Chieftain's Q&A #2

Goodings and we are back for the next QA as before the priority goes to the folks at the appropriate patreon are subscribed star tears but I'm going to grab one or two interesting ones from the comments on last month's video as well to make up the numbers a couple of admin notes first though first up thanks to Mario's who came out for a drink with me and Thessaloniki he was paying attention to my facebook page and caught that I was in the area I do seem in the image should be blocking the White Tower in the background but I do promise I was in Salonika if you want to find out about any other meetups there's a link to the Facebook page and also if you want to donate some money I made the patreon and subscribe to our pages are in the text below further apologies to whoever it was I ran into a Munich Airport I needed to sort out the wife and baby before they got stuck in the middle seat for the flight back to the US I'm gonna be a Conneaut for the D Day event for wargaming but watch out for a pub session in Cleveland the Wednesday before I'll also be bringing along Bernard from military history visualised suggestions for locations are welcome but preferably on the outskirts of town this will be in transit from a location somewhere off to the southwest of the city the Conneaut so we're gonna be kind of bypassing it if we can finally I do have to get going on that livestream chat thing that I promised the patrons which of course patreon itself doesn't host so any recommendations is the house the best set about doing this we'll be welcome anyway how were the questions and we're gonna kick off with shrine Maiden when would I estimate if it has it all that the trade Armour for Speed philosophy of the leopard one AMX 30 and type 61 amongst other words began to fade away in deference the heavier frontal armor an interesting question there are a couple of ways to look at it it is interesting though to note that the nations which gained fame of world war ii for having the big heavy monster tanks like france and germany changed a tune and moves a lighter ones in a post-war period and those on the receiving end of the monster tanks tended to move to heavier tanks than the Germans in the French started building and so basically the position swapped entirely although in fairness the strategic situation at the British Americans face in the Cold War was not quite that which their fates in the early 1940s there are again the matters of operational and tactical mobility the lighter weight can result in one of a couple of benefits and note I'm sayin mobility and not speed and I think the design philosophy is done a bit of a disservice by saying trade armor for speed instead of trade armor for mobility firstly at the purely tactical level for a certain engine size the tank will give you a certain amount of get-up-and-go the tank will accelerate faster and may well meet a higher top speed now obviously you are not going to be able to outrun a missile or a gun the idea of relying on speed instead of armor is a bit of a myth but there are certainly some advantages in terms of being able to quickly reposition there are also the two advantages at the operational level first the powertrain simply isn't being stressed as much and note how the biggest heaviest tank in NATO in the 1970s chieftain was also the one with the worst reliability reputation so a bit like King Tiger fantastic tank if it ever got to where it needed to be the second advantage and I think the one which really ruled the design requirement for the sub 50-ton tanks of the Cold War period is operational mobility though ie crossing bridges Peter pre-existing or combat engineer built being able to be landed by landing craft of different sizes fuel consumption and so on and these last you might be a particular known in Japan with its many islands and perhaps more limited fuel resources it is worth noting that it does not actually require sacrificing frontal armor in order to achieve the light weight the Soviets demonstrated this quite well with the t-64 t-72 series tanks which are right at the top of the list of most heavily armored tanks in the world for their time without sacrificing a large gun and while still remaining at a reasonable weight they did have to make sacrifices in other areas of course but it's a good demonstration that even in the Cold War period it wasn't absolutely necessary to sacrifice the one over the other the Israelis didn't have very much acreage to worry about operational mobility and and obviously the Americans could deal with their fuel or bridging problems by a simple brute force by lots and lots of engineering equipment the fuel trucks and so on which really just needs us with the British and I strongly doubt that they deliberately set out to put into production a vehicle with known reliability issues palpable but like the Germans in World War two they simply bit off a little bit more than their engineers could chew at the time so they're finally getting around to answering the question I would say that the late 1970s is when the trade Armour for mobility concept was primarily put to rest even though even today France and Japan are still making lighter tanks in the other Western