Tank Warfare: Russian Armour vs Western Armour

I said MBT are useless because their MAIN GUN is extremely vulnerable .

A tanks main gun is vulnerable if you can hit it reliably.

Its tracks are also vulnerable if you can hit those reliably too.

the point is that a tank is not defeated when its main gun is taken out... it still has at least two machine guns and excellent long range visibility of the battlefield.

the time it would take to rebarrel a modern MBT means within a few hours it can be fighting again... that is assuming you can actually manage to hit the main gun in the first place. ARENA defends the whole tank including the main gun.

There have been numerous cases in both Iraq & Syria where the MAIN GUN of the MBT was specifically targeted by the militias who were armed with RPGs . Once the Main Gun was destroyed the MBT hardly served any purpose .

Makes you wonder why they target the main gun?

Two main reasons... on a tank with no APS system fitted it is certainly vulnerable, AND because the main gun represents a real danger to enemy forces.

You need to find an unbiased source that shows a realistic figure for vehicle losses... a tank loss is the total destruction of a tank... ie it can't be used any more. Damaging or even blowing off a tanks main gun is trivial damage that can be fixed rather quickly.

MBTs are good in Open and Hilly terrain but certainly not in Urban conflict . And even in Open & Hilly terrain their MAIN GUN is vulnerable .

So ask yourself why all major powers that operate tanks (which is all of them) take them into urban areas???

And if YES , was the ARENA successful in destroying the incoming Hermes or KH 59 ?

I can assure you that the ARENA ( or any other APS) cannot protect an MBT from the Hermes and Kh 59 .

No APS can defend from Kh-59. Very simply a large HE warhead even if prematurely detonated by an APS 10m from a tank will still kill the crew because of the power of the HE warhead. Heavy ATGMs can be stopped by ARENA, including fast ones, but cruise missiles and guided air to ground ordinance like Maverick or LGBs will be engaged by TOR or Pantsir.

So which is it?
Are you an illiterate idiot posting this crap from a trailer park, or are you a troll claiming to be American when you're really not?!
Let us know cupcake.

Is it necessary to be abusive? You can ask for clarification without being offensive.

And you can't deny that Hermes & Kh 59 are used to take out armored vehicles including MBTs .

Even if Sensor Fuzed Weapons like BLU 108 , CBU 97 or Russia's SPBE D are used ARENA / any other APS will be of no use .

It is odd that you talk about ARENA trying to deal with Hermes or AS-18, but talk about American submunitions...

The delivery platform has to reach the MBTs... in the case of MLRS those rockets only reach 40km and would be engaged by Vityaz and BUK, with Smerch making sure they fire only once.

Hermes would likely be hit 10-15m away from the tank but it is questionable about its effect. A standard blast 30kg warhead would likely be more effective than a HEAT round, but the new Afghanistan APS might involve a mechanism that turns the incoming threat in flight... this would yaw the APFSDS round rendering it much less effective... with a HEAT round this could direct the HEAT plasma torch into the ground or up at the air making it rather less effective in its anti armour role.

So yeah, ARENA is useless against Kh-59 since it lacks the intercept distance needed for the tank to survive the blast. However afghanistan may very well be able to counter it- if it uses either a solid hit to kill interceptor or a proximity fused HE-frag one it will be able to engage the kh-59 from 50 meters or maybe more.

ARENA probably wouldn't stop a Tomahawk missile or a Minuteman III... and it is totally ineffective against land mines...

At the end of the day it is very effective against some of the most widely used anti armour weapons like RPGs and recoilless rifles and most ATGMs.

Net them in to the IADs and keep their laser homing shells would keep costs down and also offer serious self defence potential from enemy ground forces.

Not having radar on the vehicles should reduce costs and weight and complication, but with shared data from the IAD it should be able to keep track of all viable targets in range.

Of course a simple MMW radar homing head could offer fire and forget capability too so fitting a MMW radar to the vehicle it could be used in the SARH mode.

The vehicles would also be very potent additions to convoys and for anti ambush use.

From memory the system has a autoloader feeder with 20 rounds, so a burst rate of 20 rounds with rounds loaded into the 20 round loader at a rate less than the rate of fire.

