The Armored Vehicle Thread

Given the general underperformance of the Merkava and the other dubious claims Israel has had lately about its armored vehicle attachments like Iron Fist I'm pretty iffy on this one.

Garcon: I think you confusing it with a completely different tank. Last I checked it's APS systems worked very well especially against the ground launched Russian ATGM's that have found their way to the region. Trophy works very well and Iron Fist is meant for vehicles that can't handle systems like Trophy. Not that it is exactly hard to knock them out of action with weapons other than rockets.

Gar, what is up with you and confusing vehicles lately, the Merkava currently tops out (top 4) nearly every top tank list... it is by all means a highly preforming vehicle, to the point that the US military even brought a couple over for testing to use as an APC.

Isreal's hardware is battleproven, as many issues as they are having in there country, making bad warmachines isn't one of them.

Trophy and Iron Fist work just fine for RPGs but have you actually ever read Israel's marketing material for them?

They say they can knock out APFSDS and shells and so on too.

And Merkavas routinely got torn to pieces by ATGMs because they're not very tough vehicles compared to other Western designs.

Some 50% of them suffered armor penetrations even through ERA and only eight Merkavas that were struck in the 2006 Lebanon war survived, the rest were penned and written off. Although minimal crew losses, I'll give them big points for that.

But they have shown that they are not as durable as the Challenger or the Abrams or even the Leopard when faced with modern Russian ATGMs and warheads. Hence the extreme reliance on Trophy.

Personally I don't believe crew survivability is the most important metric in measuring how useful or protected a tank is. A lost hull is a lost hull, it's failed it's mission whether the people inside are ok or not.

Edited by LeGarcon on Jul 30th 2018 at 2:26:43 PM

There not DESIGNED to be Gar.

Tank design is Armor, Speed, Gun, pick 2.

The Merkova picked the Speed and Gun options off that list, and instead focused on making sure the crew survives a lethal hit instead of preventing lethal hits in the first place, which by all accounts they do end up surviving.

I won't dispute that the Merkava has incredible amounts of crew protection, it's up there with the Abrams in that regard. But it's been shown that crew survivability does not translate to combat effectiveness.

But really my main doubts about this combat AI thing stem from the fact that recently Israel's marketing and press department is being ridiculous. They sit there with a straight face and tell me that Iron Fist, not Trophy, but their lightweight low cost APS can shoot down APFSDS rounds all day every day with no failures? Yeah right.

At least when the Russians tried to make that claim their release basically said "Well we did it by accident once in the lab and we'll probably never do it again."

Edited by LeGarcon on Jul 30th 2018 at 2:38:57 PM

Garcon: I don't know where you have been getting your info but you still have your facts pretty thoroughly messed up. The last big conflict the Israeli's faced with tanks hit was back in 2006. Even then the Merkava's did very well especially given quite a few were III's. They had exactly four destroyed by ATGM's and one by an IED all the others suffered easily repairable damage and were back in the field within a week. The vast majority of the crew left their vehicles unscathed or lightly injured. That means they can man a tank again fairly easily so yes crew survivability is rather important that and crew don't want to be in tank in which they will die at the drop of a hat. It is harder on a military to lose a crew than the tank.

Last I checked Trophy's first trial by fire wasn't for another 8 years in 2014 with a couple single incidents prior to that and every single viable account including 3rd party observers puts Trophy's performance at par excellence which includes swatting those Russian made ATGM's that were used so widely in 06'. The encounter in 06' helped fuel the drive for the full bore APS which paid off in dividends as in zero successful guided missile hits. The enemy fired several Russian made ATGM's including Konkurs and Kornet, and even stopped an RPG-29. We have live combat footage from Hamas showing the Trophy swatting fire. Israel's enemies gave us proof on top of their claims. Kind of hard to ignore that and then have you say their performance was disappointing when the evidence points to the contrary.

Seriously what weird standard are you using for armor performance?

I said that Trophy swatted ATGMs just fine, what I don't believe is Israel's claims that they kill tank shells and long rod penetrators on top of that.

Which is why I'm dubious about their so called combat AI. It sounds like marketing nonsense.

Garcon: I am going to go with the folks who have demonstrated repeatedly they can back their claims from their ADA, CRAM, and combat tested APS systems.

Well then I guess the T-14 is invulnerable to APFSDS as well considering it's a much newer system coming from the people who invented the very concept of active protection.

