N-L-M

What the fuck is that nearest sign, land mines?

Abrams Driver then Gunner* 
 
Anyway once after we returned from Kuwait and not to long after we gotten our tanks back from the boat/train we had to loan out some of ours to another unit conducting training. So after like a week of so the guys return the tank claiming the turret was traversing on its own with zero human input whatsoever. So one day the mechanics tell us to go ahead and startup this particular tank and move it forward (so the turret can be freely moved without hitting other parked tanks). They specifically told us not to worry about the turret because its hydraulic line had been completely disconnected and that there was no way it could move unless manually.
 
I hop in and startup and I swear that thing made the freakiest engine startup noises I'd ever heard. Sure enough a couple of moments later with my head out cause I was open hatch in the seat the freakin turret starts traversing on its own! Needless to say I immediately ducked my head and dropped the seat and did an emergency shut off of the engine. Even if I hadn't have ducked I would have been fine since it was parked with 2 tanks on either side and once the gun tube hit the adjacent tanks bore evacuator it stopped it in its tracks anyway. No one got hurt but the tank next to it had to get a replacement bore evacuator though lol......

Worked on a few bits of armor, some "semi famous".  Like the Littlefield M4A3E2 (Albeit briefly) and their "Swiss Hetzer".
Also did more than a little work on the M-18 Hellcat that appeared in that "The Void" movie that came out (and probably went direct to video) at the same time as "Fury".
 
An anecdote from it is from my first time working on it.
I was staff on a large MG shoot (Media/Photo/Technical(firearms)), and was trying to sleep on on a friday (the shoot starts noonish friday, we'd been there since thursday morning), and one of my friends asks "You said you were or are an aircraft mechanic, what do you know about Continental radials?".. (Now I'd heard that there was going to be a warbird or three showing up. So I semi lucidly said "hold on"  and threw on my coveralls and boots. Only to find myself diagnosing a no start condition on a M-18.
 
The gaggle there was about to pull the engine (The M-18 power plant can roll out on rails, but it's still a fucking shitshow, in the Arizona desert) when I showed up and said "Hold the fuck on, lets make sure it has spark, fuel, etc before fucking around with pulling engines".. Yes it had spark. Yes it had fuel, in one tank.. And you could hear the boost pump work.
 
SO I had a guy sit and listen at each fuel filler, as I blew into the line from the mechanical pump (the boosters are centrifugal). The guy at the full tank heard nothing. The guy at the empty tank "heard waves".  (he was like 12).
 
"Your fuel selector is not working"  I said.
 
But the switch works (It's on the firewall under the turret) I was told.
 
"No, the lever is working. (I hopped on the deck and looked down one of the air cooling grates and saw "Well, your linkage has popped off the selector. Hang on."
One  5/8" socket, innumerable bolts, lots of hanging inverted while my beer baby tried to smother me, and a bit of .040" safety wire later, and the boost pump was delivering fuel to the engine, and the beastie ran.
 
From then on (til 2015) I was the "defacto/default" driver and/or crew chief on that thing (and approved RKI and things big and tanky).

This one time in the Army (I'm required to start all my army stories this way by my wife)....
 
Well I was a driver on an M60A3 when I was in C Co. 1/70 AR in Germany in 1983. We were driving down this tank trail, the lead tank of our platoon, when this crunchy (infantryman) pops out from behind a tree. He was about 50 meters or so down the tank trail when he holds up his rifle across his body in a "Halt!" fashion. I ask my TC if I should stop & he says to keep on driving. The crunchy motions for us to "Halt" a couple more times in an increasingly more aggressive and desperate fashion. When we get about 10 meters from him he suddenly realizes that we aren't stopping and an M16 isn't going to faze us one bit. He dove one way and his rifle went the other as we rolled on pass him. I said to my TC "I wonder what he wanted?" and my TC replied "Who the fuck knows." It isn't a wonder that there's no love lost between DATs and crunchies.

