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Snowdens Secret posted:While I certainly believe you on this, I have to wonder how often historically helos have carried dedicated air-air weapons in combat (as opposed to specifically air-air exercises). And while I don't know if the exercise pitted choppers against ground attack or air superiority planes, I can't think of a single combat-deployed helo designed for air to air warfare. Marine pilots are taught never to engage a jet if they can avoid it. The odds are absolutely stacked against the guy in the comparatively slow and low helicopter and the best you can usually do is delay the inevitable while trying to break contact and escape. Speed is HUGE in air-to-air combat. Speed means your weapons fly further than the other guy, you can choose to engage or disengage at your leisure (assuming you are the faster one), and you're more likely to be able to avoid whatever they happen to be firing at you. Speed and altitude advantage mean an F-15 could lob a paveway through a helicopter from outside the effective range of a sidewinder/stinger/igla. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Jan 28, 2012 |
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Jan 28, 2012 14:30
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Totally TWISTED posted:Well the SR-71 was a secret left to the old Skunk Works to create. The JSF is a reelection machine that happens to fly. The SR-71 had a very specific purpose for which it was designed. The JSF is following in the footsteps of the F-111 and is trying to do everything on a single platform.
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Mar 19, 2012 18:57
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rossmum posted:Except that once the bugs were ironed out, the F-111 was a drat fine strike aircraft, even if it couldn't do anything else particularly well. The F-111 project never created an aircraft as capable as it was supposed to even after decades of working the issues out of it. It was never a capable fighter aircraft and was only a passable bomber. The F-35 may very well be a fine aircraft after a decade of work to fix the issues they find when it finally starts flying and to be honest the people making GBS threads on the project from a capability standpoint (criticizing the massive cost overruns is certainly called for) are loving retarded. Regardless, both projects suffered from the same issue in that they were supposed to fill a huge number of roles while introducing new technologies and it turns out it's not easy to do that.
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Mar 20, 2012 22:39
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Koesj posted:Yeah it took elements like "tracks", "armor" and "a gun". Things like the powerpack, suspension, autoloader, FCS, optics, stabilizer, gun caliber, composite armor, crew size, division of labor and workload are a bit different though. I just finished reading about the development of the T-64 and T-80. Coincidentally the original T-80 was not very popular because it turned out to be worse than the upgraded T-64s in a variety of ways. The Turbine engines were also very unpopular for a variety of reasons (fires, fuel efficiency, a good scapegoat for the horrible failures of Russian armor in Chechnya) and through poor training they led to hilarious poo poo like tank units in Chechnya running out of fuel before moving out because they didn't know the turbine eats just as much gas when idling as when moving. The T-64 and T-72 were both brand new designs rather than evolutions of the T-55/62. They were developed at the same time and shared a lot of features, such as the basic layout of the hull. However, as the higher quality offering the T-64 got a better fire control system, better suspension, composite armor, and was actually a bit smaller and lighter. Of course a few things didn't work out quite as planned so the T-64 autoloader was a nightmare and the engine turned out to be unreliable garbage that broke CONSTANTLY.
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Jun 15, 2012 12:50
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl5wHGnxmqE&feature=youtu.be Taken from the explosions thread in GBS, this should answer the question about RPGs having a minimum range that came up earlier.
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Jun 18, 2012 02:15
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kill me now posted:That looks like he was about 25-50m away from the tank which would probably be pretty close to its arming distance. Point being that the minimum range is pretty short, the T-72 in the previous video probably ate an RPG from an alleyway like that one did.
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Jun 18, 2012 06:15
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mlmp08 posted:Got buzzed by a B1B doing nearly 600 knots from a few hundred feet overhead a couple times today. It is felt as much as heard. My field training was at Ellesworth so we had B1's flying all over the place all the time. Very loud and very cool airplane.
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Jun 20, 2012 03:30
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Pretty sure there were some pretty grisly wars, expansionist empires, and longstanding vendettas between peoples in Africa even before whitey showed up, just like every other place on the planet. Also pretty sure people continue to find reasons to hate their neighbors without any colonies being involved. Not that colonization helped (they exploited a lot of the pre-existing hate to stir the pot, for example)), but it didn't cause every bad thing, either.
