Abrams Switchology and Fire Control System

greetings all we are gonna be doing something a little bit different this time instead of spending most of this video looking at my beautiful visage you are instead going to be watching a computer monitor although you will still continue to hear the dulcet tones of my voice reason for this is that in order to properly explain the Abrams fire control system and switch ology it's a lot easier to show you that it is system you talk about it and well I don't happen have an operating m1 so the best thing I'm gonna do is show you a simulator simulator in question it's called slow beasts Pro it is not a computer game it is quite literally a military-grade simulator that you just happen to be able to buy and place on your PC if you have enough disposable income in time winning this I mean I would use this if the official convict a fire trainer wasn't available on the base then we're doing the gunnery or being a barracks with my gunner and would be running this to do some of the drive runs before we actually went onto the tank on the range and your typical game is like an hour and a half long and you're shooting for maybe five minutes of it and when you do die it's without warning and then six seconds later you hear the gunshot of the tank that killed you that was two kilometers away flashed a bang so I can think of more than a few World of Tanks players that really wouldn't get on well with this but as a simulator it works very well and so I am going to use this to explain the FCS of the m1 so this kind of fits in between the tanks one or two video a little while ago and be yet to be filmed next time I get up to Boston and want anyone inside the hatch maybe not next time I get up to Boston my way and whenever I have time to do it so without further ado I load up the software and let's start talking fire-control says he might find it's a little bit more complicated to learn and then perhaps you might think all right so here we are a foot of our m1a1 array so starting off in the commander's position first thing I'll do is just observe that this is not what you would ordinarily stand because you're sticking your head way the hell out in actuality go down to what is more like an eyeball defilade now I was fortunate enough that because I was tall I could sit on the seat back here and my head was quite literally just with the eyes right above the periscope grip a lot of other folks what you have to do is have to lift up this seat bottom and stand on an adjustable platform underneath so they're standing haha sucks to be there this gives you a couple of bandages firstly you still get the full 360-degree vision is affected in the same as it would be in the open protected position like this so you get most of the same visibility obviously a little bit more up top the other advantage is you get this windshield right in front of you it's it's actually a sort of a two-way vision block you can look through it horizontally as I am right now or you can look at the bottom through the periscope and there's a mirror up here so it reflects out a little bit further and you can see the back up side for the caliber 50 V the main site is here on the right speaking of the caliber 50 you can see how it's a simple solenoid that applies to the bottle flight trigger when you get actually down inside and you start looking at all the periscopes well I mean and if you think about it this is actually pretty reasonable later the a2s have a bigger periscope yet even than this but as you can see it's pretty limited but what I'm going to do now is I'm going to take a quick advantage of the fact that I have a quote unquote working tank and try to explain something that's been causing a lot of controversy in both my Panzer 3 and Panther videos when I explain that I don't see any need for the azimuth ring that is on the outside of the Panthers Cooper because it is my contention that you don't need it to know which way your gun is facing compared to the whole two reasons for this firstly if you look down you can actually physically see the hull and when you start learning the bits and pieces of the inside of the hole you can actually start figuring out where you are compared to anywhere else so for example this is the whole ammunition stowage it's on the right rear of the hull so very obviously my turret must be facing over the left side people forget that there's whole ammo stowage in the m1 there actually is six rounds the majority of other courses up here they access by use of the deep lease which has to turn lock by the way and caliber 50 stowage in the armor go a bit further around and if I recall that is the fuel cutoff if you accidentally hit power off instead of shut down your engine will run away with you and the only way to shut it down is to hit the fuel cutoff has this nasty habit something that's working loose and getting caught into her basket pretty embarrassing go a little bit further around again and you will see the drivers hole is gonna show up here oops yeah aren't you too far I think yeah computer games aren't necessarily the best so yeah here's a driver's hole and this is actually a swing gate so you take all this half cap capture out of the way and this becomes a swing gate so when you see an m1 park in storage you'll see that's a little bit over to the left as the turret is looking at it of the rear deck and that's to align this gate with the driver so we can get out so anyway after a while you get to know the inside of your tank very well and you just glance down very quickly you don't need to look at anything else and immediately you know which way you're facing the