All the Guns on a T-62 Tank (with Nicholas Moran, the Chieftain)

hi there thanks for tuning in to another episode on forgottenweapons.com i'm still not ian mccollum he's gone off in search of another gun park i think i hear him now [Applause] yep nice going thank you so thanks for tuning in uh i am of course joined by nick moran uh the chieftain here today and of course we are joined by yuri the t-62 so uh why is it why don't you just tell us how did it change it turns out that either carrots or bribery works so you you recall last time we did the m4 we had a lot of sherman it was great we went through every gun on the sherman and hopefully you guys enjoyed it as well we basically said look it's a marketing ploy we think that enough of you would join world of tanks game and keep playing it that the marketing people would say this was worth the money and we said that if it did come out that way we would do it again and it did guess what and we are so we're going to try to keep this trend going so again this is a marketing ploy there's a link at the bottom that ian is going to provide you with and if you use it and you start playing all the tanks and you keep playing it the marketing people go this is brilliant we should work with ian moore and we find more tanks so yes that's my cunning plan yep so that's that's the pitch uh where are we uh we are today out with battlefield vegas uh who has this really fantastic example of a t-62 because there are a grand total of how many running t-62s in the u.s in private in private hands i think there's like one that one and firing i'm firing one that one and uh anything bigger than 105 millimeters well it's 115 so one yeah i'm just trying to keep the trend going here one one one uh the biggest privately owned fully functional firing tank in the us and also a really interesting piece of armor history as well as well it's covered in interesting russian machine guns as well so it is the plan is we are going to walk around the t-62 climb up on it and show you guys all three of the weapon systems that are built into this tank so uh we have starting from the smallest we have a coaxial pkt tank machine gun which is kind of neat we then have sitting up on top where you can see it a dshkm uh dashuka i guess uh anti-aircraft foreign languages yeah i'm not going to try russian um and then of course we have the 115 millimeter smoothbore main gun so we'll talk about why that's a particularly relevant and interesting gun uh in a few minutes but uh let's start off with the tank the tank tell me you're the tank guy what's what's the deal with the 62. well look at it's basically the ultimate variant of a t5455 okay so if you look at the development process and you go back to let's say object 140 object 165 object 166. you'll see what you start off with is basically a t-55 has been somewhat elongated now the original plan was to put a 100 millimeter a new 100 millimeter rifle into it the d54 ts as i recall okay but it's a very big gun and they had to make a bigger turret to fit this gun into so what they had to do is that the elongate the t55 chassis a little bit they had to make a wider turret and we'll you can see the the flange which overhangs the edge of the hole that's purely for the turret ring because they couldn't make the tank wider it wouldn't fit in the railway anymore that's an issue logistics i mean people will always talk down on the t62 or t72 the russians are not idiots when they design something there is a good rational reason behind it so anyway you got this massive big turret and you have the original t-62s you look at the engine deck it looks like a t-5455 engine deck that doesn't change it the big obvious giveaway is obviously going to be the gun and the wheel arrangement they're basically t-5455 wheels as well they just spaced them a little bit differently because the weight balance of the tank has been changed by the addition of the big gun which now has more weight up front and the big turret okay but uh it came out in 62 this particular one is model 72 uh because of the dish in or however you pronounce it no offense to any russians watching this i'm irish i bet you're irish enough and um then of course he came in with the 115 which we'll talk about a little bit in a minute would it be fair to say that this is like the last of the world war ii style tanks yes this is the last of the simple soviet in fact part of the reason it entered into such large grail production was they couldn't quite get the t-64 sorted out okay which was the complicated one with the autoloader it's like the the the new first-line tank that was going to be better than anything nato had okay but it is a you were quite correct this is one of the last of the simple tanks well i mean let's here's an example of how brutally simple the early t62 was yeah what's holding the track together okay let's have a look at the back right here but you will note how it's scraped and this is a system that goes way back to pre-world war ii uh later t62 track so this was the ohkm track there was a rshkm track which actually has proper bolts on it let's move on to the pkt before you start telling us about the tensioning system but it's over there it's so interesting all right so first and smallest little gun that we have on this tank is a pkt as a coaxial gun so even to this day we still have coaxial machine guns on tanks right yep um you have to it's most commonly used weapon is it really well because you think what most of your targets are going to be you're going to be shooting there are more troops on the battlefield than there are tanks there's more