[Official] Armata Discussion thread #6

And the gap is only going to become bigger as the Russian MIC consolidates even further while Europe deindustrializes.

Bullseye.
People who are crying a river about the matter lack any serious perspective, and that is a sad observation.
Sorry folks, you really, really don't.

Some of you are just infused in the western propaganda, even not realizing that - I suppose the language or time/effort barrier is the issue here.

kvs objectively is disgusted by the fact that Russkie produce ONLY 2 tanks a day

Bro, it is still more PRODUCED tanks than the whole NATO made in the last fukin' DECADE

In a DAY.

There is not a single PRODUCTION line for tanks running in the whole of Europe, the US, Canada etc.
Not sure if Turks are not doing something around Altai, but hardly believe in that.
Not a single piece of Leclerce, L2, Ch2, M1, Ariete, PT-91, T-72 is being PRODUCED.

Can they?
Well ... sure. But how to switch from a 1 pcs a month refurbish to 2 pcs a day production?
Who will do that?
Physically.
Where are the skilled&trained personnel to carry heavy industry jobs, in Europe that considered this work not fancy for the last two bloody decades at least?
Who will supply tens of subcomponents, having the very same issue?
How much will that cost, in Europe lacking any serious resources and forced to import 80% of the industry needs?

Well .. sue they can.
It will take time. Years.
It will take money. Billions.

And guess who lacks the time, and who lacks the money?

For me the most disgusting flex has to be rebuilding Mariupol and the Donbass and just the greater rejoined Russian Novorossiya - with a shooting war not a few hundred miles away. Armies of laborers moving thousands of tons of construction material every single day while the real Russian Army is fighting its own battles at the same time. Most of NATO couldn't even fix their shit in peace time, the US included. They don't need to do this, they could proceed with reconstruction after the war is won like its normally done. But no, the Russian state simply has so much strength it can decide it can do both at the same time. And NATO thinks it has a snowball's chance in hell without nukes....

Look at the thing from a positive perspective.
This land was heavily exploited for the last 30 years. Decapitalization rates are sky high.
In most of the cases it will be really much more cost effective to build that brand new, with new concepts and whole development system.

F it, i am bored.



BTW, honest question, because this keeps getting brought up all the damn time.
Who the F, told the media that Russia would have 2000 Armatas in a few years?
Who, Who the F was it??

I can smell the AIDS from that video...  

The west was super butt hurt when the Soviets led the way by introducing smoothbore main tank guns... would be too inaccurate... they are doing it because it is cheaper so they can build ten times more tanks than we have and try to compete with our sniper tanks by trying to machine gun or submachine gun them and overwhelm them with less accurate fire... storm them... get in close... within 1-2km where even inaccurate guns get hits anyway.

Of course all that was bullshit butt hurt... the irony is that it was obvious... most HEAT rounds were fin stabilised and all APFSDS rounds were fin stabilised so were getting no accuracy benefit from their guns rifling anyway..... absurd...

Sorry dude, I am not even going to bother to watch that video... it looks like the usual shit.

My guess is that the west will claim the T-14 is a step backwards and real future tanks will be fully remote controlled and completely unmanned.

The T-14 is actually just a software update away from autonomous operation. According to RUMINT a couple test vehicles that received this upgrade can drive, conduct patrols and even hunt and engage targets without human input.

But the proving ground is one thing and I doubt this unmanned mode is anywhere near combat ready.

I suspect the Russians will be looking to operationalise
teleoperation instead. The T-14 might be the most survivable vehicle of its kind but why stop there? Throw out the crew and remove the risk to human life altogether.

F it, i am bored.



BTW, honest question, because this keeps getting brought up all the damn time.
Who the F, told the media that Russia would have 2000 Armatas in a few years?
Who, Who the F was it??

The author of that video is the same moron who criticized the T34/85 for having a "low velocity" main gun, He completely redefines the term retarded.

If these kind of videos are any indication of the state of the anglo saxon race then they would probably all die off due to failure to perform the basic tasks needed to keep a society running. That is to say if the Russians do not put them down first.

lyle6 wrote:The T-14 is actually just a software update away from autonomous operation. According to RUMINT a couple test vehicles that received this upgrade can drive, conduct patrols and even hunt and engage targets without human input.

But the proving ground is one thing and I doubt this unmanned mode is anywhere near combat ready.