other thing you can do is quite simply just drive so as you're driving you can tell that this way is forward because that's the way you're going to the ground is coming directly at you if you're looking that way they've been looking at the right the ground is going directly off the left side if you're looking off to say the one o'clock see the ground is kind of come in a bit different mixture and this happens as you're looking through the periscopes as well so as you're looking as you as you start rotating around so right now I'm looking directly over the left side of the hall and now I'm looking you can see the ground is kind of camilla because towards me so it's more like the ten o'clock if I look on the right-hand side there we go so from the foot there's the direct form to their society you can just see how the ground sort of changes its movement in relation to where you are so again I'm now looking over the left hand side of the hall because if you drive forward you can see the ground is moving right to left so for a general you know gunner scan to two o'clock you don't need an azimuth indicator anyway that done a couple of other year knobs and switches will display 23.1 Tom for caliber 50 arming and there's only one electrical trigger this is it that fires the fires the caliber 50 solenoid with them manual elevation so this is a purely geared or banded system there's a band here that elevates and depresses it is not a flex mount like it is in the caliber in the a to the site is a very simple graduated sight with range at the bottom and the best thing about it is that you get precision fires on a target without exposing your turret at all so if you're in if we're in a defensive position and you turn your first target of pops up as a PC let's say this is a gunnery you're back in the old days of table 8 against now at table 6 you just put your sight on the target and immediately caliber 50 and you don't need to expose the turret while you get a zero exposure time so it they should be easy points it's very accurate machine that way you can flip it between Traverse and let me yeah traverse the Cal the 50 round little bacon you again put it back up straight the power Traverse is handle here you select between this is an incredibly flimsy handle between the manual and regular power your left hand for stability comes up here this is a guard that protects your your elbow from coming in great way the breech so while your hand is up here you can easily toggle the radio with the intercom system as you desire commander site extensions to see what the corners go can ask what is not shown here is the blue force tracker panel that I would have had for example of my tank in Iraq older system now of course because that was 15 years ago it was 15 years ago god help me but Department remains the same so vehicle master power that basically tells the electricity to start going around through the hall and the intercom system turret power would start your motors battle slight range I'll come back to that and a minute but that's if you don't know what range the target is and you just want a default hunters will know it as maximum point-blank range and then you can once I said that you can add or drop accordingly aux hydraulic power yet turn it on unless the battery's low you get to sell those few grenades and that's it and your fire goes on you got a problem NBC alarm if that goes on you really have a problem I was always amused by the air temp especially the one that says cooler doesn't doesn't bloody work and NBC don't turn it on a peacetime or your or tank will catch fire a bit of a design flaw really agarose correction Kesey's override handle so you can do all the gunning from here and what I could do because I was tall is I will be sitting in this seat looking for the primary side extension but still being able to manipulate all the buttons knobs and switches at the gunner seat because I could reach so that is basically the bottom line for the TC side let's hop into the gunner seat and look at some of the knobs and switches here first thing going up on the top you got these doors these are if you look in the outside of the tank that's these doors here the ballistic doors so when you are under artillery barrage let's say you simply close those doors one for thermal one for the day life and you can't see a damn thing all of a sudden I you see is black open them up again hydraulic pressure gauge don't you worry about that right now so the people always forget about there is a unity site on the Abrams this is the unmagnified site this has been on American tanks basically since day one and what this does is basically gives the gunner a very good observation of what the hell's are random without the problem of the magnification of the primary site and without the problem of the obscuration of the axillary side coming a bit further down in the tanks 102 I was talking about how you do a an Mrs update to do the with the sensor on the end of the muzzle so again if I look through here you can see there is the mrs sensor the most reference sensor that is aiming at the site and it tells the gun it tells the computer where the gun actually is compared to the site you make that adjustment by use of the by use of the control panel this is a toggle switch he will move your mrs around a little bit in America sort of light the pops up I thought okay no matter so it's a very simple toggle in or out it's not simulated in this game for better or worse coming further down auxilary site primary site fire control modes I'll talk about those in a few minutes you got emergency normal manual coming further down I'm also gonna talk