trucks on the battlefield than there are tanks so if you don't have a good coaxial machine gun your tank is really really hobbled okay i suppose most targets don't justify a gigantic he or no yeah this tank you're only carrying 40 rounds of 115 versus 2750 or whatever it is on the coax so why use the big round if you don't have to okay so uh yeah there was going to be a second one at the front they decided uh no that was a stupid idea like the old d54 you know let's redesignate the tank it's a tank destroyer we can get away without it being a bow gun machine gun so that's an interesting reason we've pretty much gotten away from bowel machine guns about this period like in all tanks haven't we uh 60 i can't think of anything that was still being coming off the production line with them oddly so the the israelis came up with uh their modifications of sherman and unlike the british firefly they got they kept the bow machine gunner instead of using the room for ammunition but after the 1970s they realized well hang on a second if you take the bow gunner from four tanks you can man a fifth tank what is more important to you a fifth tank or four extra machine guns okay and i think that's a fairly good argument and makes sense yeah you know you get more room for your ammunition so underneath here is you you got a ammo storage for the 115 instead of you know where the driver is on the other side all right um so in this particular vehicle that is a pkt uh kalashnikov design bureau machine gun and i believe the t62 was actually the first production vehicle to get the pkt sounds right i'm not gonna argue it uh prior to this it would have been the sg43 goryonov and of course with both the goryonov and the kalashnikov they made a tank version because you've already got this really good general purpose machine gun for the infantry let's use the same mechanism why not but make a few tweaks to fit it into a tank so you don't need a pistol grip on it what they did instead was outfit it with an electrical solenoid trigger so the gunner down in here and we'll take a look at that in a moment he's actually got a little joystick control with a fire button on it for the machine gun that is pretty cool um take the butt stock off you don't need that give it a heavier barrel because you're not going to be changing the barrels out on these things um get a little more sustained fire and it doesn't matter what the weight is really because the tank can carry yeah the tank's already handling 3000 rounds of ammunition it can handle a kilo or two extra barrel weight why carry a weapon when the weapon will carry you yes so another interesting question with coax is just how accurate do you want the coax to be so you can you have two screws at the top one is you have to absolutely pinpoint accurate which means that you have to manually create the beaten zone or the other is you deliberately leave it a little bit loose with a little bit of vibration so you get a little bit of dispersion i can see pros and cons both ways and that's why tanks were built both ways um the one other thing they did on the pk for the pkt the tank version is they actually changed up the gas block design slightly to reduce the amount of gas that it was ejected into the vehicle um the you know on an infantry gun it doesn't really matter if if some of your gas is vented out the gas block well the gas block on this is sitting inside a tight tank and you don't really want to overwhelm that with machine gun fumes if you can avoid it or anything else so the story of fumes actually will come back to the story of fumes on this tank when we get to 115. well let's go inside and take a look at the uh the business center the the operators end that pkt we'll do that so all right so down here inside uh this would be the loaders hatch we have our pkt right in front of us a couple things to point out we have a charging handle on a chain here to connect up to there we have our solenoid firing mechanism which is going to be connected down it is currently disconnected to safe the gun but everything else that you need to do on the gun you can do right here you can pop the top cover you can do that one hand here we go that allows you to load the gun up you have a bracket for a can of ammunition there manual trigger down here all right so um if we are in here to fire either the main gun or the coax we would normally have ah yes we'll have nick move into the gunner's seat instead of the commander's seat commander is very friendly behind the gunner it's actually not too bad no it kind of isn't so you've got your hands on the turret controls um which if this were powered on would be moving the turret around and then the light right there in front of you would normally be where the gunner's direct fire optic is yes yeah and would that be one single optic for both the coax and the main gun yes okay keep it simple okay and what's kind of cool there is because well they didn't have to recalibrate the coax reticle or elements of the reticle because they kept the exact same barrel length between the gorion of tank guns and the pk tank guns so there's that which is nice but we don't have this in place so kind of our next best thing for firing the coax is going to be the vision block uh right up there uh and then there's also another big bracket right in front of you yeah what was that right so if you remember the the night vision systems that the soviets had were not necessarily considered to be the greatest possible so unlike an integrated system that we would have today that would you would often find a separate site for the infrared to the