Gun Ready

The excerpts are from a British report on Chieftain replacement, 1988.
_________
 


 
Weight.

At the 40 year anniversary of Leopard 2 at KMW in Munich it had been announced that the German Army Leopard 2 A7 will get TROPHY from RAFAEL as an additional active protection system. The decision was made against the Rheinmetall ADS.
 
 
 

This is typical "Welt" reporting. They have heard about the 17 units of Trophy purchased for the VJTF and thinking this is valid for the complete fleet...
 
Trophy's defeat mechanism isn't secret and KMW also isn't the one to decide which APS will be fitted to the Leopard 2 MBT, but the countries operating it. Stupid video.

The program name is SPEED and is a multi-material Eulerian / Lagrangian hydrocode with explicit solver technique.

Coming back to the old German specification for armour steel (TL 2350-0001): The allocation to hardness is the following
A, R and D   250 to 300
B                   310 to 360
C                   340 to 390
E                   400 to 450
X                   370 to 420
W                  400 to 450
V                   440 to 490
L                    250 to 300
Now @Wiedzmin you can perform the analysis for the old Leopard 2 AV.

My all dear friends,
first of all - polish MoD mr Błaszczak is lying when he only open his mounth. The same PiS (Law and Justice party) goverment. This is faritails propose only by parlement election this outum in Poland. They will be no new tank in possible to recoginze future in Poland - 2PL, 2A5 after small upgrade and just refresh T-72M1 and thats all. Poland will take Finish 2A6 and Protugaleese if those countres will sell those tanks. And thats all. You must understand that this goverment is lying whole time and sucht "declaracton of interest" is only bubble talks to deluge all around - german partenrs, EU industry, polish soliders and...people before parlament election. Whole goverment narration is about "building strong army" whit 4th division, unit deploy to est, taking US forcet to Poland and tehnical modernisation of the Polish Army. Inn all aspect is low-cost shit. Sorry for talk this straight. In case tanks - all buble talk about "super duper IVgen German-French=Polish tank"  is only to deluge that will be done more then...to small refresh 230 T-72M1 and 148 Leopard 2PL (and this program is totall disaster right now). 

Source: https://www.janes.com/article/90641/poland-interested-in-joining-franco-german-main-ground-combat-system-programme

Test Line-Of-Sight Thickness Diagram overlay at +10 degrees of the Leclerc S1 model:
 

 
The overlay diagram is just a test. Considerable more fine tweaking has to go into it before i can release the rest. The MATLAB program measures the LOS thickness in 10 mm intervals over any part of the crew compartment using pixelated slices of the vehicles in a .png picture format. I have tested it several times with smaller inputs and it seems to work, although it has to process  for 30+ minutes for each aspect. Note that this is not the vulnerability diagram.  As one can see the left front hull LOS is not visible because it went below the value color threshold. Other color coding schemes are available, which i might use instead of this "hot" color scheme. The values vary from a couple of centimeters to a couple of meters. The tracks and the main gun are the primary contributor for these large differences. The program and/or the slice diagram could be adjusted to get rid of the main gun and track assembly so the program generates a more reasonable output.  Either way, more fine tuning and work is required to get the diagrams to a presentable level.
 

 

@Gun Ready
 
It's mucht more complicated. First - this goverment in Poland now have dogma about building 4th division (The 18th "Iron" division) and still having in army 12 mech and mot bde (+ 2 areomobile). While we haven't enught soilders and money. To be honest - money level cover at least 6-8 briades on "NATO level" wile they want to have double of that. Impossible.
And now we have typical improvisation. Polish Army whit 4 div need at least 840 tanks.
 
IMHO Rheinmetall  will have difficult times in Poland couse 2PL program is very far from good cooperation term. Of course at least half is couse polish industry sins but in overal shape - KMW proposal in 2015 where mucht better and accurately calculated. In common opinion here choose RHM was mistake for multiple reson but it was caused by polish PGZ group who chose a partner in the program. PGZ told RHM fairytails about polish competition and RHM told PGZ fairytails about cost and posibilitiest to improve Leo 2A4. Result as known - whole 2PL program for 128 Leopard 2A4 will cost 3,4 bln PLN and finall tanks capabilities are questionable in some areas. 
 
Now this whole bubble talko about "polish nex gen tank" is just smooke scren before parliamentary elections (this autum) and easy PR explanation why T-72M1 are upgraded in so limited way. 
 

He can only climb in and out if the turret is in 11:30 position! That is also the position to drive with open hatch on road.

Coming back to the old German specification for armour steel (TL 2350-0001): The allocation to hardness is the following
A, R and D   250 to 300
B                   310 to 360
C                   340 to 390
E                   400 to 450
X                   370 to 420
W                  400 to 450
V                   440 to 490
L                    250 to 300
Now @Wiedzmin you can perform the analysis for the old Leopard 2 AV.

