Bronezhilet

What a fucking retarded statement. Fuck off.

Just got through Guderian: Panzer Pioneer or Myth Maker? by Russell A. Hart. I was looking forward to reading it; the introduction says the book "seeks the real Heinz Guderian, not the man of legend." I was expecting a short but interesting insight into how Guderian inflated his accomplishments, much like Bond and Mearsheimer had done with Liddell Hart (and which Gat later attempted to redress). No less than Richard DiNardo proffered a decently glowing review of the book that concluded with, "This monograph is certainly not the definitive biography of Guderian, and I do not think the author had that goal in mind. As a corrective to one of the more mendacious memoirs of the Second World War, Hart's work clearly hits the mark." Looking good!
 
As it turns out, the book is a hot mess. It consists of surprisingly repetitious (and it's only 118pp), scantily-researched, poorly-evidenced, and thesaurus-driven prose that does little to convince the reader of the author's arguments unless the reader is fine with simply taking his word on things. (Of course, with the way things go on social media, this may not be an issue...). The third sentence in the introduction is, "Unfortunately, too many of Guderian's biographers have accepted Guderian's view of his accomplishments without sufficient critical scrutiny." In the endnote for this sentence Hart mentions seven such hagiographies, including two editions of Macksey's book on Guderian, Panzer General and Creator of the Blitzkreig. From this strong start, I thought with glee, clearly Hart will offer some hard-hitting, original research using novel sources!
 
Oh. Hart's main sources are the biographies he accused of insufficient critical scrutiny in the third sentence of his book.

 
Hart consistently makes assertions and accusations with no supporting examples, and often with even no citation. Some of this stuff I even believed going in, but if I had disagreed I would not be convinced by Hart simply saying so. E.g., people now realize Lutz had a large hand in forming the German armored forces. Hart agrees, stating. "It was Lutz more than Guderian who transformed the Mobile Troops Command into a strong, coherent branch in the late 1930s. Quietly, with much less fuss and rancor than Guderian was raising, Lutz negotiated, cajoled, listened, and compromised to push forward his command more effectively than Guderian ever could have done." What negotiations and compromises actually occurred are, like many things in the book, left to the reader's imagination.
 
Hart later says that "Guderian despised the Catholic, Slavic Poles who now [in 1939] occupied parts of his native, beloved Prussia." This is not provided with any citation or evidence. It's not that I wouldn't believe such a statement, but I would expect some evidence to accompany its presentation. Hart later says that during the French invasion, "In his private correspondence, Guderian expressed compassion for the plight of the French populace. This demonstrated that he held the 'civilized' French in much higher regard than he did the Slavic Poles." So I guess that's the evidence? Again, not that I wouldn't believe it, but that connection seems a bit of a stretch.
 
Likewise, Hart says that during the Polish invasion Guderian "earned the enmity of many a senior officer whose command prerogatives Guderian carelessly and thoughtlessly trampled over. For example, Guderian soon found himself at odds with the 3d Panzer Division commander--Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg--another future rising star of the armored force." What prerogatives were trampled, what odds occurred, and how those odds were resolved are not mentioned.
 
A fourth example: "Largely as a result of Guderian's insistence, these [Hummel and Wespe] were produced only in limited numbers, sufficient at best to equip a single battalion in each panzer artillery regiment during 1943-5. The lack of self-propelled guns reflected Guderian's opposition to diverting resources and production capacity to artillery weapons and his firm prewar belief that only tanks could fight other tanks effectively." This cites pp.216-22 in Panzer Leader. Unfortunately, my edition is apparently paginated differently, because there is nothing in those pages in my copy that talks about Guderian's opposition to SP arty. I did find where Guderian laid out the notes he took to his 9 March 1943 conference with Hitler et al after becoming Inspector-General of Armored Troops, which included "9.The artillery of the panzer and motorized divisions will from now on be receiving the adequate number of self-propelled gun-carriages which has been requested for the past 10 years...Tanks of latest design must be supplied for artillery observers."
 
A final example of evidenceless assertions for this post, but by no means final in the book: "[Guderian's] response to that trend [of the SS and Nazi party gaining influence and threatening taking over the army in 1944] was to more strongly identify himself and the armored troops with the national socialist worldview and agenda." No citation, no elaboration on how Guderian identified the armored troops with the Nazi worldview and agend, or even what that means, really.
 
Hart can't seem to decide how well Guderian performs as far as politics and influencing others. He variously describes him as having "political naiveté" (p.90), being "a consummate political operator" (p.92) who "continuously politicked" (p.93) those in Hitler's sphere, who executed a "calculated political neutrality" (p.102) after the assassination attempt on Hitler, yet who was again "a political neophyte" (p.115) who was "politically naive" (p.117). This list starts at p.90 only because that's when I bothered to start keeping track. It exists throughout the book.
 
