Chieftain's Q&A 21. Mt Rushmore, Promotions and Motion Sickness

greetings all welcome back to another somewhat delayed q a it does seem to be rather par for the course for these days for those of you not following on patreon my attempt to fly out to do more inside hatch filming has failed miserably and now needs to be rescheduled hopefully within the month importantly though new t-shirts are available yes the t28 gets its time to shine as usual for those who are interested in reduced shipping packages the older shirts are also being reissued as well look at the link down below also as usual these are batch prints so the shirts will accept orders for a couple of weeks and then the window will close and they'll be sent to production with look you'll be getting them before the next salvo of real world tank events so you can wear with pride also i need to go back to the patreon post and see who actually came up with this idea so watch out for a pm for me you're getting you're getting a free t-shirt anyway to the questions as normal priority is to the patrons but i've taken a few from other sources as well like youtube comments and i'm starting with loch ness hamster how dangerous is the muzzle blast of a tank's gun right you don't want to be all that near to one i seem to recall that 200 feet is potentially hazardous to anybody in the front sector of modern 120 millimeter cannon and lethal at about 20 feet that correction 50. for those sticking their heads out of a neighboring tank on the range or even one's own tank it helps that the majority of your body is actually inside the tank but it is still an extremely significant impact on you which you will feel i have fired head out once just for the experience and i have no particular desire to repeat that experiment it's a bit like when i took the gas mask off in the nbc chamber it's kind of like yeah i didn't have to do it and i was stupid i decided to try it anyway so anyway actually kind of thing but there's quite a few things i've done in life that are really stupid and i decided to do them anyway even if i knew it was stupid at the time but experience is what teaches you anyway for something a bit older on the subject of blast the report on the blast's 17 pounder firing apcbc stated that prolonged close range exposure i.e 20 feet from the muzzle would produce considerable discomfort and temporary deafness now what may be interesting is the exposure limit you will recall from the hewlett video a couple of weeks ago that one is authorized to fire only six rounds ecology a day such limits also do exist for tanks depending on the level of hearing protection that you have and whether you're inside or outside of the vehicle the tc of a neighboring tank actually suffers a bit more from the blast than the tc of the firing tank an exposed tc can shoot about 26 rounds of 829 a3 a day but it is unlikely a crewman inside the vehicle would ever fire enough rounds to be concerned as an aside the m1's manual also sets how many minutes an hour you can go at any particular speed depending on your level of hearing protection suffice to say you really need to turn on your active noise reduction in your victories and even at that 92 miles in the day is considered the danger limit i do suspect these limits are generally ignored in wartime the other problem you have are sable pedals as they obviously cannot be aimed but will just go you know that away the manual gives a danger area of about a thousand meters long and 70 meters to each side of the gun target line for a 120 millimeter as a general guide and if firing 25 millimeter sabo that's an arc about 200 meters in distance and about 30 degrees each side of the gun however i am not sure i would trust to being 71 meters from the gun center line and d a pam 385-63 seems to have other figures up to 300 meter per side there is a reason why master gunners go to gun school to sort these things out robert henry elston i've noticed a lot of heavy recovery vehicles spend a significant amount of time driving backwards either getting into position or executing a rescue i understand that many of these vehicles are built from existing hulls but without the turret or with a special turret but has anyone ever built a purpose-designed track-to-roof recovery vehicle or one that utilizes tandem drivers one facing forward and the other to the rear yes as far as i know there has only ever been one designed from the ground up tank recovery vehicle built and that's the m88 built by bone mclaughlin york people often think of it as a derivative of the m48 or the m60 but it isn't as a good look at the whole shape we'll show you it merely uses a number of the sub components which are also used by the tank such as track and engine during the design process there was indeed consideration given to a rear-facing crew in addition to the front phrasing but the recommendation was to not do this and so only the front configuration was built if the arv needs to extract the tank they nose up to it to my knowledge it has not proven to be a drawback charles charange if there were a mount rushmore of tank-affiliated individuals who would be on it and were not limited to the us okay so the four presidents were selected because from the artist's perspective they represented the most important events or characteristics of the history of the us washington was selected as the father of the new country and represents the birth of the u.s the logical counterpart then would be hugh ellis the first commander of the world tank regiment president number two is thomas jefferson and he was selected to represent the growth of the u.s since the louisiana purchase like 15 states happened under his watch so as a tank counterpart i would nominate jean-baptiste sdm his concepts of mastermancy concentrated small armor led to future doctrinal development and also importantly the ft that he helped design worked on proving the form factor which led basically all subsequent tank development and which also saw the basis of a number of tanks to be built around the world from the u.s to the ussr teddy roosevelt was selected to represent the development of the u.s and this poses quite the challenge as tanks and their use were developed by anybody from tukachevsky to lutz however since this is a mount rushmore we're talking about here we will default to the yank and go with adnet chaffee jr finally lincoln to represent the preservation of the us this is a little bit difficult since i don't know if anybody has per se being responsible for the preservation of tanks as a concept yeah there are owners like littlefield or museum staff like fletcher but as a concept the best i can come up with offhand is someone who used tanks to preserve their country arguably if israel tal had failed the country might not have been preserved and so probably more than any other single tank officer i will go with him it's a shame that oddball didn't make the grade though and no i don't plan to be a d-day connie out this year competing events he also wants to know what doctrine the m36s fell under in korean service because obviously tank destroyers were gone as a branch now apparently they were used as light tanks though it does seem that the conversion didn't happen during the war by the time they had left service in 1959 they were converted to have a whole machine gun i don't see a coax port added so it seems that that was the only machine gun added they were eventually replaced by m47s jay a known limitation of heavier tanks is slash was that they require additional infrastructure to support them this could be stronger bridges special trucks vehicle roadways wider roadways i'm sorry etc has there ever been work done to develop a disassemblable tank which can be transported by normal infrastructure and then be reassembled close to the battlefield yes then it will be to several levels the most simple is to just make the tank a little bit narrower look at tiger one remove the outer set of road wheels and a track shield put on a narrower transport track it can now fit on your railway cars same with churchill which would have the air tint intakes which are the big boxes on the side at the back they could be removed for the same reason and of course there's t28 with its