T-90 Main Battle Tank #2

It has a hand strap.... it is a hand held recon set of binoculars... those lens covers are popped off manually... who is going to climb out and climb up and pop them off to see or pop them back on to protect those lenses if it gets windy or dusty?

It looks fake... something else goes there and I suspect it is a drone that lands and takes off but operates from that pole, or their might be a different sensor that can open its lens covers and close them remotely.

AFAIK ARENA-2 is to be fitted to other tanks, while Armata has Afghanit, and Kurganets and Boomerang have Standard.

ARENA-2 is able to shoot down top attack missiles, and I assume the newer systems (Afghanit and Standard) can too.

The first version of ARENA could engage overflight ATGMs like BILL 2, but not diving weapons like Copperhead... which is a very rare missile anyway.

Russian_Patriot_ wrote:Detailed photos of the retractable optical reconnaissance system of the T-90M tank

That's the snorkel tube lmao.

Arena can shoot down top attack missiles because of the way the projectile is launched (smart af if you ask me).

The original ARENA could shoot down missiles that flew over their targets like Bofors Bill 2 that would fly directly over top of the target and fire a downwards HEAT warhead when directly above the tank, because of the angles it launched its munitions upwards at and the way they angled their fragments down into the ground close to the tank. This was to prevent fragments killing friendly troops operating near the tank like a normal shotgun like blast of fragments would do.

The newer ARENA model can also destroy incoming missiles in a steep dive... I would think the easiest solution would be that the original munitions were like a claymore mine with a sheet of HE and a layer of fragments and ball bearings on one side to be blown down into the ground hopefully through the incoming missile target, so very simply adding another layer of fragments and ball bearings to the other side of the munition blowing directly up into the air should kill both birds with one stone... and could be used against incoming suicide drones as well.

The only other modification would be to add radar arrays looking up, which would not be a big deal.

The ARENA-M seems to have replaced the wide hemisphere of large numbers of munitions around the front turret edge with munitions in boxes on each side of the tank with wider coverage so they could cover all four directions with four munitions, which I guess is simpler.

And for those Copperheads, fitting a system that's able to defend against that amount of explosives and kinetic system is absurd. It's kinda overkill (or overprotect), and it adds a lot to the weight. If you think about it, even if a system like that is one day fitted, people will always continue to demand stronger APS systems, like those that protect against ATGM from helis. Peole can keep asking for stronger system, but at some point, there will be a "diminishing return". The simple thing is that you cant always protect yourself against every threat.

Copperhead is not heavily used AFAIK, they seem to prefer the Excalibur, but either way it does not really matter because these systems use HE to launch fragments and a ball bearings like a claymore mine... not much is going to survive... the easiest way to stop Copperhead is pop smoke so they can't lase your tank.

Also this is the first time I've heard of the Standard system. Do you have any info on that?

Only occasional mention of it being fitted to the lighter vehicles they are making... Kurganets and Boomerang and Typhoon.

Copperhead was never as effective as advertised but was eventually replaced by the far more capable M982 Excalibur in the US and is in service with a few other countries like Australia and India as well.

The Copperhead was a pain in the ass to use apparently... when the Russians were trying to sell the Krasnopol 152/155mm calibre missile to the French they listed the manual for Copperhead and it was rather extensive checks and special handling procedures for the round. The Krasnopol has a lens cover that is not removed before firing... it is designed to be ejected in flight so the round is simply loaded as a normal piece of ammo and can be loaded into auto ammo handlers like a standard round of ammo.

I think LSOS said they didn't end up buying any anyway... even though they were effective and cheap and already worked with French laser target marking equipment... so they could have kept using the same equipment they already used...

At that point, Tor-M2, Pantsir-SM or even Sosna-R mounted on the Armata Chassis to protect the other tanks would be more useful.

Excalibur should be a fairly straight forward target for TOR and Pantsir in combat... and also Hellfire and other long range missiles.

The shorter ranged Javelin would be more of a problem due to their shorter range and therefore less time to engage, but decent camouflage like Nakidka should render the fire and forget capability of the Javelin ineffective so it becomes a really expensive Metis-M CLOS missile.

Well, not if you consider the cost of such protection.

The problem, really is that, despite having APS systems since the mid 1980s they have not been actually buying and using them so their prices are not going down.

Compared with the cost of losing a vehicle and more so the risk to other vehicles to recover the crew and the vehicle as well then the money is probably very well spent to prevent the damage in the first place. It does not add much weight either like some new armour structure can do.

Once it is in mass production and use its performance can be improved and experience will show what works and what does not.

Having them on all vehicles should allow many new features to be added to the vehicle... imagine a MMW radar view of the ground around the tank that works in all weather, day or night... even dust or snow storms or monsoon rain storms... hell they might even improve it to the point where it might detect land mines in the road ahead...

That's the snorkel tube lmao.

