[Official] Armata Discussion thread #1

Bustles are much better than internally stored ammo since blowoff panels can be installed making it very safe for the crew.

Except that when the turret is unmanned there is no risk to the crew directly, whereas a turret bustle location for the ammo is very exposed to enemy fire.

All the propellent stubs igniting at once is one thing, but all the HE shells detonating at once because they are hit by a HEAT round will destroy the vehicle.

Even Abrams vehicles have been taken out by IEDs that are 50kgs or more of HE... each 125mm HE shell is about 20kgs of HE... times that by 10 and you have a small aircraft bomb inside the vehicle... it wont matter about blow off panels the shockwave will kill the crew without penetrating the armour.

Certainly having a turret bustle with ammo separate from the crew is better than live ammo throughout the crew compartment.

Having all the ammo below the turret ring with an armoured bulkhead between the turret and the crew compartment is even better because it protects both the crew and the ammo.

A turret bustle on fire will burn out an entire tank... it will burn for hours at very high temperatures and the heat will be conducted by the armour to heat the entire tank... everything plastic will melt all the wiring will short out... it will be a write off. And don't think you can pour water on it to put the fire out... it is propellent and explosive... it has all the oxygen and fuel it needs and no amount of water will change that.

Every design has drawbacks. Armata's layout, with the crew placed in the highest protected part of the tank, with all the ammo and fuel stored far away behind firewalls, IMO is the best layout possible for crew survivability, excluding a drone AFV.

The armata is a from scratch design... as you point out... they have thought about their own experience... note their original lack of turret bustles was from their own experience during WWII where they found the easiest way for infantry to take out a tank was to put a block of HE under the bustle on the rear deck with a short fuse. The explosion would either flip the turret off and ignite the ammo in it, or it would just ignite the ammo... either way the heavy frontal armour of the vehicle became meaningless... Note normally if you put a large HE charge on armour it sends a shockwave through but unless it is a huge charge it will do very little damage.

They have also looked at the experience of other armies like the US in Iraq.

An internal cookoff will kill the crew due to the explosion force not having any direction to escape while blowoff panels make the crew survive because the blast isnt directed at the crew compartment.

Explosives will take the line of least resistance... except when there is an enormous amount.

An example is with land mines. With tiny mines wearing a good heavy strong pair of boots can greatly reduce the injury from standing on a mine.
For normal sized mines however the general rule of thumb is a boot that goes up to your knee means you will lose your leg near the knee. A pair of gym shoes you will lose your foot at the ankle.

The explosive takes the body part at the weakest area. Really powerful mines however can do further damage so even if your whole leg is not blown off it will need to be amputated anyway.

Any sealed container like a tank will try to contain the explosion, which is really just a very sudden... you could say explosive increase in pressure. The increase is supersonic and travels as a shockwave of expanding hot gas. If it meets fuel or ammo further detonations will create further shockwaves. When a shockwave hits a flat solid object it usually reflects back the way it came and certain parts inside the tank can be damaged far more than other parts because of the way these explosive shockwaves are reflected and concentrated. Needless to say except for a very small explosion any weakness or opening in the turret will help release pressure. If a turret is fully sealed that doesn't mean that from all angles it has the same strength of the frontal armour. Some openings like periscopes and machine gun and main gun ports only have rubber seals. The crew hatches also will have rubber seals, which would all likely fail in the case of a penetration and internal explosion.

Needless to say a catastrophic explosion it doesn't matter how many points of failure there are... they will all likely fail and all hatches and even the turret might be lifted from the hull due to the enormous pressure.

Having said that for a penetration of a T-72 turret that does not have any loose ammo in the crew compartment and has the hatches open there will be supersonic debris and it would be very unpleasant and loud but unless hit directly by the penetrator both crew would likely survive.

Sure the engine will be destroyed if the bustle cooks off but is that worse than a blown off turret?

The temperatures generated by an engine fire will totally disable the vehicle... all plastic monitors and computers will melt, all wiring will catch fire or short out... a tank with a burnt out engine is no more use than one with a turret blown clear of the vehicle.