removable outer tracks the only tank i can think of which was designed to be utterly disassembled for transport was the m22 locus but that was simply because the whole vehicle couldn't fit inside the one single transport aircraft and the turret got in the way for an underslung load the entire vehicle though would be carried by that single transport it was certainly possible if necessary to transport a tank in two pieces it's how the tiger currently in fort benning found its way across the atlantic hull was transported separately to deter in the hold of the same ship but it is highly inconvenient plus there is always a question of just how much disassembling would have been needed to have the the japanese take delivery of their tiger by u-boat these days you generally see levels of modular armor packages normally for air transport alexander h congratulations on the promotion thank you you mentioned that it took a bit until you got the new rank can you explain the process right sit down ads this is going to take a while first i would refer you to the many armies of the united states video to refresh yourself with some of the details so remember i'm a national guard officer which means that i'm technically in a separate military right now to the federal u.s army regardless of what the us army name tape says i'm not subject to ucmj president biden is not in my chain of command i belong to the texas military department and governor abbott however as the guard can be mobilized into federal service it makes sense for there to be very close cooperation between the guard and the federal army so with very few exceptions which are normally at the very top level and aren't federalized routinely you don't want to have a situation wherein a soldier at one rank can be mobilized only to discover that the federal army doesn't recognize you at that rank as a result the rank is not generally awarded until the federal military has approved the promotion to that rank in its own structure be it by making sure the mandatory minimum requirements of time and service time and grade and education are made and also by approval of congress then there are two forms of promotion you got unit vacancy promotion and department of the army select high speed low drag folks can get promoted by unit vacancy so you take a major you throw him into a lieutenant colonel's slot then you submit the paperwork to get him promoted or her to the fit the position that he is in and it can take quite a few months for the process to be completed the effective date of the promotion is when the federal military says it's approved then there are a few unfortunate buggers who have specific guard rank limitations like agrs but that's not important in the large scheme of things it says i as a good friend of mine is finishing up his battalion command as a major i went through the da select route because i'm not all that high speed low drag every year or so a group of officers in dc get together and they look at all the people who are in the zone for promotion to the next grade they make a recommendation on whether or not they are fit for the next rank and submit the names for congressional approval and when that comes back they publish the da select list i have absolutely no clue what percentage of officers who get considered get approved in my case i got boarded in february 2019 my name came out in the list in july 2019. however just because the feds say i am worthy of promotion doesn't mean that the guard agrees and it also doesn't mean that i get promoted even if guard does agree you still need to be in the slot on the table of organization so there i sat until november of 2020. i was transferred to my current position in first armored division which is a lieutenant colonel's slot so now i enter the wonderful world of admin i had to put a packet of paperwork together to be submitted to the state personnel office the state office eventually approved the promotion in february and i received my state promotion order at that point however though texas said i was lieutenant colonel the federal army had not yet said that they agreed they've only said that i should be one so at this point 99 of da select promoters will continue to wear the old rank until the paperwork comes back from dc plus since i'm in a federal military unit and i was working on fort hood it wouldn't have been permitted anyway it wouldn't been allowed what happens on the state side of the fence is not the federal army's problem eventually come mid-april the paperwork comes back from dc saying that yes the federal military agrees i am now a lieutenant colonel in their system i was at that point authorized to wear the new rank but i held off on the insignia change until i can get promoted properly by the general commanding the division whose headquarters i was working in at the time that said folks on the other end of the telephone had no way of knowing what badge i was wearing so i started throwing the silver leaf around immediately and it's amazing how much more i was able to get done the french in the division hq who didn't understand any of this but knew i had the paperwork just started me addressing his colonel oh and because the federal military had pre-approved my promotion by way of the da selection board at the time was transferred to the new position the rank was backdated to november 2020 anyway which was also a nice pay bonus so there you go that's why it took so long it's to be noted that some promotions used to take nearly two years to go through the system maybe five or six years ago congress eventually got involved and told the army to try to make it a little bit faster admiral tiberius with the marines ditching their tanks and trying to acquire things like anti-ship missiles and other capabilities is it possible we would see the return of something similar to the defense battalion concepts of the 1930s and 40s don't think so the defense battalions were exactly what they sounded like defensive generally static units basically garrisons intended provide anti-landing and anti-aircraft defense of critical locations the modern marine corps isn't big enough to have units just hanging around waiting for somebody to attack them i have not seen any manuals or doctrine yet for these new units but i strongly suspect that they are going to be used in a more mobile offensive role likely in smaller numbers preying on singleton ships and generally being a nuisance to enemy infantry forces and logistical assets and quite probably leaving immediately after the attack sim crawford disregarding that it's a horses for courses sort of thing if cornered for an answer do i pick firepower armor or mobility i pick armor as the one to be de-prioritized at the expense of the other two however as you say it is a horses for courses thing and it's also not a sliding scale as much as it is a stepping scale so if you look at armor for example it isn't created just to be as thick as possible or going to some arbitrary number of thickness unless you hitler thinking an eight centimeter is better than six centimeter for a panthers front slope because in reality there is a baseline level of protection which represents the most likely threat and this is going to be gross simplification that i'm going to go into here but bear with me so for example the requirement is must protect against a 125 millimeter gun so let's say for the sake of my little p brain mathematics this means 20 centimeters of armor the next most dangerous gun is a 115 let's say that's 10 centimeters of armor let's also say that you're not happy with the level of mobility from a 20 centimeter armored tank and you drop 2 centimeters of armor you are now vulnerable to 125 millimeter guns but still invulnerable to 115 you've also improved your mobility by number out of posterior 5 percent there is however no point to this sort of level of armor you may as well drop it to 10 centimeters of armor because you will still be protected against the same weapons that you would be at 18 centimeters of armor but you've lost far more weight and thus gained far more mobility this sort of thing is commonly enough found in us thinking in the archives kind of like yeah we could add a bit more armor to stop more than we