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hello, yes, this is nerdComrade Koba posted:There’s a YouTube video from the 1970s depicting live fire trials on the S-tank. The simulated shockwave from a nuclear detonation is nice. That's a copy of my original upload. I paid for a copy from the archives, translated and subtitled it and had it on youtube on my own channel for years before it got copyright claimed for whatever incomprehensible bureaucratic reason (I'm 95% certain the claimant didn't and doesn't actually own the rights but I didn't feel like risking a civil lawsuit just because someone was wrong on the internet). Here's the subtitle file though in the unlikely event that it might be useful to someone. Fangz posted:There's an interesting article on evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the S-tank here: Mainly based on source documents from my blog, more specifically these two: http://tanks.mod16.org/2015/04/02/report-from-british-strv-103-trials-at-the-baor-1973/ http://tanks.mod16.org/2015/04/02/report-from-british-strv-103-trials-at-the-baor-1973/ Chillbro Baggins posted:The S-tank was a turretless MBT, it had proper armor and just sacrificed the turret for a low profile because their whole schtick was to dig in and slow down the Red Army for a day or two until NATO got their poo poo mobilized. People keep saying this for some reason. I guess it makes some kind of intuitive sense, but the actual plan was, uh, not really that. If you actually go and look up what's left of the operational planning of the southern military district in the 1960's and 1970's you'll find three armored brigades (or, in other words, a bit less than half of the tanks in the entire army) with initial positions in Skåne, a miserable province barely bigger than 100x100km. That's in a country that, if you flipped it over north-to-south, would stretch down over Europe as far south as Rome. There is a reason why they thought it was important, though. The strategic reality of Sweden in the Cold War revolves around The Great Naval Invasion. The Warsaw Pact was expected to only care about Sweden as a minor speed bump on the way to their strategic objectives - the Sound and the Norwegian North Sea harbors. Possibly they could be interested in Gotland (which was fundamentally indefensible, but the attempt had to be made) and in a decapitation strike on Stockholm as well, but that was pretty much it. Reaching the Norwegian coast was a matter of crossing many hundred kilometers of frozen taiga and sub-arctic mountains with incredibly poor infrastructure, and that war was expected to become the Winter War 2.0. The Sound and the decapitation strike though were a different matter. To accomplish either objective, a naval invasion was needed. When people look at Cold War Sweden they kind of assume that NATO support must've been expected, because of course the idea of Sweden winning a war against the Soviet Union is absurd. However, Swedish operational planning did not actually expect or plan for any military NATO help. The NATO cooperation was on a subtler level and more political than anything else. If you're thinking that, well, in that case the Swedish operational planning was pretty much a very complicated way to say dulce et decorum est pro patria mori and delaying the inevitable for as long as possible, then, well, you'd be wrong. The Swedish plan was to win the war, to win it alone, to win it quickly and decisively. Not winning in the sense of dictating terms from the ruins of Moskva, but winning in the sense of eliminating the military threat to Sweden for the immediate future. The planners saw one way to do that and then they bet on that horse with almost everything they had. The way you win a land war in Asia is by not fighting it. Everyone knows this. Sweden attempting to delay the Soviet Union would be idiotic. There is nothing good that could ever come from that. Instead, the Swedish military focused with laser-like intensity on the Great Naval Invasion. It was the Soviet Achilles heel, the only point at which there was a fighting chance, the one moment where the war could be won. Push the landing force back into the sea, destroy the specialized landing craft (a scarce strategic resource for the Soviets) and there you go - you can sit back and stare at the Russians over the Baltic Sea in relative safety. If they establish a beachhead and start shipping in Guards tank armies, might as well throw in the towel immediately, because there is no winning that game. This is what the S-tank was built for and why half of all the tanks in the country were stationed so stupidly close to the Iron Curtain (seriously, you could reach their tank garages with rocket artillery from across the Sound). East Germany and Poland were too close, the sea too narrow and the travel time too short for the navy and the air force (the Swedish air force was and to some extent still is specialized on anti-ship strikes) to take much of a bite out of the landing craft, so the army had to shoulder more of the burden. The plan in the 60's and 70's was to take every tank and APC that could be scrounged up and start rolling towards the sea as fast as the tracks would carry them. As soon as the brigades were concentrated and rolling on the open roads, they were expected to take horrifying losses from air strikes, but that was part of the calculation. Go for the beachhead, establish close contact as soon as possible to make it unpalatable for the enemy to use tactical nukes (since