I generally like historical scholarship and biographies to take a decently even-handed approach, but Hart makes no attempt to hide his bias with word choice, time and again throwing out strings of adjectives full of negative connotation: "More than anything else, it was his repeated, insolent defiance of higher authority, his insatiable and threatening demands for more of everything, his inability to understand the needs of other commands or act as a team player, combined with his inability to finesse his superiors, that cost Guderian his appointment." Jeez, say how you really feel.
 
So, in sum, I was disappointed. I went into this book believing that Guderian made more of himself than he should have re: the formation of German armored forces, but Hart did little to convince me had I not already thought so. The book is not all bad (I hadn't heard of the bribes Hitler gave to senior officers, but this research is not original to Hart, who cites others' work), but it's shallow and I feel it's not very good scholarship, especially from a history professor and PhD-holder who specializes "in the history of the Second World War in the European Theater." At least it was only like $12.
 

This is a list of materials I've found in the papers I have about SLERA, NxRA and NERA. It is by no means complete or containing only materials that are actually fielded, it's just what I've found:
Glycidyl azide polymer (GAP) hardened with Desmodur N100 GAP (hardened) with CaCO3 GAP (hardened) with Guanidinazotetrazolat GAP (hardened) with varying amounts of RDX "Rubber or GAP" with a layer of Dottikon Perbunan NBR PU FKM SI Dyneema HB26 Carbon reinforced rubber Glass reinforced rubber Kevlar reinforced rubber PBO reinforced rubber But there's probably more, this is all I could find in the grand total of three papers I have on this topic.
 

Paralay continue to work on his 3D model

 

Oh boy, we already had Uralvagonzavodskis vs Kharkovites, now we got KMW vs IBD as well? Nice!

Oh boy, we already had Uralvagonzavodskis vs Kharkovites, now we got KMW vs IBD as well? Nice!

Oh boy, we already had Uralvagonzavodskis vs Kharkovites, now we got KMW vs IBD as well? Nice!

Oh boy, we already had Uralvagonzavodskis vs Kharkovites, now we got KMW vs IBD as well? Nice!

Oh boy, we already had Uralvagonzavodskis vs Kharkovites, now we got KMW vs IBD as well? Nice!

IS-4s in Kazakhstan

 
 

https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5c154835b2d87b00acb731f7/unificirovannye-tipovye-shassi-okr-odnotomnik-5c1bda1855f3da00aa81a727?from=channel
GurKhan artice about pre-Armata work on unified chassis vehicles.
 
 
 
 

 
 

This is a list of materials I've found in the papers I have about SLERA, NxRA and NERA. It is by no means complete or containing only materials that are actually fielded, it's just what I've found:
Glycidyl azide polymer (GAP) hardened with Desmodur N100 GAP (hardened) with CaCO3 GAP (hardened) with Guanidinazotetrazolat GAP (hardened) with varying amounts of RDX "Rubber or GAP" with a layer of Dottikon Perbunan NBR PU FKM SI Dyneema HB26 Carbon reinforced rubber Glass reinforced rubber Kevlar reinforced rubber PBO reinforced rubber But there's probably more, this is all I could find in the grand total of three papers I have on this topic.
 

This is a list of materials I've found in the papers I have about SLERA, NxRA and NERA. It is by no means complete or containing only materials that are actually fielded, it's just what I've found:
Glycidyl azide polymer (GAP) hardened with Desmodur N100 GAP (hardened) with CaCO3 GAP (hardened) with Guanidinazotetrazolat GAP (hardened) with varying amounts of RDX "Rubber or GAP" with a layer of Dottikon Perbunan NBR PU FKM SI Dyneema HB26 Carbon reinforced rubber Glass reinforced rubber Kevlar reinforced rubber PBO reinforced rubber But there's probably more, this is all I could find in the grand total of three papers I have on this topic.
 

Visible barrel length vs actual barrel length of a Leopard 2A6 barrel:

I know we already have a topic on the Arjun, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have another thread about how DRDO can't make anything.
 
I mean, the Arjun program started in 1974 (according to Wikipedia) and the thing got produced 30 years later, in 2004. Should we take a look at the list of tanks that got developed at around the same time period?
 
T-72
T-80
Type 88
Type 96
Type 74
OF-40
Merkava 1
Merkava 2
Merkava 3
Leopard 2
M1 Abrams
Challenger 1
M-84
K-1
Type 90
Leclerc
T-90
PT-91
Zulfiqar
C1 Ariete
Challenger 2
TR-85
T-84
...and many more
 
A keen I will have noticed that these are both second and third generation tanks, which is right, because the development of the Arjun took place during two generations of tanks. Of note is that the Israelis managed to make three Merkava variants in the time DRDO took to develop the Arjun. And if that wasn't enough, he Challenger 1 was developed, build, accepted for service, and taken out of service by the Brits in less time than it took DRDO to deliver the first batch of Arjuns. What the fuck.
 
Alright alright I'll stop the bashing! So lets take a look at the armour of the Arjun:
 
Okay now that we've taken a look at the armour of the Arjun, we can take a look at something of which the Indians pretend is armour.
First, the turret 'armour':

The first good thing to note about the turret armour is that the left front is decent. The second good thing about the turret armour is that it's so bad I can spend a whole post on burning it down.
 
