I have just heard from Richard Ogorkiewicz's wife that he died suddenly on Sunday. As all will know, he was a brilliant writer and analyst in the field of AFVs. He was still active physically and mentally, just completing his memoirs.
I remember all his many kindnesses, keen intelligence and his wry sense of humour. I wil miss him.
Marsh
https://www.army.mod.uk/media/7504/adr008741_in_front_issue_4_final.pdf#BeTheBest
BAE/GD 'Black Night' bid dead?
Rheinmetall/BAE bids merged
Enhancements to powerpack
Gun WILL be replaced with smoothbore
Armour will be "upgraded" to "provide higher levels of protection"
Allow APS to be fitted
Sights, fire/gun control upgrades
The defense comittee of the German parliament has requested that a further 80 Leopard 2 tanks will be purchased for the Bundeswehr, bringing the German tank fleet up to more than 400 Leopard 2s. The buget comittee of the parliament has still to approve the decision, so knowing how they try to keep costs down, it might lead to nowhere.
The programs you mentioned are not failures because of them being handled by the private industry, but mismanagement on the government's side.
The negative difference between state-owned industry complexes and private industry can be summarized with one example: the army wants a new tank, so they tell the industry to design a new tank. In case of a state-owned industry complex, the tank designers will have to utilize components and technology from the state-owned industry complex - there are no alternatives and there is less technology available overall (why should the state-owned industrial complex design a second gunner's sight, when they just had designed a new one?). They end up with one offer and one component for every aspect.
A privatized military industry meanwhile competes against each itself; this forces innovation (evolution works just like that), every company tries to beat its competitors out in terms of technology, reliability or price. This means that there are multiple components or designs form which the military then can choose the best - whatever "best" means in that case. As there is no state-owned competitor, there is no benefit of choosing an inferior product just because it is made by a state-owned company (i.e. no money to gain from choosing worse parts). For the Leopard 2, competition of private companies meant that there four different FCS from which the military then could chose the one that best fits it needs.
Interesting, from when is this document? Seems to be a very early array.
It doesn't matter how a layman, an enthusiasts or even a member of a tank crew rates the survivability of tanks on purely subjective impressions. We know that a part of designing a modern MBT is a survivability analysis, both in terms of simulation and real life-firing tests and we know that every tank aside of the Abrams and Armata has opted for a "wine-rack stowage". This is not an inexcusable flaw, but a intentional design decision, as every tank design is a trade-off between negatives and posivites. As it turns out, every tank design team bar Chrysler's one for the Abrams program has ended up with "wine-rack stowage" in the hull, even on new tanks like the K2 Black Panther and the Type 10, which were designed decades after the Abrams.
Using combat experience to access crew survivability is not bad, but given that only a dozen or so Leopard 2 MBTs have been hit by ATGMs and these were fitted with an outdated armor package from 1979, this is hardly a proof of limited/lower crew survivability, not to mention that crew survivability also can be higher/lower for each tank depending on what enemy it faces.
Seeing the videos from Yemen where a Saudi M1A2S Abrams tank's turret is hit by an ATGM, penetrated by the warhead, yet the crew is saved by the isolated ammo storage and the blow-out panels doesn't actually tell us much about crew survivability (not to mention that these videos are usually cut before anybody can see what happened to the crew) in comparison to a Leclerc, Leopard 2 or K2 Black Panther.
As it stands there has been not one example that clearly shows a tank being destroyed due to its "wine-rack stowage" for the hull ammunition. There is no case of a M1A2S Abrams hit in Yemen at an angle, where the "wine-rack" would cause trouble, but the isolated hull ammo of the Abrams is safe. There is no video of a Leopard 2 being hit and penetrated by an ATGM at the hull front or in such a way that one can say the crew would have survived in an Abrams. There are videos showing singular incidents that are not comparable, yet people are pretending they can serve as a valid base for a comparison. Just two weeks ago a video of a Turkish Leopard 2 tank surfaced, which is hit at the turret front; the missile penetrates the armor and despite the isolated turret ammunition, the tank turns into a big ol' fireball, because 20-30 mm steel were not sufficient to keep the ammunition isolated against the penetrating shaped charge jet.
Documents from the British-German tank design cooperation as part of the FMBT program suggest that according to a British analysis, wet-stowage was considered to be better for crew survivability than isolated ammo stowage in the hull.
Either all tank engineers bar Chrysler's team are dumb or crew survivability isn't as one-dimensional as you seem to pretend.
I don't know what your experience with the thermal imagers from European manufacturers are, but this might just be up to US military/manufacturer just utilizing better screens for displaying the output. Technologically, there is no lead on either side.
But okay, lets talk thermal imagers and MBTs.
When the Leopard 2A5 upgrade was developed, there were two second-generation thermal imaging sensors available in Germany, both designed as part of the tri-national TRIGAT (third generation anti-tank) missile program that lead to the failure that is PARS 3 LR. A small, low-cost IRCCD sensor using a 40 x 4 detector array for the short-range variant of TRIGAT meant to replace MILAN and a large sensor utilizing a 288 x 4 detector array meant for the long-range version (which ended up being PARS 3 LR).
At the time, the latter sensor was considered unreasonable expensive, specifically given that the change in the political landscape had a negative impact on the military budgets in Germany and other LEOBEN countries, while the smaller sensor array was considered to provide insufficient resolution. As a result using the US-German Common Modules for the Leopard 2A5's commander periscope or developing a new IRCCD with lower cost than TRIGAT's larger option, but better resolution than TRIGAT's small model, was considered. Both these systems were tested on the Leopard 2 prototypes (TVM min with the US-German Common Modules, TVM max with a new sensor).