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Jun 27, 2012 16:28
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I doubt you'd find many stable nations that don't also include groups who had/still have longstanding hatred. The issue is not national boundaries, it's that the governments are weak and corrupt to the point that many areas are essentially lawless. This combined with some areas where you've got tons of people living in poverty around valuable resources controlled by whoever can strongarm everybody else out of the way pretty much means this poo poo isn't going to stop anytime soon. If you split every African state along ethnic and tribal boundaries and gave them all their own nations/micro-nations it wouldn't do poo poo to stop anybody from fighting.
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Jun 27, 2012 19:20
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grover posted:Fascinating paper on SEAD here: http://web.mit.edu/ssp/publications/conf_reports/3coteorPAD3.pdf I think the latest update to the HARM was supposed to give it capabilities against the good old "switch off the RADAR" trick, too.
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Jun 30, 2012 03:10
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mlmp08 posted:Oh, for an example of how underestimating air defense systems has played out very poorly for a major power recently aside from Serbia, look to the conflict in South Ossetia. Russia got embarrassed. http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=35951 They didn't just underestimate air defenses, Russia also entirely failed to maintain any semblance of air superiority. The 9 Su-25's Georgia had were able to operate unimpeded by Russian aircraft for the duration of the war. The majority of them survived the war.
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Jun 30, 2012 17:40
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C is for Capture.
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mlmp08 posted:Yes, but "unimpeded" is a stretch. They conducted combat missions throughout and all losses were from ground based air defenses. That's not really suggesting any kind of air superiority on the Russian's part. Especially considering the small size of the country, there being very few Georgian combat aircraft/airbases to begin with, and a complete lack of Georgian air-to-air/long range surface-to-air capabilities. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Jun 30, 2012 |
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Jun 30, 2012 17:50
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mlmp08 posted:Air superiority is not restricted to losses from enemy air. It applies to any enemy means to stop you from conducting air ops. That's true that air superiority is not limited to aircraft, but I only said "able to operate unimpeded by Russian aircraft". Obviously they were somewhat impeded by air defenses, as they had 3 shot down (at least 1 was potentially friendly fire, too!).
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Jun 30, 2012 18:15
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AntiTank posted:Yeah, you don't need crazy contraptions to kill enemy tanks if own tanks are available. I think I actually came across brief mention of the anti-tank dogs in a Soviet tanker's translated journal, so while exaggerated it may not be entirely bullshit.
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Sep 5, 2012 06:27
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I'm unsure about how a slightly faster airplane with half the operational radius, twice the size, and yet a comparatively miniscule payload is superior.
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Sep 10, 2012 19:58
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Slo-Tek posted:I think Australia and Canada should buy in with India on the T-50. Yeah, but Russia has a history of exporting seriously terrible equipment. According to Russia there has never been a combat worthy non-monkey-model Russian tank or airplane used in combat by anyone but Russia. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Sep 11, 2012 |
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Sep 10, 2012 23:56
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Psion posted:This seems like a really bad position to take when you want to make money exporting things. Soviet equipment didn't look so hot on the foreign market after it failed horribly during the 70s-90s (Israeli conflicts/Desert Storm/Kosovo/etc.) so the official line was always that they'd sold whoever got stomped on inferior versions of equipment/ammunition/etc. and the REAL ones were actually super good and everyone should come buy them still because THIS TIME they'd totally not sell them the worthless ones. On top of that, particularly after Desert Storm and the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a massive push to sell equipment internationally that would make even the US military industrial complex blush. As a result there is/was an amazing amount of misinformation and outright propaganda pushed out about whatever they wanted to sell at the time. Oh, and the Chinese flanker thing was hilarious. Russia cut the contract short after they figured out that China had just reverse engineered the design after getting the first couple planes and was making an upgraded domestic version of their own including a carrier based version like the Su-33. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Sep 11, 2012 |
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Sep 11, 2012 08:39
