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History of US Tanks.


Damian90

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My speculation is that there's a small charge in the forward quarter of the rod to separate the precursor a short distance before the impact, so the wires go all the way up rather than connecting to the bottom of the round where it would conflict with the tarcer element, and require a bore through the entire length of the rod to connect to the timer fuze.

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If there is a fuse and it is programmable, it would be done magnetically without the need for wires. 

 

I think it's a new primer setup.  I don't see a primer assembly sticking up from the base.  Maybe they discovered it's better to ignite the propellant from top-down rather than bottom-up?

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On 9/24/2016 at 5:39 AM, Damian90 said:

The problem I see in the US, and other NATO member states, is that because they are democracies, and a lot of military development is under control of bureaucrats, plenty of good ideas got cancelled because they don't work well at the beggining of their development path, and need more refining, which means more time and money needed, and a lot of this intelectual potential is wasted because of short sighted, many times simply dumb, bureaucrats and politicians.

After resounding successes like the T95, MBT70 and XM803, Congress and the public became more paranoid that the Army was wasting money on fruitless projects and implemented much more govt oversight on these projects, which helped give rise to the critics like Pierre Sprey and the guys at Combat Reform. The failure of FCS isn't making things better.

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You could just as well make the case that in most cases, the reason for failure were overambition and lack of self-discipline when defining requirements; also, plain incompetence.

 

  • Marine One: If the strongest non-Russian helicopter on the market can no longer lift off with all the gadgets and gizmos mounted that White House and State mandarins declare indispensable for his Majesty, the King President, you know that the department tasked with "limiting requirements" before inviting for tender is dysfunctional.
  • Stryker MGS: If your main rationale to build the thing is to be air mobile with Hercules, and a staffer checks the maximum take-off payload of a Hercules to be 23.4 tons to set it as the target weight for a combat vehicle, and only later the Pentagon realizes that this payload limit means "take off at sea level, fly for 100 miles at 100m altitude, then you're running out of fuel and must land", this is incompetence, plain and simple. You can then still try and save face by telling the public that "you didn't really mean 'Hercules' air mobility" when you said "Hercules air mobility" ... but you're banking on short memory of the public; it was the key argument to demand an insanely light "medium" combat vehicle in the first place.
  • FCS debacle - again, way too ambitious. If your entire plan hinges on the discovery of new lightweight materials, it is clear that the plan must fail if you don't find that new miracle material.
  • EEFV - we need a twin super-engine to turn our Amtraks into heavily aremored speedboats because the enemy might have weapons that could target troop transports up to 40 miles off the coast, and they need to cover that distance in less than 20 minutes. Oh, that requires sea state 2 or less, and you realize that, when? Three years into development?

 

Also, ideology. Crusader was complete, but then a smartass declares that the army doesn't need tracked, armored howitzers, and tosses the one project that actually worked out of the window (not counting the other M8 or what that lightweight tracked 105mm gun system was called - which was perfect, except "not wheeled" and the then Joint Thief of Chaff declared that everything needs to be wheeled - because, reasons. Congratulations. You have just managed to nuke 10/10 land combat vehicle projects, and got a good peace-keeping/low intensity combat type patrol vehicle - except your army doesn't want to do peace-keeping.

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Still, I believe the fact that arms procurement industry in western democracies was nonetheless accountable to an extent that of the Soviet Union was not was a big factor in how they came out on top in the Cold War. Reading through Steven Zaloga's The Kremlin's Nuclear Sword and David E. Hoffman's The Dead Hand one gets the sense that the Soviet military industrial complex was wasteful and all-devouring to a degree the likes of Lockheed and General Dynamics could only idly fantasize of. You see this with the M-4 Bison (a jet-powered strategic bomber that only had the range to hit CONUS targets on a one-way trip; diplomatic overtures were made to Mexico to get permission to use their airfields as diversionary airstrips and when that effort came to naught the bombers were later converted into tankers) as well as the SS-11/SS-17/SS-19 debacle in which the RSVN wound up buying all three missiles to fulfill a single requirement.