about the the controls for the laser rangefinder so safe first return or last return by default you leave it on the last return moving further down drift so if you start up your tank let's say and you turn on the motors then what your foot weight might have fine happens when you activate the stabilization is you're going to see a very very shallow drift a bit like this and by use of those two knobs you basically not like the drift so that when the controls are centered the turret doesn't Traverse or elevate consider it like central centering your joystick let me go that way there is also for emergency mode and emergency mode drift but you got to unscrew this and play around with a with a screwdriver inside it's technically a 20 level task but anybody can do it big red handle here is your master blaster the emergency firing to switch or emergency firing handle it's a little dynamo when you crank it hard to the right boom goes to go guns primary control handles it down here the column the Cadillacs so you got your laser rangefinders are the thumb switches your triggers with the palms for we are index fingers and on the far side you can't really see it is the palm switch it sort of is here and what you do is you simply grasp the control that activates everything a little bit of an annoyance when we had an exchange student over from the Romanian army because apparently the Soviets do in Reverse not only does this handle work like a steering wheel like the left while the Soviet once they push forwards or backwards but that is actually apparently the trigger so you're getting lazy booms a laze boom is when you try to laze but the gun goes boom and way down underneath that you got any selector for which filter is being seen through the side here either the daylight the or the infrared thermal imager ammunition selector unlike some tanks such as never to the gunner is responsible for telling fire control system what round is in the tube so he's got a listen at for both the fire commander what the loader reports so if the commander just says fire well you have a the next round being loaded the same as one that was in the tube if he else a fire fire heat that means that the next round is gonna be heat round and the loader is going to confirm this after he loads around instead of just saying up that the next round is ready he will say heat up and you'll see the Sabre one here between being the two most likely rounds are actually on opposite ends because there's no fine motor skills he just cranked all the way over one side to the other downloaded me fast you toggle switch for in magnification with the daylight site selector for coax or the main gun or trigger safe which of course he double trigger safe in a computer game instant point in that and now on the right hand side you have the thermal imager again separate magnifier for the thermal imager so you can have by 10 on the thermal and by three arm the daylight it is a camera so you do have to focus it you got contrast and sensitivity as well and what you'll see a lot of people will do in the thermal imager is that they will basically try to tune the thermal imager so it turns into a sort of black and white TV should be another m1 around here somewhere there it is and arguably that's not what you want to do what you want to do is you want to put the the contrast such that if it's hot it shows up and if it's not hot it doesn't show up as near as many as you can practically do it and the reason that you do that is that especially at long distances if you're scanning at high speed you know burning at those turn motors you may not actually see something at a long distance but if you have it so that something that's hot is really just white and everything else is black you can gain gonna miss it so what you can do especially in daylight you'll configure it that way just to see the hot spot and then when you find a hot spot flip to the daylight site that'll show you what it is that you're looking at at night yeah you make a slight adjustment to that and no because it's kind of pointless we don't know what it what it is that you're aiming at another little item you have here is a polarity black heart or white heart and you can see what the difference is there as a general rule people leave it for white heart but the nice thing by blackhawk is sometimes it's actually easier to figure out what the devil it is that you're looking at the a1 actually has a fairly old thermal imaging system the guys that came in from the n60 a3 TTS thought it was a bit of a downgrade and the resolution isn't the greatest and probably accounts for some of the blue on blue that Abrams have been guilty of that's about it you do both sites separately the the infrared to the Dayla at daylight sites you actually both side to daylight with computer speaking of the computer things that you plug into the computer when you're sabor sighting the ammunition temperature behind here is a thermometer that reads what the mo temperature is behind the bustle barometric pressure gets put in air temperature gets put in that's where the URS light is basically this calibrates the atmospheric sensors to make sure that the the gun goes where it's supposed to go these are you mori often used in testing than anything else it is possible to manually input the range that you want to you want to fire at you quite simply just arrange it whatever your range is hit enter and you put into ballistic computer that is pretty much it for the Gunners seat right now you know your m240 there with a little cable it's the better PC side it's very simple loop and cable that you pull to I grab the recharge and so now I've