powers it's not as if Mitsubishi lacks a technology to make a working 70 ton monster tank with the type 10 they evidently simply didn't want to make one which broke 50 tons presumably the same liability for the island-hopping for example still applies by this point in the late 70s he had the advancement of automotive technology that you could build fast reliable tanks in the 60 plus tonne weight class you have advances in engineering technology which indicate that you can now make a useful avlb capable of taking that 60 plus tonne weight and for that 60 plus tonne weight Western tanks could now have enough armor to provide the required levels of protection without making the sacrifices that the Soviet tanks were making in other words by the time you get to abrams in leopard 2 the tank designers could have their cake and eat it too which i always always kind of was first surely you would have to say eat you cake and then have it too anyway the maiden also asks on an entirely unrelated topic do I have plans for more war stories and is calcium buildup a problem with the boarding vessel which are not related at all yes more stories will pop up from time to time but I don't plan them after all if I use them all in a deliberate video I can no longer go off from random tangents from other subjects it's my wand as for the boiling vessel I haven't heard of any such problems and I would presume that occasional cleaning should deal with it I personally did not use the boiling vessels are my abrams or Bradley a hot tea and coffee was not really much in demand in Mojave Desert except the breakfast which point top provided that would together with the rest of the food so I never really had to worry though another thing but I don't really recall any particular maintenance requirements came in the manuals for me to her so perhaps a viewer can chime in down below SEO 896 posed the following how effective do I think that the tortoids 1495 would have been at their design roles now these are of course those super-heavy monster tanks cooked up by the British and the Americans the British PA commented the 32 pounder derived from the 3.7 inch a a gun and the American one had a 105 and incidentally the t95 was more normally known as a t28 and for further explanation look for the link below for the t28 95 article I wrote these were fortification busters designed to go up against German strong points take the hits from the 88 and then use their large high-velocity cannon to deal with the enemy bunkers at the cost of course of absolutely horrendous operational mobility one had to plan well in advance to ensure that the vehicles were in the right place at the right time now could they have done the job I don't see why not everything seems to indicate that they would have succeeded at the role but there is a question of whether or not it was actually worthwhile to build on for example by the end of the war the US Army is using 155 millimeter cell propelled guns in the direct fire role leading to that rather famous quote from Oberst your heart milk that when the Americans start using 1 v 5s as sniper weapons it's time to give up however the 1 v v did have an AP round available and it was on issue this wasn't just something made up by World of Tanks for gameplay purposes the intended target of course wasn't tanks it was bunkers so if you were going to get an armoured vehicle for blowing up bunkers you know in theory had a choice in about three different levels you could have the 105 millimeter super-heavy t28 the 155 millimeter T 30 heavy tank or the 155 millimeter M 40 or if you want to go to just stupid levels of big gun the 240 millimeter T 92 or the 8-inch T 93 so at this point the only advantage to t28 or tor toys is the armor but if you're going up against fortifications it's much less of a problem as events evidently would show if the enemy can't see you they can't really hit you and fortifications don't move so in a tactic which goes back at least to the m10 days you take advantage of a smokescreen or Knight some form of cover to get your gun into position and then camouflage it then once visibility is restored you can see the target you send your M downrange problem solved and the m12 performed this task apparently without any great issue despite their lack of armor as a counter view look at this response from Henry Doyle about Durham vigor the closest vehicle which actually was operated with that sort of impenetrable armor big gun design philosophy it's really interesting to read the after-action report from the unit commander that was involved in bombarding the Warsaw Ghetto he claimed that this was a total waste of money because the weapon was so effective that you as the guy who fired it had to be so far away unless you want to get your own vehicle destroyed that he said you don't need to be armoring with 200 millimeter of armor you might as well have something like a homo with just 20 millimeters of armor and bombard from a far distance because the blast radius was about 500 meters with one of those that seems to corroborate rather my line of thinking the clip of course if you don't recognize it is from operation think-tank which you find else around my channel so there you go no