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Koesj posted:Sure, stuff got shot to poo poo in the Bekaa Valley and GWII, but I wouldn't exactly call the performance of Soviet air defense equipment in '73 or '99 an unqualified failure. That and the post '89 financial and economic pressure where they were inclined to sell or lease a lot of their top of the line stuff, from nuclear subs to long range bombers, makes the monkey model argument highly situational. Soviet personnel manning Kubs in '73 didn't exactly have to make lemonade from lemons right? Who was buying Russian helicopters again? Unqualified failure or not it never turned up on the winning side and never quite met expectations. The Kub, for example, was initially a success primarily because it had a lower ceiling than the SAMs the Israelis were expecting and didn't trigger the outdated Israeli RWRs because the Israelis were running a shitload of seriously outdated aircraft at the time. Thing is, as soon as the Israelis figured out what was going on they started mounting lower level attacks on the SAM sites and just reprogrammed the old RWRs so that in the end Israeli aircraft were able to clear the SA-6's out pretty handily in both Gaza and Syria to with a great deal of success. Really even before 1989 you had a lot of actual top-of-the-line or at least current issue Soviet equipment being sold. Syria, for example, got a bunch of Soviet army T-62's as the Soviet production lines for them couldn't keep up with the losses at a time when those were still the standard Soviet MBT. There really wasn't any appreciable difference in performance between those meant for export and those taken directly from active Soviet military service documented by either side of the war. The first batch of T-72s sent to Iraq plus a number of tanks in the later batches were actual Soviet surplus T-72A's or even a few new production tanks meant for Warsaw Pact states. The same deal with Syria, they got a mix of export model T-72M and surplus T-72As. In the end many of the monkey model claims, especially those made after the collapse have been unproven and basically look like attempts to drum up some sales. For example: that the Iraqis used "steel training ammunition" and the big push to claim that the T-72/T-80 REALLY didn't have those catastrophic fire/turret-popping-explosion issues and that it was all just a big lie by the West. The "professionalism" argument is also hit or miss. Both sides on the Yom Kippur war were client states with personnel trained to operate the equipment. I absolutely do not buy the argument that every Arab state involved in the wars lacked a professional army. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Sep 11, 2012 |
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Sep 11, 2012 16:37
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Forums Terrorist posted:They were still effective, to the point where Israeli pilots had a healthy respect for them. Also consider the effectiveness of the SA-2 in Vietnam." Pilots have a healthy respect for most things that can shoot them down, regardless of whether they perform especially well. They were effective against Israeli pilots using tactics and equipment meant to engage a different threat. It was more effective than older Soviet SAMs of the time which had little to no success, certainly, but in the end it did nothing to prevent the Israeli aircraft from destroying the SAMs and providing effective support in the areas they protected once they became aware of it. Forums Terrorist posted:Wrongo, the T-64 was the standard tank for armoured battalions; the T-62 was only meant for infantry support, and even then the US army acknowledged that in many areas it was comparable to the M60 Patton tank. Well that's an interesting opinion considering the T-64 wasn't even in production until 4 years after the T-62 and the 115mm smoothbore gun chosen on the T-62 was specifically chosen over the 100mm offering favored at the time to allow for the use of ATGMs through the gun and better HEAT projectiles. The T-62 was a stopgap tank meant to replace the obsolete T-55 due to the repeated development delays of the T-64 project and it remained the primary main battle tank for the Soviet army for over a decade while the T-64 slowly replaced it. Honestly it sounds like you haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Forums Terrorist posted:This presumably would be why post-Cold War tests showed that Soviet tanks were tougher than seen in Iraq, as well as armed with significantly more effective penetrators? Additionally the Russians knew about the vulnerability of the T-80 in particular to ammunition explosions, it was a big factor in their retirement along with their fuel inefficiency and the whole "factory is outside of the country" deal. Actually post-Cold War tests showed more or less what was expected aside from that of new generation ERA, which was more effective against kinetic penetrators than expected. The test you're referring to would be the one concerning 120mm projectiles against Kontackt-5 equipped tanks which determined they were extremely difficult to penetrate except at short range *in the areas protected by the ERA*. Without the ERA you could frontally penetrate both the T-72B and T-80U practically anywhere on the tank with the existing 120mm SABOT projectiles. Those results just happen to have matched the findings of the later Soviet investigations into tank losses in Chechnya where both models suffered frontal hull and turret penetrations from RPGs when not equipped (or improperly equipped) with ERA. Additionally, both the T-72 and T-80 suffered from the auto-loader related explosions when the crew compartment was hit. The backlash toward the T-80 (which had previously been considered the better offering) specifically had more to do with the politics at the time, the Turbine engine, and the fact that as you noted the primary factory making them was now in Ukraine. Coincidentally the reaction to those NATO tests was just to make a heavier 120mm SABOT projectile that COULD penetrate Kontact-5 protected tanks at long ranges. Forums Terrorist posted:West Germany in the 1960's was a NATO client state, North Korea in the 1960's was a Soviet client state, therefore they clearly had equal training and leadership standards. :warbadger: It is possible to have a professional army that isn't up to snuff, hth. Sorry, I don't buy the "HURF DURF DEM AYYRABBS CANT FIGHT" theory. The Soviet Union provided trainers and advisors along with the equipment, had a vested interest in their clients winning the various conflicts, and the tactics they employed were generally right out of the Soviet playbook of the time. I'm also somewhat curious whether you think the North Koreans or East Germans were the pushover in your comparison there. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Sep 11, 2012 |
