T-90 Main Battle Tank #2

Just like hermes and koalitsiya was supposed to saturate the battlefield?

You can't fault them for not being ready for service yet, they are new systems and if you throw new systems into service without proper testing you end up with the shit the west has in service not properly tested except against natives trying to protect their land from the space marines that are the US.

How could the gunner have delayed the ignition of the rocket motor?

They're not shot out of the barrel, they don't have a powder charge; rather they're simply ejected out of the barrel as the rocket ignites and does the rest.

It seems more likely that the long range kill was achieved with a new propellant/updated missile.
Or perhaps the 5000m range was just a very conservative specification from the beginning, or misinformation. It's in any case common to design and construct systems for 30% above tolerance or specification, in any field of engineering. 30% above 5000m is 6500m, which is even greater than what we saw in the video, so it's quite plausible.

The description and speculation was not exactly sensible in my opinion.

The system uses a laser to point at the target, but the control system is not on the tank, it is in the missile.

The Tank does not tell the missile what to do other than pointing a laser in the direction of the target.

For such a long range shot I would think the laser might be aimed several dozen metres or even hundred metres above the target so the missile flies high so it clears trees and wires and fences etc and should also allow it to travel further, but I also suspect improvements in lasers and optics on the tank would allow it to precisely mark the target to much greater ranges.

The missile likely also has better propellent and could possibly be made lighter with more compact and lighter electronics to further improve performance with more room for rocket fuel.

After being fired the missile looks back at the launch tank and detects the laser beam and finds its position inside that beam.

A better way to describe it would be four lasers each of a different frequency, so lets use visible light frequencies and say top left is red and top right is blue and bottom left is green and bottom right is yellow. There is no colour mixing so the missile looking back seeing all four colours knows it is flying down the beam of the laser and that is all it knows and cares about. If it looks back and the laser is red it knows it is high and to the left of the target so the missile itself will turn to the right and downwards slightly. If it then sees red and blue then it knows it is aligned with the target but that it is flying high so it will stop turning right and keep descending till it sees green and yellow. When it sees all four colours it knows it is in the centre of the beam and it will stop turning and stop climbing or descending.

Of course the tank will be aiming the lasers high till the missile gets within about 1km of the target or less and then it will drop the laser down onto the target so the missile will see the change and manouver to remain in the centre of the laser beam.

The missile does all the work and processing but is not looking at the target so smoke and lasers wont effect the missile till it hits the smoke. The lasers being used can be 10,000 times less powerful than Semi Active Laser Homing lasers used to put a laser spot on the target for a laser homing missile to hit.

This missile is not a laser homing missile, it is a laser beam riding missile so the target can be shiny or dull and it can be any colour because the missile does not need to see a laser reflection from the target and the laser only travels to the target.

For a laser beam riding missile a 7km target means the laser travels 7km at most. For SALH the laser has to travel to the target and reflect back off the target so the missile you launch can detect it so a 7km shot would mean the laser sensor in your missile would see the laser going 7km to the target and reflect back 7kms so the laser travels 14km from a surface that might be dark and dull that absorbs light and does not reflect it well.

Tuning a laser warning system to detect the laser from a laser beam riding missile means even low powered laser emissions like reflections from your own laser range finders will set it off leading to lots of false warnings and to it normally being turned off.

The propellent stub for launching these beam riding missiles seems to have a small propellent charge with a big spring and effectively wadding to blow the missile down the tube but at a fraction of the energy and speed of a normal round.

ALAMO wrote:

flamming_python wrote:How could the gunner have delayed the ignition of the rocket motor?

They're not shot out of the barrel, they don't have a powder charge; rather they're simply ejected out of the barrel as the rocket ignites and does the rest.

It seems more likely that the long range kill was achieved with a new propellant/updated missile.
Or perhaps the 5000m range was just a very conservative specification from the beginning, or misinformation. It's in any case common to design and construct systems for 30% above tolerance or specification, in any field of engineering. 30% above 5000m is 6500m, which is even greater than what we saw in the video, so it's quite plausible.

Actually, those do have a propellant charge, only a very small one. It is responsible only for ejecting the missile out of a barrel. The engine ignites outside the barrel only.

Yes, that's what I meant.