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1976  Leopard 2AV armour(all from declassified reports), bustle spaced armour(12+30) also used on serial Leopard-2 tanks.

2AV
 

Hello guys,
I think that possibly some of you might be interested in our interwar Czechoslovak stuff. For starter I've decided to share with you a wonderful online document about our fortification system. At the very beginning I'd like to say that I have nothing common with its creators. It's just an incredible gem that deserves to be shared with you. If you know it, sorry for that, nevertheless I think most of you don't. Since I am new here I will not waste your time debating what if scenarios. Don't worry.  
 
Well, enough of talking. What I want to share with you is a massive interactive map of our fortification system containing nearly 11 thousand objects with information about every single one of them. You can switch on even such crazy details like cable networks or construction facilities used for building of the fortifications. The map is directly linked with an online database of the fortification buildings where more than 2000 objects are listed with detailed description (plans, 3D models, photos, weapons, crew, important dates, recent state etc.). Unfortunately this database is only in Czech language but it can be a great source of information for you anyway (especially when linked with the map). The good thing is that the map alone supports other languages and you can easily switch them.  
 
This is the base view where I have already switched on all objects. You can change background map type, information etc. on the left side and visualise everything what You want to see on the right side. 
 
Let's zoom in a little bit. Here You can see one of the strongest fortified places - a valey at Králíky in north-east Czechia. As you can see the object marks have different shapes, colours etc. The shape is matching the menu on the right side. Triangles are concrete pillboxes vz. (mark) 36. Small circles are pillboxes vz. 37. The letter inside means type of the object (with one firing post, two on each side, angled one etc.). The color can be decoded from the information table in the bottom right corner. Basically it shows whether the object was actually built, if it was later destroyed or the works were only started or even not so. The heavy objects are the large circles. The numbers have also a meaning. It's a resistance class (1 -> 2 -> I -> IV from the lowest to the most resistant). 

 
You can switch on also the ground plans of the artilery groups (fortresses with underground network between the casemates). You can see it here (fortress Hůrka). 

 
You can also switch on the firing lines. Here You can see heavy artilery coverage of the most fortified section of the line (the sad thing is that no heavy artilery pieces were installed by the time of Münich crisis - but lets leave such details aside for now). 

 
You can switch on the firing lines even for the pillboxes as you can see here on the example from the souther border. Nearly all Czechoslovak objects were built for side fire having superheavy resistance frontal walls with stone and earth covers. 

 
If You zoom even more and switch for satelite map you get something like this. In this case the red color shows anti tank 47 mm guns and the blue color is 7,92 mm (sometimes double) heavy machine guns of a heavy separated casemate (possible use of light machine guns in observation cupolas is not marked). The grey color shows vz.26 light machine guns of the neighbouring pillbox. 

 
You can click on every single object and you get available details. The first icon shows detailed lines of fire including realistic range. Bellow the L: L1 M ZN 3-4 means: Left side: L1 = 47 mm anti tank gun with 7,92 mm coaxial heavy MG; M = twin 7,92 heavy MG; ZN is I think type of the cupola but I'm not actually sure about it. The codes for the weapons are shown at the table in the lower right corner (you need to keep the cursor on the question mark). 

 
The Second icon leads to a database of objects which is unfortunately only in our weird language. Anyway you can dig a lot of information from it as well (drawings, recent state, photos, exact location etc.).

 
 
The best thing is that most of the objects still exist till today (all of those heavy ones). The Germans managed to destroy roughly 2000 light objects (and gain some 11000 tons of steels from them). They managed to damage also many heavy ones when they were testing weapons and tactics for the future use duirng the WW2. They even moved some cupolas (and of course the famous hedgehogs) to other fortifications along the Atlantic wall or elsewhere. Many of them are made into better or worse museums today (large quantity is private now). Huge number of them is just left alone and freely accessible for anyone. If you are more interested I can give you tips which ones to visit. On the Czech map portal You can use a mode panorama which is basically the same thing as Google street view but it's much more up to date and it's nearly everywhere where they got at least with a motorbike. Since the fortifications are also visible there, you check where they are for easier access. 
 


 
If you are interested I can continue the fortification topic with some other information (I'm no historian but I have visited quite many of the objects myself and read some books about them). 
 
