Xlucine

Speaking about turret shape, i just want to remind about first video with Armata crossing a road - tank did not had add-on sheet metal on it.

 
Turret is way narrower than what we saw later.

Hi Donward,
 
Zippo adverts from WW11 with the catchline "Lights every time". There are loads out there, particularly the adverts that focus on the device being windproof.
 
 
 
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/163325923963584488/
 
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/163325923963252344/
 
Just to reiterate. I do not believe that Shermans were referred to as Ronsons in a derogatory sense, nor Zippos for that matter.
 
cheers
Marsh

According to this interview with Deputy General Director of Uralvagonzavod for special equipment Khalitov, T-14 is 100% Russian-made. About Koalitsiya it says that there is unification of parts with T-90, but Khalitov hints about Armata chassis-based Koalitsiya SPG.

Koalitsia-SV.

 

 
Illusion, just illusion.
 
 

 

From Vkontakte

 
T-15: Land battleship.

 

 
Exhaust armor modules can work as a cover from rain AND heater!
 

 

 

 
"Pew pew, capitalists!"

STRNG
 
 
 

Big, light weight, plastic boxes with no interior divisions.  Less packaging, cheaper food.  Grapes and eggs are expensive to get to troops in fresh form because they require extensive packaging.  Fresh meat needs a reefer to move sides and a human butcher at each end.  
 
Flour is easy to travel - throw it in sacks or - if you are handling it rough - a high wall container like show above, suitably covered.  A highway container can carry 50kg, be carried by two soldiers like a litter using little carry hooks, be stacked 5 units high, rolled onto.  Truck beds can have wheels and a ramp allowing the boxes to be rolled on and off fast.  High wall loads do not shift in transit because they are tight packed - full to the top.  When you want to use what is in the high wall you open the top and dig in.  best of all - the bulk cost of a high wall is like $5.  You cannot carry ammo in it, but if you can make all your food stuff naturally shelf stable without packaging (think how you can sit a bowl of uncooked rice on your counter for three months and it will cook up find afterward) then it cuts lift costs a LOT.  Technically reusable, but some high walls are made from food products themselves (such as corn) and can be shredded, soaked in lye water, and used for tortillas.  

It is not. Merkava tanks have very differently looking mine protection plates. Something like this was described by those articles.

Articles that i saw are speaking about anti-mine EW system. Merkava tanks are equipped with passive protection on their hulls against IEDs.
http://defense-update.com/20150509_t14-t15_analysis.html#.VU97SPlVhBe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS2IASOAubA
 
Also:

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 
 
It seems to me that commander's sight can rotate inside of that armored housing.

T-15 TBMP from behind.
 

Catfish of war!
 
 

 

From:
http://charly015.blogspot.ru/2015/05/el-tamano-del-armata-comparado-con-un-t.html
 

 

But keep the hilarious sex ed diagrams in the back. Especially the ones where the vulva grows Mario mustaches.

Best tank
 

We really need to re-dub that video to make Luigi start spouting off about Khirosheev and Deathtraps.  

If they just increased STEM funding the problem would be easily solved.

She was just giving him electrolytes, it's what children crave.

This is called a pretext prosecution and is based upon selective arrests and a scientific measurement of human behavior known as psychographics.  Done right it is a god send for getting bad guys put away.  Done wrong and it is a racist trap that does little to stop crime.
 
However, just arresting people is not the only answer.  Here is my own story.  Not exciting Miami Vice stuff, undercover is not what you think - it is mostly buying drugs or letting chicken heads come on to you.  You do get a good understanding of the world though.
 
Drive someday into Bluff Estates, a blighted black community in Columbia, South Carolina.  When you drive in there will be three or four school age children not in school near the entrance.  They are the drug lookouts.  Their mothers get 20 bucks a day or so in drugs to rent their kids out to yell about police.  If you are in civilian clothes, and fit a profile, they won't yell, but maybe the old lady two doors down makes a call.
 
You are now on borrowed time.  If they make you as a cop you are safe, except people will stand out and yell at you, and they will have their kids run in front of your car hoping you will hit one.  If not then you are probably buying. 
 
As a drug user you take your life into your hands each day you buy.  You either buy from a friend with low risk but with a jacked up price, or you go to Bluff estates where the stuff is cheap but where you might draw the wrong attention and make someone decide you are better off dead.  
 
The first thing you realize about the neighborhood is - no older men.  You have very old men, and boys, but nothing in between.  
 
To understand why this is so weird you have to drive through an impoverished neighborhood where drugs are not a major issue, and they exist. These communities form around 30-40 year old men who are often veterans and usually hard working and blue collar, who provide cultural glue to the younger men.  Younger men are often unemployed, but take day work.  Criminal activity is part of the southern black experience, but black communities draw pretty serious lines between property crime and outright violence.  Beat your wife and ten guys from the neighborhood will come by and talk with you often lead by the pastor of the church. No one, even in the honest communities, talks to the police, but everything in the community is public knowledge.  Older black women are placed on a high pedestal, and motherhood is the route to respectability.  This is not a white suburban community but it works - and if the issue of educational access and job access would be solved, then these communities easily become middle class.
 
Bluff Estates though has no young men.  In the past decade forty are dead.  Four hundred are in prison, half never to return.  There is no statistics for fathers raising children because none are - most children meet their "baby daddies" when they are themselves first incarcerated.  Unlike the poor black community I described above, this one has most women having babies before they are 15 because literally, their men will be dead or in prison soon afterwards.  And addiction runs 50%.  
 
