That_Baka

4.3 and 4.4 is about disalignment of the optics after being hit by an undefined tank gun. Under point 5. a hit by a 90 mm M71 HE round hitting the turret at 11 o'clock (i.e. right cheek of the turret front) is mentioned, the warhead of the is fuzed without delay and impact angle (relative to armor) is about 45°. The round is fired from 100 meters away, hitting 200 mm left and 500 mm below the optical range finder.
 
 
Following the hit by the HE round under 5., the following happened:
a) the gunner's sight is disaligned even more
b) the commander's sight's alignment couldn't be measured, because it broke
c) the following damage could be noticed at the rangefinder: The left opening already broke away after a hit form the 40 mm (Bofors) gun, now after being hit by a 90 mm HE round, the right optical opening of the rangefinder has broken away too. The shockwave of the detonation was enough to tear away the six screws(diameter 12.7 mm) holding in the (armored) protection cover in place. After removing the rangefinder and examining its status, it became apparent that all mirrors inside the rangefinder broke away from their mounting points. The dots and patterns inside the reticle weren't visible anymore, even though the illumination was still working. None of the mirrors was actually unfastened from the bonding, but the glass mountings broke.
 
 
d) Five vision blocks of the commander were damaged. Two are completely useless (the glass in one is broken, the glass in the other has become misty), while the others are broken, but still can be used to some extent.
 
5.1 The shock caused damaged to the optical connection of the commander's sight, again a mirror was knocked out of the mounting.
 
5.2 Further test firing according to the (planned?) hit pattern was not possible, because the hits from the 90 mm gun damaged the turret mechanically in such a way, that it couldn't be turned anymore. These damages are mentioned in the report of the test facility 91 Meppen.
 
 
4. Firing of a 90 mm HE round from the M48 tank and a distance of 50 m. One hit occured at the right turret side at the lower section, total distance to the rangefinder of the impact location was 600 mm. Result: Armored cover of the rangefinder torn away, right port of the rangefinder broken away. Turret slewing gear loosened (several screws torn away), no hydraulic operation (i.e. turning of the turret) possible anymore. Turret bearing blocks after turning a few degrees. No visible damage caused to the crew (simulated by cardboard cylinders). The tank is for the time being not fit for action.
 
Conclusion: The results of the hit on the optical equipment show that the rangefinder should be mounted elastically in the turret. Wether this can be achieved on the standard tank (i.e. later Leopard 1/AMX-30) without restricting the aiming by the gunner, is being investigated. It is planned to use a prototype of the standard tank's turret W 4a with fitted rangefinder for the same test firings.
 
___
This is a rather loose translation.

NERA & ERA from South-Africa
 

 

Ingwe ATGM being tested against armor

Thanks for the detailed post!
However; I'm not assuming anything about slope or the real limitations of ceramics. I'm simply laying out what I think is a plausible story for why glass or ceramic sandwiches got into the public domain while NERA didn't.
 
My argument is that researchers really were working on glass and/or ceramic arrays (the DTIC documents confirm this) and were very excited about them at some point. But, as you just pointed out, NERA arrays are much better than sandwich arrays (4X efficiency in tests compared to 20X efficiency). So my guess is that, having discovered NERA, the researchers were then very hush-hush about disclosing it. The older sandwich array designs, however, got discussed and slowly leaked into the public domain.
 
Now, you're a reporter and you know something about glass sandwich arrays. But you also know that the work going on that you've heard about was a decade ago. So, having heard almost nothing about new tanks with fantastically effective new armour arrays, what is your assumption?
My guess is that you put together what little you can find out (something about special plates inside the armour package) and add it to what you already know (the layered composite arrays). Add in a few hints about fantastic materials (super-ceramics, advanced polymers, depleted uranium) and you end up with the story about composite armour (honeycomb arrays, supermaterials, plates 'turning' inside a polymer matrix) that we all got told up until a few years ago.
 
TL;DR - Secrecy and the unexpected nature of the advance in technology is what lead to all the stories about fantastic sci-fi materials used in modern tank armour. All along, however, the real secret sauce was in attacking the problem from another angle.