This means with 20 rounds loaded with a further 80 rounds in the turret ammo storage area you could perhaps fire off a burst of 25 rounds where reloading the 20 round ready to fire starts with the first shot and by the time all 20 rounds had been fired at high rate of fire (at perhaps 240 rpm or 4 rounds a second) then perhaps loading 1 round a second into the 20 round autoloader means 25 rounds are fired at 4 rounds a second and then the rate of fire drops down to 1 round a second until the burst is stopped and the autoloader can catch up.

that is my assumption anyway...

With guided shells firing single shots makes the most sense with short bursts mainly useful with unguided shells for anti armour or HE use against area targets.

With all the vehicles on the battlefield able to lase targets there should be no problem engaging large numbers of enemy targets fairly rapidly... a 57mm shell would devastate most aircraft they hit.

RTN wrote:And you can't deny that Hermes & Kh 59 are used to take out armored vehicles including MBTs.

Obviously !  

Anyone at world will naturally deny that an "Hermes" ATGM (because still not inducted into service) or an X-59 (because totally unsuitable and ridiculously inefficient, like any weapon having as its main defeating mechanism blast overpressure, in the anti-tank role) has been ever used as an anti-tank weapon.


MBTs is by a very long margin the most resilent element in the arsenal of any military force around the world agianst momentary/sustained blast overpressure and thermal shock ,to the point that already as result of extensive experimentations and studies completed in the Cold War by both NATO scientists and domestic Institutes the MBT-equiped armoured divisions (taking into account literally ALL VEHICLE or structure present in Army, Navy or Air Force arsenal) was  esteemed the only capable to reliably survive and mount offensive /counteroffensive operations in mission's theatres interested by extensive employment of tactical nuclear weapons by part of both enemy or friendly forces.


Just to provide some figures the T-90 MBT ,in the development phase of its first iteration, was found, in live tests ,capable to maintain almost complete battleworthiness and protect the good health of its crew against a 30kT yield nuclear detonation (that is 30.000 Tons TNT-equivalent , for comparison the filler yield of an X-59 correspond to about 260 Kg TNT-equivalent ) at only 740 m !!
By domestic and foreign late cold war literature mechanical and plastic failures dependant on the effect of blast overpressure capable to render a MBT not more battleworthy occur at level of pressure variating from 310 to 430 kN/mZ.

Even more ,discorporating from the previously cited distance the radius from nuclear detonation's point where was present level of gamma and X dose-rate irradiation lethal for the MBT crew (effects obviopusly absent in the detonation of a conventional warhead), this safety distance was reduced even at less than 510 meters !!.


The defeating mechanism of modern KE and HEAT class of weapons has been purposely designed to overcome the very huge resilience shown by heavily armoued targets to even the most extreme amount of explosion-induced thermal radiation and blast overpressure .

An X-59 exploding at 10 m from a modern MBT would produce a level of energy pressure delivered and induced shock in the internal volume occupied by the crew of the MBT some orders of magnitude smaller than a purposely designed HESH warhead exploding directly on the armoured surface ; and we all know as already relatively outdated space armor has rendered this defeating mechanism largely obsolete.

In Iraq and Afghanistan huge IEDs with 400-500 kg TNT equivalent yields exploding at very few meters from MBTs has been obviously proved to be incapable to even merely damage, and even less taking out, it. JDAMs (with CEP in the order of 9-13 m) has been repeatedly found totally ineffcient in taking out armoured targets ,as clearly shown in First Gulf War when ,after 1 month and half and literally thousands of ad-hoc air to ground missions by part of the uncontested combined Coalition's Air Forces , less than 10 % of the Iraqi armoured targets attacked had been neutralized and the very bulk of the iraqi armoured losses was instead inflicted in only 3 days by the HEAT/KE weapons equiped NATO ground platforms (in particualr TOW ATGM and M829A1 APFSDS) .