reason it wouldn't have worked but no reason to build it either it's a job could be done by other more flexible methods charles challenge inquires what tank doesn't exist to do a video on that I wish did and and that can certainly be a very long list there is some which I can feel sad never survived the war being blown up in service or whatever so much do I would love to be able to film the one porch Teager which saw combat it's something when occupational hazard is acquired I mean after all these things were built for combat and go to combat you everyone at risk of blowing up the ones which were expended as range targets like the Churchill gun carriage those are faced Palmer's since the army obviously didn't know or care what they were doing the ones which exist but due to incredible neglect or unfilmable and the low key in Aberdeen here are distressing but the ones which absolutely infuriate me are the ones which were specifically set aside to be museum pieces and then for spurious reasons or maybe no reason at all were later destroyed there were a number of project reports in US archives which say something like this project is cancelled all vehicles use will be returned to the depot for conversion back to the original configuration with one vehicle to be sent to Aberdeen for the historical record news I can tell a large number of World War two prototype vehicles were indeed sent Aberdeen and then in probably more desiccates to try and keep up appearance and for anything else melted down from metal perhaps during the Korean War along with some captured German equipment is melting down the t57 GMC for example really going to make that much of a difference to the u.s. is war production Korean War there are persistent rumors that some of these old vehicles still exist on the black side of the fence in Aberdeen but frankly I'm disinclined to believe them and this doesn't have to be just world war ii vehicles either there were plenty of Cold War prototypes that I would love to ramble over which now seem to exist only in honey cookbooks however since he asked for a specific vehicle which no longer exists that I would like to have filmed I shall respond with Bob sample out of sheer curiosity for nothing else cipher Warner 18 wishes to know are there any examples of tanks which could have been which maybe could have gone somewhere if more time consideration money and so on had been given to see them through Charles arange voted for the P 43 was actually pretty good answer there are of course a couple of reasons why tank may have its development canceled it could be that the raison d'etre of the tanks design no longer existed or perhaps it simply wasn't technologically feasible for the tank to meet its design requirements or perhaps they just blew through the budget was cancelled financially on the American side I would rather have liked to see what could have been done with the t95 medium or the mbt-70 to a set of pure technological curiosity however I do wonder if there wasn't an actual lost capability that the Army was worse off for not having with regards to vehicles such as the XM 800 either wheeled or tracked the AGS which is still being flogged by BAE by the way or the m2 47 as near as I can tell all three would have been capable of performing a needed role although there 247 likely would be benefiting from being put onto an Abrams hull I'm sure the Corps of Engineers would have loved the Grizzly as well Marines well I have no idea what was actually wrong with the EFV it seemed to me would work according to James the program to replace the then lv t p7 a1 was started in 1973 the EFV was cancelled in 2011 the replacement program for the efe the ACB still isn't in service yet and God knows why is taken nearly 50 years to replace the AAA v's welcome to the modern military procurement system even a lot of the simple stuff isn't coming I saw a technology demonstrator for an m3 Bradley but a mast mounted sensor system well over a decade ago and it still some it's not as if it's something that we couldn't use in the recon squadrons and as for the Redlegs they're probably infuriated at the fact that they're still using warmed-over in 109s I wanted to see what other nations are using the XM 2001 program could have been complete game-changer for the artillery world especially if they ever got that liquid-propellant concept to work and that's what's the American side of things if we go to KU bunker there is an absolutely amazing number of prototype vehicles on display that the Soviets were playing around with and these guys really were thinking outside of the box another said they weren't alone the Germans you look at the VT twin gun system it was quite interesting and there was a proposal for an S tank - could it have really worked I don't know obviously they decided not and they want with the conventional strv 121 sadly the best we can do now is just read the test reports which I can't because a I haven't seen them and B I don't read German or Swedish or Russian gecko five five one wishes to know are there any real strides yet to be made in design or doctrine to improve the modern vehicles well you've got the evolution versus revolution I guess engines are going to get