With all of the above, we finally have a formula for why NERA is so prolific:
 
The basic issue is long rods and shaped charges penetrate, to a first approximation, in proportion to their length. Accordingly, the first order of business is to deform or break up the penetrator. This is why NERA and ERA are so good - because only reactive armours can even attempt to do this. It also helps that, as a byproduct of moving towards the penetrator, the reactive armour will tend to feed material into it and effectively increase the volume of material that the penetrator has to plough through.
This does not mean, however, that material properties are useless beyond mere density - high hardness can provide a 30-40% improvement in TE at 'lower' velocities (ie: sub-3km/s). Even where density is concerned, there are optima to be found which can increase ME and TE significantly.
 
So here, then, is the recipe for NERA - an array of modules arranged at a significant angle to the penetrator, the modules being composed of two plates seperated by an incompressible solid (or a liquid, if you can find a way to keep it from leaking). The penetrator, striking the module, forces the plates away from each other due to the action of the incompressible middle layer. Both, in deforming, will tend to feed material into the path of the penetrator, with the facing plate potentially applying a shearing force to the penetrator as well. Finally; where long rods are concerned the rod will tend to bend towards the module during penetration - something which may be less pronounced where the rod is more rigid.
As to the materials and exact composition: equally-sized RHA plates seperated by rubber will do (rubber being the solid which comes closest to being incompressible), but my guess is that unevenly-sized plates would provide an advantage in terms of optimising their function. Here my guess is a lighter (thinner) facing plate and heavier (thicker) backing plate, as this will tend to maximise the shear forces applied. While doing so, the best approach might also be to use a high-hardness titanium facing plate in order to get the highest mass efficiency and plate velocity.
Further improvements might be to put a thin skin of high-density material in front of the modules, to eat up the highest-velocity portions of a shaped charge tip. A ceramic sandwich array might also be a good option. Behind the array, it might be a good idea to have a high mass-efficiency plate (possibly a high-hardness aluminium alloy) to deal with residual penetration. This, in turn, might be backed by a final layer of RHA to provide structural support and a last, high-ME barrier. The whole arrangement; modules, front and back plates etc; should ideally be enclosed in an armoured box for ease of repair and replacement.

While looking for information on perforated armour, I bumped into this:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread162738/pg1
 
This shit is why it's so disappointing to discover that all the secret armour out there is essentially NERA. Look at the description of chobham: layers of high-hardness steel and advanced ceramics! With kevlar fibre-reinforced back plates! And a strike face of ultra-hard, ultra-tough DU/tungsten alloy! It all sounds so space-age and high tech - the penetrators just bouncing off this magic stuff as the crew no doubt hangs out of the hatches, laughing maniacally.

The time of shaped charges being an efficient tank killer when hitting the front - or even the side - of a modern tank are over. The biggest issue with shaped charges is that they work only really good against simple steel targets. This also seems to be the problem of your assumptions: the penetration against steel armor doesn't really matter anymore.

The metal jet formed by the shaped charge liner after the detonation of the warhead is extremely fragile, that is biggest issue of shaped charges. A few milimetres of sloped steel with some sort of elastic or energetic material (thus working as NERA, NxRA or ERA) can be extremely effective against shaped charges, while essentially not affecting the penetration of kinetic energy penetrators.

The Israeli Blazer ERA used two 3 mm thick steel plates and 3 mm layer of explosives; sloped at 60° (and thus in terms of weight eqivalent to some 7-8 mm of steel), this array was capable to reduce the penetration of a RPG-7 from 300 to only about 100 mm - that's about 25 times as much protection as steel of the same weight provides against shaped charges - to be fair one also has to include the weight of the cover plate (which is probably about 3 mm thick based on photographs) and the mounting bolts. The Soviet Kontakt-1 ERA uses two reactive elements (sloped at different angles to still be effective when the ERA tiles is impacted perpendicular) consisting of two 2 mm steel plates with a 7 mm thick layer of explosives. This can reduce the penetration of shaped charge warheads by 400 mm!

But it's not only ERA is extremely effective against shaped charges, but also NERA and NxRA. A sandwich consisting of a 2 mm steel plate, a 20 mm layer of Dyneema fabrics (areal density of 21 kg/m², i.e. lower areal density than a 3 mm steel plate) and a 4 mm steel plate, is capable of reducing the penetration of a 115 mm MILAN 2 warhead by 400 mm, when sloped at 60° and spaced infront of the steel witness block. Granted, there was a lot more empty space between witness block and NERA panel than on real tanks, but actual NERA (that also provides some protection against EFPs and KE ammo) can be more than 8 to 10 times as efficient than normal steel armor.