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Sep 11, 2012 21:58
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Veins McGee posted:Unless you're saying Soviet equipment was significantly worse than NATO/US equipment, your conclusion doesn't logically follow. If they were decently equipped and provided with Soviet trainers and advisors, then why were the Arabs generally unsuccessful against Israelis? It was a combination of the two things. Soviet tactics of the time did not pan out very well (with the Syrians in particular) -which has fuckall to do with whether they knew how to use the equipment- and the equipment often did not live up to the hype. Not even sure why THAT is even being argued given that my point was simply that the monkey-model stuff was often a myth and that even the Soviet-issue equipment that made it into conflicts often failed to perform distinctly better than the instances where a "monkey model" argument was made for its use elsewhere. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Sep 11, 2012 |
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Sep 11, 2012 22:44
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Koesj posted:Surprise! All post '89 conflicts fought by Western states were conventional pushovers. -They turned out to be, yes. Iraq certainly hadn't been expected to be a pushover. Aside from Vietnam the pre-'89 conflicts also turned out pretty poorly for the Soviet equipped armies on the rare occasions East vs. West proxy wars actually happened (Korea & Israel). Koesj posted:Of course their 'outdated' RWRs didn't register that particular system, it hadn't been used in combat before and NATO intelligence had nothing on it. Looking at a 70s/80s Soviet OOB there's a shitload of different systems that you'd have to account for and some fucker with a KPV might always schwack you from a treeline. How are you going to cope without technical assistance phoning in from TRW? Yes, hence me saying they were outdated. They did not have up to date threat recognition. I'm not sure what confusion here is, because the point is simply that as soon as they understood "oh poo poo there's a new SAM in use here" they updated the RWR, slightly modified tactics, and dealt with the SA-6 and the stuff it was supposed to be defending pretty handily. Not exactly sure what you are trying to argue against here, because it seems like you're stating the thing I already said. Koesj posted:Dude which particular war are we talking about here? -The Yom Kippur war, unless you know of some other war when Syria was losing a shitload of T-62s to the point the Soviet Union was cannibalizing active mechanized formations to replace them. Koesj posted:Yeah this I've never heard before so if you have a reference it'd be cool to read. Especially concerning whether or not they retained their armor inserts and had the latest penetrators delivered too. The T-72A and T-72M1 (Iraq purchased export version) used nearly identical armor layouts including the kvartz insert in the turret. Effective armor difference was 17 vs 20 inches on the turret and 16 vs 17 inches on the hull. Neither of those models could hope to stop the M829, much less the M829A1 used in Desert Storm which could even punch holes in T-72B's reinforced turret with plenty of room to spare. To note how how little the difference between export and domestic model actually meant here, Defence Research and Development Canada punched 105mm shells from the Leopard 1 through the front and out the back of modernized East German T-72M1s. Without Kontackt-5 slapped on the things it really wouldn't have mattered what type of T-72 had been in use. As far as ammunition? It's incredibly poorly documented in general but the only part that matters for my point is that the various "steel training ammo" monkey model claims appear to be unsourced and I've never seen any kind of evidence to support it. Did they have top-end Soviet kinetic penetrators? Nope. But then neither did most of the Soviet units and even the top end Soviet 3BM44 125mm projectile of the period could not frontally penetrate the M1A1 outside of around 500-1000m based on the M1A1's non-classified protection. Koesj posted:Yes, all those 120mm armed NATO tanks back in the early eighties. See above. The only time I referenced 120mm anything was in regards to either Desert Storm or the post cold war testing the previous poster mentioned which involved Kontakt-5 equipped T-72's getting shot up on a range. Neither of these things happened in the 80s. Koesj posted:Dude really if you've got some concrete, documented examples of this kind of stuff I'm all ears. We've already mentioned the T-62 and SA-6 in the Yom Kippur war and the T-72/T-80 in Chechnya as compared to performance in the middle east. In the T-62's case some of the tanks were (according to Zaloga) shipped from Soviet units to the Syrians as a method to expediate the replacement of losses while the rest were built to the normal specifications. In the SA-6's case they were simply Soviet-issue. These are all documented quite well. Zaloga's books are decent enough if you want to read about T-62/72/80 performance and there has also been a great deal of video coming out regarding the upgraded versions of the T-72 getting shot up by cold war era stuff in Syria. Point is, the Soviets didn't build god machines either and "monkey model" has become a lazy no-true-scotsman defense of any Russian military hardware that doesn't pan out. Created by a government and industry that desperately needs to sell that hardware and perpetuated by idiots and nationalist chestbeaters. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Sep 12, 2012 |
