T___A

IKV 91 is a lot more comparable to the Object 934 than the PT-76.

The Soviets thought turretless tanks weren't even good for that as in their opinion turning the tank to move the gun would reveal the tank's postion.

It's interesting to note what the Soviets and what the Swedish thought were viable designs. The Soviets desgined a tank similar to the Strv 103 but it was rejected due to their concerns on aiming the gun of a turretless tank.

The IS-7 also had two RP-46s in addition to the 14.5mm coax.

My current belief is that the evidence points towards the leaks being deliberate, at least in part.  I suspect that probable leakers are fed stories; one story per probable leaker, and when the stories make it to the press, the responsible party is fired.
 
It's also worth noting that the leaks have become less common and less accurate.  There was no warning whatsoever about Rex Tillerson being fired, for example.  There was a false alarm way back in November of 2017, but it's not like anyone had the inside scoop on it in March 2018, and Trump waited for Tillerson to get back from a trip abroad before the announcement, which means that the decision was made in advance and there would have been several days for it to leak.  It didn't.
 
You have to contextualize the Trump presidency the way I do for my views to make sense.  Washington D.C. is a world unto itself.  I have classmates who have jobs there.  They are intelligent, kind and thoughtful people and they do not live in the same world as you or I do.  Washington D.C. is what happens when you make a theme park that is totally divorced from that like in The Gods of the Copybook Headings "if you don't work you die."

Obviously, people in D.C. have jobs.  But they don't work.  Hustle would be a better verb.  The difference is that in D.C. the degree to which any enterprise is rewarded is a function of perceived righteousness rather than market value.  This is how they can have ridiculous things like the initiative to train moderate rebels in Syria that spends half a billion dollars and ends up training five dudes.  Could you imagine a recruiter for a hypothetical mega-PMC spending that sort of money and getting those sorts of results?  They would have to invent new kinds of torture for the fool.
 
D.C. is completely insulated from reality.  The only reason it interacts with reality as much as it does is because the majority of the people ho have jobs there are intelligent, kind and thoughtful.  But that only goes so far as they push themselves.  If some new, idiotic intellectual fad sweeps the District, it has no immediate feedback from external reality and thus no strong defense against trendy nonsense.
 
One idiotic intellectual fad that has swept the District is to hold blue-collar white males in absolute contempt.  The Democrats are more guilty of this, but the Republicans do it too, especially if they are Republicans who have spent significant time in the District.  Humans are naturally amicable creatures, so if you spend a lot of time with people their views will begin to color yours.  If you spend a lot of time with an insane death cult, you can quite easily end up as a perfectly sane, easy-going individual who will casually slip up and go on tangents about the necessity of blood sacrifice to Moloch in casual conversation. 
 
That's basically your typical Beltway Republican; they really, really want to fit in with the cool kids.  The cool kids believe some kooky things, including that the Beltway Republicans' voting base is Satan.  The Beltway Republicans, for years, would simultaneously pander to the views of their voting base while simultaneously avoiding doing anything that would piss off their cool friends who have jobs in the District.  The Republican base was completely aware of this dynamic, by the way.  It's not like this was some big secret.  Rush Limbaugh would speak at length about it.  The Republican Party may have thought that they were tricking their voters, but their voters were only humoring them because they didn't see a better alternative.
 
And so it would go, year after year, the Republicans became a little more indoctrinated with whatever was the trendy ideological fad in the District, and the trendy beliefs of the District drifted ever apart from anything that makes goddamn physical sense.
 
And then Trump happened.
 
 
If it were President Zodiac Killer or President Low Energy any of the other Republican candidates except Trump, I would agree with your assessment.  But Trump is different.  Very different.

Trump brings a completely different in-group out-group dynamic to politics.  In previous years it was simple; for Republican voters the Republican Party was the in-group, and the Democratic Party was the out-group.  This year is not like that.
 
