/k/ - Weapons

Russian Armata modern tanks production delayed due to high cost

https://defence-blog.com/army/russian-armata-modern-tanks-production-delayed-due-high-cost.html

http://archive.is/4Rz7p

>On 29 July, the Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov said that the Russian armed forces do not aspire to purchase the tanks of “Armata” in large quantities because of their high cost, preferring to increase the combat potential of existing military vehicles due to its modernization.

>“Well, why flood the all Armed Forces with the Armata tanks, we have the T-72s in great demand in the market, they take it all, compared to the Abrams, Leclercs and Leopards, for their price, efficiency and quality, It’s the same situation with “Boomerangs,” – Yury Borisov told.

>To date, Russian defence funds were diverted into the modernisation of older armoured vehicles and Russia’s army decided to upgrade its fleet of Soviet-designed T-72, T-80 and T-90 main battle tanks. Russia returned and creates new tank’s brigades equipped with updated upgraded T-72B3, T-80BVM and T-90M main battle tanks.

Frenchanon, tell us about this!

>>599093

Or not John McCain, what's the name of that thin black haired mexican/jew looking guy who leads the American congress?

Actually not a bad idea, increase AT range and shit on attack choppers.

>>599085

Welcome to Russian procurement, they do it slow and keep older models in service longer.

>>599093

>paining armour divisions on RWR

Pass thanks.

>>599085

What do people think about the Russian claim that Afganit APS can stop sabot rounds? Nonsense? Slav magic?

>>599095

>low-probability intercept

>low-probability intercept

low-probability intercept

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Probability_of_Intercept_Radar

>>599099

The APS system includes ERA bricks designed to chop up a KEW projectile. It's completely legit.

>>599109

You're confusing modern array radar with old dish radar.

Dish radar produces a single frequency into which 100% of its power is placed. This is formed into a single burst, which bounces off a target and is detected by doppler physics. Let's say 100W for simplicity sake.

Array radar has ~4 micro-emitters and detectors, each of which has different frequencies, and each of which produces/detects different bursts. This reduces the power on any frequency by 64 times over 10^3 vs (10/4)^3 which makes it that much harder to detect. Also using different frequencies means you can do tricks with the radar that require you to use less power in the first place…

Only downside is higher heat generation which isn't as big an issue for a ground based system.

>>599113

Even with reduced power the RWR detection range is always going to be double the radars effective range assuming they are using detectors of similar sensitivity.

Sure the radar manufacturer has the advantage of tuned length antenna but I can't see variable length antenna being any harder to implement than an extendable antenna that retracts into a Faraday cage.

Is there something fundamental I'm missing? Has it ever been combat tested against HARMS?

>>599085

It's largely an industrial production scale problem. 200 T-14 instead of 100 can't change any major conflict.

5 000 T-72B3M can (they've officially upgraded all their T-72 in line to T-72B3 or BM standard. AFAIK currently there is no T-72 modernization ongoing, last orders were modernization of T-90As and T-80BVs).

Same with Boomerangs, when they now have a shitload of BMP-3 (all tanks/regiments brigade are equipped, heavy infantry is still mostly on BMP-2 though) and the BMP-2M upgrade is a really a big improvement in firepower, it's not really urgent.

Also they're thinking of upgrading BMP-1 with the BTR-82 turret (as most BTRs are now up to 80A, 82 or 82A).

Basically they're making the choice to upgrade back-line (and even reserve) gear while the new production lines for the new gear get sorted out rather than trying to aggressively push through the new stuff.

They have something like 7 000 BMP-1 in reserves…

>>599117

I really can't dumb it down any more.

The RWR is not a giant antenna, its not nearly as sensitive as a radar to incoming radiation. It also can't see the multiple frequencies being used by the radar, and even if it did the tiny power consumption on each wavelength is going to be lost in background noise.

These radars have been tested in combat for decades, in the 80s we were down to the point where we were putting miniaturized LPI radars on fighters, which means your fighter can paint an enemy and the enemys RWR wouldn't tell him he's being targeted. This was used in both desert storms and ever since then.

>>599084

>Be Current Year +3

>Still using tanks

>Not using an all terrain light (but not really) armoured vehicle, with an offroad cruise speed of 200kmph carrying active and passive APS, a decent stock of hypersonic line of sight missiles, a 14.5x114mm rotary machine gun, multiple 50mm AGL with overlapping fields of fire (loaded with thermobarics because fuck the other guy), a couple of flamethowers (for purely defensive purposes, honest), and a concert grade sound system to blast the enemy with nonstop vid related throughout the battle.

if anyone can identify the poor bastard contracted for vid related, do we know what sort of financial hardship forced him to sell his dignity to a Japanese record label?