OK, so this was my first post on the forum. I hope you find it interesting and maybe for some of you it can be a reason for a trip, who knows :-) 
 
 
 
 

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That video is fucking awful piece of shit and because of it, I now have super-aids. Just first few points that come to mind:
 
-Dude has a PhD in physics, not in history, which is why it's a bit shady to use it so overtly in a video about history.
-the scale of battles are horribly uneven; capture of single frigate (without bloodshed) is considered good enough for jihad and made no distinction to events where tens of thousands of people get killed. Obviously he is trying to inflate the map with his fucking dots.
-stops counting crusades after the third one ??? (there are still 4th-9th crusades, reconquista, Albigensian crusade, Hussite wars, All the Swedish, Lithuanian, Prussian etc. crusades), some of them are obviously between christians or uneventful (6th crusade IIRC) but the same should then apply to "jihads" as well.
-counting almost all muslim conflicts regardless of who is fighting who and what is the motivation behind said conflict (Civil wars between muslims e.g. in Granada 1482-1484 or abbasid succession war in 811, defending from enemy campaigns (Granada conquest by Castillian forces, didn't have time to check but it seems that all of reconquista is somehow counted only as jihads but not crusades..).
-counting dishonestly bizarre events as jihads, such as; French exile of jews in 1306(???), 1999 Kosovo war, Turkish invasion of Cyprus, or counting possibly small skirmishes as battles (hard to say as there are no sources for these and the description is vague as hell).
 831 Spain war
 832 Spain war
 833 Spain war
 834 Spain war
 835 Spain war
 836 Spain war
and lot more from Spain with no sources.
-he's trying to evoke this muslims vs christians/western world by wording things vaguely ("..primarily battles against classical civilizations of rome and greece" ???)
-framing every muslim conflict as a way to enslave, rape and murder everyone non-muslim, but romantisizing crusades as just helping bretherens.
-pretending that every single one of these battles were fought because of religious reasons.
-cramming together ~1500 years of history, hundreds of millions of people from hundreds of civilizations and simplifying them to homogenic muslims and christians.
 
If you want to have super-aids as well, go check his sources:
http://cspipublishing.com/statistical/charts/Islam-BattlesDate.pdf

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There are massive differences in probability comparing a 25 mm to a 120 mm APFSDS...
 
 
Tanks and other AFVs are designed to resist certain reference threats, ideally they would resist them at every part of the desired surface. In practice that is unfortunately not possible due to the need to make place for the gun mantlet, turret ring, optics, etc. Still design decisions can be made to try compensating as much as possible for the weakened section.
 
On the T-72M1, there are parts with very high LOS and there is the center section, which is a lot weaker. This means there isn't a very uniform level of protection, i.e. it can be penetrated by rounds that are - in relation to the base armor - a lot weaker than the reference threat (specifically if you also include anti-tank munitions with shaped charge warheads as refernce threats). The Soviet tanks were designed in such a way, that the surface area and volume was minimized, which provided advantages such as weight saving, reducing the probability of being hit and allowing to invest more armor into the turret cheeks and hull. Tank designs are trade-offs between various different factors, there rarely is a design decision that has no negative effects; in case of the Soviet tanks, this was a lower protection level at the gun mount.
 
On other tanks different optimizations have been made and other drawbacks were accepted. In case of the Leopard 2, accounting for the holes (one with a diameter of 215 mm and two with a diameter of 75 mm) in the mantlet reveals that at a weight of 650 kilograms, it is equivalent to a 186 mm steel plate - but it is not steel, but special armor. How much protection it will provide? I don't know, it will depend on the exact threat. British tests (with Chobham armor and their own reference threats) showed a 30 to 50% higher mass efficiency against KE threats and more than 2 against shaped charges. In such a case, the mantlet would provide 240-270 mm protection, which added to the gun mount means that the area directly next to the gun cradle reaches the same 400-450 mm protection vs KE as the rest of the turret (against the refernece threat), i.e. a very uniform level of protection. It also would be enough to stop the MILAN's shaped charge warhead, which served as shaped charge reference threat.
 

 
Obviously the very center of the gun mantlet remains a weakspot, but it shows how the tank design was adapted to minimize these. A different design with different drawbacks and advantages (to the latter belongs the ability to easier access the gun for repairs and replacement).
 
You already claimed once that the 420 mm LOS thickness figure would be incorrect, but your proof was proven wrong back then. Why do you still say that
 
 
Yes and no. It is always a weakspot, but how large it is depends on the exact design. Measures can be made to minimize them. A cupola like on the T-72 doesn't seem to be optimized for protection, but rather for providing a good overview on the battlefield, trading higher vulnerability for that.
 

 
 
As I said, there is about 500 mm LOS steel from the front plus the kvartz filling. Take a look at the cut-through section III. That's 284 mm + 142 mm of steel (plus 115 mm of kvartz) at 38° slope. From the front this will be ~540 mm steel at LOS (+ kvartz). The cut above has the nearly the same thickness without slope (532-534 mm instead of 534-535 mm), but is sloped only at 30°. That's ~490 mm steel at LOS (+ kvatz). Overall there is about ~500 mm steel at LOS at the cheek sections closest to the center.
 