So I drive to the back of Bluff Estates, to a house where twenty men stand.  Only they are not men.  There are 10 old men - 50 plus, and 20 boys, and maybe two men around 20.  The kids are jumped in at 15 after having worked as lookouts.  Several of the kids will be carriers - they will have the guns - the young men never touch drugs or guns.  You look the kids over closely because the week before you had a kid accidentally shoot himself in the leg with a gun and bleed out.  The month before a kid was proving how fearless he was - on video he racked the slide of a Tec-9 he was told to hold, ejected the magazine to make sure it was empty, and then put the gun under his chin and laughing pulled the trigger.  People called it a "malfunction" of the gun and tried to make a case to sue the company that made the gun, but I argue it did exactly what it was told to do.  The gun was purchased by the girlfriend of a drug dealer - most of the weapons are stolen or are straw purchases but the DA is under pressure from the NRA not to prosecute straw purchase deaths, so it won't be a prosecution.  At the local NRA meeting I argue for a change of policy, but everyone is worried that it may happen to them so no prosecution for the gun buyer.
 
There is three cars in front of the drug  house in front of me, about normal - the drug sales is like McDonalds and Bluff Estates has only two entrances, so people tend to queue up.  I am buying an eight today which is five old twenty dollar bills.  If they are new from the bank you may get your ass beat - so be careful about that.  I run my twenties through a washing machine after signing them out because that mistake will get you dead.  You are not suppose to buy with a gun on you, but I have a MAS49 in my trunk and a GP 35 under the seat.  That way if I have to defend myself the department can deny they sent me in, because officially I am not cleared for the work, but the crew at Bluff estates knows all the full-timers so a lot of undercover is done with constables and deputies with part-time tickets.
 
An old guy comes up and I hand him $100.  He puts up five fingers, which means five twenties - everyone does it different but you learn how your dealer works.  If he puts up anything else I will get mad because I am a junky after all and if I let him cheat me to easily I will be in trouble.  He does not because if they think he held out on them they will kick his ass.
 
I drive down the street and a kid runs out with two tweens in a zip lock for me.  It is usually yellowish rock.  I smell it - it needs to smell acid.  If it smells base then I will flip my shit because they are treating me like some college kid and I am dressed like a chubby redneck in a wife beater which I have stained with motor oil.  White guys buying direct are either country or college, and I do not look college.  
 
One of those five twenties will go into the pocket of one of the young guys, and we will have PC to get him, usually in a traffic stop.  He will almost always have a small amount of drugs on him, and a gun.  He is the kingpin of Bluff Estates but we end up only getting him on a weapons and a drug charge.  However we get him, ignore the old guys and the kids.

There's a reason they put a bag over its head.

Yuri Pasholok's guide to posting about the Armata.
 
Suspension:
6 wheels? Obsolete, no modernization potential.
7 wheels? Excessive, heavy.
 
Exhaust:
Side? Hard to conceal, makes tank vulnerable.
Rear?  Impedes the tank's movement in a column.
 
Optics:
Direct optical channel: makes the tank expensive and complicated, signifies primitive electronics.
No direct optical channel: the system is unreliable, the tank becomes blind after the smallest mishap.
 
Protection:
Side armour is insufficient (always)
Top armour is insufficient (always)
 
Active protection system:
No? Any tank without active protection has no future.
Yes? Active protection reveals the tank and impedes cooperation with infantry.
 
Reactive armour:
Poor (always)
 
Fire control
Poor (always)
 
Sights:
Poor (always)
 
AA machinegun:
12.7 mm: excessive obsolete caliber, all the cool kids have 7.62
7.62 mm: insufficient obsolete caliber, all the cool kids have 12.7
 
Armament:
125 mm: insufficient and obsolete caliber for an MBT.
152 mm: excessive caliber, signifying primitive shell technology
 
Cost:
Less than 5 million: disposable garbage
More than 5 million: kickbacks

Source:
https://twitter.com/mod_russia

Or

 
 
I really can't stop 

I'm personally interested in why German turrets were chronically underarmored from the front for no discernable reason. Even basic testing would have shown the glacis to be an order more resistent to incoming projectiles, yet this design flaw persisted from the Panzer IV up to the Tiger Ausf B. Surely they should have realized it, just as the American did when gunners were instructed to primarily aim for the Panther and King Tiger turrets as the best way to disable the cats, right?
 
I know that the M26 and M46 theoretically falls into this same issue, and to appearances so does the M48, but a quick look in the turret reveals the T99 gun mount to support a 38mm thick internal shield, but even beyond that communications recovered by the Chief (? I believe, I a may be sourcing this wrong) indicate that the Army specifically requested and wanted the M26 M46 tanks to have a turret comparable to the then in limited production M4A3E2 in protection, wherein Barnes lies to them; whether because he thought the truth would slow down deployment, or because he honestly did not know, is not my place to make a call. In any case it seems that the Army did as practice prefer stronger turrets and for good reason as post war studies and standard tank tactics showed.
 
I don't think the M48 falls into the trap since it's using the same post war hit study to maximize armor protection, and cross sections do not tell the whole story on something as complicated on the cast bodies of the M48/M103/M60 tanks.
 
Further, as far as I am aware, all other nations were on the same page as the US - Russia continiously updated the T-34 and KV/IS designs with imrpoved turret armor being a priority, and both France and UK made efforts to at least keep front hull and front turret protection the same.
 
Is this a fascist disease? "I demand a tank reflective of the national peoples ideals!" *builds a tank weak in the head*.

And then they're going to demand the AF cut something else instead, and it's probably going to be unglamorous but vitally necessary.