Except the APS coming out of Russia right now is operating on electronics several generations or more old, with sensor systems known to be low quality compared to the Western standard. From what we’ve seen in their ATG Ms their cutting edge is our last gen, and that seems to be true for most of their hardware.

The enhanced Trophy that’s able to stop shells and penetrators isn’t supposed to be finished until like 2020, but I’m skeptical it’ll work at all. Stopping something with that kind of kinetic energy behind it isn’t the same as stopping a missile or rocket. That’s one of those “defense contractors run their mouth” situations. Iron Fist is the same situation, overmarketing and hype. I’ll point out though that it uses much larger countermeasures than Trophy.

All that said, the Merkava has shown pretty good combat performance over its lifetime. It’s consistently effective, even in situations where tanks routinely struggle.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jul 31st 2018 at 9:17:58 AM

Stopping a shell that has a warhead isn't that hard and we have discussed the likely hood of different types of APS possibly stopping or deflecting kinetic rounds. The shrapnel based ones I would seriously doubt have that capability. The blast type though which use a close powerful blast could potentially deflect a projectile. Last I checked the Russians are still using fragmentation based countermeasures even if it is a duplicate of their less capable Drozd with modern dressing.

Isn't the whole point of ADS against APFSDS to decrease the effective penetration of the round enough for the armor to stop it reliably anyway?

In Trophy shatters the projectile enough for the passive armor to soak the shot, then it works.

The problem is your not exactly going to be approaching easily shattering a speeding hunk of metal with relatively small fragments. Especially when said chunk of metal is a combination of steel and DU penetrator core, and metal wind screen cap. Shattering the long rod penetrators would be difficult to say the least. Deflection though is a lot easier as you can do that with a powerful localized blast or shaped charge blast. A shaped charge explosive could possibly shatter or cut it but none of the APS systems use a shaped cutting charge and few use a blast based counter charge.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jul 31st 2018 at 3:26:32 AM

That’s the only reason I rate the Iron Fist claims with any degree of seriousness.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jul 31st 2018 at 1:27:02 AM

I am personaly not even sure deflection will work on a kinetic round, the momentum on them is just insane.

Maybe if they had proof I could see it just changing the angle of attack enough that the pointy end doesn't go in, but that thing is most likley going to hit whether you want it to or not.

Blast type deflectors like Iron Fist supposedly defeat them by causing them to tumble, which either sends them completely off course or makes them relatively ineffective when they hit armor. Of course, information on how exactly these systems work is limited.

The round would likely still hit just not tip first or at a less favorable angel of impact.

I have no idea if it will work in the field given the blast type APS systems are rare we may be waiting a while.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jul 31st 2018 at 4:12:28 AM

Thats my big question here as well, "Will it work in the feild" lab tests don't matter too much if it doesn't work in practice, and I have doubts that it will.

But if it does, weapons are going to need a whole paradigm shift to function right again... I wonder if we will see a rise of tandem munitions where they fire right after each other (Maybe out of the same cartridge?) the idea being that the first one takes the APS and the second hopefully gets through.

It could. The blast type APS systems could still knock the non-kinetic threats as well if they do work against the long rod.

There were several blast type APS developed but to the best of my knowledge few if any were ever deployed and none have faced down tanks.

"I'm sorry, I don't know what that is."

Drozd used fragments but both Arena and the new Afghanit both use airbursting explosives and shockwaves as their method of destroying projectiles.

Edited by LeGarcon on Jul 31st 2018 at 10:03:14 AM

I’ll point out that Russian media makes the exact same claims you were calling the Israelis out on earlier.

Russia doesn’t currently field any blast type APS. Arena uses fragmentation interceptors. It’s performance is also notably less than stellar. Afghanit uses a combination of frag and EFP, similar to Trophy. From what we know of it so far it performs similarly to modern Trophy variants, and it’s likely they’ll be adding blast type countermeasures at some point in the future.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jul 31st 2018 at 7:19:30 AM

From what I understand, Drozd was soft-kill APS. The Russians didn't make a hard-kill type until they made Arena which fired multiple projectiles like a shotgun.

EDIT: I was thinking of Shtora. But both Drozd and Arena do the same method, multiple projectiles fired like a shotgun.

Edited by MajorTom on Jul 31st 2018 at 7:27:16 AM

Yeah but when the Russians claimed it shot down an APFSDS round they basically said it was an accident in the lab and said there's no way they're doing that a second time with the electronics they have.

The Israelis are trying to make it a selling point.

No, Arena uses airbursting explosives

Edited by LeGarcon on Jul 31st 2018 at 10:38:19 AM