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Sep 12, 2012 06:18
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grover posted:Soviet warships are so much more impressive looking than our own. Shame DNC can't tell the difference. These days they look very similar to US/NATO ships. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steregushchy_class_corvette
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Sep 12, 2012 23:09
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PhotoKirk posted:Don't forget the TU-144 incident at the Paris Airshow. We really, really wanted to get a better look at the canards on the TU-144. Maybe or maybe not. The most that's been released to support that (popular in the USSR) theory is that there was a Mirage in the air nearby, not that it was actually involved in the crash which coincided almost immediately with the completed deployment of the canards. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the popular French theory was that the Soviets were fed flawed information about the Concorde, used it in the design of the Tu-144, and it resulted in structural problems. Probably also false, though the Soviet effort to steal anything they could about the Concorde to help with the Tu-144 appears to have been real. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Oct 1, 2012 |
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Oct 1, 2012 00:58
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McNally posted:He also cited building a giant gently caress-off claw game rig to reach miles beneath the ocean's surface to pick up an entire Soviet missile submarine off the bottom as being more plausible. *without being noticed by the Soviet spy trawler circling them the entire time.
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Oct 15, 2012 03:40
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Nebakenezzer posted:I know modern tanks and aircraft are hardened to withstand the EMP created by a nuclear blast...would similar hardening work against this? How does this sorta hardening work anyway? A breaker circuit on the inputs combined with a faraday cage or similar shielding around the devices themselves.
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Oct 26, 2012 03:16
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Boomerjinks posted:Every air and space museum should follow Pima's example and have at least three B-52s on display. Yep, tornado.
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Nov 4, 2012 22:46
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mlmp08 posted:I'm getting pretty tired of all these articles that proclaim that an 80-90% kill rate from Iron Dome is unprecedented and that no missile defense system has ever done that. As evidence, they tend to point to Patriot's failures circa 1991 rather than Patriot's nine for nine scorecard in 2003. THAAD and the SM-3 also had very impressive performance. ^Don't let D&D catch you suggesting anything shot out of Gaza is dangerous. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Nov 20, 2012 |
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Nov 20, 2012 01:37
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LingcodKilla posted:Nothing much said about life in the West Bank right now. Are they just chilling, shaking their heads at the trolls in Gaza or is poo poo about to go down there too? I haven't heard about anything going on there, and I suspect what's going on in Gaza is wrapping up soon as well.
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Nov 20, 2012 01:49
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Throatwarbler posted:What was the USSR supposed to use FROG-7s for, anyway, just randomly terrorizing civilians? They're not accurate enough to be used against military targets to any great effect and the launch vehicles seem pretty vunerable considering their short range. Chemical/biological/nuclear weapons or shooting a bunch of them at large targets like runways/ports/any sort of base.
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Nov 20, 2012 08:43
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StandardVC10 posted:I thought that was a Sukhoi Su-25 from Iran's Coast Guard, i.e. a plane largely unequipped for air-to-air and flown by Iran's D-list pilots, but maybe I'm thinking of a different incident? The Revolutionary Guard (the only ones operating SU-25s) do a lot of dumb, provocative poo poo including the attempt on that drone over international waters but I'm not sure if you can call them D-list pilots in comparison to the regular Iranian Air Force. Personally I'd think the point is more that they tried to shoot it down rather than use their Djinn magic to capture it. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Dec 5, 2012 |
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Dec 5, 2012 23:23
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Psion posted:I use this logic when driving: every other driver is an idiot out to kill me. I didn't always have this mindset, but the one and only traffic incident I've ever had involved two cars accelerating down the start of a long straightaway right through a red light while I made a left turn, continuing to audibly accelerate right up until the collision as though I didn't even exist. The impact launched my car sideways across three lanes and a divider after the collision (this was in a 35 zone). Now I always think "Is this guy going to stop at the stop light/stop sign or is he too fast and furious?"