more powerful and I still don't write off the turbine but watch for mr. Schindler's question and armor will still get more effective active protection systems will take more of a role but fundamentally does little new here just the same things just better if there is any real revolution like the in the near future a wager is going to be in terms of situational awareness or the denial of such and there's a lot of ideas out there such as give a tank a UAV through sight audio-visual transmission of the spotting reports the iron vision VR headsets for 360-degree vision from within the tank faster and smoother integration of battlefield communication technologies maybe contact transmission reports you designate art by laser and it goes much simpler version has now and on the other hand you're looking at stealth technologies against radar thermals and even visual signature laser detectors are becoming commonplace and the course is the probability of electronic warfare to degrade the enemy's communications and even in fact the limitations aren't simply financially technological so for example the British Army decided to let the troops loose for the tank they called it the Street Fighter project great idea actually they just let the troops add whatever they felt would help the tank one symbol edition arm was so simple it defies belief that nobody seems to really tried it out before or it's a sticker camera on the end of the gun tube facing perpendicular to the gun so the idea was that the tank could just stick the end of the gun around the edge of cover see what was there before committing the tank the problem in practice though was this slowed progress to such a crawl the crews are always taking a good long look before driving forward then it took forever to get anywhere so the enemy had plenty of time to respond and react now imagine what would happen if tank platoon had their own UAV as a lot of people are proposed you end up with a new version of paralysis by analysis the tank simply has to rely on the other arms to do some of the work such as the accompanying infantry or the Recon units ahead who actually have time to fly the UAV or other units for a nobody support and so on while the tanks themselves move with speed and aggression and just do what tanks do best a I can doubtless assist with the taking over some of the theoretical load in the future but at this point you start going beyond mere tanks and you move into bolos Andrew wishes to know if the NATO attempt to do quality over quantity is the questionable concept given that the Germans try to do the same thing in world war ii and failed well I don't think the Germans have a choice there is no way that they were going to match the quantity criterion so they had to go equality now this isn't it a say that tanks like Sherman had no quality they they did indeed but the Germans needed to turn to quality dial 211 only to discover that it didn't actually go that far they just broke the dial so the Germans never really made it a question of quantity versus quality what you ended up with was more matter of quantity of working stuff versus quality of no working stuff now I do slightly overstate the problem but I think I think it's very simplification if you moved to the Cold War period though NATO kind of had an interesting blend on the quantity quality scale so I'm sure a large number of my older European viewers will be familiar with the Conscription that was common in most of Europe and still exists in some countries today so Mario's remember back little earlier in front of the war tower he's gonna have to get his hair cut soon when he joins up and my currently 12 year old cousin has the military in his future as well whether he likes it or not the British were more of a minority when in 1960 they ended conscription joining the British and the quality side of the scale with Americans and even during the Vietnam War for the high intensity high technology theaters such as Germany in Korea the regular experienced well-trained full-time and Guard forces tend to be focused there and not on Vietnam but if we want to put it in the figures just as an aside there are eight point seven million people who've served in the active Army between 1964 and 1973 2.7 million went into country in Vietnam 2.2 million people were drafted of whom about 650 first went to Vietnam and I'm again I'm leaving out Guardsmen and drafted Marines here this means that just over 2/3 of the active army did not go to Vietnam because they were being held for the high-intensity conflict that said two-thirds of Vietnam draftees didn't go to Vietnam either which means they split the Vietnam and draft forces fairly equally as for why NATO did the split when it comes down to national identity really the u.s. was big enough and secure enough that it could rely on volunteer forces and it could pay well enough as well that people would do it countries like Germany Norway were unlikely to get enough volunteers to make the quality override the Warsaw Pact quantity there does come a point for which there is simply no substitute for numbers and who also asks other any post-war conflicts would support the NATO philosophy well yes and no even a world war two the German