I wonder why the worlds best tanks leclerc, challenger 2, leopard 2A6, merkava 4, type 99 and T-90MS have bustles with blowoff panels

Probably to do with the fact that all the vehicles you mention except the Leclerc and T-90SM have human loaders who need to stand at the rear of the main gun to load it. Having ammo in the rear turret is handy for them to reach to load the main gun.
The Leclerc has two crew in the turret as does the T-90SM so in the latter case the turret bustle allows them to carry more than the 22 rounds that are in the under floor cassette autoloader and the other box containing 8 more rounds, while for the Leclerc it performs the same function it does on the other western tanks... keeping the ammo separate from the crew.

These considerations don't apply to the armata because the ammo is separate from the crew, while at the same time protected by the same heavy frontal armour that also protects the crew... I would say the western solution is good enough, while the Russian solution for the Armata tank is the best all round assuming the problem of situational awareness is sorted out (and I assume it has).

Detonators are not fitted to HE rounds till they are ready to fire, and normal HE will not explode unless you push a detonator into it... ie you need an explosion to detonate HE.

The real problem is the propellent, which is designed to burn explosively.

30-40 rounds of propellent going off at once will do some serious damage.

In this case the Soviet and Russian tanks are much worse off than western tanks as the 120mm western ammo is one piece and has a metal case containing the propellent, so a penetrating hit needs to also penetrate the shell case to ignite it directly.

What actually happens in the real world is that the tank is penetrated and the sparks and hot fragments start a fire which sets off the ammo in 2-3 minutes time.

What tended to happen with T-80s was that with a ring of propellent stubs around the floor of the turret with highly inflammable cardboard exteriors exposed any penetrating hit ignited the stub propellent charges and blew up the tank.

With the T-72 the loose ammo in the crew compartment was the problem because the ammo in the underfloor cassette magazine is armoured and separate from the crew... that is why the T-90AM keeps it... the change in the T-90AM and SM is that all that loose ammo is removed from the crew compartment so it also does not catch fire.

Of note the Sheridan tank also has combustible propellent stubs and they pretty much had the same problem regarding internal fires.

Blow off panels are a pressure release mechanism, but so is an open hatch. If the HE rounds are detonated then blow off panels wont help because the shockwave will be uniform and the pressure wave that does the damage will kill what it hits... we are not talking about pressure building up like propellent in a gun, we are talking about instant detonation like a HE charge. The difference is that propellent in the chamber of a gun will build up pressure and pushing that bullet down the barrel is the weak point or blow out panel... basically a designated point of failure.

Replace that propellent with HE and detonate it in the chamber and the chamber and bolt and bullet will shatter because the pressure peak will be reached to quickly for the movement of the bullet down the barrel to release the pressure and the gun will fail in several places at once... it will blow up and gas will leak from all sorts of directions.

Thermo baric means heat pressure.

Very simply by mass a HE charge is about 1/4th fuel and 3/4ths material that generates oxygen rapidly to be consumed with the fuel.

The idea behind an thermobaric round is that it is 100% fuel so it needs to be spread out so the air around the target can be used to ignite with the fuel.

We are not talking about fuel like petrol that will just burn, we are talking about a powdered or liquid explosive that will detonate.

Coal dust or flour will detonate if you get the right mix of air and fuel and a spark.

Because there is no material inside a thermobaric round that generates oxygen and it is all fuel the explosion tends to be more powerful, though variations of air to fuel mixture can lead to variable results where some fuel doesn't burn because there is not enough oxygen.

Most thermobaric charges have a small HE charge inside the thermobaric fuel to spread it rapidly to be followed by a detonator designed to ignite the main thermobaric material using the air around the target.

Russian weapons tend to detonate as they spread.

Thermobaric warheads tend to have lower velocity detonations compared with HE but the shockwave tends to be hotter and of course the oxygen is consumed near the target resulting in suffocation for those hidden from the blast...