main gun so you saw on the front there are infrared active infrared search lights basically right so the idea is your spot it's a big spotlight and the reason is infrared so that people with the naked eye can see what the problem is that everybody on the other side also has infrared receivers so you're not really much better off and the act the effective range of these early infrareds is only in a matter of you know six seven hundred meters anyway you could use it passively maybe a couple of hundred meters but you would have a separate site here just for the night vision okay so let's load this up i am going to move over to the gunner's seat and we're going to have one of the battlefield vegas guys come over to maintain the gun and we'll do a little bit of pkt shooting i thought after [Music] that did not take very long to do 50 rounds solenoid's off all right nick uh now moving up onto the turret we have the number two gun which actually wasn't always here on the t-62 was it nope or on the t-5455 after the post warrior either so the problem was this is this is an anti-aircraft gun it's what it's really useful if you have troops that's why you got the pkt this is exactly the same as on the sherman yeah basically the caliber 50. the 50 on the top of the turret is for shooting at aircraft uh but the problem was that the russians figured that well what are the aircraft that we're shooting at you're you're shooting at the early jets you're f-84 or z86 or whatever and you couldn't really hit anything with complete waste of time so t62 for 10 years was built without the machine gun mount and a lot of the t-54s were as well then the americans come up with this thing called the attack helicopter which flies a lot slower than a jet and you can actually shoot one down with a machine gun that i might be able so they decided well let's uh let's put these machine guns back on the tank so it's much easier to put the machine gun on the t55 turret than it was the t62 they had to completely redesign the shape of the casting to get the the gun on so the model 1972 is the one that introduced this new turret shape with the mount for the dish cam so you know this is one of the last of the 19 000 or so t-62s made okay so as far as the gun itself it is basically a standard dshkm the m is the modernized version which dates to 1946 when it was adopted i think production actually began in early 1945 and essentially what they did is completely replace the feed system because the soviets were looking at ways to mount these in multiple multigun mountings and the original dshk feed system which is by the way the sh in that dshk the original feed system couldn't be adapted to be left or right hand feed so they replace it with this guy which is easily convertible between left and right that becomes largely the m probably the easiest way to recognize the m is by that muzzle break um which is a good bit chunkier than the original disco muzzle brakes um there would have originally been an anti-aircraft site for this which we don't have on it at the moment but we have a really cool traverse and elevation system i have an elevation hand wheel here and you can hopefully see the spring in here there are two springs that hold the gun at whatever position so it's really quite easy for me to elevate this despite the fact that this is a solid hundred pound gun um i have a little handle here so if i clamp down on the handle it locks the elevation and then i can also traverse the entire cupola let me see if i can do this without knocking you off the tank i guess it's worth noting also this is the loaders heavy machine gun so a lot of people see the the big 50 cal on let's say an abrams is on the right hand side because that's what the tc is but on this tank you're on the loader side and this emphasizes why it's an anti-aircraft gun because if you're if you're shooting an aircraft you don't need to be running the 115 or the coax that's right it's the other cupola over there that is the commander's position isn't it okay so we have ammo storage right here this would be normally would hold 100 rounds of this is 50 0.50 or 12.7 by 108 millimeter the russian dshk cartridge is a little bit bigger than the us-50 browning so lock that up because it's not in use that of course that belt will feed right into the gun now to actually release the the pintle to move we have a lockout lever right here flip that up and then i can elevate and depress with my hand wheel here uh we have a lockout for the cupola that's actually up inside here but works very similarly to rotate just the mount you've got that one right there now as originally designed this would be your firing trigger so you would use this hand to control the lateral movement of the gun and you would use your right hand to control the elevation and the elevation lock if you need it this particular turret hasn't been set up to actually fire remotely so instead of having the solenoid attachment on the back this tank has been set up with a regular dshkm with its actual spade grip handles so when we do some shooting with it i will be controlling the elevation with one hand and controlling the gun and the trigger with the other hand alright so there is our elevation wheel this lever on it is a locking lever so if i hold that down it locks my elevation which is important because there is a tremendous amount of concussion and recoil that comes off of this behemoth when you shoot it so also worth pointing out when you get this up to its you know some extreme elevation the spade grips actually interfere with the mounting block that is part of why we have actually