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Dec 13, 2012 06:14
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Suicide Watch posted:Anyone want some F18s and A7s? Some assembly required... More like some disassembly required. Shredding them is a condition of sale.
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Jan 16, 2013 07:58
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NightGyr posted:It's hard to kill tanks from the air. Any platform that is flying steadily enough to lock a missile on a tank is easy pickings for SAMs. There's a reason the US built special platforms like the AH-64 and A-10 to kill tanks. The Soviet armored force was so large that it could take the attrition of air attacks and push on to its objectives. Then why, for example, was the Russian army unable to maintain air superiority over say...Georgia? Despite the presence of a great deal of air defenses and air superiority aircraft the small number of Georgian Su-25s continued attacks with relatively few losses until the end of the conflict. Also notable that mobile armor, particularly operating on the offense and/or large formations, is much easier to find/kill from the air than those with the luxury of staying hidden in friendly territory (as was the case in Serbia). As are the support elements required to keep said armor mobile. The reason there continues to be a large emphasis on tank killing aircraft and helicopters in both East and West (and for that matter anti-aircraft weapons to protect against them) is that they are actually quite good at the job. In regards to the Soviet army simply having so many tanks that they could just absorb losses and steamroll over everything - they really didn't. They actually had comparatively few high quality AFVs (T-80 series, upgraded T-64s, T-72B). The bulk of their "modern" armor was mid-range T-72/72As, T-64A/B, and T-62s which were of similar quality to what was seen in the first Iraq war and even those weren't especially numerous in comparison to NATO AFVs. Even if you count the T-55s, which made up more than half the armor available (yet were already obsolete in the era of the M48 Patton), the Soviets never enjoyed the kind of numerical superiority/qualitative equality they had with the Germans during WWII. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Jan 22, 2013 |
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Jan 21, 2013 23:41
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Koesj posted:AFAIK that squadron of Georgian Su-25s did gently caress all after day 1 and were wheeled away to the south (I can't remember where the link to the big independent Russian AAR is). As for the massive interfacing problems they had between VVS and Land Forces in '08, how exactly does that relate to a hypothetical WWIII? By "did gently caress all" do you mean "continued to fly missions involving shooting at and bombing Russians"? Given that there were only 10 such aircraft in the Georgian inventory they obviously had a rather limited effect. In the late 80s the Soviet/Russian military wasn't exactly in tip-top shape. I don't think you'll find that they were enormously better "interfaced" than the 2008 Russian military. Arguably even less so. Koesj posted:Very true. Warsaw Pact land forces did have a large number of dedicated AA assets for exactly that kind of thing though. So did the russians in 2008. Hence the example. Koesj posted:T-55s obsolete compared to the M48? That's bullshit. The T-55 was obsolete compared to the M48. The Soviets determined that while the mid-50s M48 could penetrate the T-55 anywhere except the front of the turret at long distances, the T-55's D-10T gun was inadequate against either the M48s frontal hull (275mm at LOS) or turret. To highlight this point, the top of the line 3BM6 projectile developed in 1967 for the D-10T could still only penetrate around 290mm - just barely enough. Its inadequacy against the M48/Centurion combined with the continual delays that plagued the T-64 program are the only reason the T-62 even exists. They needed a better gun but the T-55 could not fit a better gun so they stretched the chassis and produced the T-62 as a stopgap tank to replace the T-55s until the T-64 could be deployed in significant numbers. And that doesn't even get into factors like the T-55s having incredibly dated FCS/optics/etc. by the 1980s. Koesj posted:Also, what'd NATO actually have to offer against your so-called mid-range tanks? In 1980 it would have been mostly L7 armed Leo 1s, M60s and Centurions which at moderate range were non-penetrating in the frontal arc against everything up from a T-64 (already present in large numbers in the GSFG). Hell, before '86 there isn't even a 120mm armed Abrams although NATO allegedly got their penetrator quality up to speed for the 105s. Fully decking out the Bundeswehr with Leopard 2s took more than a decade, during which the GSFG had more than one entire turnover of tanks from early model T-64s and T-62s (in MRDs and the odd independent battalion/brigade) through upgraded models into ERA equipped tanks finishing up with 90% T-80s and later model -72s in forward formations. In the given year (1987 was the year given - not sure why you used 1980) anything with an 105mm L7 gun or better could pop holes in the front of a non-ERA T-64 or (especially) T-72. *Maybe* even an early model T-80. The Soviet ERA did not offer substantial protection against kinetic penetrators until