gone over the switches let me show you how the how the systems work okay so we have ourselves a little simple tank range and we're going to start off in the normal mode there's not very much to normal mode all you do is you simply track the target for a second and a half or so to allow the computer time to calculate the lead laser target pull the trigger that's the end of it your sight is actually measured in mils so by use of the various different lines you can estimate how far away something is by simple mathematics that's probably subject for different lessons so again all you do is oh by the way I now have heat loaded so watch what happens if I fire around with heat loaded but I haven't changed the index because if you look at the if you look at the control panel I'm still running with same up so what you will see is it will do a fall short so lays the target fire and shorts oh dear I forgot to change the ammo so hot back down go down flip the ammunition to heat go back to your Gunners side now the other thing you'll see is as our lays and it enters the range into the system the range shows up at the bottom you'll see that this sight picture will jump witness in a moment like that and the reason it does this is because the a1 only has a single axis stabilized mirror so in the Gunners sight there is the the mirror which is stabilized up and down as the tanks bouncing around so it's not doing this so it's not doing this it's stabilized but the control handle as controls the left and right of the stabilization so what happens is in normal mode and this is something a lot of people can't quite get through a head around in normal mode you control the sight and an emergency mode you control the gun which means that in normal mode all you do is you put the reticle on the target and the computer figures out what the gun needs to do in order to hit it so when I lays the target and the gun jumps up to put the correct superelevation it also jumps left in order that when the round gets to the appropriate range it meets up with the target but this means that the entire turret has to turn you know that that extra 5 degrees whatever which means that your sight picture also moves that same 5 degrees to compensate for this the reticle itself jumps to the right like so now the other problem with this though is as the computer is calculating the average of the last second and a half or so of tracking if you put a false input by accident let's say you get JA sold as the tanks going across country and you accidentally go off when you try to put it back armed you'll find that the reticle starts flying uncontrollably around if you if you just lose track of your target what you do is you double eat and all that is is you very briefly let go of the Cadillacs and quickly grab hold of them again 1/2 a second however long it takes it open and close your hands and that'll reset everything back to a default position and you can start your engagement over again you also want to do it after every round is fired as well so track the target and the range looks good 1450 seems to be a reasonable range on the way to be a reasonable range let's try again sometimes you screw it up all right so I'm still running heat now the next thing I'm going to demonstrate is the difference in first and last return so okay we got the tank way the hell off in the distance and if I lays right now you'll see now that there is a a bar on top of the range numbers oh by the way that little square box means the gun is ready to fire what the bar means is that multiple returns came back from the laser because the laser is not a pencil-thin beam of light well there may be at the beginning but due to diffraction of the air and so on it spreads out a little bit and you could get a return back from the bush that's in front of you or let's say right there if I were delays perhaps you might get the bush return well obviously if the tank is not at 700 yards you know whatever they are a thousand yards that the bush is that the tank is actually at the better part of 2000 so by selecting last return it means that whatever the furthest distance is that the laser comes back with bounce that's what gets input into the fire control system so for example as the tanks bounce around here you see it goes right behind the hill if I accidentally lays at the time that it goes behind the hill I'll get the multiple return but it will still get the correct distance to the target now the alternative is let's say all I see is that hold down a hole down tank and just a turret and turret itself is smaller even than the than the estimated return so the circle also works more or less as a good guideline for how wide the laser beam becomes as it goes that range so you go back out you select first return and what would happen now is let's say I mix it with the you know the distance as well 1600 meters now is distance to the tank with again a bar that bar is to pad a bar to two and a half thousand whatever the distance is in the background so let's go back to the last return don't lead and again I'll lace to that two and a half thousand it is so that's why you want to keep an eye excuse me on if you have first or last returned thermal imager works in exactly the same manner as the daylight sight you track the target for a second or a second or so lays the range looks good fire target and that is all there is saber loaded you heard Sabo up so I had to switch the controller there's a hot key for me to do it I didn't actually have to come out so now let me let's assume that something has happened our computer has gone down and we're now firing an emergency mode in emergency mode