The Armored Vehicle Thread

Not as many Bimp crews emptied out the rear-door mounted fuel tanks as you may think. The mujahideen did a garden business barbecuing Russian troops all through the Afghanistan War, who hadn't bothered NOT making their vehicles even more vulnerable than they were just by other design factors.

Despite the article claiming the BMP-2 was good, it still has a horrible service record as a death trap due to being an IFV cramped and with a dangerous central fuel line and packed with enough ammunition to make sure that if anything pierced its armour, it would explode.

Ivans usually rode the BMP and the BTR on the top rather than inside for a reason.

What if the interior being such a death trap was just one of those urban folklore things, and the deathtrap reputation earned by squads riding outside of the armor protecting getting hamburgered by stuff that the armor would have stopped?

The article did point out that the centrally-mounted fuel tank was a horrible mistake. The rear fuel doors were somewhat mixed; they could stop most small-arms fire without igniting or at most emitting rivulets of burning diesel fuel, but god help you if they were hit by a shaped charge. (In which case, though, the burning fuel-filled doors would be the least of your concerns.)

I'll be looking through the articles on the other armored vehicles by and by. It seems that the rudimentary "gunner, look here!" hunter-killer cupola was a fairly common feature on a lot of Soviet AFVs, but they were hampered from being true hunter-killers like the M1A2's CITV by the lack of rangefinding equipment.

It also looks like maintenance would be relatively easy to do—contra Forczyk's observation, perhaps?

It got the reputation in Chechnya, so it could be both but no one wanted to stay inside the thing when an RPG or land mine hit the BMP due the high chances of the fuel line being set on fire and making charred and well done Ivans.

The difference is how other IF Vs allow the crew and infantry to escape before it bursts into flames the BMP series were never designed with that in mind but that comes with being small and packed with fuel and ammunition. It is no secret the IFV crews of both BTR and BMP knew their choices were being set on fire or just exploding inside the IFV or risking getting shot or blown up on the outside.

edited 30th Jun '16 5:37:40 PM by AngelusNox

I mean, if someone is hitting the vehicle with anti-armor weapons, it's probably best for the crunchies to disembark anyways so they can get to work peppering the anti-armor baddies with large quantities of lowest-bidder small arms rounds.

Folks riding on top is also a thing of the M113 APC. Like the BMP and BTR counterparts, it would pulp you good if you got hit by an explosive and would often burn like mad. (Which depending on the source you read says it is or is not the aluminum skin lighting up. I'd be less concerned with the aluminum skin catching fire than I would the fuel brewing up or getting plowed into the ceiling when a mine comes knocking at your boots.)

The BMP definitely burned up something horrible. Which was discovered well before Chechnya and as Tom noted much like the M 113 is a well known issue with the vehicle. They were all very vulnerable to even moderate fire power and mines did horrible things to them. The BMP turret emplacement and the exposed munitions rack in the interior tended to cause BMP to go up like roman candles when hit with any sort of HEAT projectile. The M 113 fuel tanks were very vulnerable and tended to catch fire rather easily when hit with mines or HEAT shells. The RPG-2's more shallow HEAT cone was reportedly very good at setting M113s alight.

Same blog, here's the T-72. The armor scheme, particularly of the T-72B, is fascinating; the alternating rubber-and-steel layers in the turret give a ton of protection, although only once. Interestingly, and completely counterintuitively, it seems that the diesel fuel tanks up front serve as additional armor. How they're not touched off by shaped-charge warheads I have no idea.

Interestingly it looks like the T-72B3 is mostly the same tank as the T-72B model 1989 (with Kontakt-5 ERA). The main improvements were FLIR and a modernized FCS, plus modern radios. That means that the frontal armor is mostly the same: impressive one-use protection with the K-5 and the built-in NERA, but less impressive base armor underneath.

Very good find.

As soon as I saw the loose storage around the interior of vehicle the infamous jack in the box and catastrophic kill frequency of the T-72 made a lot more sense. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea? The load speed of the auto-loader is pretty impressive for a unit loading a two piece cannon munition.

edited 2nd Jul '16 8:57:04 AM by TuefelHundenIV

The loose storage isn't there to store shells. It's actually a top-secret intelligence test.

Any conscript dumb enough to actually use them to store shells will get blown up in the fighting, therefore increasing the average IQ of the Soviet Army!

Does diesel produce flammable fumes? If not, it should serve perfectly well as armor protection against the initial penetration. If it gets set off afterwards, most of the burning fuel will be outside of the compartment. If the hit still penetrates, the presence of burning fuel won't be the cause of the bad situation, just another topping on the pie.

Also a DTIC article on a variety of US warhead developments Lots of EFP stuff including multi-plate EFP warheads. Also a note about use of CL-20 as an experimental explosive for HEAT style warheads with some seriously notable improvements.

Diesel won't burn as easily as gasoline but the hot splinters and HEAT jet are definitely hot enough to set it on fire. It only has a flash point of around 52-96 Celsius. Vegetable oil has a higher flash point. Also diesel turned into aerosol spray by violent agitation such as explosives hitting a fuel tank can lead to hot splinters and materials igniting the fuel.

Here is a video of the testing done on the Stridsvagn 103 showing a hit to a fuel cell. Apparently they have a similar idea of using the fuel tank as a method of reducing velocity of projectiles. The fuel leaks out and the hot splinters from the hit set it blazing quite merrily.

Has custom subtitles to so turn on CC. Burning diesel seen at about 3:15 in the video.

edited 1st Jul '16 6:39:19 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Apparently the Russian SP Gs are just as good at setting themselves on fire on combat as they are on parades.

I like how, about a minute in, the one guy is standing on top of the SPG watching the huge gouts of flame like "Huh. Would you look at that?"

Did they seriously keep firing that SPG's gun after it went on fire?

The camera pulled away before the creeping realization had time to set in, like Woody in Toy Story:

"The rockets are on fire." (Beat) "Waitaminit... rockets EXPLODE!!!"

Just watched Fury finally. I've had it on Blue Ray for months now, I'm just terrible at actually watching movies.

I saw it in theaters when it was first released. While it was rather straight with war film tropes, my only major complaint was that I personally felt that the Tiger, with all the marketing explicitly highlighting it as the film's One-Scene Wonder, should've been saved for the final climax instead of being unceremoniously eliminated midway through. Allowing the other Shermans to survive until the climax also would have made the final Last Stand much more believable - something similar occurred with Kuomingtang M5 Stuarts during the Chinese Civil War - while it would have been a great touch to have the Tiger's commander survive and take the role of the flashlight-toting Waffen SS trooper.

Is Fury any good?

Actually, I thought it was a nice subversion of expectations for the tank-on-tank battle not to be the climax of the film. I was curious how they'd manage to get out of that situation, and I have to say I wasn't disappointed with what the writers came up with.

So I found this picture online.◊

What a disheartened looking tank.

"Cheer up, grandpa. We'll survive Brexit. ...maybe."

Between this and the Sad Tornado I'm half-wondering if disheartened-looking British military gear is just a thing now.

edited 6th Jul '16 7:26:10 PM by SabresEdge

Mark IV(?) tank: "Grandson, I am disappoint."

Chally 2: "But Granddad, we just decided to stick it to the Germans again with Brexit!"

Mark IV(?) tank: "With only a 52% margin? You don't sound very confident about it! Back in my day, 52% might as well have been considered a loss."

Chally 2: "Uhh Granddad, I'm not talking about casualty rates..."

Mark IV(?) tank: "Then what the bloody Hell are you talking about?"

edited 6th Jul '16 7:49:59 PM by MajorTom