>73 years after the end of WWII

>We still haven't made tanks that won't get penetrated like butter from the sides by a fucking WWII 1942 anti-tank gun

Adding weight limits to tanks was a mistake. 70 tons is simply not enough to compete with modern AT weaponry.

>>599176

APS can't stop literal flying rods travelling at 2,000 meters per second. I'd never risk the lives of my men, especially when Western Nations suffer from low population and birth rate. We're not chinks. We can't put thousands of men in garbage light-armored vehicles and send them to battle to die, and then replace them within 45 minutes with the next wave.

>>599184

Fine, make it a drone then.

>>599117

Ignore the leaf, he has no idea how phased arrays work. AESA is stealthy for three reasons:

Firstly, AESA produces a very narrow beam with largely undetectable sidelobes, so it's nearly impossible to pick up unless it's looking almost directly at the receiver.

Second, they have excellent frequency agility, which prevents less sophisticated RWRs from figuring out that successive pulses are coming from a single source and prevents modern sets from identifying what the signal is actually coming from.

Third, they can change their pulse rate on the fly, which makes it almost impossible to tell where the signal is coming from unless the plane has a phased array of its own.

>>599176

>a decent stock of hypersonic line of sight missiles

>100mm caliber

>3000mm length

A humvee is 4500mm long, so this missile basically takes up the entire crew cab.

There's no such thing as carrying a decent stock of these.

>>599184

>APS can't stop literal flying rods travelling at 2,000 meters per second.

Yeah it can.

>>599188

Nigger that is LITERALLY WHAT I SAID.

>>599183

How heavy do you want to go? I doubt that you can really AT-weapon-proof something without going heavy beyond practical.

>>599192

>There's no such thing as carrying a decent stock of these.

So we find a way to double the speed of a Mastiff or Wolfhound.

>>599183

Armor has been in a race with penetration since leather and rocks and every single time armor has been defeated by new weapons faster than new armor could be developed to defeat those weapons.

Moving forward I think just enough armor to deal with whatever is left after APS goes off is the way to go. In another decade or two the top western tanks won't even be crewed so you don't even need to worry about bad PR from light tanks.

>>599571

>austrian

*Australian, thanks autocorrect.

>>599571

I suppose enough blows to the head will do that to anyone.

>>599648

1. Testing a prototype isn't the same as having a finished result, and until I see otherwise price is going to be the main sticking point besides the size.

2. 10MJ is not especially impressive, it's upper 105mm to lower 120mm range. I don't think any modern MBT is going to lose sleep unless incoming is 13-15MJ.

3. Also all that energy isn't all too focused, at mach 6.5 it means the penetrator is 4kg when most contemporary penetrators are twice that. In fact 4kg might even be ~90mm cannon tier, so it's going to be extremely fragile to ERA and even if it does penetrate it's not going to be doing much damage.

tl;dr twice the weight of a Kornet, anemic action similar to Metis, price of dozens of superior missiles.

>>599571

Where was he when GayJ cancer spread?

>>599648

>Lockheeb

>Raytheon

So never happening then? I really miss when US actually had an arms industry and not an Israel industry

Bolted armour was already obsolete by the beginning of ww2, yet nowadays every new vehicle has optional bolt-on armour. Is it different beause they are bolted onto a solid hull (instead of an skeleton frame)? And what kind of bolts are used exactly?

>>599085

>do not aspire to purchase the tanks of “Armata” in large quantities

Big mistake IMO. The biggest, if not only, advantage of the armata chassis is in the logistics since commonality that allows you to make all your armed forces armata-based.

btw my question towards tankfags cause I hardly have a clue on the subject:

Why isn't the armata multi-role chassis a good idea? How much can a generalist chassis design compromise the performance of different specialized treaded vehicles?

>>601576

The engine and drivetrain in most modern AFVs is modular, right? Not 'modular' in the sense of 'its just like LEGO, i can mix and match parts', but in the sense of 'unscrew four bolts, lift the whole assembly out, set it aside for repair, drop in a new unit and go'.

Having one chassis that can do everything with mix-and-match add-ons seems like something the Good Idea Fairy came up with. I guess we'll see how it plays out. In my mind, if you really wanted to maximize ease of repair and logistics, you'd turn as many critical systems as possible into plug-and-play assemblies, and then make those assemblies commonalities to all of your vehicles. So even if you have dedicated chassis for your APCs, IFVs, MBTs, AA, et al, they all use the same motor, the same turret ring, the same suspension bogies, and so forth.

>>601576

>Why isn't the armata multi-role chassis a good idea?