currently stop but what's the point if we wanted to add enough armor to make a practical difference for the next level of gun let's say the tank would be so heavy that it loses all the other good characteristics similar can be said for guns if the tank can kill a t-62 but not a t-72 then there's not much point in increasing firepower to the levels of somewhere between those two armor packages if it negatively affects any other characteristics so back to my earlier question don't get seen and don't get hit are further out of the survivability onion then don't get penetrated i'm not actually a fan of relying on the armor in general i view it more as a saving throw for when a mistake has been made there are some exceptions in the heavy tank roll though caleb engelhardt when i commanders commanded abrams what were your regular maintenance tasks did you ever emphasize a particular smaller task in order to avoid having to do a more unpleasant one well the regular maintenance tasks are those spelled out in the dash 10 the process is called preventative maintenance checks and services or first and last parades or before and after operational service checks depending on your your country let's see something fell off there we go let's clip that back in okay so pmcs in the manual on the m1a1 and they look kind of like this there are 130 of these checks all told of these 42 are conducted before you set off four are things to keep in mind as you're roaming around 68 are performed when you're done six are checked weekly and 10 monthly and these are the crew level tasks then you get the maintenance level stuff like semi-annual or annual services some of these tasks take longer than others for example check that the fire extinguisher handle is not pulled out is a step it's actually number two i think so is check for loose end connectors or wedge bolts which takes quite a few minutes in practice overseas we tended to do a daily abbreviated check of the really important stuff like track fluids leaks weapons check and mrs update and that would take maybe a half hour before the mission we also had a weekly maintenance day where the tank would be gone over in far more detail to include reborn siding the only time i can recall that we ever said sought it were not doing that was for track pad replacement replacing 312 track pads on a tank is annoying especially in iraq heat we just decided it was easier to simply replace the whole track and let somebody else deal with refurbishing the rubber gary nielsen why is the gunner the two ic of the us tank but the loader operator in a british one i don't know if i've specifically seen anything on the matter it's been a few years since i've been to the british army's tank school actually 2006 and at the time at least upon induction a new recruit would be selected to either be a driver or a gunner and would undertake the course of training appropriately the loader is indeed the second in command the thinking being that he can assist the commander because he's got a good overview of what the tank is doing from his relatively detached position he can see the whole turret and the crew he can see the terrain around him and he can easily take over controlling the tank if the tc suddenly gets busy doing platoon things on the map and radio or whatever on the other hand the us philosophy is that the new guy is almost always a loader in this position he can learn quickly because he can see what everyone else is doing whilst also being able to see the terrain and maybe understand why the tank is doing what the tank is doing then he's put down into the driver's position then the gunner is arguably the most technical by the time the tanker is in the gunner's seat he's probably seen a lot of traps or common malfunctions and so can handle himself as well as being fully familiar with the tank operations so that he can handle the gun and turret without too much oversight so it's not as if there is no logic at all to either position i guess both work larry brown compare the logistical needs of a world war ii platoon of tanks with those of a current platoon well it'll vary hugely depending on what's going on a tank sitting in a defensive position with the apu running is going to use a lot less fuel in a day than a tank bounding across western europe but what would you say if i told you that an m1 abrams tank platoon might use less fuel than a sherman tank platoon no i wouldn't have believed it either and it's not until i started looking into the figures of course a big reason for this is that an m1 platoon is four tanks and a sherman platoon five but even at that it depends on what you're doing and it is surprising considering the reputation m1 has a as a gas guzzler so as you can see from this table whichever side i a sherman would run about three gallons of the mile cross country and about 1.5 gallons to the mile on the road of course no tank is ever doing only one thing or spend all their day doing one speed in the mid 1990s the thinking was that an operation a tank is running 10 to 13 hours of the day of this 85 percent of the time is spent at idle 10 moving in secondary roads maybe about 25 miles an hour and five percent cross country doing about 17 but even then things change the turbine for example used to suck down over 11 gallons an hour just sitting there though a new electronic control unit in the late 90s dropped it to nine today with working apus it's far less than that cross country in the 90s you're looking at about four gallons at a mile or 2.5 gallons a mile on a road overall then this meant that armor branch estimated a use of between 175 to 230 gallons a day per tank by the time you get to the a2 sep v2 you're looking at under 2 gallons of the mile at 29 miles an hour and about 0.58 or so miles per gallon at 25 to 27 miles an hour i have no unclassified data to share on the current v3 or current a2 cross country it's an interesting example though of how the m1's fuel efficiency has improved over time even though the engine itself basically is the same and the tank has also been getting heavier so at this point with the modern tank you within about 10 of the road fuel economy of an m4a1 and a little bit further going to the m4a3 whilst going 5 to 10 miles an hour faster than the sherman cross country i suspect it would be even more interesting if we could find the figures because improvements in gearing torque and suspension would mean that the m1 would negotiate quickly obstacles which might cause an m4 to slow to walking pace and then scream at full revs for however long it takes the tank to get out of low gear there is unfortunately nothing i can find for the idle consumption rate of the m4 so in the pre-apu days it's pretty much inarguable that an m4 unit would suck less fuel on regular operations but once the apu comes along that argument actually drops dramatically also the m1 is noted for not being the most fuel efficient tank overall so if anyone with reliable leopard figures for example wants to throw them at me i'll come back to this next month all that unfortunately though merely covers the fuel consumption oil consumption we can probably leave alone this is not all that huge but then there's a problem of measuring the amount of spare parts if the figures for those exist anywhere i couldn't tell you i can tell you that in 1990s armored division was supposed to roam around with a war stockage of approximately 400 tons of m1 spare parts and that's somewhere over a ton and a quarter per tank but i cannot give a similar figure for world war ii and neither can i account for supplies requested at higher levels like core workshops or supplies which are just delivered on demand as for ammunition there is a paper written for cgsc which estimates that on the experience in 1991 the modern army needs only eight percent of the tank ammunition of world war ii to achieve similar results although of course the modern ammunition is still much bigger my quentin how many m1a2 sep v3s are to be built the contracts are still ongoing but the last i've seen as of early last year is 2101. that said it seems that the contract is a sort of a crossover one which when approved will instead be switched to putting sep v4s off the production line so it's really