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Note that my examples above have had NOTHING to do with defense industry (not) being held to account, or me accusing it of being the main culprit. I only illustrated failures on the political end of the spectrum, or incompetencies in the military bureaucracy during the procurement process. That industry also plays a role is undisputed. Whether "ours" was not quite so bad as "theirs" is only a secondary factor in my opinion. Both the western and the Soviet military-industrial complex are wasteful; we may disagree about the degree of wastefulness. The Soviets punished failures by sending individuals to the GuLAGs; that implicit threat I have no doubt was a strong motivator to do as told. Also, I think we westerners tend to underestimate that the mid-level bureaucrats in the Soviet system probably believed that they were under threat from the West, and that this actually contributed to an intrinsic motivation to want to be successful with what they did.

The Soviets lost the arms race because their economic growth was mostly quantitative, not qualitative. The West reaped the benefits of the computer revolution earlier and faster. Most of the advantages that "we" secured over the last 50 years are based in electronics miniaturization - whether that's GPS navigation for smart bombs, laser seekers, thermal imagers, encrypted radio communications, computerized fire control systems, etc. etc.; the quality of precision mechanical engineering hasn't gone up by a comparable degree since the 1960s. Some progress was made with material sciences, but I think the bigger discoveries are still ahead. The Soviets couldn't keep up with the pace of computer development because they were largely cut off from access to industries to develop and to produce ever faster processors and bigger RAM chips. The best computers they could get at the end of the 1980s from East Germany were at least ten years behind of what you could get in the west, in larger quantities, and much cheaper. In electronics hardware, that's an eternity.

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ugeqBy3.jpg

 

Interesting, this is the initial hull design for the Infantry Fighting Vehicle variant of the NGCV designed and builded by TARDEC, DATC and CTC. This is not the final design of course and will change, however this hull is meant for initial testing of the new friction based welding method, welds strenght, general structural integrity etc.

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4 hours ago, Damian90 said:

ugeqBy3.jpg

 

Interesting, this is the initial hull design for the Infantry Fighting Vehicle variant of the NGCV designed and builded by TARDEC, DATC and CTC. This is not the final design of course and will change, however this hull is meant for initial testing of the new friction based welding method, welds strenght, general structural integrity etc.

Al-Hull?

These welds look very neat. If they pass the "red-white" test, I'd like to hire their welders!!

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1 hour ago, Agiel said:

Apparently Trump wants a military parade in DC. You think those roads are going to be able to take a company of M1A2s going down them?

Without a problem, in Poland during Armed Forces Day parade we have plenty of tracked heavy armored vehicles and nothing especially bad with road happens. Heck we guested in 2016 also US troops with M1A2SEPv2's and no problems were noticed, most likely US troops will again participated in our Armed Forces Day parade this year, also with their M1's.

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oQAt2pQ.jpg

 

This is model of the new turret for M109A7 armed with next generation howitzer XM907 ERCA with L52 gun barrel. With new HE ammo the XM1113 and new propelant charges, the range of this thing will increase up to 70km!

 

Small correction, XM907 is not an L52, it's an L55!

 

https://www.army.mil/article/182638/picatinny_engineers_double_range_with_modified_m777a2_extended_range_howitzer

Edited by Damian90
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On 2/7/2018 at 8:30 AM, Damian90 said:

Without a problem, in Poland during Armed Forces Day parade we have plenty of tracked heavy armored vehicles and nothing especially bad with road happens. Heck we guested in 2016 also US troops with M1A2SEPv2's and no problems were noticed, most likely US troops will again participated in our Armed Forces Day parade this year, also with their M1's.