At today the unique reliable defeating mechanism against armoured target remain its penetration by part of pluri-MJ capable highly focalized means , be it a KE long rod or a chemically formed jet stream.

nice, so even arena can defend against Kh-59.
still a direct impact from such a missile should crush be able to crush and breach the turret armor with the massive explosion.

hmm, the upcoming appearance of APS that can intercept APFSDS has got me thinking- what is the best counter for this new type of countermeasure?

one can always say go faster- but then what stops the other side from just improving reaction times on their system.

make it stealthy seems ok-ish, but a neat counter is use of widely spaced phased array radars to detect more than a 30mm circle and have a look at the sides too.

other brute force approach apart from getting faster is getting fatter, i mean more massive to resist an impact and preserve its trajectory- 1 problem is what stops the other side from just doing the same with their interceptors or getting creative and use shaped charges to punch holes.

Its really interesting problem- more likely for the russians complex solution of maybe all three mentioned above and some more- only problem is that these next gen rounds would be really expensive. And next gen tank and tank-like targets are going to be more resilient to penetration ie isolated ammo and fuel is expected and would necessitate expenditure of a lot more ammo for a single target. hopefully nothing like m8929e4 price that costs half a car.

Easy solution, if you are in urban warfare or have enough ATGM's overwhelm it from different angles, two possibilities.

a) You will overwhelm the APS System with different and lot of ATGM's RPG's fired at it, also with RPG-30's with predecoy.

b) Use some old PG-7 and alike warheads that cost nothing and wouldn't do much to the tank anyway and deplete his APS countermeasure explosives, problem is you give him time window and expose your location to him like Shtora which turns the turret into the direction of the source of the Laser and with Okhotnik installed in T-90MS and most probably will be installed in Armata and Kurganetz it will give you no time for preperations or 2nd shots, so possibility A) should be the safest way if you are limited to ground forces like infantry with AT weaponary.

Werewolf wrote:Easy solution, if you are in urban warfare or have enough ATGM's overwhelm it from different angles, two possibilities.

a) You will overwhelm the APS System with different and lot of ATGM's RPG's fired at it, also with RPG-30's with predecoy.

b) Use some old PG-7 and alike warheads that cost nothing and wouldn't do much to the tank anyway and deplete his APS countermeasure explosives, problem is you give him time window and expose your location to him like Shtora which turns the turret into the direction of the source of the Laser and with Okhotnik installed in T-90MS and most probably will be installed in Armata and Kurganetz it will give you no time for preperations or 2nd shots, so possibility A) should be the safest way if you are limited to ground forces like infantry with AT weaponary.

those work if you are in urban terrain as you said- im thinking more of general purpose countermeasures.

top attack EFP from big ace 152 shells seem like pretty great option too- those are pretty fast - as fast as what APFSDS dream to be when fired from ETC guns. and a succesful intercept is more likely to rain a lot more hypervelocity fragements on the roof than protect the vehicle.

Another option would be Thermobaric warhead since it won't matter if the tank counters it with APS, it will still go boom and due the high pressure it will damage or destroy the AESA radar and hopefully rip off or damage cannon and destroy optics. This is of course speculation but i think Thermobaric weapon of even RPG round could actually destroy the on or the other system and that with a high probability. A tank that can not shoot, see or defend itself via broken APS, is nothing else than a driving target.

Do you think the russians will eventually manage to make conventional guns fire thermobaric warheads?

KomissarBojanchev wrote:Do you think the russians will eventually manage to make conventional guns fire thermobaric warheads?

Conventional guns? Tank guns you mean?

Well that would be possible without much of hazzle but i think the current HE-Frag grenades with airburst capability are already capable enough and cost most probably less than thermobaric rounds would cost and so far haven't seen anyone using or designing thermobaric weapons for intentional crippling of enemy armors offensive or defensive capabilities.

Do you think the russians will eventually manage to make conventional guns fire thermobaric warheads?

What would stop them from delivering thermobaric payloads from conventional guns?

Regarding defeating enemy APS systems I would simply take a standard calibre round like the 14.5 x 114mm round or the 23 x 115mm round and develop a sabot round (because it would have the lowest drag and highest real velocity and so mimic an APFSDS round best over the greatest distances) and fit the nose with a radar invisible ballistic cover with the actual nose tip being a corner reflector to make it look rather bigger than it really is on radar.