Comrades! The time of your waiting is over! I introduce to you the Sierra Nevada VagonZavod AFV-50 Gun Tank
 

Frontal Dimensions
Frontal Armor
Turret Cheek Armor Array (not to scale)
Top/Side
Vital Statistics(as pictured):
Weight : 52.6 Metric Tons
Crew: 3 (Commander, Gunner, Driver)
Length (hull/OAL gun forward): 6.9m/9.3m
Width: 3.9m
Height: 2.4m
 
Engine: Twin Turbocharged+Supercharged V-12 Diesel (880kw/1180hp)
16.73kw/tonne / 22.4hp/tonne
>70 kph on road
 
Armament:
125mm L/48 auto-loaded smoothbore, 30 rounds ready
1x PKT 7.62x54mm Coaxial MG, 3000 rounds
1x KPVT 14.5x114mm AAMG, 500 rounds in 50 round belts
 
 
 
 

NAVAIR Air-to-Air Intercept Procedures Workbook.

Tactical Missile Design by Fleeman.

Johns Hopkins APL Lectures on Missile Design.

I'll get to it mathing them out in a few hours.
Note that the armor numbers are tuned for warheads below 200mm dia; for larger weapons the light armors would lose some of their dynamic effects (thicker more robust jets wouldnt be as affected by light flyer plates), and there ideally should also be a gradual loss of dynamic effects for successive layers (once a jet is destabilized, theres diminishing returns for destabilizing it further); these factors were however excluded for the sake of not overly complicating the equations, as the reference threats are all within reasonable limits.
 
Also @Lord_Jamesthe air gap is multiplicative, so you need to take the exponent, ie for 13 cm the factor is 1.1^1.3=1.13.

Troop surveys suggest they too are in favor of this fuel arrangement.
 

Your most serene radiance, rest assured that we have already considered this very issue and requested our sister Auditors in the Department of Rocketry to develop and manufacture a suitable engine and associated fuel tanks, pumps etc. Unfortunately, our most learned sisters have since informed us telephonically that it may take a significant amount of time for their engineers to miniaturise the A-series tanks and motors to fit a sub-133mm form factor. We would accordingly humbly ask your assistance in motivating the various Auditors involved to apply their full effort to the project given their shared enthusiasm with the advantages it could provide, and eagerly await news from them of any further progress. We will of course happily provide whatever humble technical assistance may be necessary (including providing blueprints of our existing gun and shell designs, and detailed requirements for the motor's thust and specific impulse) to assist our sisters in these endeavours going forwards.
 
Here we should note that we have also taken the liberty of approaching the Department of Aero Engines for assistance in designing and producing a suitable ramjet engine for use as a motor to drive an armour-piercing shell from our existing 133mm gun. This project would, we feel, provide a secure backstop should our most respected sister Rocketry Department Auditors encounter unforseen technical difficulties in achieving their promised goals.
 
Until then, in the interests of beating back the phallocentric Cascadian dogs who even now threaten our Northern border, we have elected to press forward with production of the present shell and motor configuration purely as a stop-gap measure. By the grace of Hubbard, our sisters Auditors will soon deliver a technological marvel to assist us in our fight, but until then we are committed to pressing on as quickly as possible for the sake of the security of our glorious Dianetic People's Republic.

Shaving cream is Haram, as it is a reminder of the days of Patriarchy and toxic masculinity.

So I think I've pushed the RAP-FS concept about as far as I can in this gun configuration:
 

The core is now two 30x350mm rods threaded together. The forward rod has a 13x51mm tungsten carbide bit in the front (underneath a fibreglass cap), while the rear rod screws into the nozzle for the rocket motor. The entire assembly is now somewhat undersized in the bore, with a set of forward fins to stabilize the front and a combination of the rear fins and a rear buffer to stabilize the rear. The fins are now fixed. The whole assembly weighs 8.8kg, with the pad weighing around 500g.
 
The RAP-FS round leaves the barrel at around 1900m/s, with the rocket motor being ignited in the bore via a flash hole in the pad. The rocket burns for around 1.5 seconds after ignition, and is capable of boosting the assembly to around 160m/s from a standing start. In practice, it serves simply to offset the drag of the shell assembly, keeping the round moving at more-or-less its initial speed for around 3km before falling off rapidly. As a result the round has a very strange trajectory.
 
Penetration is around 420mm RHA at the muzzle, with the more slender tungsten bit providing a fair proportion of the overall total (around 78mm).
 
A side effect of the way the shell is constructed is that the steel walls of the outer shell itself make a fairly potent anti-armour weapon. This might result in secondary penetration of as much as 130mm of RHA in a ring around the core assembly, with suitably impressive levels of spalling and shrapnel generation. If the round impacts the target before motor burnout, any remaining unburned fuel also turns into a rather impressive incendiary as it gets pulled into the penetration pathway of the core and/or outer shell. As a result the RAP-FS round is very effective at dealing with light vehicles and bunkers at shorter ranges.