I suspect the Russians will be looking to operationalise
teleoperation instead. The T-14 might be the most survivable vehicle of its kind but why stop there? Throw out the crew and remove the risk to human life altogether.

More importantly, I can see the Armata concept morphing into the development of a tank command vehicle that doesn't engage in combat itself, but controls a pod of UGVs such as modernised T-72B3Ms or similar.  The UGV MGTs would have net-centric local-area comms links that maintain simultaneous data connections to a number of command tanks. The command tanks share control of the available drones according to a handshake system where control can be passed between command nodes according to operational needs, and where each can issue movement orders and assign targets which the MBTs then either engage according to onboard AI, or where the engagement complexity is too high for automatics, operate under direct control of a human operator.

Command tanks would have especially heavy active defenses and ERA, and I expect would be equipped with IR suppression camo kits along with top-attack protection and anti-personnel self-defense weapons like HMG pods and probably a 30mm autocannon. They would also have a number of integral UAVs for survelliance and communications relay.  Removal of the main guin allows a carousel to be added for feeding UAVs into a vertical launcher.

Surviveability is key for these units.  Drone losses can be countered by sending in more UGVs, and as long as the supply of drones matches or exceeds the combat losses then the operation can be  maintained as long as the command nodes can be protected.

Droid army of the Trade Federation?  Learn from the Nemoidian failure in Naboo by having multiple command "ships" and concealing them from enemy attention.  

Well with all the crew in the hull the main issue for making the T-14 is situational awareness... which needs to be sorted... most tank commanders prefer to risk getting shot by having their heads sticking out of the turret hatch because the alternative is driving around blind.

Down in the hull the drivers of tanks generally have a rather poor view of the battlefield and rely on the commander giving them driving instructions to move from cover to cover... but in the T-14 the same optics that gives the commander a good turret top view of the battlefield can also be viewed by the driver and gunner which should make its situational awareness very very good... better than a standard tank even because they all get an optimal view.

The point is that this amazing view is also used by the APS system to detect threats but it could be sent to a van 100km away as easily as it could be to the crew inside the vehicle so remote operation starts to make sense.

With no crew to kill the areas of the tank that need heavy protection decrease dramatically... ammo, fuel, and engine and gun loading mechanism... which means the vehicle can be much smaller and lighter and therefore cheaper.

One of the ironies of a combat robot is that people are stupid... they see a robot coming at them and their immediate thought is to shoot it in the head... because in a human that is where the brain is... destroying that and the human is useless... but a robot is not a human even if it might have human form... there might be nothing at all inside the robot head so you could riddle it with bullets and the robot will keep coming... the brain and batteries might be in the groin, or duplicated in each shoulder or the chest cavity with heavy armour.

The point is that a robot tank might not be vulnerable to the normal kill shots on a conventional tank.

The T-14 has an armoured capsule at the front hull with all the crew... on a robot version the armoured capsule might be around the engine and ammo storage areas and fuel. The turret might be huge but also largely empty and you could shoot away to your hearts content and not hit anything important because nothing important is located there.

The huge turret might be rings and rings of upwardly firing ARENA munitions with Drozd munitions around the base of the turret, and other launchers located all over the place for instance....

A robot vehicle with optical and radar and acoustic sensors to detect enemy fire and locate its source and transmit that info back to HQ to mark on a live map showing where the next artillery barrage should be directed to...

Its ammo stores could be tripled but wired to be all detonated if the vehicle is immobilised or disabled and no longer able to make it back to base...

ERA panels could have claymore blocks attached to the outside and manually detonated as it approaches enemy troops... under the nakidka fabric camouflage who could tell there are MON 300s fixed there... and underneath have ERA bricks too...

You make a good point.  If a tank crew can fight effectively using vid feeds from their vehicle pano cameras (such that they operate entirely from screen displays) then they don't actually need to be located in the vehicle. They could be anywhere, as long as they have a broadband datalink with high bandwidth and low latency.  Operating a MBT evolves from having 3 crew in harms way to 1-2 drone operators (driver and commander/weapons officer) in a remote location.  

Purpose-built UGVs would have armoured "crew" capsules reduced in size to accomodate the controls hardware, which could be arranged as seperate capsules connected in a 1oo3 redundant arrangement to counter the disablng of the vehicle with a single lucky hit.  Converted "old-style" MBTs would lack this surviveability but would be plentiful and compartively cheap.