While tandem warheads were made to counter early ERA types (and also provided a higher efficiency against composite armor such as Chobham according to a British document from the 1970s), there are a lot of reasons why shaped charges are still unsuited and less than ideal at defeating tanks. Explosive reactive armor types such as ERAWA-2, DYNA, Duplet and Relikt have been optimized to provide protection against tandem warheads too. At the same time, NERA and NxRA can be layered without issues, resulting a significant gain in protection also against tandem warheads. This makes shaped charges rather useless for defeating the frontal armor of tanks and also the side armor on vehicles such as the Leopard 2 Evolution or the T-84M Oplot-M.

Meanwhile in order to be efficient (in terms of protection per weight) against APFSDS ammunition, steel plates require a certain thickness, in ideal case more than the diameter of the penetrator. This also affects the efficiency of NERA and ERA against APFSDS ammunition: The Soviet Kontakt-5 ERA, as installed on the T-80U turret, is claimed to enhance the protection of the T-80U by 20% to 30% against (older) APFSDS ammunition. Given Russian/Ukranian claims on the protection level of the T-80U, this means that the ERA provides 130 to 180 mm against (older) APFSDS. Given that the Kontakt-5 ERA at the turret consists of 53 mm to 60 mm of steel and 22 to 24 mm explosives (depending on location due to the different slope of upper and lower ERA tiles), this means it can only provide between 2 and 3 times as much protection as steel of the same weight against APFSDS ammo. Not very efficient compared to the ~20 times the protection of steel per weight of early ERA!

Modern APFSDS ammunition has a more complex construction, using special tips, pre-penetrator, multi-segmented rods, metal jackets or in some cases a composite penetrator, consiting of different (heavy) metal alloys. This allows modern ammunition to be optimized against composite armor, spaced armor and ERA. In extreme cases, this can result in a much higher penetration against special armor than against steel. The Danish Army tested the German DM53 APFSDS against the KEW-A2 (M829A2 with tungsten penetrator), both fired from the L/44 gun of the Leopard 2A5. Despite being shorter and slightly slower - which according to estimations based on the Lanz-Odermatt equation would result in a lower penetration - the DM53 proved to be superior against complex target arrays... supposedly the result of a three-segmented rod construction. According to the German author Rolf Hilmes, who worked as a tank technology expert for the German military procurement agency and who lectured at the German military academy, depending on velocity and range, the DM53 can defeat armor targets that are equivalent to 1,000 mm RHA against conventional penetrators. However he doesn't claim that it can defeat 1,000 mm RHA; in contrast, values from the manufacturer seem suggest a much lower penetration against RHA.

This all isn't possible with shaped charge weapons. You cannot optimize a shaped charge in the same way; the penetrator (metal jet) will always have a similar shape and construction. One can exchange the material of the liner, the shape of the liner or the number of shaped chartges. The Soviet Union developed the 3BK-21B HEAT-FS round with DU liner for the 125 mm smoothbore guns. It was supposedly developed for better penetration against complex/composite armor targets. Based on an US assessment on different liner materials, DU has an "excellent" jet ductibility, which might result in less shattering when interacting with NERA or ERA; however copper was also noted to have "excellent shaped charge jet ductibility" and we know how bad it is against (N)ERA/NxRA. According to some sources, the Soviet found the DU liner to lower armor penetration (against RHA at least) despite it being a denser liner material than copper. This might be the result of a much poorer sound velocity compared to other materials. Given that the Soviets (and everybody else) has given up on using DU as liner material for shaped charges, DU apparently doesn't increase armor penetration against modern tank armor. Alternatively tantalum and tungsten have been found to be desirable for use in shaped charges (at least tantalum is still being used for EFPs) thanks to their "good" ductibility and much better sound velocity. These materials are however rather expensive and both require vacuum sintering.


 
There has been research on different liner materials, which won't set off the explosives in ERA, such as special materials using teflon; however to my knowledge this has lead to nothing useful yet and it won't work against NERA and NxRA. So from the "material" point-of-view, shaped charges are still 1940s/1950s technology, most of them using copper liners; meanwhile APFSDS technology has grown at the same rate as composite armor, currently people might be shooting "composite" APFSDS (combination of different materials in special non-homogenous layout) against composite armor.