Remember most APS systems only scan the last 50m or so around the tank, so it just has to get to the target area quickly and then over the last 50m appear to be a small calibre high velocity penetrator that will threaten to do serious damage to the tank if not intercepted. The enemy APS system will have specific parameters to decide engage or don't engage... a high velocity large calibre incoming penetrator will be... engage... there wont be a human in the loop because there wont be time.

20 rounds coming in in a burst should render the APS system spent of interception munitions.

GarryB wrote:
Regarding defeating enemy APS systems I would simply take a standard calibre round like the 14.5 x 114mm round or the 23 x 115mm round and develop a sabot round (because it would have the lowest drag and highest real velocity and so mimic an APFSDS round best over the greatest distances) and fit the nose with a radar invisible ballistic cover with the actual nose tip being a corner reflector to make it look rather bigger than it really is on radar.


Remember most APS systems only scan the last 50m or so around the tank, so it just has to get to the target area quickly and then over the last 50m appear to be a small calibre high velocity penetrator that will threaten to do serious damage to the tank if not intercepted. The enemy APS system will have specific parameters to decide engage or don't engage... a high velocity large calibre incoming penetrator will be... engage... there wont be a human in the loop because there wont be time.

20 rounds coming in in a burst should render the APS system spent of interception munitions.

great idea- though i would prefer a 30mm high velocity cannon for its versatility and larger propellant. with computer controlled FCS once the gunner locks on the target and fires the trigger a prep. burst of decoy rounds followed by the apfsds a tiny delay later would screw the heck out of most APS.
i would also add some electronic fused rounds filled with radar chaff. that way the apfsds just strolls through the APS nose (most have delay time for another interception plus the radar chaff cloud just blocked accurate radar picture).

The 30mm round is a much larger round so you would have rather fewer decoy rounds, though conversely it would mean all your APC type vehicles could have a reserve of decoy rounds.

the reason I suggest 23mm is because it is a small compact round that could be carried by any vehicle able to carry a HMG... which is most

it can also carry useful ammo like HE, so these decoy rounds could also be used against light vehicles as an AP round... once all the APS munitions are used up then Kornet missile based attacks can be launched against the heavy vehicles and guided top attack missiles can be directed against the rest.

You could probably fit three to four APFSDS darts in a single 23mm case with a ballistic cap to make ammo handling easier. Corner reflectors on the nose tips and also on the fin leading edges should make them appear to be much larger on any radar pointed at them and their dart shape should allow a very low drag design so high velocity can be maintained over useful distances.

GarryB wrote:The 30mm round is a much larger round so you would have rather fewer decoy rounds, though conversely it would mean all your APC type vehicles could have a reserve of decoy rounds.

the reason I suggest 23mm is because it  is a small compact round that could be carried by any vehicle able to carry a HMG... which is most

it can also carry useful ammo like HE, so these decoy rounds could also be used against light vehicles as an AP round... once all the APS munitions are used up then Kornet missile based attacks can be launched against the heavy vehicles and guided top attack missiles can be directed against the rest.

You could probably fit three to four APFSDS darts in a single 23mm case with a ballistic cap to make ammo handling easier. Corner reflectors on the nose tips and also on the fin leading edges should make them appear to be much larger on any radar pointed at them and their dart shape should allow a very low drag design so high velocity can be maintained over useful distances.

true, and good points. id just add making some of the decoy rounds as "soft" rounds- made of light composites treated with RCS increasing measures. they would be easy to shatter from the front- so a nice solid hit with a hit to kill projectile would release lots of confusing decoys - and most of them would have similar if not larger RCS than the apfsds.

Werewolf wrote:

KomissarBojanchev wrote:Do you think the russians will eventually manage to make conventional guns fire thermobaric warheads?

Conventional guns? Tank guns you mean?

Well that would be possible without much of hazzle but i think the current HE-Frag grenades with airburst capability are already capable enough and cost most probably less than thermobaric rounds would cost and so far haven't seen anyone using or designing thermobaric weapons for intentional crippling of enemy armors offensive or defensive capabilities.

HEF will never give quite the amount of exponential increase in blast power thermobaric gives. If the shmel launcher with it's puny calibre has the power of a conventional HE 152mm howitzer round then imagine how powerful would the 125-152mm thermobaric tank shell would be.