It really depends on a combination of road pavement , temperature and how old the road pavement is cause i once drove through a town called Jægerspris which incidentally is/Was also a live fire area for the danish army and the had just 4-5 hours earlier put down new pavement and it was a very hot day with around 30 C and we vent through there with 2 Batterys of M109A3 and M113s and we tore up the whole town it cost quiet a penny as in the had to scrape it off completely and lay a new pavement so even "light" tracked vehicles can destroy road pavement with ease ;-) 

The community learned that when you have a military training camp/Live firing excise area in town you might have to take other measures 

But the army had to paid for it

 

MD

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yt2kUlI.jpg

 

And so, US Army resterted the MRM-CE 120mm long range GLATGM for 120mm smoothbore tank guns program, under a different name, but then again, XM1111 MRM-CE was working, it only went in to a development limbo after Future Combat Systems program was cancelled. Good to see it is back on track.

 

 

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0y6ifxd.jpg

 

Meanwhile US Army is testing another component of vehicles active protection, this time it's soft kill system. System is made from Laser Warning System and ROSY smoke granades dischargers. This system will be a part of larger MAPS or Modular Active Protection System, which will also include a dazzler to jamm guidance system of the ATGM's, and a hard kill component, in case of the M1 it will be of course Trophy HV. From the photos of both systems installed we can see that LWS, ROSY and Trophy HV can be all quiet easy integrated together, and they won't interfere with one another.

 

Dsf5Utz.jpg

 

Video from LWS and ROSY tests can be seen in the link below.

 

 

 

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1000w_q95.jpg

 

An M1A2 SEP w/CROWS-LP crewed by tankers from 3-3 CAV at NTC on Febraury 15th.

(https://www.dvidshub.net/image/4158446/us-soldiers-scan-area-m1a2-abrams-tank)

 

1000w_q95.jpg

 

Anybody know what the piece of equipment mounted on the front of this M1A2 is?

 

Also, I'm gonna post that LWS/ROSY test video on YouTube, thanks for posting it Damian.

Edited by Nate Lawrence
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56 minutes ago, Nate Lawrence said:

1000w_q95.jpg

 

An M1A2 SEP w/CROWS-LP from 3-3 CAV at NTC on Febraury 15th.

(https://www.dvidshub.net/image/4158446/us-soldiers-scan-area-m1a2-abrams-tank)

 

 

Reading the bumper, from left to right, this is a vehicle of the 1st Infantry Division (1 I), 3rd Battalion of the 66th Armor Regiment (3-66 AR), Bravo Company, 3rd Platoon, second tank (B32).

Edited by TSe419E
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22 hours ago, TSe419E said:

 

 

Reading the bumper, from left to right, this is a vehicle of the 1st Infantry Division (1 I), 3rd Battalion of the 66th Armor Regiment (3-66 AR), Bravo Company, 3rd Platoon, second tank (B32).

I noticed that and was a little perplexed, however I didn't read the DVIDS post fully to see that the crew is from 3-3 CAV, and the tank is just theirs during their rotation.

 

On an unrelated note, one of the the SEP with LWS/ROSY seems to have "DR" for its right hand bumper markings, it might mean Demonstration Regiment or something. I find it odd, because I've only seen the DR marking on WW2 vehicles at the Armored Force School.

Edited by Nate Lawrence
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7 hours ago, Nate Lawrence said:

1000w_q95.jpg

 

An M1A2 SEP w/CROWS-LP from 3-3 CAV at NTC on Febraury 15th.

(https://www.dvidshub.net/image/4158446/us-soldiers-scan-area-m1a2-abrams-tank)

 

1000w_q95.jpg

 

Anybody know what the piece of equipment mounted on the front of this M1A2 is?

 

Also, I'm gonna post that LWS/ROSY test video on YouTube, thanks for posting it Damian.

It’s the mine roller mount on the front. The rollers can be detached.

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15 hours ago, Nate Lawrence said:

On an unrelated note, one of the the SEP with LWS/ROSY has "DR" for its right hand bumper markings, it might mean Demonstration Regiment or something. I find it odd, because I've only seen the DR marking on WW2 vehicles at the Armored Force School.

Looks to me like it has "SEP 011" on the video.

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