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Sturgeon's House

N-L-M

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Posts posted by N-L-M

  1. 5 minutes ago, Beer said:

    After the war Hartmann was charged in USSR for various crimes including "destuction of 345 expensive Soviet aircraft". The trial was also more of a propaganda show I guess but interestingly it operated with Hartmann's offcial numbers.  

    Likely, the kill claims are taken as a confession. In many court systems, a confession means the defendant accepts the validity of the charge, and therefore the substance of the charge does not need to be proven, only the guilt of the defendant. 

     

  2. If you are talking about plain steel armor, the answer is the penetration area is cleaned, edges are chamfered, and a plug is inserted and welded in place. 

    See page 30 here, for a quick description of steel armor repair processes. And indeed the rest of the paper for details on fused silica armor.

    A note for the above: Austenitic welds are softer and more ductile than ferritic welds, but do not require the extensive and precise preheating that ferritic welds do to prevent cracking in the weld. This does however leave the weld as a somewhat weak spot in the repair.

  3. 5 minutes ago, Serge said:

    1 - it’s easier to move both battery and CBRN compartment than rearrange the Mk-3 fuel tanks.
    2 - suspension modifications were already made with Centurion based chassis. 

    First third of Mk-2 and 3 sponsons are similar and we can’t see the rear part

    1. Fuel tanks are very easy to move, what with fuel being liquid. Also we have some pics of blown up merk 3s which suggest the rear fuel tanks are just bolted on, which would make them fairly easy to remove: 

    9qixlbzmrzv31.jpg

    2. The most the Israelis ever did to Centurion hulls was fit them for Merk 2 bogies, which may have been designed with a similar interface in the first place; as we have previously discussed, the hull body for the single swing arm suspension is substantially different, and would require major hull cutting, welding, and machining operations, hardly a minor deal.

     

    3. There are a few differences in the front sponson between the 2 and 3. One is the exact location of the red handle, which is slightly aft and high in the merk 3 vs the 2; another is the slight dimples in the side, presumably where the armor pack is, which isn't a thing in the 2; and a third is the single headlamp in the 3, where the 2 has a double (white/IR) headlight.

    All of which point to this being a merk 3 sponson.

     

    So yeah I don't buy the "converted merk 2 to merk 3 suspension" claim, given the current evidence.

     

    Should new photos come up we should revisit this topic.

  4. 18 minutes ago, Serge said:

    Because the rear hull of the Mk-3 based Ofek is not extended. The clamshell rear door is kept. 
    This Mk-2´s got a ramp.

    Ok, so 2 questions.

    1. What is the source for the claim that the mk3 based Ofek retains the clamshell doors and was not converted to a ramp?

    2. Seeing as we know that one mk2 Ofek has the clamshell and one has a ramp, how is it more sensible to assume that the entire suspension was replaced off the hull rather than, say, another mk3 Ofek existing, this one with a ramp too?

     

    The pics in the post we are discussing have a Merk 3 sponson and Merk 3 suspension. Seeing as the Ofek doesn't appear to be in series production yet, and is by all accounts supposed to be a quick and cheap repurposed hull, even if we assume point 1 as given, the odds are good that its another prototype, not a case of "lets take a Merk 2 hull and start making deep complex changes in it".

    This appears to be an assumption on your part that I have a hard time accepting.

  5. What about the Merk 3 chassis makes you consider it impossible to convert in such a manner? Doubly so, that you consider it more likely that they went to all the trouble to convert a merk 2 chassis to merk 3 suspension?

    This is especially odd given that we've already seen one based on a Merk 3 hull:

    44167245572_bed89d9567_c.jpg

  6. Perhaps, what if there is no downselect in the first two rounds? IE, everyone designs guns, but all guns are then available for turret designs, which are then all available for hull integration?

    Gives a bit more freedom to pick and choose the components you want to integrate, and as there is no downselect there's no penalty before the vehicle is complete.

  7. On 03/02/2021 at 10:34 PM, Toxn said:

    ITO judging the turret, I assume it would be on the basis of how well it packs in the gun, turret crew layout and ergonomics, vision device type and placement, armour layout and any other clever ideas that the contestant may have had.

    My issue with that is the hull-turret relationship, wherein the turret has a substantial basket, which dictates to an extent hull dimensions, and the fact that anything not stowed in the turret must eventually be stowed in the hull. Not least of which are crew and ammo.

  8. 2 minutes ago, Toxn said:

    but might perhaps also include something like the standardised APX turrets that contributed to hobbling historical French tanks

    I actually kind of want to avoid this a little.

    As we saw with the DPRC competition, overly constraining the design space leads to boxing people in, and in a historical context the more you box in the more you inevitably converge on "only do what was done" because they all had good reasons at the time.

    The "what if they were all a bit more open to ideas we now know are good" approach frees that up a bit.