they'd be hitting their own guys too), and either you reach the sea or you run out of tanks. That's it, that's the plan, the one chance to win the war. If it doesn't work, then the infantry brigades get to fill the entire southern half of the country with mines and it's time for the delaying tactics while waiting for an unlikely bailout from NATO, but that doesn't involve much tanking. This it not some creative interpretation on my part, by the way - when they were setting the tactical and operational requirements for the strv 103 project back around 1960, they were doing calculations for what kind of operational range they needed based on how much fuel it would take to take the armored brigade from its initial positions down to the sea and fight a battle there without refueling (no time for that stuff when the enemy strength grows by the hour). Similarly, in the air force, there's planning documents that very strongly emphasize that the strike aircraft must not be wasted on things like close air support - that's for silly Americans with more money than sense. The Swedish strike aircraft were a strategic resource, to be carefully protected and saved until it was time for the moment of truth, the potentially war-winning day, where you would deploy every aircraft and pilot completely without regard for losses in three or four concentrated strikes. The surviving planning documents speak of it in those exact words, "a potentially war-winning opportunity". For a long time, this really did seem like a battle that was actually sort of winnable, at least on paper. For many years tje Soviet Baltic fleet had enough landing craft to lift around two reinforced naval infantry brigades in one go, and against six Swedish armored brigades on the mainland that's actually not such a bad equation. There you go, not-a-tank-destroyer chat. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Nov 5, 2018 |
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Nov 5, 2018 22:57
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Cessna posted:I wonder how well it works when you need to nudge it up and over just a fraction of a mil and you're parked on uneven ground. Laying precision was required to be equal to or better than what was available on the Centurion, that is to say 0.2 mils, and in practical tests the tank met the requirement. Or, well, it's not 0.2 mils, it's 0.2 streck because in Sweden we do things a little bit better than everyone else, so we have 6300 mils to a circle - neither 6400 like the imperialist Americans nor 6000 like the imperialist Soviets. the army adopted the NATO standard 6400 mils in 2007
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Nov 5, 2018 23:26
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FrangibleCover posted:From my understanding of it, the Viggen force was basically held at the same state of readiness that everyone else had their nuclear bombers at for basically the same reasons. Sweden looked into nukes, did the cost-benefit analysis and then ditched them and developed the world's only conventional strategic deterrent. Yes, the Strategic Air Command is a pretty good analogy for the Swedish strike wings. Though the reasons for abandoning the nuclear program were more political than budgetary, I'd say. LatwPIAT posted:Have you written effortposts on the Hawée modifications of the J 35F1/F2/J Drakens or will I have rewrite my draft lost draft through a torrent of tears? I don't know much about that  I have a had a draft for an effortpost about the Stril 60 data link system sitting around for years though. My post history in the AIRPOWER/Cold War thread also has some pretty good posts, if I might say so myself.
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Nov 6, 2018 08:13
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Milo and POTUS posted:This is really neat and I'd love more of them but wouldn't any tank work for this strategy? Why not just buy a bunch of whatever contemporary tanks exist. Were the savings on the S-Tank such that that you could get just that many more of them for a given sum, were they more likely to have better readiness because they were simpler to maintain and operate, or did the Swedes just not want to be dependent on foreign supply chains? Yeah, that's exactly the point - any tank would work. The key takeaway here - which I maybe failed to articulate properly - is just that the Swedish army planned to use the strv 103 offensively, just like any other tank. It is a very human trait to look for meaning in all things, even in tank design. The strv 103 is an armored folk etymology on tracks, is what I'm saying. It looks weird and different and to some degree it is weird and different, so it's generally assumed that there must be some kind of operational or tactical reason for that weirdness - but there isn't. It's just a tank. The only reason it is so weird is that the designers thought that would let them build a tank that had protection and armament equivalent to or better than that of a Chieftain, but with considerably lower weight and some unique tactical advantages. It gave a better win probability in war games and simulations and was judged more cost effective than buying a Chieftain. That's all there is to it - it's just a tank like any other tank. It pretty much performed like any other tank of the time too, so it's far less weird than you'd think it is in practice. It sure as hell is interesting from a technical standpoint though - if you're a gigantic nerdlord, that is.
