to the wheels to allow the pressure to be changed from the cab... or it might have been an early model BTR-40. Later models had internal hoses that were better protected from small arms fire and the environment.

Interesting they mention 122mm calibre for artillery... I wonder if they will keep the 122mm calibre for artillery or move to a long barrel 120mm gun able to fire shells and mortar rounds in that calibre.

They have already "upgraded" the 2S1 122mm SPG with the 120mm gun/mortar to create the Hosta 2S34.

Howitzers and mortars already have a lot in common as both can use reduced charges for firing at targets close to the gun much more accurately and offer much better fragmentation patterns as the bombs land near vertically which means fragments are radiated in a near circular pattern rather than with a high velocity gun where much of the side walls of the projectile direct the fragments up into the air and the other side directs them down into the ground.

Firing at close by targets with a reduced charge means less time in the air for the projectile as it doesn't need to be lofted high up into the air to shorten its range which means shorter flight times yet still steep impact angle for good fragment patterns.

The long barrel 120mm mortars the Russian military uses are blurring the difference as their max range shells can reach 13km, which is very close to the 15km range of the 122mm howitzer rounds and the inclusion of 122mm laser guided projectiles means accuracy can be excellent.

Of course the Navy and VDV have said they are looking at modified versions to meet their own special needs.

The Army needs amphibious capabilities, but only to cross rivers and lakes, while the Navy will want to operate in rough sea states and land on beaches, while the VDV will want to throw them out of aircraft occasionally and regularly fly them around the place.

They have several 120mm gun/mortars from the old system on the Nona to the new systems on the Vena and Hosta.

All these weapons are rifled and can fire shells or mortar bombs, though the Vena can fire standard HE shells to 13km, which means that using rocket assisted shells can probably already match the 15km range of the 122mm D-30.

The new weapon might have an even longer barrel for improved performance.