I long to see Russia leading the global pack in developing effective and practical future ground combat miltech.  It would be a nice kick in the teeth to the arrogant corrupt Western privately-owned MIC profit machine and its legion of fluffers, fanbois, flag-wavers and brainless chest beaters

They  already had three man tanks in service and this was going to be a two man tank, but they realised that a two man crew could not operate 24/7 on a battlefield in any capacity at all so with the Armata they went for a three man crew where on a 24 hour battlefield one crewman can take a rest for 6 hours while the other two are "driver and commander" with the commander able to look and fire the weapons and the driver able to move the vehicle.

No matter what the time of day all three crew have had 6 hours sleep in the last 24 hours, which is probably about as good as you could hope for.

Obviously during busy times all three crew can be "on duty".

This two man 24 hour tank has not been implemented, and I think a no man tank makes more sense but of course routine maintenance requires about four men per tank, with the fourth man at the moment being at a higher level so in the field they can't do all the maintenance and operational stuff.

Of course in the real world you don't hold down a keyboard key and keep the vehicle stationary for 35 seconds to fix a damaged gun breach or a destroyed track...

If the tank wont move you abandon it... if it wont fire or you can't see you drive back to a rear area and get it fixed.

When you abandon it you rely on follow up forces to recover your tank and then fix it.

The term has been bandied around like candy but the T-14 is the first and only MBT specifically designed around the network centric warfare concept.

In essence the T-14 MBT is not just a combat unit - its command and control, a communications hub, a surveillance node and even a target designation system for friendly units.

That's a lot of tasks for the crew who have to run the vehicle in real-time. It would taķe a radical revamp of how the vehicle operates to give the crew the capability to pursue the added networking functions without sacrificing combat capability.

Which brings us to the T-14's cockpit:


Compare it with the Ka-52 cockpit:


The same layout for the commander/gunner positions on the T-14 and the pilot/navigator for the Ka-52.

This is intentional. The Ka-52 is expected to provide autonomous deep strike, close fire support for ground units, target designation for artillery and airpower, and recon by fire capabilities, etc.

The T-14's designers specifically sought Kamov's expertise to provide the same multifunctional capabilities as their advanced attack helicopters.

What they got is a side by side cockpit with duplicated controls for both crewmembers. Both commander and gunner can see what the other is doing at all times - a massive but understated advantage when most threats allow only a few seconds to react.

Together with extensive automation and data postprocessing this allows the commander to offload the actual tank handling to the gunner while he himself focuses on coordination with other units.

This is huge. Other MBTs have the commander juggling between fighting and networking because its simply not possible to do both simultaneously. The T-14 would be able to do both seamlessly and fight as a true netcentric unit.

NATOids like to harp on about soft factors but the fact of the matter is there isn't much difference functionally with the 3 crew positions for legacy vehicles. But with the T-14 it might as well be night and day.

Thoughts on this rather pessimistic Russian take on armata?

Who the F, told the media that Russia would have 2000 Armatas in a few years?
Who, Who the F was it??

They know that they cant argue objectively that any western tank is better than the Armata. So their retort just becomes, "you wont have very many of them so ha"

Also, it was David axe or one of his clickbait compatriots who said that about t-14.

Top war and lazerpig together pushing this nonsense. So tired of "osint experts".

I thought the T14 used a V12

Important to note that the Russian MoD trialed the Oby 195 with more or less the same powerpack.

This being the oughts the Russians would have had no problems whatsoever sourcing Western engines if they couldn't hack it - just look at the license they bought for the French thermals. Some of their warships even use German diesels. Some of their warships were even to be French designed and built.

That they didn't says a lot without venturing further into the realm of speculation.

Not just the engine, but I seem to remember it being called a power pack because it includes other components and parts that are not normally part of an engine as such.

Speaking of the Black Eagle, I remember they were to have a much more powerful 1500 hp GTD engine. Which got me thinking - can that engine be used for the T-14?

The answer is yes - I even went ahead and checked woth Klimov's site and yep, they have the same weight and dimensions as the GTD-1250 for the T-80U - which means the whole power-transmission can fit within the T-14's powerpack compartment quite easily with lots of room to spare for fuel, to compensate for the fuel efficiency 

And while Klimov no longer makes the GTD-1250 engines, they still are manufacturing GT engines for Russian helicopters so the capability and capacity is still there, along with some 20 years of technological advances in GT technology. 

So no, even if the Armata's engine turns out to be a dud, they still have a capable replacement in the GTD engines.