As much as I like bashing BW because he's French I am getting pretty tired of every Posting turning into a Herald vs BW slugfest. It hijacks the thread and turns off a lot of other posters who have to wade through pages of invectives to find any nuggets of other posters OPINIONS.

BW and Herald, can't you both agree to disagree. BW please preface your posts with "In My Opinion" rather than presenting as a fact...and Herald please understan that you can say "I disagree because..."

This is really getting tiring...you both are prolific posters and I get a lot of entertainment from reading a lot of the info that you guys post but I can do without the back and forth insults.

 

A modest suggestion - could the Russians work on modular appliques (passive or active) because they are not confident in their quality control?  Easier to swap out a bad Arena or Kaktus (sp?) than an entire tank hull with one gaping fault in the front plate.  And I think it is no stereotype to say the Russians are not over their manufacturing problems. 

I dunno that I want to sell Russian material tech short. When they have to build it, they can be very good. Those clowns produced HEMISPHERIC shaped heat shields for re-entry bodies and some very esoteric alloys for their rocket motors we still can't match today. Its the QUANTITY and EXPENSE that throws them for a loop.  When you use the statistical numerical approach to things  as the Russians do, you tend to look at good enough as opposed to best possible when you have to produce in quantity.

If you can't produce quality plate and chain, crank out lots of scale or ring mail and hope for the best.

Another way to look at the analogy is to suggest that you have a choice as a poor king of 10,000 horse archers, Mongol style, or 1000 knights French style. Different tactics and different expenses-yield different technology solutions, and acceptable cost per unit limits.

I think the Russians operate within the limits of their transport logistics, their climate and terrain, their mass quantity production base, their available capital in manpower and resources, and their engineering talent pool [which is CONSIDERABLE and VERY good.].

Of course they have politics too, which is why we are flying Raptors instead of Black Widows, and why the French build crap  military hardware these days, instead of some of the excellent stuff they used to field.

It explains a lot about why MiG is still hanging around long after Sukhoi showed them what was what aeronautically.

Right after that uglyness, I think it is time to get on this this thread back on track, so far we have established:

 

Due to the tactics employed by the Russians, mass and swam attacks which worked in WWII, they oppted to produce tanks by the thousands. This allowed the Russians to apply just enough armour on their tanks to ensure enough broke through NATO's line. Their reason being, "just enough" amour allowed for the cost and weight of each tank to be realitivly low but also because their strategy called for survivabilty in numbers, which they had. Amour is only their to increase your CHANCE of survivability, it does not make you invunerable, it is also costly and heavy, these factors play against the Russian strategy.

 

With the cost factor and a strategy which called for numbers they had no real reason to develop a Chobham like armour, the only reason we did was because we had fewer units and were expected to fight a primarily deffensive battle, so our strategy called for the individual units to have a very high chance of survivability and thus heavy composite armour.

 

With the emergence of anti tank missiles and with stolen Israeli technology the Russians developed ERA to counter the HEAT warheads, this was done due to the fact an enemy can deploy lots of missiles, and ERA was realitivly inexpensive to develop and deploy. The heavy ERA developed was designed to stop the lastest tandem HEAT warheads, it was also found that the heavy slabs could also dissrupt and possibly break incomeing LRPs, whether the Russians designed this feature into Kontkat-5 I am not sure, hell the concept of ERA istelf was observed at first unintentinally. However with the delopyment of top attack weapons and BVRAT weapons which could be very effective at halting a massed tank rush, the Russians developed hard kill systems to go along with their ERA, and again increase their survivability.

 

So why not develop a tank with Western style composite armour?

 

Cost. It is cheeper to upgrade your tanks than to develop a new tank and new materials, what they have fits their plan, no need to change it. However many of their tanks are almost 30 years old, and with combat experience, it shows the basic Russian design to be flawed when it comes to crew survivability when the armour is penertrated. Russia is currently making the transition from a conscript army to a professional one, this means the troops chose to be soliders and expect to go home alive. But rather then develop costly composites, which could be beaten or fall victim to shody manufacture, the Russians are using existing technology but with a new layout. Use the autoloader and keep the crew in seperate armoured compartment, in the hull, lowering the chance it will be hit by enemy fire. There is alot of speculation on what this new Russian tank will be like, indeed, what I said above could be false.

 

Leading on from that I think this topic needs a change in direction, we have established why the Russians did not delvop composite armour as seen in the West, so my follow on question is what is the best way, methods in design and hardware, to increase crew survivablity Russian style; low cost, realitivly low weight, rugged and can be replicated in the thousands.

Right after that uglyness, I think it is time to get on this this thread back on track, so far we have established:

 

Due to the tactics employed by the Russians, mass and swam attacks which worked in WWII, they oppted to produce tanks by the thousands. This allowed the Russians to apply just enough armour on their tanks to ensure enough broke through NATO's line. Their reason being, "just enough" amour allowed for the cost and weight of each tank to be realitivly low but also because their strategy called for survivabilty in numbers, which they had. Amour is only their to increase your CHANCE of survivability, it does not make you invunerable, it is also costly and heavy, these factors play against the Russian strategy.

 

With the cost factor and a strategy which called for numbers they had no real reason to develop a Chobham like armour, the only reason we did was because we had fewer units and were expected to fight a primarily deffensive battle, so our strategy called for the individual units to have a very high chance of survivability and thus heavy composite armour.

 

With the emergence of anti tank missiles and with stolen Israeli technology the Russians developed ERA to counter the HEAT warheads, this was done due to the fact an enemy can deploy lots of missiles, and ERA was realitivly inexpensive to develop and deploy. The heavy ERA developed was designed to stop the lastest tandem HEAT warheads, it was also found that the heavy slabs could also dissrupt and possibly break incomeing LRPs, whether the Russians designed this feature into Kontkat-5 I am not sure, hell the concept of ERA istelf was observed at first unintentinally. However with the delopyment of top attack weapons and BVRAT weapons which could be very effective at halting a massed tank rush, the Russians developed hard kill systems to go along with their ERA, and again increase their survivability.

 

So why not develop a tank with Western style composite armour?

 

Cost. It is cheeper to upgrade your tanks than to develop a new tank and new materials, what they have fits their plan, no need to change it. However many of their tanks are almost 30 years old, and with combat experience, it shows the basic Russian design to be flawed when it comes to crew survivability when the armour is penertrated. Russia is currently making the transition from a conscript army to a professional one, this means the troops chose to be soliders and expect to go home alive. But rather then develop costly composites, which could be beaten or fall victim to shody manufacture, the Russians are using existing technology but with a new layout. Use the autoloader and keep the crew in seperate armoured compartment, in the hull, lowering the chance it will be hit by enemy fire. There is alot of speculation on what this new Russian tank will be like, indeed, what I said above could be false.

 

Leading on from that I think this topic needs a change in direction, we have established why the Russians did not delvop composite armour as seen in the West, so my follow on question is what is the best way, methods in design and hardware, to increase crew survivablity Russian style; low cost, realitivly low weight, rugged and can be replicated in the thousands.