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Nov 6, 2018 21:52
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P-Mack posted:If the turretless tank was a regular tank and tanked just fine, is there a particular reason there were no more turretless tanks after this one? It turned out to not be a great idea pretty soon after its introduction, because it got hit by a technological development double whammy. Not having a turret is undeniably a disadvantage, because you can't drive in one direction while shooting in another. At the time of its design this was considered to be a feature with limited value and it was acceptable to trade it away in exchange for better protection. However, around 1975 these newfangled computers started to make it possible to make tank guns very accurate even on the move, and suddenly having a turret was actually much more useful and allowed greater mobility without sacrificing your firepower. The disadvantage of lacking a turret and stabilization became a bigger cost, comparatively. At the same time, the better protection that sacrificing the turret had bought became pretty much obsolete. Not having a turret enabled a HEAT standoff screen and an extremely well sloped (but thin) glacis plate. The HEAT screen worked pretty well against many types of HEAT ammunition but newer types were capable of defeating it, at least to some degree. The glacis plate however rapidly became completely obsolete. When the strv 103 was in the prototype/early production stage, it was immune to its own gun at typical combat distances, but by 1970 that was no longer the case, and 1970's 120mm long-rod APFSDS just completely ignored the sloped glacis plate. Instead, the way forward was composite armor and stabilized guns with ballistic computers, as in the M1 Abrams and Leopard 2, which entered service around 1980. It was of course impossible to foresee that development in 1960, though. It's worth keeping in mind though that almost all of the above also applies to other tanks of the strv 103's generation. The Leopard 1, AMX 30, M60 and Chieftain all lacked protection against 120mm APFSDS. Some of them had ballistic computers retrofitted though, but in most cases the fire control never became nearly as good as on the newer generation tanks. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Nov 6, 2018 |
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Nov 6, 2018 22:17
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Nenonen posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT_tank They actually experimented with stabilization for the strv 103 on several occasions. I think they even made some token attempts at stabilizing the suspension (didn't really work, too much for the hydraulics). What ended up being sorta workable though was stabilizing the sight but not the gun, and then letting the FCS fire when the gun and the sight picture happened to be aligned as the tank was bouncing along. Problem was, you were supposed to lock the strv 103 in elevation when driving around at anything faster than a crawl because otherwise all of the shocks that were normally absorbed by the suspension would also be acting on the hydraulics (which of course wore on it pretty heavily), so there was no guarantees as to when a firing opportunity would become available. e: they also tried some other more or less wacky things in the 70's and 80's, one of which I've posted about in the Airpower thread TheFluff fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Nov 6, 2018 |
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Nov 6, 2018 22:26
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LatwPIAT posted:With the exception of the early Chieftains, those tanks all had ballistic computers. Ballistic computers based on 1950s technology, but ballistic computers nonetheless. The difference between upgraded versions of them and newer generation tanks is also often pretty faint. The M60A3's M21 ballistic computer and the M1 Abrams' M21 ballistic computer were designed to give the same performance, and the West German Leopard 1A5 was basically fitted with the Leopard 2's fire control system. Fire control systems is usually one of the easier and faster ways to upgrade an old tank in the 70s and 80s, so you see a lot of hulls from the 50s and 60s fitted with brand new fire control systems. Stereoscopic/coincidence rangefinders were not really useful below 2000m with 1960's and newer ammunition (and combat distances greater than that were rare in Scandinavia and Western Europe in general). The ballistics were good enough to be rather forgiving of ranging errors. The strv 103 was more accurate at or below 2000m without a rangefinder than the M60A1 AOS with a coincidence rangefinder in comparative trials in the US. The first Leopard 1A5 was delivered in 1987. That's almost 20 years after it (and the strv 103) were first taken into service. The upgrade was made because without it the tank was effectively obsolete, just like the strv 103 (which was replaced by the Leopard 2 a few years later). The Swedish army was very keen on a new tank around 1985 too, but there was no budget at that time. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Nov 6, 2018 |
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Nov 6, 2018 23:28
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LatwPIAT posted:TheFluff also mentioned that at ranges less than 2000 m stadimetric scopes are as good as or better than the stereoscopic/coincidence rangefinder, so if you're only engaging at ranges less than 2000 m you might not have this issue at all. Well, maybe that argument was a bit exaggerated. I think in the trial I was referring to in that post they only recorded hit/miss on 2x2m screens, and the hit percentages were of a total of around 500 rounds fired at ranges between 500 and 2000 meters. Also, I forgot to mention that this was for high velocity AP - think close to 1500 m/s muzzle velocity and a flight time to 2000m of about one and a half seconds. According to the ballistic tables for the slpprj m/66 for the strv 103, between 1500 and 2000 meters, misjudging the range by 500m would mean changing the impact point by about one and a half meters. That's a pretty significant error, but tanks are big targets. At ranges below 1500m though the error is of course smaller. I'd say a range finder starts becoming pretty handy above 1500m or so, but above 2000m it starts becoming necessary for accurate gunnery since elevation angles and the effects of dispersion increases. Also, it's useful for HE. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 11:29 on Nov 9, 2018 |
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Nov 9, 2018 11:21
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Book rec: The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, by Paul N. Edwards. It's not exactly a book about war or battles, but it's extremely good. Came out in 1996 and talks about history, but has some downright eerie parallels to current tech trends.
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Nov 14, 2018 12:25
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