All about the T-72 Main Battle Tank ☭

this is probably one of the most favorite vehicles that we have within the museum especially for ozamafest so this is the Czechoslovakian built t-72m or M1 because there's a couple of different changes within the check-built vehicle what I want to focus on today is more looking on the armor side of it so both glasses plate and turret so the glacias plate is really interesting the CIA did a paper on this vehicle back in August of 1982. they actually had a Syrian t-72m which the Israelis have obviously got their hands on when they did the analysis on this they found that at the front here we had an 80 millimeter high hardness steel plate going up to about 340 bhn then we had 105 millimeters of what they initially thought was compressed polyurethane and it was said to have about one quarter the the density of Steel this has later changed to be with a product what we call textalite so textalite is a glass based armor in between the the top layer of armor and the back layer of armor comes in two layers the first layer is about 65 mil thick and the second is 40 millimeters thick so what we'd have is multiple layers of armored glass in a resin and we place that behind the 80 millimeters of armor and then we have another 20 millimeters of armor behind that the whole grassius plate was made in one piece and then welded into the vehicle so when we look at the actual angle of the glasses plate this gives us a line of sight now of about 572 millimeters it actually gives us good properties against our chemical Warheads so high explosive anti-tank and high explosive squash head especially with the the angle with incoming heat because a lot of the older Western heat rounds had a spin rotation on them as well so they when they would hit they would obviously generally try and spin off so he didn't get good penetration so what we have is essentially a ditching blade so we can create a ditch in front of the tank now this is lowered manually by the crew so they undo the the clamps here they would generally get a long crowbar and lower it down so the thickness up here is about 21 millimeters as the blade comes down the rods push back and they seat in a recess so the blade will only come down to a certain point it was said to be able to dig yourself in anywhere sort of up to the 20 minute Mark depending on the the type of ground that you're in they could do it in five minutes if they've got nice soft ground as well so you'll generally have the commander out of the vehicle given driver directions as they go forwards and backwards as well so essentially does give you a little bit more extra armor on the front but it's meant to be a uh to create a ditch in front of the vehicle like a little Dozer blade exactly yeah so the gun fitted to the t-72 on all variants was 125 millimeters said to be the d81 TM gun essentially which sort of morphed into the 2a46 the 2a46 we can tell because it has the thermal jacket along the length of the barrel thermal jackets obviously in a a cold winter would have an effect where we keep the heat uniform around the barrel when the barrel is hot and we get a cold wind or snow sitting on the barrel the thermal jacket actually provides a uniform temperature so we don't get a Barrel Bend now there was some documents that do state that this gun could punch through 40 centimeters of reinforced concrete so it'll actually puncture a wall now if anybody can confirm or deny this that would be really good so the gun within itself when it fires it actually The Recoil with this one goes back to about 330 millimeters so recall is quite far back into the turret so it's actually when we look at leopard we're only sort of talking about the 240 I think millimeters in in recall but the interesting thing about this one it doesn't have a mantlet so there's no heavy mantlet at the front as such because then to have a heavy metal we've got to have a heavier breach to to balance that out as well so we just have our dust cover around the actual Barrel itself and it's recessed back into the turret now with this one I said it's sort of a checklist barking belt so we have a sort of mixture of M and M1 features so along the both sides we have the 81 millimeter toucher smoke grenades so these will essentially see on Soviet vehicles from t-72a onwards when they're loaded they can't fire these smoke grenades when the hatches are open because it breaks the firing circuit so really good interesting for a safety feature as well if we can see the infrared and white light Searchlight now if we look back to t64 the t64 had it on the right side of the the gum Outlet now in the information that I've I've got it actually says that the site was mounted on the right hand side next to the coaxial machine gun so this prevented the driver from actually standing up in front of the machine gun this is the tpd K1 laser sight and if you look straight in you can see there's two distinct colors so on the left as we look at it this is the laser sight component now the laser sight was said to be accurate up to 3000 meters of plus or minus 10 meters with the laser after 3000 meters it goes out to about 15 percent so the accuracy of the range can affect the accuracy of your ammunition as well so for armor-pisting fin stabilized discarding Sabo you start to increase large errors in your shooting over 3000 meters but for a high explosive and heat it's not so bad on the right hand side of that side is the actual siding system that he looks through back and to the right we have our another little infrared Searchlight there so next to it you can see behind an armored cover this is his uh night sight so the tpn 149 23 night sight this was initially compared by the Americans to be one of their downfalls early on the m60s night sight was a little bit better than this one at the time when this come out magnification was quite good at about 5.5 I think Chieftain come in at about three but then again the cheating had a wider field of view it's said that they could pick up a tank size Target at 800 meters with this site so again with further development sites improved a lot better in the IR range the only problem is if you're using your infrared beam in conjunction with your night sight if any other opponent