[Official] Armata Discussion thread #5

It is an interesting idea... the Russians have a history of not putting all their eggs into one basket so if several new technologies show promise the result is a better product.

They developed APS and ERA and NERA, but they also developed composite armour and now they are modifying the basic design of the vehicles to maximise the protection for the vehicle crews... with everyone in the hull it would be simpler to implement electric armour... of course an add on external module like a NERA block on the outside to blunt any penetrator and then a single piece surface located block with insulating armour in the middle and a front electrode and a rear electrode that is attached to the standard vehicle armour would be the ideal solution... from the outside an incoming penetrator would have to run the gauntlet... smoke and chaff/flare launchers put a visual barrier in front of the tank as the round approaches... APS systems fire and intercept incoming missiles and projectiles, NERA blunts any penetrators that get through greatly reducing their penetration potential when they reach the armour of the vehicle. Then it hits the add on armour, which fires up the charge... as the penetrator penetrates the inner stuffing it touches the inner electrode and an enormous charge goes through the penetrator obliterating it... or at least that section of it... greatly reducing its mass and energy and blunting it again... and then it reaches the normal armour of the vehicle...

Most of the time the grenade launchers will result in a miss anyway... those that get through the APS system will take down many of them, and that still leaves three layers of protection...

Of course it does remind me of the British comments about when a Challenger tank accidentally shot a Warrior... the round was stopped by an external armour panel added to improve the protection of the Warrior and everyone talked about the Warrior being as well armoured as a tank. Of course it wasn't until later that they mentioned that the round the Challenger used was a HESH, or High Explosive Squash Head round, and this example just served to shot such rounds are totally useless against any platform with spaced armour or external armour modules. It wasn't that the armour wasn't great, it was a case that the tank round was rubbish. Most tanks fitted with extra armour panels would not be effected by HESH... which is essentially a big soft ball of HE with a tail fuse so it hits a sheet of armour and squashes flat and then explodes sending massive shockwaves through the armour. It doesn't penetrate any armour, what it does is make layers of the inner armour plate to peel off and bounce around inside the tank like shrapnel. Any space or gap or layered armour is totally resistant to such rounds and anti spall liners make it even less effective... but there is a big boom and it looks impressive.

Would be good against light vehicles most of the time, but again against spaced armour is useless.

If you were in an old British tank in WWII and you came up against a Tiger I and you had an old short barrel 76mm gun then your best and only chance would be a HESH because a short barrel gun wont penetrate the armour, but a HESH might take out the crew anyway.

Small calibre HESH don't work well so there is no chance of a 37mm or 45mm or 57mm HESH round being effective.

The 152mm tank gun is better than the 125mm tank gun... it is also more expensive... physically bigger and twice as heavy and the ammo is significantly larger and heavier and also more expensive.

While the 125mm gun is still able to get the job done there is little to no reason to change guns... only internet fanbois are upset about this.

The vehicle families have custom designed turrets... it is highly likely that like they have a new BMP turret with a 57mm high capacity gun and another turret with a 57mm grenade launcher... in addition with turrets with 30mm cannon fitted to, that they probably also already have a turret for a 152mm tank gun ready to go when needed... not a big deal.

Sounds like this guy has a fixation for war thunder.... upgrading guns is done whether it makes sense or not in that game because that is just what you do...

Germany having a 130mm gun is meaningless... they probably need it to ensure they think they can penetrate Armata tanks at battlefield ranges, but the only reason you would mount a 152mm gun on Armata and other vehicles like Kurganets and Boomerang is because some HATO tank has been shown with armour too heavy for the 125 to reliably penetrate at battlefield ranges.

Only 12 year olds think the gun with the biggest calibre wins.

Besides the American Sheridan tank has a 152mm gun too and it is a dog.

miketheterrible wrote:What?

T-14 was always destined to use the 125mm 2A82 cannon.  

Ignore these idiots. Jew-tube fan-boi rubbish sponsored by War Thunder. Its all intended to get dumb kids onto the game and to spending money on buffs like gold ammo.

GarryB wrote:Besides the American Sheridan tank has a 152mm gun too and it is a dog.

Not sure you can call it a gun. it's more like a ISIS-brand mortar that can shoot crappy early-generation ATGMs.

The whole point is that you have to make a design choice and these choices come with consequences... with the T-14 they are in the rather ideal position of having an effective gun that is pretty much standard across their existing types using the same ammo so no unnecessary burden in terms of supply and purchase and loading. They also have a fully developed replacement gun already to go if needed.

If there is an analogy I would say 1941 eastern front with the T-34 tank. They have a 76.2mm gun and a 57mm gun as options and they chose the former because it has a better HE round that is more useful. In this case they would also already have an 85mm gun ready to go too but the 85mm gun is bigger and heavier so you carry fewer rounds, it is more expensive... and vastly over powered... Panzer 2, 3s and 4s of the time really don't require such a big powerful gun... a 76.2mm gun with a longer barrel is a much better solution and that is what they are going with.