Well, yes, I suppose this is an armata related thread...

But I was expecting it to be more focused on modern tank design and what can be considered a success and what can be considered a failure.

For instance using Apache helos as low altitude strike aircraft to take out long wave large fixed radar sites in Iraq before committing stealth aircraft was genius and likely not considered a normal use for the Apache. Later on of course when a unit of apaches were deployed to attack a ground force without preparation resulted in one apache getting shot down (reported as rifle fire which was dismissed in the west as propaganda... the same west that accepted claims of Hinds being shot down with small arms fire in Afghanistan... but I digress).

What I am saying is even the best system can fail if misused and it can shine in unexpected uses if its strengths and weaknesses are taken into account.

An attack on a radar site could have been a terrible failure if they had been prepared for such a thing and had appropriate air defence systems in place to defend the radars.

Very simply a small rise 5km from the radar site on an otherwise open flat plain suggests that that rise should have AD assets nearby in case it is used by attacking helos to fire from cover. Those air defence assets should be hidden and protected of course.

Anyway, if we merge the topics will they keep their order, or will the intermingling of posts make it unreadable?

Ok you beat me

Don't think of this in those terms.

Perhaps you learned something you didn't know before... how can you consider that losing?

I like to laugh at westerners that claim Russia lost the cold war... like getting democracy was some sort of punishment...

Those same people often claim the Soviets lost the space race... they clearly won the space race, what the US won was the race to put a man on the moon. They didn't even take the first pictures of the far side of the moon, nor were they the first to land something on the moon.

OK lets merge these two threads...

MBT (Rear engined)
AA (Pantsir) (Rear Engined)
The Support Armata (Rear Engined)
Coalition (Rear Engined)
IFV (Front engined)
APC..? (BTr-T, Front engined)

To replace every vehicle in a current brigade with an armata chassis vehicle you would need:

R for rear engined F for front engine

MBT R
AA Gun and Missile R(ie Pantsir-S1 turret)
AA Missile R (ie TORM3)
Engineer vehicle R (armoured recovery/repair vehicle like BREM-80U)
Engineer vehicle 2 R (IRM engineer recon vehicle for toxic areas/rivers/ and BMR-3M mined areas/IED areas)
Engineer vehicle 3 R (IMR-3M with grader blade and bucket obstacle clearing vehicle)
Bridge layer R
Command/communications/control vehicle F
IFV F
APC F (lighter armament more troops like BMO-T)
BMPT R
Mortar carrier F (like Vena)
Koalition (replaces MSTA)
Ambulance vehicle
rocket artillery vehicle?
TOS-1 F would also be useful too

They have said there are 5 different electronic suites that have been created that are unified between the brigades so one is tank, one will be a command/recon suite, one will be air defence, and one will be artillery, and I guess there is a troop carrier/general use system.

Most vehicles will have built in APS systems plus DIRCMs and anti sniper sensors etc etc as standard, I would expect, though with their data sharing they would only need one or two vehicles to actually find targets and threats.

COme to think of it, with the high integration of technology ino the T-99, is it possible for an unmanned variant to be available?

That is very likely. Especially for the Mine clearing and river bed recon versions. They could be driven around by their crews till they get to a place where they need to do their job... perhaps an extra vehicle in the brigade could have double control sets and no turret and could be used by Mine vehicle crews to remotely control their vehicles.

That same vehicle could be used as an operational trainer vehicle and also to control UAVs perhaps.

Or perhaps it could be a function of a command vehicle so the crew get out and the vehicle is put on remote control and the command vehicle controls it.

therefore the armata we see with the 120mm gun/mortar fulfilles the bmpt or mortar carrier role? or does it condense both.

It could perform both roles I guess, though a dedicated mortar vehicle could carry more ammo... I would assume if they don't have guided shells they soon will so the number they need to carry to get the job done will be greatly reduced.

I suspect they could certainly use that vehicle for both roles of mortar support and tank support and convoy protection.