a release lever on the original firing control here so to shoot this at high elevation i would have to come way down inside the vehicle like this which is not really conducive to using the spade grips while we're up here you can see the feed block here i actually have a video on a semi-auto dshkm that shows this whole system pretty well so i'll link to that um at the end of this video if you're interested in more about the mechanism of this gun uh you can take a look at it there in the meantime though let's put some rounds through this this all right woah i tell you that muzzle break gives you something doesn't it oh yeah all right so the pkt the disco these are pretty standard they're cool they're very cool guns but they're not particularly exotic when it comes to this sort of vehicle no what makes the t-62 something unique and special is this main gun correct so what what's the deal what is it well you're basically trying to get as much punch as possible into his turret ring that of that size so there were a couple of different guns that were being developed at the time 100 millimeter rifles the t62a was a model that was designed to take 100 millimeter rifle not very many were built okay but the problems that they had were the although they've increased the size of the turret ring the rounds are absolutely huge and they weren't really pushing it so the 100 millimeter round for us 37 kilos as i recall for a single 100 millimeter round that's chunky and it was nearly 1.2 meters long whereas the round for the 115 there's not like 1.2 meters in that turret no there isn't that that's part of the problem that we're dealing with here so the ram for the 115 is 20 kilos and 1.1 meters long so you'll see inside this is not going to be a small piece of ammunition but again they were talking about rifling 100 and the rapira anti-tank rifle correction anti-tank gun was already in service the t-12 and that was a 100 millimeter smoothbore okay and they looked at the mathematics behind it and i saw just how much more penetration they were getting from the repair smoothbore than the rifle equivalent so okay look let's take the 100 millimeter rifled gun let's bore out the rifling and oh it turns out to be about 115 millimeters okay and get a little more bore diameter and uh well you look at the cases like a neck down case it's the massive amount of repellent in this thing and the end result was that you had a muzzle velocity increase from about 100 meters per second to nearly 1700 meters per second 1700 meters per second that is insane wow and the gun work this is one of those guns that because it was overtaken by the 125 it was never really developed to the extent that it probably could have been okay uh but uh if you look at the iran-iraq war the these things were punching through the front of chieftains which were the the chieftain was the bogeyman for the soviets at the time so let's put our t64s up against the chieftains and uh these things would go through uh chieftains m60s uh it was a very very good gun so the idea is you're getting rid of the rifling because you're actually using a sabode smaller projectile right for the fin stabilized round yes so there's an interesting story behind this so when the t-62 was first exported to egypt and the only reason they even got exported was it was supposed to be a secret tank but one got captured by the chinese during a border conflict and the secret was out oops so to say okay well we'll export it to everybody so they exported it to egypt and the egyptians got ap ammo which was basically a solid slug with a few fins in the back and he ammo which again it's just a big shell with a few fins at the back but not stabled okay but they forgot to change the optic for the gun so the optic had reticles for ap hg and fin sabo and the egyptians are going hang on a second you said you said you said you sent us all the ammunition and the soviets going oh that was an administrative error don't worry we'll send you the proper ammo and that's what ended up being flung against the israelis uh you know a year later but you you could fire out of this round with ap ap fin stable uh he uh or heat so a battle load for this would have been about 16 he frag eight heat high speeds of anti-tank chemical effect and another 16 fin stable okay and this was like the first soviet tank uh with that sort of smoothbore gun and they've kept with it ever since and eventually nato caught hope okay so at this when this was introduced nato didn't have no native equivalent type gun but nato was barely introducing the 105 and when the soviet leadership discovered that this brand new british 105 gun was going into service and the best tank on the head at the time was 100. that was part of the other reason that this got approved as 115. that's a smooth war because we can't have the nato with a better bigger gun than we have we have to have a bigger gun so that that's another part of the reason these do got approved this sounds like an issue of not necessarily a better gun but a gun with a bigger number the way well for the politicians there may be something to do with i mean if you argue is this a better gun than the british 105 you'll be arguing that till cows come home and the 105 is an absolutely fantastic wonderful gun this ain't bad okay well let's take a look inside and take a look at the actual shelves for it sure all right here we go so if i remember correctly there are four rounds of ammunition that are held ready in the turret yeah so this there's really only two me really available so this is not proper procedure for this but that's a chunky heavy