Coming back to the old German specification for armour steel (TL 2350-0001): The allocation to hardness is the following
A, R and D   250 to 300
B                   310 to 360
C                   340 to 390
E                   400 to 450
X                   370 to 420
W                  400 to 450
V                   440 to 490
L                    250 to 300
Now @Wiedzmin you can perform the analysis for the old Leopard 2 AV.

btw good pic of polish L2A5(or 6?) showing bottom part of turret(here you also can see how its differ from 2AV)
 

 
and some old photo
 

I have the answer for @Wiedzmin to the different steel types and old dude @SH_MM is completely wrong with his theory:
The letters are used in the old German specification for armour steel TL-2350-0001 for different hardnesses where W is 400 to 450 HBW, V is for 440 to 490 HBW and C is for 340 to 390 HBW. The letters hh and sh are not German abbreviations.
 
 

This time, photo taken by myself.
APC Rosomak firing single 81mm camouflage granate GAK-81
 
single 81mm in 1st salvo:

 
 
and single 81mm in 2th salvo:

 
 
And this one was mucht difficult due to weather conditions.
 
Six 120mm motar round on one picture:

 
And twins:

 
 
And the result:

 
 
 
 
In summary - 120mm SMK Rak is very good weapons, very powerfull modern and now the best serial produce in the world. Nice that at least one type of weapons producing in my country can be on top lvl... 

A few absolutly astonishing photos made by Rafał Mniedło  - press officer form 11 Lubuska Dywizja Kawalerii Pancernej
 


 
 

Nothing public as of yet.
There have been some political bickering between French and German politicians both concerned that the other will get a bigger share than them, disagreement over the future export policy, etc, the usual in a binational project.
The first tidbits of information on it are due by June or July IIRC.
 
http://forcesoperations.com/mgcs-le-5050-a-vocation-a-demeurer-selon-florence-parly/

After seeing more photos and paying attention to more details, I'm absolutely sure that this is a Danish Leopard 2A5, which KMW has upgraded to the 2A7 configuration. There are numerous indicators:
it is missing a lot of the optional features that KMW has been advertising for the Leopard 2A7+/2A7V, such as e.g. the SPECTUS driver's sight and the FLW 200 RWS it has the same storage boxes mounted on the hull, that are only used by the Danish military it also features the AMAP-M mine protection kit (which covers a larger section of the LFP and is held by two visible bolts) instead of the Mine-PRO kit installed on the normal Leopard 2A7(+) on top of the turret roof, next to the gun mantlet, an Israeli-made search light is installed, identical to the one adopted by the Danish army on the Leopard 2A5DK (and Leopard 2A7DK) for peace-keeping missions the turret bustle is extended due to the installation of a climate conditioning system the turret roof is not fitted with the bomblet protection kit installed on the Strv 122, Leopard 2A6HEL and Leopard 2A6E, yet the tank features the up-armored version of the PERI R17 - this is again a configuration unique to Denmark  

 

An opinion piece published in the Revue de La Défense Nationale from Marc Chassillan : 130 or 140mm for the future ?
http://www.defnat.com/e-RDN/vue-tribune.php?ctribune=1161
In French. 

I used this image to get the lower boundary of the center hull cavities. For the the cavity thickness I used a prototype Leclerc diagram as a reference and two images of the Leclerc front hull under contruction. Using the two images I got a rough ballpark range  of around 590-690 mm using CAD and photomatching techniques. With the prototype diagram i got a thickness of about 620 mm. It seemed like a plausible number so I went with it.
 
 

 
I can provide some more detailed explanation including the sources if someone wants to know. I was very careful in my evaluation.
 
I will use this model to create a vulnerability map:

With enough money and the full support of the state it's possible yes.
For Israel I could see that happen since the country is still technically at war.
For the US though the cold war is long finished and the tensions between them and the rest of the world haven't risen that high yet.
They definitively can develop and produce a new MBT in a short time frame, but I don't think that there is the political will to spend the money doing it that fast ATM. American members may think differently though, and I would be glad to have their hindsight on this.
 
But as I said we don't even have a letter of intent for now, so it's only speculation at this point.

This is not an assumption by me, but mentioned in the patent by KMW. Each individual armor element has an opening (covered by a plug) on the top, which is used to fill them with Schüttgut (via gravity). This plug is visible on the Wisent 2 aswell. Aside of that, the shape of the armor element is optimized for being filled with Schüttgut rather than NERA; if it would be NERA, why not reuse the same falt-sided NERA modules as fitted to the Leopard 2A4M CAN?
 

Hole and plug for filling the armor boxes, labeled with the number 8.1 in the patent.
 
Light-weight NERA by itself provides poor protection against KE projectiles such as AP(DSFS) munitions and EFPs. That's why modern vehicles usually use a combination of light-weight NERA and passive armor (ceramics, spaced steel plates, etc.). Diehl designed a type of anti-EFP armor consisting of hollow steel bars meant to shatter the brittle EFPs. For additional protection against EFPs, NERA sandwich plates (labeled 11 in the patent drawings) could be added inbetween the hollow spaces:

As for why your URL wasn't working...there is a difference between:
4l-image-85.jpg
and
4I-image-85.jpg
One is a lowercase "L", the other is an uppercase "I".
 
Sauce: https://www.army-technology.com/projects/wisent-2-armoured-support-vehicle/