    5 minutes ago, Toxn said:

    say, perhaps, a round to design the gun, which must then be used in the round to design the turret, which must then be used on the hull

    This would have to be very carefully curated, but could be interesting. Not sure how one would judge a turret in the absence of a hull, though.

  9. Had a couple of ideas for competitions, want to put them out there and see what y'all think.

    1. The year is 1911. The rapid pace of artillery development has left the Belgian military increasingly worried about the vulnerability of the Brialmont forts in case of war, which combined with the overall charged atmosphere in Europe leaves much to be desired in the nation's defensive plans. 

    It is hoped that the automobile revolution may be able to solve this issue; any army advancing into Belgium must move at least its supplies by road or rail, and any valuable goal must also be connected by road. Thus, long range independent "road cruisers" may successfully fight off such a force, without the vulnerability to long range slow firing artillery of fixed forts.

    Such a cruiser force would also be able to rapidly shift from the German border to the French, to counter either country without having to build twice the force.

    Requirements are as follows:

    A. Automotives not exceeding the state of the art or requiring extremely lengthy development.

    B. Long operating range on good terrain.

    C. Protection against infantry weapons.

    D. Armament suitable for engaging troops in the field and supply columns on roads, ideally also weaponry capable of destroying enemy materiel such as artillery or wagons.

    E. Top speed on existing roads in excess of a horse at canter. 

    F. Capability to operate singly or in groups.

     

    The Army, not having any experience with armored land vehicles, is very open minded about design, layout, crew, size, and so on. 

     

    2. The year is 1934. The French Army is preparing for the next round they suspect is coming in Europe, but is getting increasingly wary in its faith in small 2 man "mosquito" tanks. Looking at the Navy, as well as at other developments in the world of armored vehicles, it appears that there may be a substantial benefit in scale for armored vehicles. The small 2 man tanks, favored for their low crew requirements and fuel consumption, may in fact be a false economy.

    Your task, therefore, is a simple one:

    Design a tank which provides increased combat efficiency both per crewmember and per ton, not exceeding 30 tons, for the French army to use in its expected tactics in the upcoming decades.

    (Chiefly, containing breakthroughs of the Maginot fortified zone, supporting infantry counterattacks once the enemy has exhausted their force, and general cavalry roles).

    While the Army would prefer that where possible you use existing systems, the industry is capable of complex manufacturing and development of subsystems.

     

  10. Quite likely, yes.

    I buy that THS more thickness- efficient, but tanks don't seem to have dimensional constraints as much as they do weight ones. The very wide array of very wide skirt options for tanks seems to suggest that weight efficiency is the more pressing concern.

     

    As time goes on we see more and more that pretty much everything is a reactive sandwich of some sort, with the exception of armor solely optimized for dealing with rigid KE penetrators, where ceramics shine in the role of shattering them.

     

    Unless the design optimization has very extreme constraints in some places and not others, there's no good reason to not bring your A-game design practices in terms of using the most efficient solution to every part of it, and unless you possess some magic secret sauce nobody else does, chances are the optimizations converge on a local maximum in the design space.

    And indeed we see pretty much everyone doing more or less the same thing, with individual flavors varying based on externally set requirements (like extremely low collateral damage ERA for the German Puma).

  11. The CV90 upgrade is already in the CV90 thread. I would point out that as of now, Iron fist has not been fielded on any vehicle, only selected for service on a few. This inherently means a lower level of system maturity, as it hasn't had the decade Trophy has to shake out any bugs.

  12. I also strongly suspect Trophy as a system was tailored to the Merk, and integration anywhere else is an afterthought inherently limited by (likely sensible, in the context) design choices made at the time.

    But it is reliable and in active service, which is more than can be said for any other hardkill APS (with the exception of Zaslon on Turkish M60Ts, I suppose).

     

    Delays in such programs are common, and the long timelines for fielding any APS seem to suggest it is not as easy a technical problem to solve as one might think.

     

  13. It's worth remembering that steel beasts is a game available to the general public. I'm led to understand the professional version of it allows one to plug in values of their own, so presumably militaries which use it on a professional basis have what they consider to be accurate values, the open source version, being based on unclassified data, cannot be taken as an authoritative source.

  14. The MTU 883 is not at all smaller than the AVDS 1790. The engines are approximately the same length, similar width (though the 883 is square and the AVDS is trapezoidal in section and a tad wider at the top), and with the cooling system on top similar height (though the MTU has a more optimised slope for hiding behind the glacis). You would note, that the engine compartment on the Merk 4 is not notably shorter than the same on the Merk 3.

    Likewise, the Renk 325 transmission that goes with the 883 is slightly fatter than the Renk 304 which goes with the 1200 HP AVDS 1790, so there's no real room saved in the engine compartment. Definitely not the approximately 60 cm you'd need to cram in another seat.

    I would also question the tactical utility of being able to seat more people in a Namer, as it already carries a full infantry squad.

     

    The IDF don't appear to have said anything about it yet, but they tend to keep quiet anyway.

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