Ironically if this was the situation they should put the new 85mm gun on the KV-1 so that it becomes more of a Tiger equivalent a few years before the Tiger got on the battlefield... but the 85mm gun was not ready then sadly.

Then when the T-34 went to the 85mm gun the KV could turn into the JS with the 122mm gun... but again... not needed or possible.

In terms of the 152mm gun they might never need it... or when all the vehicle families are fully in service they might change the Armatas to 152mm and leave the Kurganets and Boomerangs at 125mm guns.

New generation EM guns might make much smaller calibres normal... so a 100mm rifled gun like the BMP-3s gun and a 45mm super high velocity EM gun to penetrate enemy armour... with them mounted coaxially like on the BMP-3...

They are not mature and wont be mature for quite some time yet.

Railguns that have the highest velocities have tiny projectiles that would be essentially useless... accelerate a half gramme mass to 20km/s and it makes a fist sized hole in an armour plate 10mm thick, but make the armour more than a few cms thick and it rapidly loses its ability to penetrate.

You quickly work out that the sweet spot is about 3km/s any faster than that and you get better results by increasing the mass of the projectile than by increasing the speed, but even then getting any penetrator of any decent weight to such velocities in something you can fit on a vehicle is a long way from reality.

Agreed however this has nothing to do with the point which was that railguns are not practical for lobbing large payloads of HE around the battlefield when the enemy is not using heavy armour hence the idea of a secondary low pressure large calibre cannon to fulfill that role (as mentioned in your prior post) however I find your choice of caliber odd while you could probably get more performance out of a 100mm low pressure shell optimised for explosive payload with a 122 or 130mm low pressure gun you could probably have the power of 152mm artillery that takes up only as much space as the current 2a46m5 125mm gun.

There was a low pressure 152mm gun for the VDV that was cancelled... not a lot of details about it but the range of about 15km suggests it was a gun/mortar type weapon like the 120mm Nona... though the wrong calibre for 160mm mortar rounds of course.

New Russian T-14 ‘Armata’ tank ready for export after Syria battle test

I would take one...

It looks like we have 3 different 57mm guns.

Be aware that if you take the muzzle brake of a 2A42 30mm cannon and it will look like a different gun too.

The one on the Kurganets is a low pressure and low velocity gun.

I don't think there is a low pressure low velocity 57mm gun design...

The one on the Derivatsya is high pressure, high velocity gun with high rate of fire.
The gun on the T15 is probably a variant of the Derivatsya's gun with perhaps a lower rate of fire.

I would think anti armour and anti ground target and anti aircraft ammo is probably shared by both guns and that the two guns are actually one and the same.

I think the real difference is that the gun on the AA gun has a water cooling system like that fitted to Shilka and Tunguska and it also has a muzzle break to reduce recoil to reduce unwanted dispersion and also contain coil rings for setting fuses as the rounds are fired.

The twin barrel gun on the Tunguska and new Pantsir has a tube to isolate the shell from one barrel and a ring to measure muzzle velocity with the other barrel... with a single barrel you would just need the rings.

The 57mm APFSDS ROUND we have seen displayed is most likely to be used by the last 2 guns. The one on the KURGANETS is unlikely to use that round.

I suspect there are two types of ammo... one is a grenade launcher like round that is all HE projectile and a tiny stub propellent case like a shrunk down 100mm 2A80 round from a BMP-3, and the other is a bottle shaped S-60 AA gun round that looks like a standard 5.45 x 39mm rifle round but obviously scaled up.

Both would have APFSDS rounds for anti armour use and both will likely be fitted to BMP variants of the new vehicle families... the S-60 round would need to be used in the AA guns too because the slow grenade type HE round would not be suitable for air targets... yet fine for ground targets.

the vehicles are bigger and heavier the armour and armament will be better, however the larger the vehicle the more its a target, BTR-80 is seeing the biggest increase in weight and size. this is really a big change and upgrade for the armed forces

With modern computerise fire control systems and stabilised aiming systems I suspect they realise being a small target is not the advantage it used to be... being bigger but more comfortable for the troops and crew and carrying a reasonable amount of ammo is likely more use.

- First one is the LShO-57 grenade launcher with the reduced ballistic HE and APFSDS rounds that were shown next to it

As shown on that table in the photo the round to the left labelled 30F91 is the big 57mm grenade HE round with a huge projectile and tiny stub propellent like a 30mm grenade round. The centre front of the table labelled 3BM76 is the APFSDS projectile and sabot, and to the right of that at the front of the table is that sabot and projectile in a 57mm shell case the same dimensions as the 57mm grenade round on the left.

APFSDS needs high pressure and high velocity to be effective so therefore the grenade launcher that fires this round fires the HE round as a low velocity grenade and the APFSDS as a high speed anti armour round.

The other ammo is based on the 57mm S-60 shell which is a bottlenecked high velocity AA round in use since WWII... it is not the same as the ground based anti tank gun ZIS-3 which is a 57 x 480mm round... it uses the same round the 57mm ZSU-57-2 and naval 57mm guns as well.