has got infrared detection capabilities they can pick up that beam as well so from the CIA report one of the key things that they wanted to find out was the thickness of the the frontal Arbor of the t72 an interesting way that they found this out is we have a look at the pkt machine gun aperture here with inside the turret the Americans found that they could use the pkt mount itself as a reference point so the the reference point that they have was about 680 millimeters from there they figured out a fixed point of 380 millimeters taking those measurements into consideration they come up with an estimate that the turret thickness would be about 514 millimeters thick the m and the M1 they were the first export models to have a composite filler inside the turret now this is called caveats cave Arts is a scented quartz so we have a quartz compound and then we use heat I think it's about 1200 degrees Celsius with pressure and we make blocks of compass armor within the process of casting the turret these blocks are placed in the sand mold I've got some chalk marks that I've put on the turret here so this is a steel bar that goes through this composite material it's held in place and then the cast armor is poured around it so this gives a thickness of about 114 millimeters the Russians did I think it might have been the Polish fired a three bm9 armor piercing round at one of these turrets and it only penetrated about 175 millimeters in and it actually got to I think penetrate only about one inch of the cave Arts composite armor thank you a feature of the t72 is we get rid of our manual loaders which we have on Western tanks so we have now fitted a autoloader the auto loader on this particular vehicle was said to fire up to 3 000 rounds without failure it's done automatically when the ammunition is selected there is a carousel underneath the gun so this holds 22 rounds we hold 39 all up so there's more rounds that are loaded Loosely around the turret itself and around the hull but only the carousel is 22 rounds with this they have a mixture generally they'll have majority of armor piercing followed by heat a couple of rounds and then hash and they'll generally load these together so each round can be fired one after another in saying that if they need to change ammunition they can manually unload the gun to do this they'd open up the breech they'd pull the uh the charge bag out with the end cap and then they'd have to reach through and pull out the the main Armament around so it is a two-piece round that they load the mechanical autoloader can be loaded um by hand if one of the components fails are either the carousel or the actual mechanism to raise the round and this could be done by the commander so to his rear left he has a ratchet mechanism which is located just behind him he unlocks it now before he does that by his feet he has two handles and these are a break so he's got to pull these up this prevents the carousel from spinning around from there with his left hand we open up the covers to expose the carousel as he winds it up the round and the charge bag come up together now as this gun is in its locked position at the moment the stub catcher won't lift up so we can only get it to this point here from there the commander can using a little uh plunger he can actually push the round all the way through he will then lower the charge bag down to that level and he'll push the charge back in as well with the plunger and that stub that's on the end which holds the charge bag will trip the extractors and the breach will close now as we fire the gun as it's coming as it's recoiling back the stub is ejected and is caught in the stub catcher as the new round which is already seated in the auto loader ready to go comes up the stub catcher arm lifts up the hatch is open here by a mechanical linkage and that stub is ejected out the stub can also be removed by the crew if necessary yeah there's one particular myth about the autoloader that sort of still comes around every now and then is that early autoloaders had a habit of ripping arms off if you look at it in the safety sense of it both the commander and the Gunner have these shields now there's essentially no way unless they're doing something really silly that they could ever get their arms ripped off by the mechanism of the auto loader hence why we have the shields now as we know with inside this turret it's quite cramped most Soviet crewman was said to be to fit in this vehicle anywhere between five four and five nine with an average of five seven the Gunner seat that you're sitting on at the moment doesn't move however the commander seat if I can hold up and lower myself down so I'm at the base level now if you don't want to be too tall because once you close the Commander's hatch and the Gunners hatch especially with the handle there you're going to be hitting your head on the hatch so five foot nine I would say would be the tallest you'd probably want to be the driver on the other hand when you compare the volume of space that he has in his position it's said to be about two square meters of volume that he has in that driver's position which is said to be a little bit more than say M60 comparable at the time and the ergonomics of his driving position the position of the pedals are a lot lower than what we see especially say on Leopard where the pedals can be a lot higher as well so when we're talking about crew Comfort the Soviets said that their position was a lot more comfortable especially at the drive-in this vehicle is fantastic to drive for Speed it's not as fast as the leopard and with the actual driving itself it has a seven-speed Synchro box so you've got to go through each gear but you don't need to actually once you use the clutch to go into first you don't need to use the clutch to go into any other gears forward and back until you you want to stop as well it's a very easy vehicle to drive this is an iconic vehicle last weekend in August this year ozama Fest get in quick get yourself on this vehicle and go for a ride [Music]

Channel: The Australian Armour & Artillery Museum

Views: 799,053

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Id: 42D9KnnEULo

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 03 2023