Kontackt-5, which entered service with the T-80U in 1985. K-5 also happens to require specialized mounts built into the hull/turret and could not simply be retrofitted to older tanks. So in 1987 the threats against the mid-range tanks would have been upgraded M48s, M60 (any version), Leopard 1 (any version), Leopard 2, Chieftain, Challenger, AMX-30, M1, and M1A1. Plus a huge gamut of anti-tank weapons used by infantry or mounted on IFV/APCs. Nebakenezzer posted:Holy poo poo. I had no idea Soviet tanks had the edge on NATO until that late; I always figured NATO tanks were at least on par with whatever the Warsaw pact was fielding, and that the only real advantage the communists had was numbers. They didn't, the firepower/armor advantage see-sawed back and forth approximately every 10-15 years. The largest advantage NATO actually maintained for a really long period of time was in optics/electronic FCS/ammunition after the 70s. For example, the Soviets had consistently poor quality IR/Night optics and the autoloader designs in the T-64/72/80 put severe limitations on the length of kinetic penetrators they could use. If you want a period where the Soviets actually had a clearly defined advantage in armored vehicles, the obvious one would be the mid 60s-70s after the T-64 and T-72 came out but before the various western counterparts/responses were completed. The T-64 brought composite armor, a comparatively decent FCS/stabilizer/etc., and a much bigger gun all in the same package. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Jan 22, 2013 |
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Jan 22, 2013 04:15
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Raenir Salazar posted:A point to mention though that Warsaw Pact armoured doctrine operated along the lines of Deep Operations which deemphasised tactical superiority for the operational goals; as such having tank on tank combat and proving the victor didn't matter so much in the grand scheme of things if their planning went as it should and the enemy was surrounded from the zerg rush happening at places where the NATO did not have their uber tanks in good numbers. That's true, and NATO doctrine revolved around preventing that from happening while inflicting heavy losses on both the lead elements and the support elements behind the lines of advance. The "zerg rush" is kind of a silly comparison given that NATO actually had a combined military of comparable size to the USSR and the USSR would only have been able to achieve numerical superiority in the short term - something of an inversion of the Soviet-German situation in WWII. It's silly to think that either side could have won a short, clean, or easy victory in Europe. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Jan 22, 2013 |
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Jan 22, 2013 05:42
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NightGyr posted:I think the quote mainly works pre-1980, since everything from the Abrams to the Apache wasn't online before then. Yeah, but the BO-105, Cobra, Gazelle, etc. were and they were pretty good at inserting ATGMs into tanks. As were plenty of fixed wing strike aircraft. The Yom Kippur War, for example, is a case where air superiority certainly influenced a ground war despite heavy air defenses (what was at the time top of the line) in a highly mechanized conflict. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 11:05 on Jan 22, 2013 |
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Jan 22, 2013 11:02
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From the middle east thread in D&D - T-72s continue to react poorly to RPGs. Yikes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vljapydLfGQ
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Jan 26, 2013 00:01
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Smiling Jack posted:Might be a detonation of the ready round or a propellant fire, but it seems way too intense and short duration to be a fuel fire. It's a propellant fire. The auto loader stores a bunch of propellant charges above the gun and it's exposed to the crew spaces. There's also ammunition (anything not in the carousel) and more propellant charges scattered about the crew spaces. The armor on the sides of the tank is actually quite thin, so pretty much any old RPG can punch a hole through there and shoot a jet of molten metal into the crew compartment. At that point there's a really good chance that at least one propellant charge will light up and cause fire in the crew space which will then light up ALL the propellant charges, resulting in a tower of fire and potentially a flying turret. Sometimes the fire (or whatever the tank was shot with) will also cause one of the High Explosive rounds to cook off, causing a catastrophic explosion.
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Jan 26, 2013 03:10
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Bacarruda posted:There's aways the Cornfield Bomber Oh come on now. Not nearly as good as the Mig-23 autopilot incident. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Belgian_MiG-23_crash
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Jan 26, 2013 10:55
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 23:51 |
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Mig-21, not Mig-19!
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Feb 6, 2013 14:38
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