Edit: optimising and calculating the penetration turned out to be a bear, as the way I set up my spreadsheet every change in rod parameters sets off a cascading series of mass and velocity changes that have to be accounted for. Right now, the way I'm doing it is to take the length of the rod, minus the length of the tungsten tip, adjust the parameters until the velocity matches the original velocity, take that penetration, divide by 1.15 and then add in the penetration of the bit at the correct velocity.
 

Yes.
If you end up with negative numbers when doing this it means the sandwich defeated the threat.

Shaving cream is Haram, as it is a reminder of the days of Patriarchy and toxic masculinity.

Shaving cream is Haram, as it is a reminder of the days of Patriarchy and toxic masculinity.

Shaving cream is Haram, as it is a reminder of the days of Patriarchy and toxic masculinity.

First 2 armor arrays completed. I changed around some thicknesses, and had to completely remake the first array: 
 
Lower Front Hull Array: 
 
 
Front Right Hull Array: 
 
 
New LoS thicknesses are : 
 
Lower Front: 980mm 
Front Right: 976mm 
 
Will work on KE and CE thicknesses. 

I think I am done with my suspension, for now:

 
It comes out at roughly 350 kilograms. I would say probably closer to 400kg though. 
 
 
 
On the hull:

@Lord_James
Alright people, it's time for M A T H. For convenience's sake, all the units in this post are going to be SI, MKS.
Today's episode: external ballistics and differential equations!
So, we know that the force of drag is roughly proportional to the velocity squared (not entirely true, but we'll get back to that later).
Drag equations take the following form:

Where Rho is the air density, a is the reference area of the projectile (for shells and rockets, the convention is that the reference area is the cross sectional area of the projo), and Cd is a dimensionless drag coefficient.
Additionally, we know from Newton's second law that F=m*a, which can be rejiggered to a=F/m.
And we know that acceleration is by definition the derivative of velocity by time.
Combining the above, we get the following differential equation:

Where m is the projectile mass.
Solving this diff eq, (and the one for velocity being the time-derivative of speed), we get:

Where x0 and v0 are the initial position and velocity, and ln is the natural logarithm.
We now have almost everything we need, but where are we going to get drag coefficients for 155mm shells at this time of day?
Why, DTIC of course!
DTIC has helpfully provided the complete measured drag curve for the shell,155mm, HE, M101 (The precursor to the M107, with different driving bands but otherwise identical): https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/209134.pdf
Consulting the graph so helpfully provided, we note something odd about our previous assumption:

The drag coefficient isn't a nice constant value, but instead varies with velocity! this is an outrage!
Except it only varies fairly mildly, so we can assume it to be quasi-constant, and we don't have to solve the diff eq for a velocity-dependent Cd (or Kd in the DTIC paper).
So assuming a M101 equivalent shell, launched at 800m/s, a Cd of 0.1 seems reasonable. Solving the above equations with the following constants:

I suggest shoving the above values and the equations found for velocity and range into Excel, and solving both by t, before observing the velocity as a function of range.
 
We get that for a range of 3000m, we have a ToF of 3.86 sec, at the end of which we have a terminal velocity of 755 m/s - A fairly significant residual velocity, I think you'll agree.
We then go on to note that throughout the flight, the velocity remains over Mach 2.5, and that therefore the choosing of 0.1 for Cd is reasonable, as at no point in the flight would it be any higher.
 
For those planning shells other than 155mm, note that drag coefficients are constant for similar forms, regardless of scaling, but the reference area and mass scale with S^2 and S^3, respectively.
For those considering the drag coefficient plots for more optimized projectile shapes, I suggest consulting @Sturgeon regarding drag coeffs.

Thoughts on the Proper Use of Mechanized Forces in Defense Against the Probably Enemy to the West,  Military-Scientific Thought, Summer 2250
 
Inspired by the current procurement of a new armored vehicle, the author has briefly made a closer study of the terrain on our axes of probable deployment, based in their experience of war in the former Nevada.
 
The elevations in the Northern Theater of Military Affairs, excepting the Columbia Plateau on the former Oregon-Washington border and the Snake River Basin, tend towards above FL040 and in fact are often above FL050.
 