you no longer control the sight you now control the gun and the end result of this is that you don't have automatically leader superelevation calculated because if this if the computer is controlling the gun then the computer is able to move the gun to the left or right to lead and up and down through superelevation this is gone the ballistic computer is still working so it'll still give you ballistic solutions but I lays the target and you see the target the reticle jumps up or down so let me lay something much further away and what do what the relay the computer is telling me is that in order to hit this target because right now there's three and a half thousand meters in the list computer that is where the round would impact and match with the reticle so I lays this 14 hundred meter tank and all of a sudden the computer is telling me no you're gonna say me too high you got a lower it so you lower it but again there's no lead applied so if I if this tank turns around starts moving and I start tracking the tank alright let it get up to speed if a fire the round because I am now controlling the gun and the gun is pointing right at the tank by the time the round gets to the tank the tank should have moved on so instead what you do is you have to manually add your own level of lead and that's basically a swag scientific wild-ass gas and that is lead with emergency mode now what happens what happens if your laser rangefinder goes down what do you got to manually index the range so let's say for the sake of argument that is a mm you know commander says that's about two kilometers away go back out go back to the guns control panel hit range enter one 200 whoops excuse me one 200 enter and it is now in the ballistic computer oh sorry mm my bad I was stupid of me I entered the battle side range so mm go back to the go back to the site and let's see what happens my guess was right now if you're if you're not entirely sure what the range is in urine you just don't have the time it up and you don't have the time to enter the the range what the command or to guess the range even what the command can do is hit the battle site button which sets it to 1,200 meters and generally speaking if the target is between 0 and 1,600 meters you'll hit the target now this range is well over 1,200 s is a heat map this has gotten much longer time of flight so the manual lead on the heat round is gonna have to be much longer so oh not even close my range is wrong as well so does matter range is right I say that's still way off emergency mode gunnery is much more difficult Oh haha I am doing the old-fashioned problem did if I did this on the gunnery range you get a cease fire freeze because what I just did was I started launching saber rants into into orbit because I've been too busy talking to you and not paying attention to my TC and loader he's been loading he saber rounds into the tube and I have heat indexed so I've been sending saber rounds into low orbit but look at the difference that's the heat that's a he elevation that's the saber elevation much better I just have to get the lead about right let's try that one there we go alright so that was a little embarrassing but hey at least you figured it out eventually I cease fire freeze on the gunnery range is something you don't want to hear what it basically means is let go the controls don't touch the damn occurring or let the mass are gonna come out with the quadrant to figure out what held around landed alright so if everything has gone to hell in a handbasket your next thing is the auxilary site so let's say you shut your your doghouse doors go to the auxilary site this is old-fashioned steam gunnery there is a choke sight which will help you estimate range so what you do is here you match the bottom of the tank and then you kind of scroll over to see where the top is so it looks like about 1,900 meters let's go to nineteen hundred meter reticle it's about go about there the bastard dodged there we go I mean this is this is basically World War two steam gunnery there are two radicals and again look at the difference in me that's basically point-blank you'll notice that the the primary position no the default crosshair is at about 1,200 meters that's because that is the battle sight range now the point of battle site have to say is between zero and about 1600 meters unfortunately have to go to the heat radicals look at a difference in the graduation with reheat and say vote between zero and about 1600 meters there is no point in the arc of flight of the saber around that is higher than a tank sized target so in my head at the top of the tank my hit at the bottom of the tank but it's gonna hit somewhere so I have heat when loaded let's go with 1200 yards up still 1400 yards and very close looks to be about change and that just wasn't enough lead oh it's too much Mead think you ain't any better right oh come on there we go alright so that is basically all the bits and bobs of the a1 now I'll quickly hop into the a - I'm not quite a skilled with this because my experience with a 2 s is basically the simulators and Fort Knox but there are a couple of significant differences between the a2 and the a ones as the a - costs a couple of million dollars more so you better get something more for your money now the first thing you'll see is that the infrared section has changed the reason to this is they've they've updated it from the old 1980s in a thermal imager to a forward-looking infrared a proper Fleur and it comes with what is known as the relaxed vision monitor so you can relate you can be sitting back happy is Larry not doing anything and you know not having your