I see no reason why it wouldn't be a good idea. Unlike planes, you can get away with just bolting stuff onto tanks without impacting their overall performance too much, although ships are the true kings of that. If you want a truly modular system, then you should do this:

>1st tier: frontline armour

It has to take enemy direct and indirect fire head on. Basically something like the Armata, just with even more modular armour. It comes with enough armour to withstand the autocannons of more common potential enemy IFVs, but you can armour it up against MBTs.

>2nd tier: frontline support

This should be like a lenghtened chassis of the previous vehicle that has a system to pick up and drop shipping containers. Of course it can carry supplies too, but you can continerize heavy mortars, MRLSs, AA guns, EW systems, command posts, and many more things. You could even use them as APCs with the right containers. So it's to replace vehicles that might get targeted by enemy artillery and possible their vanguard too, but normally they shouldn't directly engage the enemy.

>3rd tier: the second line

Trucks that carry shipping containers, nothing revolutionary here.

>4rd tier: light vehicles

The modern equivalent of jeeps, and also whatever memevehicles the special needs forces like to use nowadays.

>>601614

Vid related, you could put one into a truck and a dozen into a tank.

>>599183

The Russians have it right the heavily armored crew capsule. It doesn't increase tank weight a lot but crew survival rates goes up which means more experienced crews. Make a tank that can withstand 80% of battlefield threats with the capsule coming into play when facing other MBT's and field more of them then the other guy. I don't think we really can go heavier with our tanks without major issues, already MBT's are severely restricted in where they can fight due to weight and increasing it will only give more problems.

>>599085

>Frenchanon, tell us about this!

The contract is properly out now (https://ria.ru/defense_safety/20180822/1527030365.html ) and it's for a first batch of 132 Armata (T-14 tanks, T-15 IFVs, T-16 ARVs) before 2021 with first delivery before the end of 2018.

Compared it to what was said before: 100 Armata before 2020, what a reduction!

Oh no wait, it's 30 per year, same as the low rate T-90 deliveries for example, which is exactly what anyone would expect for a first batch.

132 is just right for a tank regiment (4 bat, 3 tank 1 IFV, 90 T-14 MBTs, 4 T-14K command MBTs, 30 T-15, 8 T-16 ARV):

30x T-14 30x T-14 30x T-14

T-14k T-14k T-14k

2x T-16 2x T-16 2x T-16

30x T-15

T-14k

2x T-16

Which is perfectly consistent with Soviet/Russian procurement practice (and pretty much everyone else in peace time, you first outfit a whole unit, see if anything is particularly wrong in group training, before cranking up prod').

Borisov is the guy that always say shit like that: it's his job in the Russian government to be Scrooge and say "there is no money for that" every time the military ask for something, even if the army asked sticks as weapon for running naked in the snow, he would say that.

It's also his job to make sure whatever is decided is done too.

In Russia it's the defense ministry largely alone that decide on procurement, with Putin arbitrating if a majority of the security council (which Borisov isn't even a member) upon review disagree with the army.

But of course, even through 3 automated translators, it doesn't make a nicer headline than "Russian Prime Minister says there is no money for sticks".

>>601614

>he thinks its safe to have an entire engine just handing on 4 bolts

Are you a SmartCar designer?

>>601664

Modularity means that parts are built to be replacable at any scale of resolution. Before the concept of modularity, parts could only be replaced at the lowest scale of resolution (ie screws).

The only immediately interchangeable parts on a T-15 vs a T-14 is the radios and a few nuts/bolts. The benefit in the "unity" of the Armata line of vehicles isn't based on similarity between parts, or modularity itself (which they do have)…. the brilliance is on similarity between and unity of manufacturing procedures. Literally one factory can build every single part for every single vehicle, or just build whole vehicles from scratch.

Compare this to the west, where a fucking tank needs to be airlifted between 10 different factories just to have a few parts screwed on in every factory.

>>601664

>Vid related, you could put one into a truck and a dozen into a tank.

The video glosses over the fuckhuge loss of energy in the proposed system. Energy can't be created, only released or transformed, and every transformation has a loss. Hell, even having the driveshaft interfacing with the gears in the differential in the rear axle of a car has a loss just due to the force being applied at a right angle.

Trust me on this, I worked for a paving company. We had a customer that wanted an electric melter as opposed to the more conventional forced air burner. Marketing sold the idea as being environmentally friendly. When engineering finally got wind of it we ran the numbers even though we all knew that it wouldn't work. Sure enough, it was significantly less efficient.

>>604164

Free piston generators are already a thing, and they generate electrical power more efficiently than any other type of generator.

>When engineering finally got wind of it we ran the numbers even though we all knew that it wouldn't work. Sure enough, it was significantly less efficient.

Rule 1: give the customer what he wants, not what's good for him.

>>604188

This is /k/, not /militaryindustry/. Nobody is here to make a profit from retarded pencil pushers with access to tax money.