In the Eastern Theater of Military Affairs, the terrain is likewise often above FL040 or FL050 throughout northern Former-Arizona, Former-New Mexico, and Former-Utah. Much of the terrain is above FL040, even the valleys between ridgelines in Former-Nevada, where the remnants of pre-war road networks, arid unforested scrub, and relatively flat ground allow the dushman toyota cavalry to utilize their greater tactical mobility. Worse still would be an engagement in one of the open dry lakes which dot these valleys, where their greater on road/salt flat/lakebed speed enables them to decisively outmaneuver nearly any conceivable tracked vehicle, and attack the sides/rear with their powerful anti-tank means.
 
The peaks which separate these valleys are dominating terrain features, often rising above FL100, however the limited engagement ranges of current fire control systems mean that the ability to observe often the entire >10 mile width of the valley (weather permitting) is hampered by an inability to engage the targets observed, at the least with tank gun fire. An interesting conundrum, no doubt. It is conceivable that the very high caliber guns being pursued by the various parties of this competition may be able to engage such targets, using fire by direct aiming to deliver HE-FRAG, VT, or DPICM against the lightly armored opponents.
 
On the other hand, this job could be better accomplished by heliborne light infantry with long-ranged ATGM and a light, airmobile SPH of c.4.75" caliber able to fire shells to 10 miles (15 with RAP), and effective aviation support (fixed or rotary wing). The low "footprint" of the light infantry soldier, in comparison to the heavy mechanized unit, would reduce sustainment needs relative to armored forces, and reduce the effectiveness of enemy ISTAR means. A mission-tailored task grouping based off of an airborne infantry regiment could take any point in the whole of the Newark and Diamond valleys to the East and West under fire, and direct air and artillery fires against throughout Eureka, White Pine, and Elko counties. A lower profile force could be used, consisting of a network of observation posts with long-range radio systems to plot enemy movements, and use rotary or fixed wing aviation to "herd" or channelize the zealots into coordinated fire-strikes using high power artillery or the weapons of our illustrious rocket-missile troops.
 
Indeed, we need a unique kind of vehicle to support this style of warfare. Tentatively termed "4th Dimensional" (three dementions+3D cross domain personeuver) warfare. While past authors have spoken of similar needs for high speed tracked vehicles for this purpose, due to their higher cross country ability and greater protection than wheeled death traps, their suggestions, derived from the pre-war M113 Gavin APC, would be hopelessly outclassed by the toyota cavalry of the mormonhideen. Thus, inspiration should be taken from the pre-war Combat Vehicle (Recconaissance) Tracked series of vehicles. Of particular note are:
 
FV101 "Scorpion" light tank, so named for the 'sting' of its 76mm gun
 
FV-107 Scimitar Reconnaissance vehicle, armed with a 30mm cannon and named for the famous sword of the Medieval Arab cavalryman who's descendants perfected the toyota cavalry concept.
 
FV105 Sultan Command track, allowing the 4th Dimensional personevuer commander to keep pace with their subordinates even in the highest tempo actions
 
FV102 Striker ATGM carrier, able to sling lethal highly maneuverable missiles from outside enemy gun ranges
 
FV103 Spartan Armored Personnel Carrier, as light and maneuverable as the light infantry inside, with low ground pressure and good power to weight allowing it to be far more of a 'go anywhere do anything' vehicle than the "jeep" of WWII
 
However, the modern requirements of today require a new approach, and some new vehicles. The Light Tank would need increased lethality compared to the pre-war 76mm, for example, and a 4.75" howitzer motor carriage would be required. Further additions may include an engineering vehicle, Anti-Aircraft gun motor carriage, and a mortar carrier.
 
Armed with these new vehicles, light infantry forces would be able to move faster, across, through, and over worse terrain, with heavier weapons, than the mormonhideen. The efforts of the Armored Branch to continue investment in over-complicated expensive vehicles is indicative of the decadence, sedentaryism, and intellectual lethargy which has arisen within the Armored Branch. One might reasonably expect such simple-minded solutions from the robotic money-grubbing degenerates in Cascadia or insane religious fanatics of the tribes who inhabit the Eastern wastes. To see such behavior within the PAF Armored Branch is beyond the pale. Instead of thinking of new ways to skin cats, our fellow officers might best be thinking about how to herd them.
 