This was made redundant as an AA round because the low rate of fire, but modern fire control systems and laser range finders and being a round big enough that it can take both a decent HE charge and a proximity fuse it have been revived because it is big enough for guided shells and airburst shells mean small targets and manouvering targets can be engaged.

Very simply a large manouvering target would take enormous numbers of round fired at it to hit it... with small calibre rounds like 23mm and 30mm rounds that was OK because their high rate of fire meant the fire control system could calculate a box of where the target will be. If you think about it a plane can accelerate or decellerate or climb or descend or turn left or right or it can do any combination of those things between the time you fire and when the rounds impact the target.

Higher muzzle velocity reduces the amount of time the target has to manouver and makes the maths easier, but lets reduce it down further. You have a pistol and 5m away is a person. In the half a second the bullet from your pistol takes to leave the muzzle and impact the target how far could the target possibly move.

Dodging bullets only works in the movies.

For an aircraft that can manouver the box into which the plane will be when the shells gets there could be quite big, but a 2 second burst of shells from a Shilka or Tunguska means there could be hundreds of shells filling all around the box... with a full sized aircraft you should get a few hits and the damage they cause will make the target less agile and a more easy target for the next burst.

The problem for Tunguska is a very small target like a hand held drone even just hovering still needs to be hit so hovering at 4km it will be hard to detect and you might fire burst after burst and not actually hit it. Having airburst shells that explode as the approach the target however means that instead of 200 or 300 shells blowing past you would have 20-30 shells and they would be exploding near the drone and showering it with tens of thousands of fragments which will bring it down.

Airburst 57mm shells could reach out much further and be fitted with proper proximity fuses so if the rounds are getting closer and closer they wont explode until they are going past so they will explode much closer to the target doing more damage.

To have decent range with air burst HE rounds you don't want a low velocity grenade like round with a small propellent stub and low velocity. You want a mid sized HE round with good velocity to reach out to distant targets... like a HE round for the S-60 gun.

For an IFV that is dealing with armour and soft targets then you want the biggest HE shell you can manage but also a high velocity APFSDS round as well which is what this grenade launcher seems to be offering.

My guess is that they will mix 57mm grenade launcher armed IFVS and 57mm high velocity gun armed IFVS like they did with BMP (73mm) and BMP-2s (30mm)... because they would compliment each other.

Air defence gun vehicles would need the high velocity 57mm gun to be effective.

Note even the BMP-2M upgrade includes both the 30mm auto cannon in 30 x 165mm calibre and the 30 x 19mm grenade launcher too.

- Second and third are the same cannon (2A91, though I have seen it referred as BM-57 too), in two different AU-220M variants with different rate of fire and ammo amount but same ballistic performance.

Thanks... 2A91 57mm cannon is what we are talking about for the high velocity AA gun.

I wonder what the 2Axx number is for the 57mm grenade launcher. 2A7 and 2A14 are for the 23mm cannon, and 2A42 and 2A72 are single barrel 30mm cannon for the BMP-2 and BMP-3 respectively and the 2A38M is the twin barrel 30mm gun for the Tunguska and Pantsir-S1...

On Derivatsia and T-15 is the same gun. Derivatsia only have programing device on muzzle break to program air burst programable ammunition. It would be good to equip T-15 with air burst ammunuition as well.

With the 30mm airburst ammo there is a rear looking optical sensor in the 30mm round and a coded laser beam is used to set off the round from the vehicle that fired the round... it means no expensive accurate timer is needed in the shells which makes them vastly cheaper... I would hope the 57mm airburst rounds would be the same to be honest. Note the Tunguska has an induction coil over one muzzle to measure muzzle velocity in real time which is passed to the fire control computer to improve accuracy... are you sure it is not doing this?

Kurganets with low pressure gun could not use APFSDS ammunition, because APFSDS have even higher pressure than ordinary ammunition

But the ammo displayed on the table shows both a HE round and an APFSDS round.

No one said the 57mm grenade launcher was a low pressure weapon.

The APFSDS rounds on display show it is not a low pressure weapon.

Low pressure gun need special ammunition with less powder in it and could not use the same ammunition as derivatsia and T-15.

The only low pressure guns they use are the 73mm gun of the BMP which is more a closed end recoilless rifle like an SPG-9, and the 30mm and 40mm grenade launchers.

So no APFSDS, no laser guided rounds, no air burst ammunition, just special He-FRAG and HEAT ammunition.

We are only calling the 57mm grenade launcher a low pressure gun because its standard round is like the 100mm rifled gun of the BMP-3... the original gun was a low pressure round that fired a HE round to 4km. Later they improved the ammo to 7km range with a higher pressure round. It is not impossible that they could further increase the pressure further in a new version to fire APFSDS if they wanted to.

The 2A80 100mm rifled medium pressure gun of the BMP-3 fires laser guided missiles when it was firing to 4km with HE rounds and when it was firing to 7km with HE rounds.

There is no reason why low velocity rounds cannot use air burst ammo.

The 40mm grenades from the standard Soviet under barrel grenade launcher had rounds with air burst as standard...