conquest of France was the case of quality being quantity after the war the Western experience equality beating or these timing quantity is long enough you look at Korea you look at the Falklands you look at the Israeli wars the Iraq Wars and it's obvious cases in point although the Israelis did make the distinction between the trouble provided by the war that correction the trouble provided by the raw numbers of the fraidy well-equipped Egyptians and Syrians and the equally difficult but different trouble caused by the high quality of the Jordanians however the quantity on the facing side of these comparisons was generally of such incredibly low comparative quality that you wonder the true question is is the qualitative differential sufficient to overcome the quantitative differential and as much more complicated question now fortunately so far in the West we haven't really had to deal with that problem conflicts with significant numbers of not quite so different in quality troops have been much rarer perhaps you might look to India Pakistan Iran Iraq also worth noting perhaps it's the Battle of the bridges in 91 a correction 90 where some quite competent 280 tankers simply ran out of ammo the walls relatively speaking nothing wrong with the quality of the Chieftains or their crews but there's only so much that they could do Christopher Nobles observes that pictures have been released showing a side-by-side comparison of the front turret and hull of the new m1 a-to-z formerly known as the m1a2 SEP three three and the preceding Sept V - he wants to know my best guess as to the armor increase in the answer is I have no friggin clue for starters I don't know what it was beforehand except secondly although presumably it is possible to come up with photometric assessment of the exact volume increase of the exterior this also would require an assumption that there are no changes or increases to the interior volume of the tank you can though provide in theory a percentage increase estimate but there is a further assumption and that is that the composition of the armor is identical now I'm going to assume that the armor boffins have not been sitting on their collective arses for the decades since the v2 entered service and that on a pound-for-pound basis the new armor is better by some only quantifiable amount as well Marcel wishes to know why the m47 wasn't sent to Korea and that's not a bad question when you consider that the patent 47 was the first product of the Korean tank panic however it comes down to a matter in need the tank started being built in some numbers before was really ready and the first series of production vehicles actually needed to be back fitted with modifications the modified vehicle was standardized in May of 1952 by which point the tank panic was well over and the m4 is in m-46 is in theater scene quite capable of dealing with the enemy's infantry heavy problem especially given the absence of any remaining tanks in the North's inventory at the meantime the evil red commie horde is staring down over the German border with some pretty hefty armored numbers and simply made more sense to send the new tanks to Germany instead according to Chanukah a small number were shipped to Korea for battle testing KT wishes to know how much wood could a woodchuck chuck now although I'm not entirely sure this is the correct channel for obtaining information on C or a day I shall attempt to answer anyway and apparently you are not the first person ask this question because there's actually an estimated answer from wildlife experts the typical woodchuck excavates some 35 cubic feet of soil for its burrow at about 20 pounds per cubic foot of soil this gives a would took an average movement capacity of some 700 pounds which of course is all thrown up through the air burrow the implications thus being that if for some reason a woodchuck had any desire to do so it ought to be able to chalk at least somewhere over a third of a ton of wood and multifarious wishes to know my opinion of Merkava how do I think compares to other mbts and do I think it's an evolutionary dead end for tanks now I mention this before the Israelis do not claim that Merkava is the best tank in the world they do claim is the best tank in the world for Israel and it's very difficult to argue the point the tank is designed very much with Israeli requirements in mind it is designed to excel at the terrain that Israel is to fight over and that doesn't mean to say that it will do better than an m1 duds in Germany for example so a case in point there is a deliberate decision for the suspension to be more rugged than fast you know the terrain and the galan and you know lebanon being a lot more rocky than most places in the world the tanks tend to operate I have thus far spent only a few brief minutes inside an early marker van and I didn't have enough time to give even that 1980s vehicle a good once-over for an operator's perspective so if anyone in Israel wishes to invite me to film a more modern Merkava I'll settle for three if not a four please send the invitation over my way the latest market certainly has some interesting features so for example note that for a while they dispensed with the loaders