-Colonel Miguel Chispas, 1st Tactical Studies Group (Airborne)

@Lord_James
Alright people, it's time for M A T H. For convenience's sake, all the units in this post are going to be SI, MKS.
Today's episode: external ballistics and differential equations!
So, we know that the force of drag is roughly proportional to the velocity squared (not entirely true, but we'll get back to that later).
Drag equations take the following form:

Where Rho is the air density, a is the reference area of the projectile (for shells and rockets, the convention is that the reference area is the cross sectional area of the projo), and Cd is a dimensionless drag coefficient.
Additionally, we know from Newton's second law that F=m*a, which can be rejiggered to a=F/m.
And we know that acceleration is by definition the derivative of velocity by time.
Combining the above, we get the following differential equation:

Where m is the projectile mass.
Solving this diff eq, (and the one for velocity being the time-derivative of speed), we get:

Where x0 and v0 are the initial position and velocity, and ln is the natural logarithm.
We now have almost everything we need, but where are we going to get drag coefficients for 155mm shells at this time of day?
Why, DTIC of course!
DTIC has helpfully provided the complete measured drag curve for the shell,155mm, HE, M101 (The precursor to the M107, with different driving bands but otherwise identical): https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/209134.pdf
Consulting the graph so helpfully provided, we note something odd about our previous assumption:

The drag coefficient isn't a nice constant value, but instead varies with velocity! this is an outrage!
Except it only varies fairly mildly, so we can assume it to be quasi-constant, and we don't have to solve the diff eq for a velocity-dependent Cd (or Kd in the DTIC paper).
So assuming a M101 equivalent shell, launched at 800m/s, a Cd of 0.1 seems reasonable. Solving the above equations with the following constants:

I suggest shoving the above values and the equations found for velocity and range into Excel, and solving both by t, before observing the velocity as a function of range.
 
We get that for a range of 3000m, we have a ToF of 3.86 sec, at the end of which we have a terminal velocity of 755 m/s - A fairly significant residual velocity, I think you'll agree.
We then go on to note that throughout the flight, the velocity remains over Mach 2.5, and that therefore the choosing of 0.1 for Cd is reasonable, as at no point in the flight would it be any higher.
 
For those planning shells other than 155mm, note that drag coefficients are constant for similar forms, regardless of scaling, but the reference area and mass scale with S^2 and S^3, respectively.
For those considering the drag coefficient plots for more optimized projectile shapes, I suggest consulting @Sturgeon regarding drag coeffs.

I've been stalking this for a while and decided to start up my own submission.
 

Currently working in Onshape so everyone can go in and poke around the assembly if they want.
I still got a long way to go but it's a start.
Next up is finishing the powerpack, inserting the turret blockout, designing the autoloader, modeling the sponsons, skirt armor, suspension.
I'll Probably be done with most of that by Monday.
 
As a side note a lot of the parts in the assembly don't have the correct mass as of yet...

T-64BV added.
Also added spoilers to make page a bit shorter, faster to scroll.
This was the last vehicle that this guide will cover, BTW. So yes, after several years it is finally done!
@Scolopax
@N-L-M
@Collimatrix
@Ramlaen
@Lord_James
@Zyklon

Sounds reasonable.

There are, however, some amusingly impractical ones:

Report from Lt. Col. [REDACTED] People's Auditory Forces Directorate of Political-Moral Reliability, Auditory and Political Officer for SNVZ and Military-Industry Liaison Officer for RFP "New Battle Tank"
 
Today, exaltedly equal comrades of multitudinous genders, or none at all, I have wonderful news! We will be discussing the ammunition and developmental armor schemes for the SNVZ AFV-50 project. First the ammunition types. 
 
 
High Explosive-Fin Stabilized The primary general purpose support round for the vehicle, equipped with a standard and super quick fuse setting M/V in excess of 500m/s 6.32kg of TNTe filler High Explosive-Fin Stabilized-Urban A “supercharged” HE-FS round designed for short range demolition work 19.88kg TNTe filler Armor Piercing Capped Ballistic Capped-Fin Stabilized The Primary Anti-Armor kinetic energy round Using highly energetic bursting materials, we have achieved devastating beyond armor effects Meets or exceed armor penetration requirements Armor Piercing High Explosive-Fin Stabilized Base Bleed A long range anti-armor round Base bleed reduces drag (and thetan level) throughout the projectile’s flight to ensure optimal retention of auditory capacity. [AUDITED] [AUDITED] [AUDITED] [AUDITED] Chemical Effects-Anti Tank An anti-tank projectile which generates its armor penetrating effects from chemical energy (explosives) within the round Multi Chemical Effects Shell A heavy chemical effects shell with improved explosive qualities at the expense of range and velocity to improve the numbers of use cases.  
 