more a case of the army is upgrading its entire current fleet of m1a2s to at least sep v3 standard interestingly the announcements seem to be quiet on the exact specifics of the remaining m1a1s still found in some national guard units but the army does say that the plan is for them all to be divested by 2025 which by default implies the intent that the entire army active and reserve fleets will be a2 v3s by 2026. also am i going to go film at the museum in belvoir no it's not my current list of places to film and indeed i haven't even visited it yet which i probably need to do at some point of terror is motion sickness common amongst tankers i wouldn't say common but it's certainly not unheard of either so motion sickness is basically caused by there being a disconnect between what your eyes are seeing and what your inner ears motion sensors are telling you if you're inside a tank and you can only see the inside of the tank which is generally stationary relative to you then as the tank is moving around you have such a disconnect similarly if you're looking through the gunner site and the system is stabilized and you're looking at what is in effect a fairly still image as you are seated whilst your inner ear is saying that you're turning left traveling sideways to the right and bouncing up and down as a result thus normally the gunner gets it worst whilst the driver tc and normally loader are looking out at the outside world without augmentation so their eyes are telling that there is yes some movement also can a low caliber cannon such as 20 millimeter flak 38 stun a tank crew sufficiently that they could not get a return shot off answer is a qualified yes as you're driving along in a combat zone any loud sudden noises will attract your attention and raise your adrenaline levels and the fact that somebody is shooting at you indicates that the enemy has seen you early enough to get the first shot off and has the range something bigger very well may be following along if the repeated impacts don't find a weak point the receiving tank may pull off a hurried shot or withdraw in operation think tank hillary doyle observed that a surprisingly effective weapon was the mg-151-20 drilling a triple 20 millimeter mount and the troops were looking for everyone that they could get their hands on however a very determined or experienced crew will probably get the incoming fire to stop by way of a well-placed outbound round spencer loper was there ever consideration regarding an interruption of fuel with regards to the turbine engine tanks or was it just assumed that the war would end so quickly either due to maneuver or nuking that it was irrelevant the interruption of normal fuel supplies is the reasoning behind the idea of multi-fuel engines the turbine on the m1 will run on pretty much anything that the tank crew will find albeit with differing levels of efficiency however if the fuel is being deliberately hit then the turbine tanks are probably the least of the problems because there's far more in an army that requires fuel like trucks and ifvs just supplies than there are tanks although i have no doubt that the people in charge have indeed considered such things i guess they figured it wasn't worth carrying over that said of course it is worth noting that the russians did conclude that consumption on the t80 was not worth the hassle but i think that was one efficiency thing for the situation not a we can't get fuel at all to random thing thunderchild had operation unthinkable actually occurred would it have made more sense to keep the germans in german tanks or re-equip the germans with allied tanks or a mixture of both probably a mixture of both a bit like the british had during the war as long as the resources were around to keep the vehicles in the field especially from units which surrendered before the vehicles were lost it would make sense to have units which already know the vehicles and keep them instead of having them take the time to pull out of the line retrain to new american let's say equipment and then go back in what the german factories will be doing other than making spare parts is a little more of an interesting question though so should stumbleshots panzer 4 or eggplants in production keep going since the factories were present operational and tooled up for it if u.s supplies can meet demand i would say there might be merit to stopping them from making those particular tanks and instead making other vehicles such as anti-aircraft gun tractors or recovery vehicles however that's just my answer after thinking about it for less than five minutes the question on continuing to manufacture panther would be particularly interesting and i do think there is an argument for doing so albeit at a lower rate of production to ensure quality control and a higher availability of repair parts and do i have a favorite thunderbird from the tv show that excludes thunderbird 6 which was a de havilland tiger moth as that was from a movie so i guess i will just stick with the utilitarian thunderbird too matthew lesice which xenos faction and warhammer 40k has the best tanks and why i'm afraid the options here are limited as tracks seem to be limited in use outside of the empire these squats have a land train which was all tracked but and it does have merit as a result but they are ab humans not zenos thus as far as i know and my knowledge of 40k lore is limited that leaves only the orcs as the other track users tao or eldar may have better tanks but they are being ignored due to the lack of tracks you cannot tension a repulsor jordan peterson me and my flatmate our fans of the channel oh thank you and one comment in an old video started a discussion between us in the video you said that towards the end of the war the u.s were getting tanks or perhaps closer to what the germans wanted at the start of the war which got us thinking how would things have changed if the germans had had those tanks realistically i'm not sure would have made much difference in the long run you still can't out produce the ussr and usa however it would have been an interesting thought exercise what would have happened let's say had cursed not been delayed to allow for the arrival of panthers and ferdinand but instead what if production had been kept to the more reliable panther panzer threes and fours after all the germans conquered france with supposedly inferior tanks to the enemy there pans are twos and threes going up against somewheres in chardes where effectively the shermans in t-34 is going up against tigers and panthers yet they obviously wipe the floor at the opposition and of course we now have the end result of the overall war went for the side with the biggest tanks note this is a slightly different question to the matter of producing more of the smaller tanks and the bigger germany was never going to be able to manufacture enough to make a difference but the question is whether those lesser but reliable tanks well handled earlier in the conflict might have had more of an effect than the cats several months later given the amount of time that the soviets had to allow for preparing a reception for the germans to curse for example there was something to be said for the argument in the long run of course there are still the issues of petroleum supply u.s and soviet production and fighting on multiple fronts so long term though no matter jordan did ask a supplemental question of whether allied tanks would have changed as a response and i'm trying to think no not in large part the u.s would still have made sherman to the same schedule including the 76 millimeter upgrades and the british would have made cromwell these tanks were created with own side requirements in mind not as responses to the opposition arguably the soviets would have still made the is as well if nothing else just to handle the towed anti-tank guns even if the big vehicles with the big guns were not being manufactured thomas er carl every m1917 light tank i have ever seen has at least one plate with bullet impact marks i guess that they would build a tank and then shoot at it to confirm that the armor is sound why on earth did they not batch test wouldn't doing a live task on your tank risk compromising the armor and