hatch deeming it to be a weak spot and that the armour on the roof of the Merc frauds now is ridiculously thick and the hatch was a weak point now apparently this design decision was not well received by troops and mark of us for soon started seeing Lotus roof hatches again I'm also not entirely convinced by the semi auto loader system now as I understand it another interesting feature is simulation integration it is possible to turn an m1 tank into a simulator using the a fist system what you do is you hope the whole shebang together it takes about four hours as I recall and the idea is that if you don't have access where you are to a cc TT ER kauft or other such simulator for example I'd say your m1 is a marine m1 on your own in phibian ship you hook up a computer to the tanks controls and you put monitors on the outside of all the periscopes and so on in that way you can do your simulation the Merkava force architecture boss is designed to take the simulators from the start and so the thing can be put into simulator mode and be used for network sim training in about 15 minutes with the crew training in their actual tank then in event of sudden war if you just want to do it quickly the tank can be returned to fully combat capable configuration by the time you know in between the warning order is issued and the time somebody's actually written the OP order now how many internet arguments over best tank have you seen that even consider such a thing and tell me that there isn't a significant benefit that you gain from the money and effort used to grant that take that capability to the tank do I think mercury is a evolutionary dead end and I don't see why unless other countries assign that they needed to design a tank to excel in northern Israel against the like the enemies there I can't see a lot of Merkava features being integrated into anybody else's tank but on the other hand I don't see why Marko vayas replacement won't use a number of its features mr. Schindler remember mentioned him he's wondering what's wrong with the hybrid electric drive systems and observes for example that heavy rail locomotives have been using these systems to haul ridiculous tonnage is for decades and it's not exactly unproven technology and there are certainly some significant advantages to the concept for example nearly two decades ago BAE II came up with the transformation technology demonstrated which is basically like I've stretched m113 the vehicle's motors put out about 500 horsepower into sprocket which is definitely more than 275 or so the standard m113 and the motor torque advantages give it a zero to three tines about five times out of a standard vehicle five times faster further came with rubber band tracks which were quiet and the electric motors alone with the 40 batteries will get the vehicle to move silently some 10 miles so you can imagine the advantages that this poses for reconnaissance vehicles for example I'm also about 10 years ago the Swedes were playing with both wheeled and track designs of their own known as SCP so what's the problem and it's likely the same problem which is afflicted petrol or diesel electric tanks since the 1940s cooling the requirements of armored vehicles and the requirements of electric motors are somewhat contradictory now if you look at the traction motors of a locomotive and since I'm a bit of a pharoah chronologist haven't have one and since you bring them up you'll see that they are within the bogie frame down here and there is something of a cooling effect from the air passing over it further there is usually a traction motor cooling blower located up here under the hood somewhere which forces additional air over the motors the additional weight of the electric motor and the weight and space of a blower motor is of relatively little importance when discussing railway locomotive the tank however needs to have its systems generally protected by armor which means no easy cooling airflow and do you really want to save room in a tank for a cooling blower development work does continue as there are obviously benefits to the system but at this point it simply just doesn't meet requirements Caldwell Transport wishes to know if leopard one was ever used in combat and I can think of twice off the top of my head the Canadians use him for a while in Afghanistan before deciding upgrade to leopard twos and some shooting was involved but as far as I know nothing too dramatic the Danes certainly used their leopard ones expressing some seventy two rounds of 105 millimeter displeasure at Bosnian Serbs for their ambushing their seven tank column with anti-tank missiles in April 94 about a year and a half later a t-55 ambushed in under-strength Danish level one platoon of three tanks a leopard one was damaged and the t-55 was knocked out outside of that I can't really think of anything so anyway that's pretty much that I had to put this out now in order to make the monthly deadline so now a back to the tank rest videos take care

Channel: The_Chieftain

Views: 103,080

Rating: 4.9753962 out of 5

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Id: 9MlQ0AMZpz0

Length: 31min 0sec (1860 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 31 2019