Using multiple shaped charge warheads however isn't a great solution either. It increases the weight and size of ammunition, while at the same time requiring a lot of space for proper (somewhat optimal) standoff in order to gain penetration without the second/third/fourth warhead beign defeated by the initiated (N)ERA/NxRA. Just look at the space between precursor and main warhead on the Spike missile:


 
TL;DR:
Shaped charges are less efficient against complex armor and apparently there is currently no reasonable way of changing this.

I am sure there is someone somewhere who don't like you at all for your support of lizard people invasion of Israel via Putin trolls twitter accounts.
 
   On otvaga forum there is a guy who created a thread in Small arms section claiming that there is a global gas piston mafia that shot down all weapon designs that don't use gas pistons.

But it "wasn't designed" to do that. 
 
M193 frags but "not by design".
 
But it's a trite clause at best. We could say the main design is to punch a hole in paper. But if it just so happens to violently expand and induce polonium poisoning then that's totally not the main design. Totally an accident. Just a little fluke. Lolz we already made some so piss off.

That's not... That's not how "LoooSeR'd" works.

I have no idea, and can only tell you it is likely a Kharkovite plot to confuse tankists of the motherland, and thus undermine defense while stuffing their pockets with profits from overly complicated instrument readout.

Leningrad 1947:

Chinese BMPT xaxaxaxa )))))

for some reason the hull looks like KV-1

[BMPT HATE Intensifies]

About the last Soviet tank design, some sort of "what if ...." - http://btvt.info/2futureprojects/490_21vek.htm

Kalshnikov gun journal .Article about flechette ammo by Nikolay Dvoryaninov.
https://www.kalashnikov.ru/strelovidnye-puli-2/
https://www.kalashnikov.ru/strelovidnye-puli/

Experimental  soviet fletchette rounds and comparison with conventional ammo

SVDG (Smoothbore SVD )and PKG (smoothbore PK)

@Collimatrix
Sorry for the waiting and confusion i.e article was avtomats in 7.62 and their history.
Anyway part two
By the end 1946 Red Army was in same situation as 3 year back: there wasnt any avtomat that fully satisficied Army requirements.Development of new avtomats and chosing best from newly developed avtomats was neccesary .Soon GAU announces beginning of new trials for avtomat and one of participant of the competition was young reserve seniour sergeant  M.T Kalashnikov with 5 five prototype guns build in metal behind his back .

Simonov Avtomat As-4-P-44

Degtyarev Avtomat KB-P-315
Preparatory stage of the competition for second avtomat trials with intermediate cartrige (May-October 1946)
Factoring in difficulties with designing new avtomat Firearm Directorate of GAU KA announced new avtomat competition.
Design of Avtomats should be conducted based on refined Tactical Technical Requirement № 3131–45 in doing so suggested that trial should encompass most experienced designers .Сompetition involved couple of design bureaus such as:
-KB-2 and PKB OGK (Kovrov) V.V Degtyarev,S.V Vladimirov,P.P Polyakov and A.P Bolshakov,V.V Zubov, V.A Vedensky , I.I Slostin and E.V Ivanov ,A.A Dementiev ,G.F Kubynov,  S.M Krekin
-KB of plant № 535 (Tula) S.A Korovin
-KB NIPSMVO(Shurovo vilage) N.V Rukavishnikov ,K.A Baryshev ,M.T Kalashnikov
-KB of Red Army Artillery Academy (Moscow) I.K Bezruchko-Vysotsky
-TSkB-14 (Tula)  A.A Bulkin ,G.A Korobov
-KB-180 (Podolsk) S.G Simonov, N.N Efimov

Tokarev Avtomat AT-44

Korovin Avtomat first version

Korovin Avtomat 1946 version
In order to reduce time and resources in beggining  competition whcih  should be proceed in two round. USV GAU received 16 project in the first round.Competition commsion basing upo order of chief of GAU from  June 19 of 1946 and conditions of competions chosen 10 designs for participation in competition (projects of A.A Dementiev,P.P Polyakov,K.A Baryshev, A.P Bolshakov, S.V Vladimirov,N.V Rukavishnikov, M.T Kalashnikov, G.A Korobov,A.A Bulkin, I.I Rakov).Interestingly some of participant brought working firearms alongside technical documentation(S.A Korrovin ,G.F Kubynov,S.G Simonov, N.N Efimov)