For Trump supporters Team Trump is the in-group, and Everyone Else is the out-group.  "Everyone Else" includes most Republicans.  Establishment Republicans hate Trump and always have.  Team Trump hates Establishment Republicans and always has, but they are not above the idea of a temporary alliance until such time as they can all be shipped off to gulags.
 
US news media is squarely on the side of the District.  I think that should be obvious; US news media is extremely pro-establishment.  In previous years, the Republican Party would try to get on the good side of the District by compromise, so if a Republican president was taking a lot of heat from the media, that meant that their attempt to get the cheerleader in bed by being nice to her and opening doors for her and buying her flowers cajole the District by compromise was not working, and the Republican base would get disappointed and see their whole party as a joke and just not show up.

Trump doesn't want to compromise with the establishment.  He wants to burn the motherfucker to the ground.  If Trump is taking a lot of heat from the US news media his supporters see that as a good thing.  An authentically populist candidate should get lots of hate from the establishment.  Trump does get lots of hate.  To Trump supporters, the fact that there is so much hue and cry proves that everything is proceeding according to plan.
 
Trump supporters don't bite their nails about the mainstream media polls in 2018 showing that Trump has low approval ratings.  They don't care any more than they cared about the projections showing that Trump had only the slimmest chance of victory in 2016.  To them, 2016 shows that the people doing these polls are incompetent at best and enemy propaganda at worst.  If CNBC releases a new scientific study showing that Trump is the worst president since Hitler, Trump supporters will scoff at it the same way you or I would scoff at videos from ISIS.  Trump supporters simply do not get their information from the channels that are strongly anti-Trump.  
 
 
If Trump were to somehow magically acquire dictatorial powers after the 2016 election, Paul Ryan would have been one of the first against the wall.  Paul Ryan hates Trump, was probably working to undermine him, and the contempt is completely returned.  It's like @Belesarius said; the real drama isn't Trump vs. the Democrats, it's Trump vs. the Republicans.  Paul Ryan retiring is most likely a victory for Team Trump.

Nah the LP-83 was meant to fire a large APFSDS shell at 2000m/s.

This shall be the general thread for all things soviet tanks. I shall start by posting an article I just wrote for my blog. I would recommend Archive Awarness which is an excellent blog about Soviet tanks and their experiences with other nation's tanks.

Rip London:
 
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/london-murder-rate-overtakes-new-york-for-first-time-ever-after-spate-of-fatal-stabbings-and-a3803566.html

Baseball is Back!

The IS-7's ergonomics got rave reviews from the testers, especially with the good autoloader. Anyway, here's the cross section of the 1946 and 1948 model:


 

Comparison of the IS-7's (Object 257) side armor with other soviet tanks:

Comparison of the IS-7's (Object 257) side armor with other soviet tanks:

A 152mm L/64 that fires a 49kg shell at 1042m/s.

Back when I was posting on the WT forums I had a guy tell me that "not penetrated" actually meant "penetrated" in one of my Russian documents because his East German friend said so.

Probably just what they have. The engine design bureau at Kharkov decamped for Chelyabinsk in 1941 and never returned. Most of the brain power behind engines was at either Leningrad or Chelyabinsk. Omsk and Stalin/Volgograd also had good teams for light tank engines. I think it is highly telling Kharkov didn't have an attached engine bureaus like the other factories did and did every thing in house. 
 
Also Uralmash did some cool stuff like the 16 cylinder engine in the Object 279. 
 
Edit: According to DAV Kharkov only did two noteworthy engine designs in the 45-65 period: 5TD and the 5TDF.

Untrue. Oedipus likes to take his victims on death marches, just ask @T___A.

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/05/as-the-trial-of-omar-mateens-wife-begins-new-evidence-undermines-beliefs-about-the-pulse-massacre-including-motive/
 
Who would've thought that having armed men would deter attack:
 

Easier to manufacture is more likely.

The 115 both used two piece and unitary ammunition.