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Interlinked

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  1. Well, if it's normal for parts to break after a trip down to the corner store, that also doesn't say good things. I'm sure that if you had a warehouse of brand new tanks and drove a new one each day, you would never encounter a breakdown. But you wouldn't conclude that the tank is reliable. The suggestion that it needs that many parts replacements on a regular basis is, on the contrary, extremely suggestive that the reliability was extremely bad, which it was.
  2. Parts replacements happens after failure occurs. A tank might have been very well serviced with plenty of spares and operational availability might be high, but the tank would still be junk that has to go through the ship of theseus treatment twice a day.
  3. All Soviet artillery in use today have monobloc barrels, no relining.
  4. Howitzers with geared controls and a higher magnification direct fire sight, firing subsonic shells out of a rigid barrel, aren't expected to hit a vehicle-sized target at 1 km with even the second shot. The M47 Dragon, fired from the shoulder but with a monopod, was considered to have a <50% hit probability at 1 km. Carl Gustaf, on the other hand, is so supernaturally accurate beyond 1 km that every grenade it fires is basically an unguided top-attack missile 🤣
  5. Quantum tanks - old soviet junk that explodes into pieces if you touch it with a feather, but you can repair all your losses if you send them to Poland.
  6. Interlinked

    COAX

    In terms of the total number of rounds fired, yes
  7. Interlinked

    COAX

    Quite suitable that it's also the British who went for the 7.62mm chaingun as a proprietary armour coax MG.
  8. CR1/2/3 hull front design is the Chieftain hull modified with a composite armour structure. It is the same as the T-64/72/80 being a basic T-44 type hull with the thickness increased by replacing the sloped steel plate with a sloped composite armour sandwich. Both of these solutions ended up with cutouts to fit the driver, because the shape of the front hull was fundamentally not adapted to thick armour like the "older" Leo 2 and Abrams hulls. CR1/2/3 hull is also tapered, a legacy solution for moving the hull side plate to belly plate weld joint further from the track, for mine survivability reasons. This wasted internal space and constricted the turret basket diameter. It's not needed for a hydropneumatic suspension, nor does it offer any advantages over modern methods of anti-mine reinforcement. Leopard 2 and Abrams front hulls were clean-sheet designs. The "age" of the hull is completely irrelevant.
  9. Formation of saber-shaped fragments, or splinters as they're called, is what happens with all artillery shells, except maybe for the most modern ones in use nowadays. But back then, the lack of preformed fragments was pretty much universal for such shells. Tank HE-Frag shells were certainly intended for eliminating groups of infantry, and also the somewhat vaguely defined "ATGM emplacement". It's just that, in general, it's more justified to use it on something that the coax can't easily handle.
  10. In most cases, it was mainly the designers and the customer not really caring all that much about these details when they were already on a time crunch. If there was no statistically major trend of tanks knocked out from shot traps, or any high-profile examples of shot-trapped tanks that became known to someone influential in the chain of command, there was no reason to do a redesign. But in general, shot traps are indeed an issue. The worst case scenario is a complete, intact shell bouncing into the hull roof with enough energy to penetrate, and that's rare, but whenever there is a shape like this, there is always the problem of fragments being funneled into the turret ring. It could be fragments from an AP shell breaking up on impact, or a HE shell detonating on the hull or on the turret, or even somewhere next to the tank. It doesn't take much to jam a turret ring, all you need is a big enough piece of metal (half an inch will do) to slide into the gap between the turret and hull. If the practice of avoiding bullet traps and shot traps was already institutionalized prior to the war, it was easier to continue building tanks that way, e.g. the British. Everyone else was slowed down by institutional inertia.
  11. Excellent, thank you, this is very very valuable to know.
  12. What was the allowed chamber pressure @Junior FO?
  13. Chris, that's because the turret was turned by pushing against the floor with your feet! And those two hand levers were to elevate the launchers. The whole setup was equivalent to putting a guy on duty in the back of the car with a MANPADS, except the missiles were too heavy to shoulder, so they put it on an all-manual turret.
  14. The visibility of IS-3 and IS-4 was an example of Soviet design orthodoxy at the time. They (GABTU) considered that the optimal solution for all-round vision would be a single MK-4 gundlach periscope without a cupola (therefore no weak point). The cupolas on tanks like T-34 and IS-2 were there to compensate for the turret ring not being wide enough to completely fit the commander within it. Officially, the vision slits were considered backups, in case the MK-4 failed. On new developments like these late war heavies and the T-44 (which got its low profile cupola from the IS-6, which got its cupola from the T-43), the design policy was to have one MK-4. When working with completely new hulls and turrets, it was possible to make sure the commander was seated completely inside the turret ring.
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