Priluchsky Avtomat 

1-st variant of Kubynov Avtomat

Efimov Avtomat Ap-34 OKB-180
10 was participant was allowed to entry second round six of them was considered as generally satifisfactory according to tactical technical requirements (Projects of K.A Baryshev,A.A Dementiev,N.V Rukavishnikov,G.A Korobov,A.A Bulkin,M.T Kalashnikov).Project of I.I Rakov,S.G Simonov,P.P Polyakov,A.P Bolshakov have design flaws and therefore wasnt recommended for continuation of development.In same time commsion decided that not a single project was deserver 1- prize.Commision given 2-nd prize to N.V Rukavishnikov. Encouragement Prizes received A.A Dementiev,K.A Baryshev,A.A Bulkin,M.T Kalashnikov.

T-64 post, with T-64A section is up.
@Collimatrix
@Scolopax
@Bronezhilet
@N-L-M

Kharkovite invention - 64.
How to efficiently waste resources of Soviet Union.
 
   Finally, we came to T-64 section. I know that it is first specific tank type related post in the thread when you scroll it, but only after T-72 and T-80 section I am doing T-64 part, and for a reason. More information on this Kharkovite invention to describe it properly was demanded. A secret knowledge was needed for this task.
 
   Before going into the abyss of Kharkovite treachery, a holy blessing and protection of the spirits of ancestors was needed to survive this dirty trip. My destination was prospekt Stachek 47/Strikes Avenue 47, a holy place of birth of T-80, Kirovskiy factory location. My hand touched a factory wall and my lips gently whispered holy words of blessing to Glorious T-80, words of curses to terrible spawn of Morozov’s twisted mind, words of renunciation from opposite piston diesel engines. “Do you believe in gas turbines, young communist?” “Yes, I do believe in superiority of gas turbines, holy spirit of SKB-2 and Kirovskiy Factory”. Blessing was granted and tough trip started from old walls of a factory that saw Revolution and flames of Great Fatherland War.
   “Kharkovite scum of course tried to conceal their attempts to sabotage Soviet system” holy voice whispered in my mind. “You need to uncover their deceitful claims of superiority of T-64 and their vile fantasies of selling Soviet Rodina property and achievements of working class to rotting capitalist West” confidently said the voice. “Trying to uncover their lies by simply showing terrible results of their attempts to create a fighting machine for Soviet proletariat is not enough! You need to show their true promptings and their deceptive manipulations of people of Soviet Union and members of Communist Party!”.
   “KGB” i said to myself, “they were collecting information about all anti-Soviet elements, and maybe they managed to get some sort of information on Morozov’s sect, what they were doing”. Target now was clear for me.
 
   Museum of political history of Russia. It was located inside of an old Tsarist homestead, build for a ballerina (and a monarchist whore). This museum had a collection of documents showing that Soviets often knew exactly what anti-Soviet elements were saying during their secret meetings. But all displayed papers, yellow and worn out by flow of time, were about “intelligentsia” attempts to undermine Proletariat Revolution by their poisonous poems.
   I needed more. “My PutinTroll ID card may be useful here” my voice sounded enthusiastic. An inconspicuous staff door was found near museum wardrobe with clear sign of PutinTroll access system controlling it. My hand pulled out a small card from a pocket, with “Lenin Banner 2nd Special Chairborn Putinskaya Assault Keyboard Unit” clearly written on one side of that piece of cheap plastic. I didn’t knew what level of access was needed to get inside, but attempt was worth a risk. Card was inserted into device but door did not reacted. Red light was looking at me from card reader, coldly answering to my confusion. “Heh, strange that my card doesn’t work here. Museum staff access card is needed, for sure”. Sounds of steps distracted me from watching in anger at card reader. “What are you doing here” said security guard. “Was looking for a toilet, could find it anywhere, thought that there is maybe a bathroom for staff that I can use.” Guy gave me tired look, “first floor, left from the entrance”. I went down, so at least it would look like I was telling truth. “Maybe this old lady in checkroom have proper card?”. As it was summer time, there was nobody in checkroom, and old lady was drowsy. Perfect. Her card was sticking out of side pocket, and few seconds later it was in my hands. Thrilled and cautious in the same time, I went to other stairs, expecting that this corridor may connect them and have big room for storage or for service personnel of Kshesinskaya. Door with card reader confirmed this assumption. Card reader mechanism grabbed card that was inserted into it and a 2-3 second later opened metallic door.
 