when did the army decide that shooting every finished tank was a foolish exercise not just one plate from the 1917's i've seen every plate had two impact marks from a rifle what i've been told and i have no information to verify but also no reason to deny is that metallurgical testing by way of the use of equipment to test alloy composition and strength had not yet been invented so shooting at the plate was the only reliable form of quality control in the u.s any metallurgical scientists feel free to chime in in comments below and i will come back to it next month if you have information to add in the meantime i guess they stopped when they were able to implement some form of metal composition analysis michael prothrow why didn't they develop a 120 millimeter smoke around for the smoothbore tank cannon as near as i can tell mainly because no tank can use it the payload of a typical smoke shell is white phosphorus it's a sort of a semi gelatinous liquid i think hc smoke has something similar but anyway this means that smoke rounds have to be stored vertically but almost every 120 millimeter carrying tank abrams nebula clerk type 10 mark of etc carries the ammunition horizontally in which case the liquid is going to settle to one side of the round and unbalance it the one exception seems to be ariete which does have a few rounds stowed on end but i guess nobody thought it was worth developing a rarely used round for the 200 or so of those tanks made as an aside there was a proposal to make a 120 millimeter breech loading motor using the m256 and the rounds for that would have been standard motor rounds mated to the 120 millimeter casing much like early he rans for the tank gun were but obviously that didn't go anywhere adam schindler considering all the ideas for machine guns and tanks used over the years how would you arrange the guns and apportion the crew to serve them in world war ii mid cold war and today well world war ii is an interesting one because obviously one has to look at the bow gunner almost every tank which could have one did so there must have been some merit to it at the time however i have found some reference that at least in the us army the desire for the bow gun was because it was something which could be fired when the tank was on the move at least by units that didn't keep their stabilizers operational this was of course a feature specific to the sherman so doesn't help with the other tanks which had bound machine guns so on an m4 at least i would ditch the bow gunner and ensure the troops were trained on the use and maintenance of the stabilizer give the caliber 30 to the loader let the tc keep the caliber 50 up front there were quite a few designs for under armour caliber 50 for the tc as well incidentally honestly i think that's quite a sensible design for mid cold war as well the soviets had a slightly different philosophy with their attitude to the aaa gun though the 12 7. you will note that they tended to give that to the loader presumably on the basis that the loader wasn't likely to be engaging in main gun operations at times when they're under air attack or at least that it was more important for the tc not to be distracted at such times in the loader the idea has some merit i'm not thrilled by the 50 cal remote weapon station placement on the m1a2 up front most of the countries have decided that their rws should be someplace other than right in front of the tc and frankly i'm inclined to agree with them i would also give the control to the loader i suspect that he has a bit more room and a bit more time i have this niggling recollection that the marines did try remote weapon station on some of their m1a1s and that the loader was in control of it but i will also observe that the cws on the m1a1 was not an issue it's far smaller s face other than hitler what instances of executive meddling in the design of weapon systems were there nothing is blatant i don't think but certainly there are influences which are occasionally less than rational for example 1961 marshall chuikov commander of the soviet ground forces was being briefed that the british were about to field the 105 millimeter rifle tank gun and it was going to go on british french german and american tanks at the time the standard soviet mbt had the 100 millimeter he was not pleased with this and wanted to know if the soviet engineers had anything bigger enter the 115 millimeter which he demanded be placed into service even if they had to strap it to the back of a pig as a side note this chap commanded soviet forces in stalingrad and he could be a bit strong-willed t-62 was accepted for service later that summer the american t92 light tank of course was nailed by the fact that the soviets had just released pt 76 which could swim and t92 could not actually t92 had a number of other faults which i will get around to one day in another video but they may possibly have been rectified the lack of swimming however could not be but sheridan could swim the british had their own version i guess churchill instructed that 500 of the new infantry tank a-22 i.e what would soon become known as the churchill tank would be built by march of 1941. this was done about june of 1941 this instruction when the tank hadn't been designed let alone trialled as a result the tank was ordered straight into production without even a pilot or testing program which led to the first tanks being perhaps less than stellar in none of those cases however was the politician directly interfering with the design the engineers were still generally in charge of doing that tn sheep will we get an inside the hatch on the oscar meyer wienermobile not on my current list of priorities though i guess it could be a target of opportunity should be near one you might have more luck asking doug demurrer that one couldn't in war thunder one often has to shoot a tank multiple times to sort of finish off the crew is that considered a war crime or at least what is the standard no generally it wouldn't be considered war crime but it's also a case with not being entirely clear-cut the rule is simple enough you cannot shoot somebody who is order combat and the common example given is somebody who was ejected from his airplane it might thus be considered that a tank crew bailing from their tank are similarly placed order combat there is though a big difference in that it is effectively impossible for a parachuting pilot to indicate surrender and it is a crime to shoot anybody that you have identified as expressing a desire to surrender someone bailing from a tank may be able to express such a desire the catch is that there's likely a short period of time in between when he's bailing and when he's actually indicating surrender during which he might get killed and there is not very much which can be done about that as for crews who remain inside a knocked out tank it's not unexpected to put a few more rounds into an octet tank until it starts to burn because that way you know for sure it's been knocked out matthew sears what are my opinions on technicals i told you to highluxes with a machine gun cannon stash recordless rifle slash rocket pod slash tank turret on the back what would i go with if i wanted to cobble one together well they do seem to work what would i go with well i mean i guess by default you start with the hilux although if you're going to go to war i don't see why it couldn't be done in some luxury so maybe you get a pickup with a high trim option like an f350 limited or ram 1500 limited i'm sure there's a way of getting some armor sheet into the doors and there's probably little wrong with the cpu4 in the back although if you want to go old school the m45 quad 50 i'm sure would fit nicely in the truck bed and it's powered better yet get also the gun shield from the korean war era m16s and you're sorted right if you are wondering about the sudden lighting change it's because about four hours ago the kids came home my mom came home had to go to dinner and all sorts of other things happened and my batteries ran out and whatever the joys i have filming at home but i continue without missing a beat because of the magic of editing sebastian cronin looking at new ifvs like lynx and ascot they prioritize armor and especially