head to the brow pad and just as you're scanning around oh look there's a target I can see the hot spot at which point then you can put your head to the side if you want or you can actually do the complete engagement with the with the magnification now again you see the magnification goes up to by 50 but the two defaults are three and thirteen and these are the two at the far end again in times of stress you don't want to worry about about you know fine-tuning your your muscles you know your high stress just all the way over all the way left other changes on the it works on the bottom there you have push button canister round has been added it's basically like a five inch shotgun empath you got your selected for air with ground targets in bed oh are his replacement round when I was in Iraq for some reason all I had was impact oh if you saw the on the a1 you saw also Staff was the other one that was a that was an experimental round it was never added chest pad here you need this to hold you in place otherwise you're using the Gunners control to hold on to yourself which is bad because you've booked both inputs an m1 tanker is known as a dad domeier's tanker and a two tank who is known as a seedot or a Jedi tanker computerized dumbass tanker and well there you go hope it's it's computerized and the TC has his own set of weirdness as well the daylight sights are exactly the same now once you actually get into the engagement process you're going to notice the second difference when our laser the target the reticle doesn't jump so what we have now is we now have dual axis stabilization on the mirror and the reason that this stabilized the mirror is because the mirror only weighs a kilo - it's a lot easier for the motors to properly stabilize the mirror than it is to stabilize a 2-ton cannon so what actually happens is the stabilization controls the mirror and the cannon keeps up or tries to keep up and that's what is summarized you'll see this little light goes out on occasion if the gun hasn't caught up so when you pull the trigger if the gun has not caught up to where the side is telling at the point then he can't fires and it will safety interlock shall we say when accuracy interlock on the a - what they've done is they've not only kept the stabilization vertical but they've also added a second pivot point horizontally so as you're tracking the target relays and the gun applies the lead the site looks jump this is a good point in the bad point now if you are not used to the a ones system of the flying reticle this is much easier the downside though is that there seems to be much less indication of when you have accidentally input a false lead and that the computer is not actually tracking where the where the reticle is supposed to be now again so thermal imager by 3 by 6 by 13 so that's gonna be your default no he's not 1100 that's the bush is going to be your default condition is by 13 because that should be plenty close enough for you to hit your target without you know with that issue but if for some reason let's say you don't you really really need to see what it is they are aiming at or if this only a small part of the target is visible you can go to 25 or you can go to 50 now the other point is that this is actually an optical zoom so that up to by 13 correction selectable zoom up to by 13 is an optical zoom anything beyond that 225-250 is a is an electronic magnification the other problem though would say with the by 50 is even the smallest inputs can send it that it can send your reticle all over the place so there's a left limit on the range fan so that's basically the gist of it that's your primary fire control system difference between a1 and a2 alright so there we go a 2 is fire control system right so that's it that is basically everything I can teach you about how the fire control system on an m1 works right so other matters admin notes as you can see the tank is on fire shirts have been much requested they are now available of on the ever press website they come we do close they come in green or black shout-out to Jin Jing Lim he didn't want to show her but he's getting one anyway hey who was generous enough to donate his time as a fan to create the t-shirts and have a little link I found some of his similar it's work online form and see what else he does down there is a illustrator so thank you mr. Lim otherwise I may come back and do some of this as you saw there are other types of tank that are modeled like the t-72 the m60 and so on so well have a look at those as well perhaps at a future time but again I am less skilled with them because I'm quite simply not trained but no no if maybe I can find a leopard to gunner I could work with him and we can do something of a similar nature with that so we'll have a Chu about that anyway that is the end of this video again hope you enjoyed it and found it informative I'll see you next time

Channel: The_Chieftain

Views: 110,296

Rating: 4.9663382 out of 5

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Id: WDs5oQW1vNA

Length: 41min 20sec (2480 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/HyperionsPaladin]

Cries in Russian

[u/Captain_Squad]

Tunnel vision is the bane of most armored vehicles, especially when you don't have the luxury of infantry cover.

[u/Dan186D]

Oh yes please. I hope we can get that for all vehicles because after about 2 hours of gunning in vehicles I find my eyes get really fucked up by the zoom. The only way to fix it currently on some vehicles is to switch to the commander seat and then back to the gunner seat (this works with the warrior but it definitely won't work with crows gunner seats)