>>599183

A heavier tank means:

>road use is more limited

>transportation is strained and specialized.

>Speed and acceleration is more costly in engine and fuel.

All of these are logistical nightmares which might make the tank unable to even make it to the battlefield.

>>604196

I know, but the reason F-20 failed is literally because it was too efficient a killer. F-20 even today would be the most deadly fighter ever built…. if it entered service. But being able to bring down a larger dollar value of enemy aircraft than a dollar value lost is a SINGLE variable, whereas a government decision has thousands of variables. Will it employ more or less people than current airplane? What can we do with the displaced people? Will it look likeable enough? Will the people working on it get trained enough at one type of high tech valve, that they'll be able to join the private sector and improve the shitty valves used in the private sector? Will the displacement of a local company cause more damage, or will the re-purposed aeronautics engineers from that company benefit the private sector in other ways? Will the country that sells us the airplane like us more if we buy it, and is it worth it having them like us? Is it unique enough to engender patriotism, or will buying a foreign airplane hurt patriotism? Do we want patriotism to be stronger or weaker? Pure efficiency is the last thing on the list.

>>604770

F-20 had FBW and a destabilized airframe.

Although….. are you aware that relaxed stability is an even more horseshit, unnecessary meme than stealth? MiG-29 had no such thing and yet it assraped F-16 in every wargame it participated in ESPECIALLY dogfights which is where "relaxed stability" would be able to shine most (post reunification Germany). Relaxed stability is basically a crutch for not knowing how to design an airplane.

>the only reasonable paths available for the F-5 basic airframe into the 21st century

F-5, the smaller less capable cousin of F-20, routinely knocked down greater dollar amounts of F-15 and F-15 in DACT. Given that F-20 is lightyears ahead of F-5 and has a similar airframe price….

>a solid 4.5+ gen fighter as the F/A-18E.

F-18E is a less capable airframe than F-18L, which is a less capable airframe than F-17, which is a less capable airframe than F-5. Given an engine and radar/amraam upgrade, the F-5 airframe itself, NO COMPOSITES or other improvements, could own aircraft like F-16 and F-18 in ratios of 20:1.

>>604801

>F-20 had FBW and a destabilized airframe.

So did the Mirage 2000. It still was a late 50s design shape-wise though.

>Although….. are you aware that relaxed stability is an even more horseshit, unnecessary meme than stealth? MiG-29 had no such thing and yet it assraped F-16 in every wargame it participated in ESPECIALLY dogfights which is where "relaxed stability" would be able to shine most (post reunification Germany). Relaxed stability is basically a crutch for not knowing how to design an airplane.

Yes. Both the MiG-29 and the Su-27 were largely based on a single blueprint from TsAGI that unlike the Mirage III and F-5 was most likely the zenith of conventional aerodynamic design, one with relaxed stability the other without; the Su-27 had slightly better performance in almost all aspects at double the weight. MiG-29M might be obscure but it did considerably better than the baseline MiG-29 at slightly increased weight, it had FBW and most likely relaxed stability too

.>F-5, the smaller less capable cousin of F-20, routinely knocked down greater dollar amounts of F-15 and F-15 in DACT.

So did our A-7s against our F-16s 1600m sustained turn radius FTW. In DACT aggressors with usually inferior and outdated planes, but much greater experience, are in charge of training overconfident rookies with the gear they will be flying in combat, so it barely counts.

>F-18E is a less capable airframe than F-18L, which is a less capable airframe than F-17

Yes, because the Rhino, as it given nickname suggest, is a fucking pachyderm due to murkans' "HURRR ONE PLANE FOR ALL JERBS" retarded obsession, when the YF-17 that it was almost directly based on (legacy Hornets were less retardedly overweight) was designed SPECIFICALLY as a lightweight high-alpha aerobatic dogfighter until someone had the bright idea of making it the entire US arsenals' most ground-attack oriented multi-role, even more so than the other devoted light-dogfighter design that Americans turned from the champion of kinetic conservation into the underpowered pig known as F-16C.

> F-17, which is a less capable airframe than F-5

[citation really fucking needed]

Call me a faithless Thomas but I kinda REALLY FUCKING DOUBT that the F-5 was somehow superior to an other F-5 but with with relaxed stabiility, FBW, double vertical fins, decreased wing loading and fuckhuge movable LERXs.

>>604832

>It still was a late 50s design shape-wise though.

I'm failing to understand how simple age is a failure. It's superior in aerodynamic terms to any fighter that came after it.

The damn thing could supercruise with a single F-18 engine, let alone F-16 engine which (with composite airframe) would give it a T/W of 1:2.2. This would permit it to break mach speed in a near vertical incline.