mine protection at the cost of size and weight how survivable is a 40 ton 3.5 meter tall in a high-end conflict probably more survivable than a 30 ton three meter tall ife but that's not necessarily saying much modern ifes and apcs are big really really big someone suggested that an answer to the ajax problem to just use boxer in the role with the turret up top but if they thought ajax was big they'd be stunned by the wheeled vehicle so compared to an m1 from the australian competition frankly i don't understand why vehicles approaching the weight of tanks haven't been common before now in terms of size and physical size if a modern fire control system can reliably hit a three meter tall tank at three kilometers being 3.5 meters tall isn't going to make a heck of a lot of practical difference you may as well start looking at armor if the engines can take it it used to be that an ifv will be armored to protect against other ifvs such as the bradley being armored to stop bmp2's 30 millimeter water cannon but it always struck me that there is a bit of an unfounded assumption that the enemy tanks would only shoot at friendly tanks and only enemy ifvs will shoot at friendly ifes and will they just ignore everything else on the battlefield that might take a pot shot at one so cue that sign on the side in 50 languages saying i am a troop carrier not a tank please don't shoot at me as for mobility given that ifes aren't supposed to be going anywhere that the tanks aren't really you know the whole combined arms thing uh you're going to need the bridge infrastructure for the tanks so you may as well raise the ifv limit to match in any case even 30 millimeter autocannon ammunition has improved over the last half century but you have other issues like explosive foreign penetrators roof armor concerns and the like so it seems that to have the same overall percentage chance of survival more armor is going to be required anyway kazuki k considering that the u.s is retiring a striker mgs this leaves a hole in the u.s arsenal when it comes to a vehicle more portable and mobile than an mbt what is the us military's plan with respects to light tanks or canon ifv development well the planet's mobile protected firepower program which is either going to be a reworked m8 ags or an ajax with a big gun yes this chassis is actually will sharper i know i i guess they just didn't need the extra length but it is an ajax chassis it is to be noted that the loss of mgs is really only a loss with the striking units in as much as we could do in assault role which the carl gustaf couldn't i don't know if anybody in stryker land is actually lamenting the loss of the vehicle i don't hang out in those circles very much so similarly the mpf isn't really going to fill the gap in vehicle capability which is filled by say bmp or zbl08 with a large cannon the u.s seems to think right now that there is just no need to fill such a gap because of all the other assets that the army can bring to bear go back to the previous q a where i go over all the various things that have to happen before a new piece of equipment is requested is there really a need for the role outside of the air mobile one that mpf is to fill also have i any plans to talk about the battlefield 3 thunder run no i cannot say that i've had any such in fact i was never even aware that the level existed until he asked a question so i had a gander at a walk through and i'm wondering various things like why the marines seem to be driving a2s why the gunner's site is on the left-hand side of the cannon why the fire control computer seems to be out of service why they're instructed to remain stationary when under artillery barrage why the heat around the guy loads looks a heck of a lot like an empath the ready rack seems to be stupidly big and let's not even talk about the symbology in fact no i have no plans in wasting any more my time on that something i do enjoy wasting time on though is shooting which brings us back to gun of the month after a bit of an absence and i am going to be continuing on with the irish theme with a bat the browning automatic pistol or or realistically the branding high power now this unfortunately is a mark three uh unfortunately i mean i like new guns because i'm going to shoot them i wanted to be reliable and accurate uh of course the irish army did not use mark threes and there's no lanyard uh loop at the bottom uh no drain hole at the front so very definitely another mark ii however it is to all intents and purposes a brownie high power which would have been a standard irish service pistol until replaced by the usp about 15 20 years ago if that long a couple of interesting features so firstly you will note that the magazine doesn't just slide out it launches out because there's a little spring at the bottom of the mag and i don't know why more pistols don't use it so if you're holding it vertically it really just shoots out so no problems with sticking mags when releasing it does of course also have the infamous magazine safety so magazine is out nothing happens safety is about oh well let's see from here to here push it inside it presses against here and the thinking is a don't trust soldiers they're idiots and they will point the pistol at themselves when they or somebody else when they think it's empty and pull the trigger which is a simple matter of training and unfortunately this is also the reason why california has decided to mandate magazine disconnects or magazine safeties in all their pistols and say again okay you didn't need to announce that i'm sorry we continue and the other argument for a mag disconnect is if you're in in furious hand-to-hand combat and somebody is about to disarm you if you if you hit the mag release then they cannot shoot you with your own gun i think this is also a spurious argument and if it wasn't for the fact that i just don't like mucking with things very much um and i think then one or two guns in the mansion to come you'll see that or i i'm not totally everest in mocking with things but this one i'm not going to mock with um a lot of people simply disconnect the mag disconnect disconnect magazine safety magazine safety disconnect whatever heck you want to call it now i am on record as being a bit of a heretic in that i have said that i am not a huge fan of saint browning's in 1911. i am i'm not going to say not a fan but i prefer the 240 to the m2 the browning 50 cal as a tank weapon not real as i am rare and tankers of that but it is not that i do not appreciate bernie's work at all and the high power i appreciate it's got a couple of new little usability features yes wife a son of a okay all right doesn't matter doesn't [Music] matter and it's done a little even quality of life issues so for example there's a little notch back here that when you want to disassemble it first take the magazine out it makes it a lot easier you can pull back and you can lock with the safety catch you can lock the slide to the rear which then makes removing the slide lock and pin much much easier and out it comes i mean the slide and spring you look at it it looks like any other pistol you see more or less these days it is a modern pistol design single action only which is a bit of a problem because it's it's an interesting size it's not quite a full-size pistol but it's not a compact and because it's a single action only it's not one that i'm going to use as a carry pistol it's not worth it um it is fundamentally still a you know 90 odd year old design but i will say it shoots wonderfully it's very accurate 13 rounds in the magazine plus one in the chamber it is let's just say you will not go wrong if this is the weapon with which you must save your life so that's it end of another month grim do fins stabilize sabor rounds spin in flight the answer is yes and it's actually something for balance because if you put too much spin you hit the magnus effect and that's the same sort of effect which makes a curveball curve i'm sure it can be ultimately countered by the ballistic computer but why make it difficult however if you put no spin on the at all then if there's any aerodynamic or mass asymmetry if it's not perfectly built then the round isn't going to go quite what you think so there