Looks like our finding gets official
The question is however... will they use the Sprut turret and therefore move the commander and gunner to the turret... or will they use the same turret as used on the Armata and Kurganets with no crew in the turret and the crew in the vehicle hull under the heaviest armour?
The point being that the boomerang with the Sprut turret on it has no troops, so the rear of the hull should be totally empty...
That means you could either have the gunner and commander in their normal hull positions and have the turret and ammo where the 8 troops normally sit... or you could move the commander and gunner to the absolute rear so they sit where the back four troop positions currently are and everything forward of that could be firewalled off ammo and unmanned turret position that is firewalled from the rest of the crew.
Or you could have the commander and gunner in the Sprut turret and the troop compartment full of ammo for combat persistence.
I suspect the best option is keeping the unmanned turrets... but using the Sprut gun and the commander and gunner at the very rear of the vehicle and driver at the front.
The D30 was cited by me just as an example of alternative type of main armament, I wasn't implying that D30 could actually be then gun to choose.
Fair enough, but if you are suggesting that the 125mm gun is too powerful for a wheeled vehicle then the same would apply to a 122mm gun, or indeed a 120mm gun/mortar.
The next suitable gun that offers enough HE fire power but without the excessive recoil would be the 100mm rifled medium pressure gun from the BMP-3, which I would agree is a very good choice, but the fact that the long recoil 125mm gun on the Sprut works on an 18 ton vehicle that it should be OK on a 30 ton wheeled vehicle too... so despite the fact that the 100mm rifled gun would be a good alternative I don't think one is needed and 125mm rounds would be totally superior in the range of types of round and their performance.
The only advantages of the 100mm rounds is their compact size so you could carry rather more, and their low recoil.
But even a far larger and heavier AFV, like the italian Centauro 2 weighting around 30 tons, has had issues with its 120 mm long recoil gun, both in terms of stability when firing the gun traversed and in terms of tear and wear suffered from suspensions, even if the hull in itself is way heavier than a Stryker, and was designed from day one as a specialized tank destroyer.
The Russians bought and tested a few wheeled "tanks" of those already...
It seems as if wheeled vehicles have some inherent problem when employing real large guns, unless in turn they get really large, somehow larger than similar tracked vehicles.
The Boomerangs are in the same weight class as the Kurganets vehicles... which are also 25-30 ton vehicles...
It should of course possible to overcome such problems, but the point is the driver behind the choices to made: if the main requirement is direct fire support, a high velocity, mainly antitank large gun could just not be the preferred choice, because it could require more efforts to get the whole thing work seamlessly than is deemed desirable. A different king of gun, actually more close to an howitzer than an antitank gun, would provide the same capabilities in terms of direct fire support with less strain posed on the hull and as such requiring less modification to the base hull.
The boomerangs are not BTR-80s... they are better armoured than BMPs... their experience with direct fire 100mm rifled guns and new 120mm gun/mortars suggests they have some experience and know what they are doing.
If the main mission, on the other hand, is actually to fight enemy's MBTs, such efforts are more than justified, and a Bumerang with a Sprut-SD derived turret, or even an ad hoc developed turret with the same 2A75 gun employed by the Sprut-SD, would be the logical choice.
But it is depending on the mission envisaged for the weapon system: Sprut-SD is mainly a tank destroyer, a Bumerang armed with a large caliber could be developed as well to provide a tank destroyer to Bumerangs' regiments as it could be intended to perform a fire support platform.
In current divisions tanks provide direct high power fire support... in a boomerang div a 125mm gun armed boomerang would provide the same fire support... and with APS and solid armour it should be fairly difficult to knock out actually... except by APFSDS rounds, but that is the same in all the vehicles in that unit so dealing with enemy MBTs would be a priority so 125mm gun armed boomerangs become rather important.
As a last note, if there could be chances that in a foreseeable future the 125 mm gun employed by T-14 and T-90 would no longer be effective enough, it could in turn reduce greatly the viability and effectiveness of a 125 mm armed tank destroyer.
Not really.
The main benefits of a boomerang tank destroyer is that it could operate somewhere like Syria and no vehicle it would come up against could survive a hit from a 125mm gun, yet a boomerang force would be highly mobile... fully amphibious... obviously better in rocky terrain than sand, but you know what I mean.
In sand or marsh then the Kurganets is a similar weight, similar fire power, similar protection, fully amphibious too... fast and highly mobile.
While at least the T-14 could be rearmed with a larger gun, I doubt a wheeled AFV has any chance to get a larger one. 120 - 125 mm seems to be the largest caliber a wheeled AFV, weighting no more than 30 tons could actually employ, and even those calibers are proving troublesome to integrate in wheeled hulls.
If the enemy is so well equipped that you need a 152mm main gun then you probably want to send Armata based vehicles rather than lighter ones anyway.
So it could be, if military top brass have already took into account the need to rearm the T-14, that they could deem more future-proof to rely on an ATGM armed AFV for the role of tank destroyer.
They already have missile armed tank destroyers... the old MTLB chassis with Shturm and Ataka missiles that has been replaced with the radar equipped Khrisantema... they will remain in motor rifle divs in addition to tanks.
A wheeled vehicle armed with a high velocity heavy gun designed to destroy enemy heavy armour is a tank... a medium tank.
The term MBT no longer applies now that they will have heavy tank, two medium tank types and two light tank types.
Armata is the heavy tank. Kurganets and Boomerang are the medium tanks... tracked and wheeled respectively, and Sprut and Typhoon are the light tanks tracked and wheeled respectively.
It is all together possible that the Typhoon might have a 100mm rifled gun with a standard round of HE and tube launched missiles for anti armour use.
ATGMs are slow and vulnerable to APSs compared to any APFSDS shot, but they could be quite easily replaced with more effective ones when their penetration capabilities are no longer enough, something not easily doing with a gun.
Russian laser beam and command guided ATGMs are all supersonic, and firing two on the same laser beam with Kornet would be tricky for any APS to engage.
They have revealed mini ATGMs called Bulat for short range engagements of lighter armour for IFVs to use... they are supposed to be fire and forget.
There are couple of possible applications IMHO
All three good examples, and further they are useful in places where the enemy has nothing better... their superior optics and communications and coordination with artillery and air power would make them fast and light and pretty devastating if used with skill.
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