   It was hard to see inside, as only light from hall, coming through doorway was only source of light here. Flashlight on my phone, made by Chinese communists and sold under South Korean capitalists brand was helpful here. Communist-made and Korean-sold flashlight revealed an old corridor with series of doors. “Kazakhstan” was written above a nearest door.
   “They are probably keeping documents here, divided by country, so when ordered by leadership, museum staff can put out or pull out from public part of museum documents with appropriate content. Don’t like country – put out bad docs about them” I told myself. “Need to find Ukraine”. Door was found, with almost no signs of wear. Piece of plastic managed to open it as well and a cool air hit me like a wall. Hundreds of shelves were visible in dim light of dying bulb. «This is excellent! Need to find a proper folder, though. This building is sure big, especially for a court ballerina”.
   After about an hour of searching a pack of folders with “Reports on Morozov’s group assemblies, for comrade Serov” written by a typewriter on it, was found. “This is it!”. I impatiently opened it, with hundreds of pages of text in typewriter font flashing before my eyes. “Everything is here!”
 
 
“Committee of State Security under the Council of Ministers of the USSR. 1955, Decem...
…..
…..
Secret…
….
For comrade Serov…
….
.. Morozov appears to periodically assemble a group of engineers from Kharkov on his property, where in private condition they exchange anti-Soviet ideas…
… as source reported among those speeches Morozov expressed his wish to sabotage Soviet Army capabilities and spend resources of country ineffectively, which was met positively by attendees.
…
[hand written]
Put a device there, I need a tape of that before showing anything to comrade Khrushchev. Did Morozov lost his mind? Recordings of their speeches give to ...
...“
 
“Committee of State Security under the Council of Ministers of the USSR. 1956 March...
….
...full transcript of those meetings is in Attachment 1, some excerpts:
…
- Those Moskovites are crazy, they want to send a device into space on top of giant fueltank with gigantic rocket engine attached to that hideous device.
- I wish it exploded during launch!
- Maybe we can make it to..
- We don’t have any rocketeers here, Mikola
- Yeah. So what we can do to hurt Moscovite thieves? They are stealing our wealth, preventing us from becoming rich, like those bourgeoisie from Paris or London!
- Majority of people here are engineers, and we managed to get inside of Commies weapon industry. We can make them spend their money on our inventions!
- But we need to make them not work, you know, so those nuts will not destroy Paris or London, or we will not have a place to run after their payments!
Laughing
- I propose my idea to make a battle tank, we already discussed this, it should have a lot of advanced features so it will be easy to sell it to Army idiots, but we will make it unreliable enough so they would spend a lot on “fixing” those “problems”
Laughing
- This is how you plan to get a new dacha, Oleksiy?
Laughing
- They will spend a 5-year plan worth of money to make it at least work, but all this time they will not be able to attack better countries then their own!
Laughing
- Give me this horilka, Sasha
- I sure like yours foreign tape recorder, where you got it?
….
….
- Most sophisticated part of any vehicle is engine and suspension. We need to make them as bad as possible, but not too terrible, or they will just reject it.
- Yeah, but we also can put more sophistication on this design. What we can make more complicated there?
- Remember Heavy tanks competition? Several of those boxes had some sort of mechanized loading systems. Maybe we can make our own, but bigger and more complicated?
…
- Let’s also make it steel-only armor! Taking into consideration that Westerners will adopt new and better weapons to the time when we will manage to “fix” all problems, tank armor will not be adequate and because of our over-optimization of weight and volume in our design, they will have hard time to modernize it! And again, this will ensure that will not able to launch any assault operations and start another world war, as our tanks would be always “not combat ready”
- Yes, but just enough “not combat ready”, we will make it balance between “battle capable” and “not capable” so they will be trapped and chained by our design for many years in attempts to finally make it capable of spreading their stupidity!
…”
 
“Committee of State Security under the Council of Ministers of the USSR. 1956, April….
…..
Secret…
….
For comrade Serov…
 