That is right that thermobaric warhead of same calibre as HEF has more power but currently HEF rounds do their job well at least those used on tanks and they are cheaper.

Thermobaric shells are not practical. There is a reason why thermobaric bombs are huge. The concept is to detonate a fuel aerosol in air. You
need a lot of fuel to create the aerosol. There are physical constraints and you can't simply replace the fuel with some high explosive variant
that can be packed more tightly and made to fit in a tank shell.

kvs wrote:Thermobaric shells are not practical.   There is a reason why thermobaric bombs are huge.  The concept is to detonate a fuel aerosol in air.  You
need a lot of fuel to create the aerosol.   There are physical constraints and you can't simply replace the fuel with some high explosive variant
that can be packed more tightly and made to fit in a tank shell.

Then how is it done on the even tinier shmel and metis-M1 warheads?

KomissarBojanchev wrote:

kvs wrote:Thermobaric shells are not practical.   There is a reason why thermobaric bombs are huge.  The concept is to detonate a fuel aerosol in air.  You
need a lot of fuel to create the aerosol.   There are physical constraints and you can't simply replace the fuel with some high explosive variant
that can be packed more tightly and made to fit in a tank shell.

Then how is it done on the even tinier shmel and metis-M1 warheads?

He's referring to thermobaric shells against armor, you would need fairly large and heavy thermobaric weapon to do some seriously damage to any MBT...now compare that to HEAT warheads, where the Kornet's 152mm 10kg warhead against any MBT armor would be best described as a grown man jumping on top of a well shaken can of soda!

i think Mindstorm explained pretty well(as usual) that modern MBTs(at least latest soviet/russian ones) are very resistant to blast damage.
If you close down everything and apply NBC overpressure the crew should only be pretty well shell shocked- bruises and concussions but nothing life threatening.

magnumcromagnon wrote:

KomissarBojanchev wrote:

kvs wrote:Thermobaric shells are not practical.   There is a reason why thermobaric bombs are huge.  The concept is to detonate a fuel aerosol in air.  You
need a lot of fuel to create the aerosol.   There are physical constraints and you can't simply replace the fuel with some high explosive variant
that can be packed more tightly and made to fit in a tank shell.

Then how is it done on the even tinier shmel and metis-M1 warheads?

He's referring to thermobaric shells against armor, you would need fairly large and heavy thermobaric weapon to do some seriously damage to any MBT...now compare that to HEAT warheads, where the Kornet's 152mm 10kg warhead against any MBT armor would be best described as a grown man jumping on top of a well shaken can of soda!

I think you misunderstood what i was saying.

My solution against new modern APS systems that can intercept HEAT,APFSDS and ATGM to speeds of 1800m/s, meaning all of those systems would be highly uneffective against an highly capable and effective APS equipped tank. The solution based on asumption of course, would be a 125mm Thermobaric warhead that does not aim to kill crew, but to destroy APS, cannon, optics and maybe do damage to ERA tile fixing points and displace them.

In case of APS interception against a thermobaric warhead it will not "intercept" it and prevent it from doing its work, but blow it off.
The question at this point would be how effective a comprimized aerosol is, or what kind of APS grenade/shotgun is used and if that is enough to "set-off" the thermobaric filler before it becomes an aerosol. The principe of thermobaric weapons is that the explosive part needs the oxygen from the air to become an aerosol to be reactionary with fire (ignition), meaning even if it is "set off" by APS it should expand before actually igniting and exploding with a massive shockwave.

Since a modern highly capable APS is not easily touched by APFSDS/HEAT/ATGM and even top-attack weapons, so what should be the cheapest and easiest solution to counter such an APS without firing hundreds of rounds untill he runs out of countermeasures. That is obviously speculation from my part but i think Thermobaric weapons should deal some damage to destroy the one or the other part to overcome the APS or to comprimize offensive capabilities of the tank, via destruction of optics or damage to cannon.
I've seen somewhere on the net a picture of a tank's cannon ripped off from a simple RPG-7 warhead which exploded very close to it, since the cannon is not armor but rather simple steel with far lower tolerance of force that is not symetrical from cannon designated use, it should fairly easily be damaged to make it inoperable.