is actually a teensy little bit of kent on the fin and if you're thinking about half of a degree you won't be far off gordecage do i still travel abroad and if so is it more difficult to travel to russia especially given my military background what are doing inside the hatch on google panzer i suspect that there's nothing inside kugelpanzer to display however yes it is more difficult covert killed my planned trips to russia and brazil so far my military background though it is required to state on the russian visa application to include any combat deployments has not been a problem in russia however the entire globe seems to have been shut down so i've got belgium and germany on my to-go list as well i'm hopeful to go to canada in september for aquino but the way the covid thing is going right now it's resurging i'm beginning to wonder if the border will even be open by then frankly i can't even seem to get the benning i was hoping to do some filming there last week but stuff happened and i ended up missing my connector from houston and i couldn't get to benning at a reasonable hour the next day so i just gave up and went home i am planning on trying again in a couple of weeks felicity longus in the past i have stated that artillery is one of the most frightening things a tanker can encounter there is little to protect from cluster munitions blanketing an entire group of tanks and submunitions was this always the case was artillery in the indirect role still such a menacing threat to armor before the advent of dpicm and the like yes and no i am sure it was still just as frightening you got a steel rain coming down on you never knowing if a 150 or 105 round will impact on the roof just inches above your head indeed it is worth observing that one of the zebra pershings had the tc's hatch blown off by a 150 round exploding nearby the rest of the tank wasn't too happy about it either however a little bit like air power at the time the psychological effect is a little bit nastier than the practical effect indirect artillery would certainly strip armor of their accompanying infantry making an attack if continued and often they weren't a little bit more nerve-wracking for the cruise but it would rarely actually stop a tank that said the ceo of abel 645th tank destroyer battalion claimed 11 tanks in two spgs by calling an artillery fire on them and anzio though the impression i got was that they were stationary seb cronin again it looks like the british have hit a snag with ajax a recent report reads successful delivery of the program to time cost and quality appears to be unachievable furthermore warrior upgrade plans have been axed off the uk stick it out and complete ajax or is it time to buy something else probably stick it out honestly from listening to the parliamentary inquiry it seems that it's up to gdls to deliver the vehicles to the fixed price if they don't get much of a profit that's their problem not british governments it seems that there are two major issues which are grabbing attention noise and vibration the noise problems seem to be a compatibility issue between the army's headset system and the vehicle given the use of other headsets hasn't caused issues it's probably going to be fixed by some rerouting of wiring and shielding the vibration issue may be a little bit harder to deal with assuming it actually is real and not perceived issue i mean we're talking about a 45 ton tracked vehicle it's going to vibrate depending on what's causing the vibration it may or may not be relatively simple to fix now the public attention has been drawn to it that said i have not seen anyone say that the vehicle is incapable of doing a tactical job for which it was intended especially if those two problems are fixed so i don't see any huge merit to throwing it off and starting over minion just been watching rob cogan and me waxing lyrical and harmony to church where does the name harmony church come from i have no idea i'll have to find out and get back to you peter anderson want to have a sensing session with the joe's does it begin with greetings all it's time for another q a no it's generally right so or as evidenced by myhulik video good morning they had me read out the official order for your analysis test last time out and top was apparently in the back trying to laugh not to laugh as airsoft and i really don't see why i mean it's something that the army takes very seriously probably not as cheerfully as i do though van owen are there automatic track tensioning systems not that i'm aware of the best i've seen are spring-loaded ones like those little tension idlers found on the backs of some post-war us tanks these days the same job is done by a connection between the number one road wheel and the idler as the wheel goes up and shortens the track when the idler pushes forward to tension it up again nothing like that on the back though but i suspect it's because the sprocket keeps that part of the track under good tension since a properly tensioned system shouldn't throw much i'm not sure whether it's worth the cost of implementing a fully automatic system the mechanically assisted tracks tension system such as on challenger 2 however where you just move a lever to increase or decrease attention is very nice also how's the modeling going did i ever finish the type 97 no i simply haven't had the time my order of priority right now is the master's degree work youtube requirements family with family sometimes beating youtube modeling is not really getting much of a foothold recently sean davis what is my opinion on the australian acquisition of m1a2sep v3 including bridging and assault variants of the m1 also as they're likely going to stuff fridge and aircon into the new tanks like the old ones would the us be willing to add some creature comforts to the fleet well after i'm used upon this the last time one or two q and a's ago wondering what they needed the v3s for given that the a1s seemed likely to deal with pretty much anything in the area or anything likely to be in the area for the foreseeable future i received a pretty informative email from an aussie in the know and it turns out it's the aussies playing the long game with only egypt with their own production lines being another m1a1 user once the us gets rid of theirs in a couple of years that means that there is no longer a us-led and funded maintenance and update plan for the tank so either the aussies would have had to pay for the development or they'd be stuck with what they had by going with the v3s they retain compatibility with the us and its vehicle developments and they also have a vehicle which is specifically designed to be greatly upgradeable in the future so from the long-term perspective it actually does make sense as for the support vehicles that also make sense if you have the tanks a weapon of maneuver one is deliberately hubbling oneself if the appropriate enablers for that maneuver are not present as for the air con in fridge now i can't see the us army shelling out for it now it took decades for us to get a boiling vessel that said if the funds were available at the unit level i wouldn't be surprised if a kit wouldn't be available through the system i noted for example that the sun shade that the aussies had on their tanks also had an nsn a national stock number which means that you can basically order it through the system so maybe a unit could get one fridge per tank platoon or something like that sworn brother of the ballistic order of saint john moses browning you're late for gun of the match oh well um in the 1985 red dawn scenario the u.s military has received a flood of world war ii korea vehicles from collectors vfw points etc we're looking at m3 half tracks the ukws tank destroyers stewards sherman's m4a1's the works which if any could be made combat capable enough to be useful within a month or less assuming ammunition is not a problem could they be fitted with more modern weapons are they better than no tank at all or are they just more trouble than they are worth more trouble than they'd be worth but not because of any inherent problems with the vehicles look at a timeline what is happening to the us's vehicle fleet in 1985 the m60s are almost removed from regular army