These shell types will allow the AFV-50 to engage and defeat all known and planned enemy combat vehicles should they foolishly decide to attack the peace loving peoples’ republic. They are effective at all combat ranges, allowing the gun tank to decisively deconstruct aggressions, micro and macro, and fulfill its combat tasks.
 
 
 
Secondly for today, the SNVZ collective would like to discuss the early development of our armor schemes. While it is a capital offense to shame for weight, it is important to note that later design iterations have exceeded initial goals. Truly SNVZ and the AFV-50 program have been blessed with the bounty of L Ron Hubbard Thought and it is important to recognize that our vehicle is healthy at any size.
 
Recognizing the threat posed by CE warheads, the design team initially investigated the use of large volumes of Glass Textolite, alongside steel. (Fig.1) Unfortunately the thicknesses required were rather extreme, and resulted in deep inefficiencies. 
 
 
Fig.1
 
To compensate for these deficiencies the ratio of steel to textolite was increased, however this also increased the weight. The integration of layers of ceramic and High-Hardness Steel was investigated, however the density/areal density of these packages was deeply unsatisfactory. (Fig.2)
 
 
Fig.2
 
 
At this time the collective investigated various arrangements of so called “Special” or “Composite” armor arrays. They were found unappealing due to the large volumes needed to contain them, and the angles required for best performance. (Figs. 3, 4, and 5)
 
Fig.3
 
Fig.4
Fig.5
 
 
At this time it is unclear what growth potential the Cascadian tandem-HEAT warhead may have, and/or the Mormohideen 2”/4”. These high lethality threat systems may not be able to be defeated without elaborate and economically infeasible exotic armor schemes, in the view of the SNVZ design collective. At this time the SNVZ collective is pursuing further armor concept development, but it appears that the weight and size of tanks must increase drastically before adequate levels of protection are possible. Therefore it appears that the medium tank as it is known, cannot be survivable on the modern battlefield.
 
The Cascadian introduction and adoption of the <<Norman>> series appears in hindsight to be a drastic misstep. The current service variation (NORMAN-A) appears to utilize conventional steel armor materials in a relatively novel layout. However, this is hopelessly outclassed by modern tandem charge CE technology. The Cascadians appear mindless stooges of chauvinist revanchism and warmongering, however despite their perfidy, they are not stupid. They are likely to be investigating the potential for equipping a derivative of NORMAN-A with exotic “special” or “composite” armor systems. They are fools for doing so! To defeat modern tandem-shaped charges would require far too much volume and weight of armor to fit in a traditional “medium” size tank. But the Cascadian dogs have made their bed, and so they shall sleep in it. They may as well have introduced the kite shields and chainmail of its namesake, for the good it will do them. In the modern threat environment, where tandem charge ATGMs outrange the ability of armor to detect and engage them prior to, or even after, launch, the Medium Tank is dead!
 
For this reason, the SNVZ AFV-50 designs have blossomed through the iterative process, between 20 and 25% over the initial predictions. Fortunately there is historical precedent for such a matter. Ancient pre-war historical texts speak of a mightily effective Main-Battle Tank, the first of its kind. During the Second Great War it was created, and grew through its design process it grew to just over 1.25x the initial design goal. The Tank Struggle Vehicle Mark 5, or “Panther”, was widely regarded by the ancient sages of the “AxisHistory” forum as the best tank of this second of the great wars, with armor, mobility, and firepower an order of magnitude above the delicate, vulnerable, underarmed and expensive Medium tank M4 "Ronson". Clearly in light of this the weight gain of the AFV-50 is not of much relevance. Collective efforts of SNVZ to improve armor protection continue, and appear to be reaching some success. The DPRC, guardians of the people and L. Ron Hubbard Thought, as well as our most eminent and wise leadership, the most Gracious and Serene Majesty Queen Diane Feinstein the VIII, require cheap winners, like the TSV Mk.5 "Panther" of old, rather than "expensive losers" like the "NORMAN" or "Ronson"! On this matter, I assure you that the shock-engineers of SNVZ will deliver!