The new sensors was developed by AEG and uses a 96 x 4 IRCCD detector array and was installed into the new Optischer Passiver Hoch-Empfindlicher Leichter Infrarot-Optischer Sensor (OPHELIOS) thermal imaging system developed by a cooperation between Carl-Zeiss, Atlas Elektronik, AEG, TEMIC EZIS and Eltro. This rather low sensor resultion was somewhat negated by a using a special sensor layout, where the detector array was split into two blocks, slightly shifted in alignment, apparently for better image quality. The software of the OPHELIOS thermal imager was already designed to accept the larger sensor developed for TRIGAT with 288 x 4 detector elements, but this upgrade was never made for Germany's tanks at least following the improved relations with Russia and later the focus on assymetrical warfare. An upgrade of the Leopard 2's thermal imager would likely have occured with the KWS III originally planned for 2008, as this would have required a new FCS and new optics.
The US Army settled for a much larger detector array with 480 x 4 detector elements, which was partly possible due to adopting second-generation thermal imagers at a later point of time; this means that more mature manufacturing techniques and smaller process nodes could be used for manufacturing, which are some of the main drivers of the costs of electronics. This detector array is clearly better than the one utilized on OPHELIOS in terms of resolution per scan. In terms of the signal-to-noise ratio (i.e. the most important factor for image quality besides sharpness/resolution), these sensors are all on equal terms, as they all have a TDI of 4 (they rely on scanning each position four times). This allows reducing the noise compared to a first generation thermal imager by half (the square root of the TDI).
It must be noted that there are further fators that need to be accounted for such as the aperature, the quality of the lenses and prisms, the scan rate, thermal sensitivity, etc. These factors for example allowed the EMES 15 with WBG-X to provide better results (according to the US evaluation of the Leopard 2AV) than the Abrams' TIS despite both relying on Common Modules with a 120 x 1 detector array. Nased on what I've read, both Raytheon's second gen FLIR aswell as the AEG-designed IRCCD array for the OPHELIOS rely on CMT with similiar thermal sensititvity (7.5 to 10.5 µm); in theory using a smaller detector in combination with a higher scan rate and larger scan amplitude could provide the same output resolution as a larger detector array scanning slower/less.
The larger detector array of Raytheon's second-gen FLIR is nothing special and not related to the Americans "just being better at making thermals". I.e. in 2000 - one year after the US adopted second generation FLIR - a new thermal imager made by the German industry around Carl-Zeiss was tested on the Leopard 2 called the HDIR. This was designed around a 576 x n detector array (n being 4 for the model tested on the Leopard 2) and provided an output resolution of 1,920 x 1,152 without using inter-lacing. In a comparison with WBG-X and OPHELIOS, it was found that HDIR allowed to detect (persuambly NATO standard) targets at up to 60% further distances. They made a thermal imager with 20% more detector elements one year after Raytheon's second generation FLIR entered service, but hey, "the Europeans are always a generation behind in thermals".
However component discussions make little sense when talking about a tank like the Leopard 2 which has proven to be very adaptable to the customer's needs and has been adopted in countless different configurations, specifically when talking about thermal imagers: the Spanish Leopardo 2E and the Greek Leopard 2A6HEL both utilize the same second-generation FLIR detector from Raytheon as the current M1 Abrams models, which has been integrated by the Spanish company Indra into the Leopard 2's FCS.
The idea that European thermal imagers are in terms of performance one generation behind US systems is laughable. All these systems are following the same laws of physics. Hendoldt's ATTICA thermal imager was designed as a modular family, coming in different shapes and sizes (i.e. small, medium and large detector arrays), which is the standard approach on the market today. Even the "small version" of ATTICA as fitted to the Puma IFV has 57 times as many detector elements as the Abrams' second generation FLIR. The medium versions use a 640 x 512 detector array, while the large one offers a 1,280 x 1,024 detector array, i.e. up to 682 times as many detector elements. As common with third generation thermal imagers, they are available either based on CMT or InSb, i.e. in different wave-lengths. For the Puma an upgrade to a larger detector has been proposed (as the Puma A1 configuration already will upgrade daylight cameras and flatscreen displays, so Hensoldt thinks that upping the thermals is the next step), while the Leopard 2A7V's new thermal imager for the gunner's sight has been adopted for its "long range", implying that they maybe didn't reuse the Puma's system.
For the third generation thermal imagers, Raytheon has developed two variants of the 3rd-Generation FLIR Sensor Engine; one with a 640 x 480 detector array and a 1,280 x 720 elements detector array, as the US military favors the 16:9 wide-screen format, so I don't see how this should enable them to stay a generation ahead of Europe. Safran, Thales, Leonardo, Hensoldt, etc. are all making similar-sized detector arrays.
Leopard 2A6MA3
new ATTICA thermal imager for the gunner's sight, new eye-safe laser rangefinder
add-on armor on the hull
new SPECTUS driver's sight (including rear-facing night vision/thermal imager)
some tanks receive the L/55A1 tank gun
changes to the final drive to regain some mobility that was lost when the tank got heavier (however this reduces top speed a bit)
stronger torsion-bars and optimized tracks, so the tank is qualified for a combat weight of 70 tonnes
more powerful APU
replacing the air-conditioning unit that was first adopted with the Leopard 2A7 (it worked fine, but a new system was developed that also double-acts as NBC protection system). The old NBC protection system is retained and acts as additional air-conditioning unit for the driver
changes to the ammunition racks, so the DM11 round can be stored in all places
modifications to the SAAB Barracuda kit
new digital flatscreen display for the commander
digital control unit for the electric turret drives
fully refurbished engines that are prepared for up-rating
Serge reacted to Marsh in Richard Ogorkiewicz RIP
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