The mantlet looks thick in this model, but it looks like it's not modeled right since it seems to be fused with the frontal armour itself. This is what the actual armour in the gun mantlet looks like:

It's fairly thin, like in the Leclerc, but even worse is that it does not cover the whole gap in the turret. Seriously DRDO, what the fuck? Of course there are pictures of a fully assembled model, but it seems that the completed mantlet is no more than a sheet metal box around the structure shown in the above photo. I mean, look at this:

You can see the weld lines and shit on top of the 'mantlet', there is no reason to believe this is a solid steel block.
 
These pictures bring me nicely to the next two points:
1. The turret side basically lacks any and all side armour
2. The gunner sight barely has any armour
 
The green blocks on the turret side in the first picture are actually storage boxes, not armour. The majority of the side is only a few cm thick steel plate. Lets just compare this to the Leopard 2A4 for a second:

(Thanks to @Militarysta for making this picture)
 
You can see that the turret side protection extends way, way further back on the Leopard 2A4 than it does on the Arjun. The Arjun only has to rotate the turret slightly to be completely vulnerable to even low caliber autocannons. And as you can imagine, that's not good.
You can also see that the armour block behind the gunner sight is around 660 mm LOS, the same spot in the Arjun is estimated to be around 300 mm thick. Don't worry about the lower part of the gun sight, that has no armour at all. The sight itself looks like this:

 
So the turret has negligible side protection, horrible frontal protection, and a shit mantlet.
 
But wait, there's more!
 
The turret roof is really thin. If you take a look at this picture you'd say that it has a decently thick roof:

 
See? That looks to be like a solid few cm thick. So why say the roof is really thin? Well, take a look at this as well:
 

That hatch/cupola is raised. So what looks to be a roof that's a few cm thick is just a raised cupola. Which means that the turret roof itself is horribly thin. And since the front third is sloped forward that means APFSDS can easily yaw into the crew compartment, and lets not speak about attacks from above because that'll end in tears for the Arjun.
 
Is there anything not shit about the Arjun turret?
 
...
 
No! Actually!
 
A sharp-eyed reader will already have noticed that the turret ammorack has absolutely no protection at all:

 
The inside of the turret itself is a horrible fucking mess, just look at it:

That's right, those cables are hanging from fucking string.
 
Since the gun is also in the turret, surely that must be a good part of the turret, right? Right!? I mean, they had until 2004 to select or make a good gun!
 
Aahahahahahahha, no. It's a rifled 120 mm. In 2004. Helloooooo India, welcome to Britain, 19-fucking-80s.
 
...well maybe they have very good ammunition!
 

No. That's about the same as DM23. Which was introduced in 1983. 1984 saw a medium-high L/D (20+ L/D) penetrator for the US, 1987 for Germany and 1986 for the Soviet Union. We got high L/D (30+ L/D) penetrators in the early 90s. India's still rocking that good-ol' 17 L/D trash.
 
 
 
Sooooo will the hull be any better?
 

No. Access hatch in the upper glacis.
 
On TS I was talking to @Collimatrix about how the driver's position most likely makes the upper glacis in front of him thinner, but that turned out not to be true, since...

...his position doesn't reach the fucking glacis in the first place.
 
Not only that, look at how fucking horsewank thin that glacis is. With how thin it is, it's most likely just solid steel instead of NERA, even though the Indians claim it uses NERA, and they have this to say about their NERA:
Literally fucking what
 
I could probably go on and on and on about the retardation that's called Arjun, but I won't. I have subjected myself to too much stupidity already since I had to go to fucking places like defenceforumindia which was completely fucking malarious. And if you don't know what that word means, it's a combination of malaria and hilarious since reading defenceforumindia is equal parts sickening and hilarious.
 
 

@Collimatrix look what I found!
 
https://defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/arjun-main-battle-tank-mbt-mark-i.9558/page-309#post-1378368

@Collimatrix look what I found!
 
https://defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/arjun-main-battle-tank-mbt-mark-i.9558/page-309#post-1378368

So only thing they had to "deflect" criticism of their beloved Arjun is insults. DRDO should use their skulls as Arjun armor, it will be first MBT impenetrable for direct nuclear warhead hit.

@Collimatrix look what I found!
 
https://defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/arjun-main-battle-tank-mbt-mark-i.9558/page-309#post-1378368

@Collimatrix look what I found!
 
https://defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/arjun-main-battle-tank-mbt-mark-i.9558/page-309#post-1378368

@Collimatrix look what I found!
 
https://defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/arjun-main-battle-tank-mbt-mark-i.9558/page-309#post-1378368

@Collimatrix look what I found!
 
https://defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/arjun-main-battle-tank-mbt-mark-i.9558/page-309#post-1378368

@Collimatrix look what I found!
 
https://defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/arjun-main-battle-tank-mbt-mark-i.9558/page-309#post-1378368

@Collimatrix look what I found!
 
https://defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/arjun-main-battle-tank-mbt-mark-i.9558/page-309#post-1378368