Well if it is then that is a good bonus use for it... combining mast mounted optics with a snorkel system would be a clever use of something you need anyway to get more features and functions from without adding too much...

But against such enemies you don't send t-14 or t-90 with arena-2 but lighter vehicles that don't have APS and against which even the old atgms are deadly.

The point of APS systems is not just to go on your expensive vehicles... it is to go on all vehicles... the first tanks the Soviets tested with APS systems were Navy T-55s...

APS is a kind of last-ditch of defence, with sole armour left after.
You are talking about defence against a direct top hitting ammo.
Why shot a $50k missile to kill a ballistic round with targeting head costing $5k, if you can kill it with a $50 cartridge?

Appreciate what you are saying but it is the job of the air defence missile to defeat aircraft and their weapons... and most of their SAMs like TOR and PANTSIR are not 50K missiles... the vehicles that carry them are not cheap but the missiles are very reasonably priced so they can be used in numbers.

Why use a SAM to shoot down a missile instead of letting the tank try to survive its impact?

the introduction of small missiles for PANTSIR and now for TOR to engage drones could be applied to shooting down enemy munitions as well that wont require large heavy HE warheads to defeat aircraft...

Against guided weapons a MAWS, multispectral obscuring smokes, and some good old fashioned last second jinking is plenty enough. Compared to hard-kill systems it would also be highly effective against relatively hard to intercept threats like heavy bombs or shells or clusters of EFP submunitions. It also renders conventional saturation attacks - which no hard-kill APS could fend off if its sufficiently dense enough, ineffective.

Think the T-14's Afghanit suite. In contrast with arena, which had 26 interceptors ready to fire that covers the entire azimuth, it only had the 10 that only covers the frontal arc of the turret, even. Instead it leans more heavily into the substantial banks of smoke mortars installed, of which it has 48 compared to 12 on the arena. Since the MAWS can determine the exact angles of approach of incoming enemy projectiles the Afghanit would only need to expend a few smoke grenades to provide concealment instead of firing off 12 at once everytime its activated, which stretches the already substantial magazine of obscurants even further. In combat you would expect the T-14 to be popping smoke with unnerving regularity every time its under attack by anti-armor weaponry, which does wonders for its survivability when it can't even be targeted in the first place.

Thats true, T-90 would benefit far more from smoke launcher launching up rather than forwards to spoof IR and SALH guidance, rather than arena.

ARENA would be excellent against light portable anti armour weapons like RPGs as well as heavier anti armour weapons.

I seem to remember the old ARENA could even be manually activated if enemy troops got too close to your vehicle, which is a fairly unique feature.

Probably not so useful in WWIII in Europe but when enemy infantry are swarming your vehicles and everyone is buttoned up firing a few of those would effectively deal with such a threat quite well.

The key upgrades to these Russian tanks will be the communications systems and day and night and all weather optics as well as the net centric stuff that lets them find targets and share target information as well as use drones and other platforms to work together to deal with threats.

To also be able to call in artillery or CAS would be valuable despite the enormous fire power each Russian ground unit commands.

It will still be useful being able to send robot vehicles forward to look for threats and targets and monitor any fire they start taking as they move around which could be dealt with using support vehicles and front line units behind the line of robots.

Considering their strategic forces have a laser system to blind optics I would wonder how far away a new tank based system might be to do the same... effectively acting as a DIRCM for the whole unit...

Mentioned in another thread about testing new armoured vehicles and robot vehicles is the Quarry laser system, which detects enemy optics and suppresses them... sounds like the sort of thing the big IR lamps on the SHTORA system used to do... except more efficient dazzling presumably with laser beams.

Such a system would be useful as it is essentially a DIRCMS system for vehicles...

The better question would be why post that shit here?

The guy has an english accent and is perhaps super butt hurt that the Challenger III is going to be replaced by nothing before it even gets into wide spread service so the next gen British tank does not exist... British armour history goes a little over 100 years from about 1916 to 2022 or perhaps 2023...

Add to that the general ignorance that Soviet tanks were cheap and simple and relied on enormous numbers to be useful, which is obviously wrong to anyone taking an actual interest in the area... first smoothbore tank gun, tanks of comparable performance to western tanks but 20 tons lighter, and yes, produced in vastly greater numbers without spending a lot more than western countries did on their military forces.

Over spending on the military did not kill the Soviet Union... simply limiting them to bludger allies like Eastern Europe and poor third world countries limited their potential for economic growth... of course along with constantly poking the Bear meaning it was focused on self defence instead of growth and development... a better question would be how did they survive so long... and for an easy answer look at post 2000 Russia... getting rid of the baggage and focusing on growth and development and their enormous natural resources they have grown in the last 20 years like few other countries have or could with US and EU pressure to limit their growth. China has of course grown and developed massively but that is in large part from western investment and support, which is disappearing and turning into the hostility Russia has been faced with... an arms race is a great way to piss away an economy and ruin growth potential... assuming it does not end up starting a war.