… it appears that this group of dissidents have somebody in upper echelons of our Party, Ivan Alexandrovich. Further investigation can become a subject of political attention. A small excerpt from recorded speech during their recent meeting:
…
- So what about your Patron in Communist party higher-ups?
- He made a report on Joseph Stalin’s cult of personality of and the mass repressions few days ago. 2 years ago he gave to Ukrainian SSR Crimea, for those who did not understood what character I am speaking about. He is reliable enough for our plans.
- Would he support our proposal for Soviet Army? Without his support somebody in Politburo can rather easily push us aside.
- Yes, he would. We started work on new tank that we will push down Army throat, while we will make them want more of that! Generally we already gave this vehicle all we need, it is a matter of construction and fine-tunning it to be bad enough.
- That would cost a lot of money for Communists, haha!
- Not only that, but we will try to make our design to be unified tank of Soviet army, so other factories will produce it as well! Nobody will be able to compete with us!
- Currently T-54 and T-55 are enough for Army, but as our Patron said, Army will be interested in new tank by early 60s. We have about 5-7 years before this project starts, so our group needs to be silent about this subject from now, especially after subject will become political.
….”
 
   “Khrushchev! It was him who helped to push T-64!” “T-64 wasn’t adopted by 1964, but serial production of first vehicles was already started. About 90 of them were made, and Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU dismissed him from the post of First Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1964 as well! Probably after seeing how terrible this tank was, that was pushed by Khrushchev, they finally managed to attract more political figures on their side and throw Nikita out. They understood his Kharkovite treacherous nature and that's why he wasn't allowed to participate in political work! It all makes sense now!”
 
T-64A - first Kharkovite to be adopted by Soviet Army and produced in numbers
Probably because it work, sometimes


 
 
T-64B - T-72 spirit is haunting Kharkovites
Make a tank that work, damn Kharkovites!

 
 
 
 
T-64BV - Conceal this tractor with explosives, maybe NATO will not notice how bad it is!
Kharkovites last original creation!

   
 
 

Experimental  soviet fletchette rounds and comparison with conventional ammo

SVDG (Smoothbore SVD )and PKG (smoothbore PK)

and higher res without watermark from Alexey Khlopotov blog 

Comparative measurements of gun power are interesting, and deceptively complicated.
 
I'll have to put up a proper thread on it as soon as I know all the physics and math, or at least more of it, but basically:
 
 
-A gun is an internal combustion engine, only it spits its piston downrange at the enemy.
 
-Bore volume in a gun is analogous to displacement in an engine.  (Obligatory make fun of T___A moment)  The swept volume traversed by the projectile informs how powerful the gun is.
 
-Pressure is the other part of the equation.  By dimensional analysis, volume times pressure is work.  (Distance cubed times force divided by area is force times distance is work).  So, the integral of a pressure/distance plot multiplied by bore area would be work:
 

(The jitteriness is caused by limitations in the sampling equipment.  The real curve is obviously smooth)
 
-Only this isn't true, because inside a gun, things are moving so quickly that Pascal's Law does not apply.  The work performed on the bullet is the integral of the distance/pressure curve times bore diameter of the pressure at the base of the projectile.  The pressure at the base of the projectile is lower than the pressure that the breech is containing, and these numbers diverge more as velocity goes up.  This is because there's a finite speed of sound in the propellant gas, and as the projectile moves faster and faster, it's outrunning some percentage of the propellant gas, which is thus not exerting pressure on it.
 
 
 
 
So, what does all this ugly math, thermodynamics and (shudder) fluid dynamics have to do with the power of tank guns?
 
At this point in the arms/armor race, APFSDS penetrators are the way to go for gun-launched anti-tank projectiles.  HEAT rounds of a given caliber can generally produce more penetration in RHA, but there are currently more effective countermeasures to HEAT ammunition than to APFSDS.  For best effectiveness, APFSDS needs to be very long and moving very fast.  So the gun had better have some oomph to it if it's going to fling a long enough penetrator fast enough to hurt enemy tanks.
 
Military Reform people (I'm thinking specifically of Blacktail Defense) love to obfuscate this facet of tank design and sign paeans about how wonderful the old L7 was, and how it's just shiny-technology-obsessed brasshat narcissist fucktards who insisted on overspecialized smoothbore 120mm that don't have the ammunition capacity or flexibility that the nonlinear modern battlefield requires.  Bullshit.  L7 was stretched to its absolute limits and kept in service far longer than it should have been.  125mm APFSDS couldn't touch a T-90 with Kontakt-5; what the hell would make anyone think that the piss-weak British rifled guns still had a place on a modern tank?