round and you're going to somehow move it from there onto here and then slam it into the breech and this is a side locking breech block now the t62 also had a really cool auto ejection system which uh is not up and running on this particular vehicle yet they're working on it but it's not set up yet what originally would have happened is after you fire the gun would come back to just was it just above level i believe two degrees so two degrees above level um and it is going to open automatically open this hatch in the back of the turret and eject the empty case just out the back of the turret because there is no space inside this thing for empty casings um that that will make this thing unusable very quickly so it wasn't just for that also it was also for the fumes so we were talking about the fumes and the pkt yeah well another problem they had was the amount of fumes that were coming off this round were so horrible that they had to eject the rounds before they simply oh the crew died you know not died but became incapacitated due to the fumes so that's that's why the other thing the other minor detail you may have noticed there you see the ammunition is stowed around it's like everywhere yeah it is and look at your feet what rotates uh i suspect there is no turret basket in this vehicle is there there isn't there is a rotating floor so where your left foot is right now or both feet now that will rotate okay but still if the turret rotates while you are trying to grab one of these rounds from anywhere except the two rounds the two-round rack behind you there right so these will rotate but i've got a rack down here and those if the turrets moving are just going to swing on past me and more likely i'm going to get one halfway out and then the turret's going to jam on the round and then it'll be just all sorts of horrible stuff right which brings us to a problem with the d62 acquisition so when you're reloading and it's a long reload because these are big rounds is uh the gunner comes off target and has to stop tracking so the gun the gun will depress his sight is going to come off target because the gun is no longer aiming and if the target was moving he can't really track it anymore because otherwise the the loader is going to have a limb removed yeah yeah that would add too and of course we should point out this is a recoiling gun carriage so this whole thing is going to come chunk back every time the gun fires well shall we shoot it i think that's a good idea all right we are not going to fire from inside the turret for safety reasons we are going to fire it electrically from outside but we will have a camera in here so we can see exactly what happens you ready send it all right let's do it [Music] um there's a nice little concussion wave no small amounts ago that was nice that was a nice little concussion wave no small amount of recoil coming back rock on that and you definitely hit the hillside yes sir well that's pretty cool never shot at 115 before i tell you that i don't think anybody has in the us actually uh actually i think it was on the third live round ever fired from this tank and you in private hands nice that's really cool a nice bit of concussion from that thing no honestly not as bad though yeah but the concussion was not as bad as i was expecting um i think i'm used to as much as one gets used to it uh like anti-tank guns with muzzle brakes and this does not meet or have a muzzle breaker so in fact with a saber and it can also also be a trouble you do not want that it will explode on you yeah so there is actually a way of fitting a snape around on the foot onto a muzzle by the firefly showed on the 17 pounder but it is very very tricky okay at any rate um i'd like to give a really big thanks to battlefield vegas for giving us access to this tank thanks to you nick for coming out and uh helping show me around this thing because this is certainly your bailiwick awesome thank you anybody who is interested in this sort of fantastic heavy equipment definitely check out your channel for all sorts of stuff and naturally thanks to wargaming for effectively sponsoring the video um check out world of tanks if you like it and if a bunch of people uh decide to start playing and keep playing it then perhaps do this again war gaming will let us come to another tank i'm kind of curious what the next like this was a really cool step up from the sherman i don't know what the next step up from the tc i can think of two uh i'm not quite sure which of the two actually i can figure three at least you and i go to the tank by athlon [Laughter] i mean we'll have we'll have our own entry yeah yeah yeah just like you keep using these old uh old guns in your two gun we show up in a t-62 or something really old i was gonna say an ft-17 but okay that could take us a while to get around the course yeah yeah be fun though it'll be night by the time we finish get run over by a t-62 anyway hopefully you guys enjoyed the video thanks everyone who made it possible and we'll see you tomorrow you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 636,714

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, t62, t-62, tank, battle tank, russia, russian, soviet, Lebanon, Lebanese, Israel, israeli, syria, syrian, Battlefield Vegas, 115mm, biggest tank, dshk, dshkm, pkt, antiaircraft, 50 cal, 12.7x108, 12.7x99, bmg, coax, coaxial, wot, world of tanks, chieftain, moran, Nicolas, t54, t55, Cold War, simple tanks, driving tank, smoothbore, sabot, fin stabilized, kalashnikov

Id: a__ks1GgJRU

Length: 32min 3sec (1923 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021