 
But how do they want to pay $3 billion USD for Damian's M1A1PL?

Personally, I blame the end of the Cold War - many 'western' governments more or less convinced themselves that they had no major threats likely and that existing equipment was 'sufficient'... so procurement has often been the first thing on the chopping block to save funds. The IDF & Israeli government crucially has a different view. The issues are pretty simple when you take into account the governments don't care.

This is just classical for Damian. He always likes to criticize every piece of military gear made in Germany for some of the most nonsensical reasons, but he loves the United States and will pretend everything made in the USA is better and flawless. He has directly admitted his bias in the past and kept making incorrect claims for his own agenda. Before armor measurements for the Leopard 2 were made, there was a time where he claimed its maximum physical armor thickness was just 500 mm, while the original Abrams would have had 900 mm. Now we know that the Leopard 2 has up to ~860 mm at the turret front, while the M1 Abrams untilm 1984 had only ~730 mm physical armor thickness at the turret.
 
1. He is correct by saying that the Leopard 2A4 tanks of Poland only have "B" technology armor. A few years ago, there was a Polish article claiming that the PT-91 and Leopard 2 had comparable armor protection, but based on documents from the Swedish tests, it might provide a bit lower protection against (modern) KE penetrators than the T-72 and T-72M1. As always there are many different factors to consider (such as: What rounds are used in the comparison? Older Soviet ammo should perform worse against multi-layered Chobham-style armor. What ammunition and steel alloy has been used for the armor values in the Swedish leaks?) , maybe militarysta knows something about "some tests" mentioned by Damian.
The T-72 has a cast turret with up to 500 mm thickness at the thickest points, the T-72M1 has roughly the same amount of steel armor, but with a kvartz filler added to that. The armor protection has been claimed to be more than 450 mm steel-equivalent protection vs KE, sometimes as high as 500 mm RHAe vs KE. The Leopard 2 has roughly 400-450 mm at the turret front.
 
However the cast-turrets of the Soviet tanks had rather heterogenous thickness, in some places the T-72M1 is only ~370 mm thick. Even the T-72B with at least ~550 mm RHAe vs KE, was vulnerable to the 120 mm DM13 and comparable Soviet rounds according to a Soviet analysis due to the cast turret being thinner at the upper and lower edges and around the gun mount.
 
What Damian ignores is that is the fact that the M1 Abrams and the M1IP/M1A1 also had a lower protection level than the T-72/T-72M1 against KE based on available sources. He pretends that the Leopard 2 is poorly armored, yet it was better or equal to its NATO contemporaries at a lower weight (thanks to minimizing the protected volume). Based on Swedish data, the hull of the M1A2 from 1992 is worse against KE than the hull of the T-72M1!
 
2. According to Frank Haun, the CEO of KMW, micro-cracking of the Leopard 2's welded steel armor would occur after about 50 to 60 years when the tank is consistently used (he mentioned that in an article, where he forecasted lots of sales for the Leopard 2's follow-up tank, the MGCS). The Polish Leopard 2 tanks should not suffer from micro-cracks and only the suspension should be the limiting factor for the weight. I've never heard or read anything about similar issues from any other country (and plenty other have upgraded old generation hulls with new armor - Denmark, Singapore, Indonesia, Germany), so maybe it is a problem unique to Poland related to how they use the tank and how it is maintained? Maybe Damian is mixing up two different things?
 
3. The Leopard 2PL uses a combination of different AMAP solutions, there are only rumors about troubles in the tests (and these might be a result of the testing procedure). I couldn't find any confirmation from my sources, but that does not directly mean that there weren't any issues.
 
 
That's between $7.5 and $10 million per tank! I've heard rumors that the new built Leopard 2A7 tanks for Hungary might be cheaper (thanks to help from the EU).

Does it mean that all the 2A5 converted from old 2A4 (for ex. the ex-Netherland ones, now in Finland) have these structural weakness and risk to crack, due to their upgraded weight, now above 60 tons ? It seems quite unbelievable ...

If Poland indeed buys M1, Damian will be the happiest man on earth!

In the AW forum there are some pretty sensational revelations (by the user Damian) about the characteristics of Leo 2 armor of early variants and about the chassis and AMAP-B too (Poland AFV, pg.95).
 
https://aw.my.com/en/forum/showthread.php?24934-Polands-Armored-Fighting-Vehicles&p=1869758&viewfull=1#post1869758
 
What do you think ?

First 3 Leopards 2PL delivered to Bumar Łabędy.

 
Another pic from Tomasz Dmitruk. 

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