In regards to the ability of knocking out a tanks APS radar, it may work for one vehicle, but if it's integrated in to a BMS than it'll be sharing data with other vehicles with radar making it a moot point. As far as asymmetrical warfare goes, it'll probably evolve away from ATGM units at some point and transforms in to remote operators of cheap helicopter drones, with TV guidance, and wired to EFP's, and the operators could launch the helicopter drones remotely and stealthily off the top of building rooftops. That level of asymmetrical warfare has the potential to be devastating!!!

magnumcromagnon wrote:In regards to the ability of knocking out a tanks APS radar, it may work for one vehicle, but if it's integrated in to a BMS than it'll be sharing data with other vehicles with radar making it a moot point. As far as asymmetrical warfare goes, it'll probably evolve away from ATGM units at some point and transforms in to remote operators of cheap helicopter drones, with TV guidance, and wired to EFP's, and the operators could launch the helicopter drones remotely and stealthily off the top of building rooftops. That level of asymmetrical warfare has the potential to be devastating!!!

not only that- you lose a potentially lethal first shot and just gave away your position. If any targeting channel is still operational the target can still fight back. imo the preempt burst of decoy rounds from 20/30mm coax cannon before a few tenths of a second later apfsds is much better solution. the thermobaric is still great for some applications particularly in the anti-helicopter dept. - even mighty mi-28 would get blown to the ground by the blast from a 125mm thermobaric shell detonating closeby

collegeboy16 wrote:

magnumcromagnon wrote:In regards to the ability of knocking out a tanks APS radar, it may work for one vehicle, but if it's integrated in to a BMS than it'll be sharing data with other vehicles with radar making it a moot point. As far as asymmetrical warfare goes, it'll probably evolve away from ATGM units at some point and transforms in to remote operators of cheap helicopter drones, with TV guidance, and wired to EFP's, and the operators could launch the helicopter drones remotely and stealthily off the top of building rooftops. That level of asymmetrical warfare has the potential to be devastating!!!

not only that- you lose a potentially lethal first shot and just gave away your position. If any targeting channel is still operational the target can still fight back. imo the preempt burst of decoy rounds from 20/30mm coax cannon before a few tenths of a second later apfsds is much better solution. the thermobaric is still great for some applications particularly in the anti-helicopter dept. - even mighty mi-28 would get blown to the ground by the blast from a 125mm thermobaric shell detonating closeby

To make direct conclusion we would need to test thermobaric weapons against tanks and see what damage they do to optics, cannon and APS and for the part that Thermobaric weapons used as Anti-aircraft weapon, they are not favorable because the shockwave is rather small in comperision with a HEF were fragments can fly several dozen meters and still make damage, where the Thermobaric warhead needs remote detonation at maximum of 10 m not counting in the split second delay after aerosol has formed itself.

collegeboy16 wrote:

magnumcromagnon wrote:In regards to the ability of knocking out a tanks APS radar, it may work for one vehicle, but if it's integrated in to a BMS than it'll be sharing data with other vehicles with radar making it a moot point. As far as asymmetrical warfare goes, it'll probably evolve away from ATGM units at some point and transforms in to remote operators of cheap helicopter drones, with TV guidance, and wired to EFP's, and the operators could launch the helicopter drones remotely and stealthily off the top of building rooftops. That level of asymmetrical warfare has the potential to be devastating!!!

not only that- you lose a potentially lethal first shot and just gave away your position. If any targeting channel is still operational the target can still fight back. imo the preempt burst of decoy rounds from 20/30mm coax cannon before a few tenths of a second later apfsds is much better solution. the thermobaric is still great for some applications particularly in the anti-helicopter dept. - even mighty mi-28 would get blown to the ground by the blast from a 125mm thermobaric shell detonating closeby

In all practical applications a thermobaric warhead would prove to be far less effective against helicopters than a HE-Frag shell with ANIET fuzing, which is already widely deployed in active service.

The best weapon against APS would be moment of surprise and stealth, the best and most cost effective solution would be cheap helicopter drones with TV guidance and directly linked to EFP's. A small drone with some ram coating would show up very small on a X-band AESA radar of a APS system, combined with the effect that the slow rate of flying speed would further disguise itself with birds, maybe even strap sythetic bird wings for further disguise.