service and are being cascaded down to the national guard units which are still using m48s or earlier m60s that means that the army has a massive fleet of m48s mainly a5s recently removed from service and now sitting in storage fleets in places like sierra army depot awaiting further disposition similarly look at the personnel carriers bradley is coming into service and knocking out m113s and itvs which are also cascading back to the us with those vehicles available what's the point of dealing with the mishmash of other vehicles being dragged out now of course there is some precedent to grabbing vehicles at a museum to fight and i'm talking about by the government not just by a group of rebels who grab a tank as a monument 1991 the british realized that they were getting into a war where there was a gap in between when tracked rapier was being removed from service and before its replacement was able to enter service as a result they raided museums and gate guards to find vehicles refurbished them and sent them off into the desert plus of course a few old tanks from bovington were being used in case germany invaded in 1940 jackson fox what countries use the m45 quadman besides us israel and ussr well if you're counting the m60 and half track your france germany belgium japan philippines portugal south korea thailand and netherlands i'm not actually sure the quad mount was used by ussr as opposed to the uh the twin mount though the ground mount was modified by colombia to fit onto the m8 armored cars apparently it was more as a counter-insurgency weapon for dealing with ambushes as opposed to as an anti-aircraft weapon jenny r whilst the u.s tank destroyer branch was dissolved shortly after the end of world war ii the german panzer jaeger branch persisted in the bundeswehr fielding independent battalions in the 1980s and not being dissolved as a branch until 2006. what factors led to the difference in decisions not actually as much as you might think indeed the panzer jaeger trooper were equipped with m41 m47 and even m48 tanks before moving to purpose-built vehicles from what i can tell although they were organized administratively as battalions in practice they were distributed as companies to brigades and later in the cold war a company would be assigned to a mech infantry battalion and this then there'd be no difference really between a german mech infantry battalion and martyrs or m113s supported by a company of jaguars and an american mecca infantry battalion m113s supported by a company of m901 itvs the difference is administrative the germans kept their tank hunters as a different branch while the americans kept amidst a different mos with an infantry branch and the itv company was an integral part of the infantry battalion instead of as an attachment reich's beer minister and you know you had me half believing that that was a real position back then now what happens inside a tank if it gets penetrated in many games in some films it is depicted as this actually wasn't much of a problem the crew just changes that to windowed or dead and keeps on fighting is this reality what is the protocol in this sort of situation now protocol and what actually happens may not necessarily be the same thing having a crewman dying to tank with you is most likely an extremely unsettling experience and it wouldn't be beyond surprising for the crew to stop fighting while they deal with the shock especially depending on the nature of the casualty the official protocol is that you configure for three-man crew which usually means the tc performs the gunners operations in world war ii the bow gunner would move up into the turret however there is just as much chance if the tank can't reverse quickly or pop smoke and that the crew would bail out as opposed to trying to stay in a tank for which the enemy obviously has both the range and a gun which can penetrate seb cronin again the year is 2000 with the cold war over albonia now finds itself able to buy almost any surplus military vehicle at once the problem is that the chap in charge of army procurement is the secret grandson of the now executed traitor who had held this position 55 years earlier eager to avenge his grandfather what vehicles and he has a list would you buy in order to ensure albonia's secret obsolescence in the new millennium i think i'm going to implement a policy similar to ian and i'm only going to start taking these you are in charge of procurement questions on an exceptional basis however i will mention this one anyway and it's actually extremely difficult because by the end of the late cold war period all the vehicles and service are generally at the tail end of a long development and break-in period finding a true lemon is tricky especially if we don't know what the benefit of hindsight that you know this fantastic piece of kit like crusader or whatever is going to be a failure so i went looking through my 1997-1998 edition of my big boys book of shooty things i eat jane's armor and artillery to see what was in use or in development at the time and i spend quite some time trying to come up with some vehicles which are believable shall we say that make it sound like it's a good idea to get them to the uninitiated while simultaneously having absolutely no potential and there we don't seem to be any bad options at least once rule one rules out inherently low quality items like north korean exports which they would be a hard sell to buy in the first place the best you can do is to try to limit capability such as you know getting the awesome looking bmp3 with his emphasis on guns over a personnel carrier as your personnel carrier it's a troop carrier that doesn't carry troops and yes i know can carry seven like a bradley although the two up front can't exactly dismount and uh also you can't use hindsight which may have been determinable in advance for example challenger two came a cropper because the ammunition plant shut down but there's no way of knowing this in 2000 really actually the umbonian saboteur could probably do worse than to just buy whatever the british were using at the time nothing inherently bad about it it's just nothing but a future he also wants to know how much of each type of ammo world war ii tank would carry and i probably need to make this an faq generally speaking you're looking between 30 to 50 armored piercing the rest is predominantly high explosive 50 50 excluding the specialty rounds like smoke would not be incredibly unusual unless you're in an early british tank with a two pounder in which case you're firing nothing but ap because nobody's giving you the hg rounds colonel chang brings us back again to the amphibians and the difference between a purpose-designed amphibious vehicle like an lvt and a regular tank turned amphibian like a sherman dd or one with a t6 swimming device he is correct that a purpose-designed amphibious vehicle will survive rough seas better and so likely would have suffered less enormity for example well part of the issue was that the dd tanks were being made in the uk and so that's where they were however the t6 device tanks were used in okinawa and they were supposed to be used in numbers for the invasion of the japanese home islands they had the advantage that the gun could be fired whilst on the way unlike the dd screen system i suspect that the reason that such modified tanks were much less used in the pacific was simply due to the amount of time it took for them to get there the amtrak's effectively predated the swimming tanks for general combat i don't think there's any great dispute that the modified tanks were better than the boat hold ones and they would have been preferred on both fronts had it been an option right gotten to the end finally plus it ends q a 21. um by the time this comes out i should inshallah have my book tickets booked to fort benning so keep an eye on my patreon page for an announcement on that if you're a patron uh aquino weekend is coming up september i hope to be up there for that uh new orleans uh first no second weekend of september keep an eye on the facebook page i've been to world war ii museum uh i think that's about the majority of it oh i could be swinging by du bois dubois du bois the town about an hour east of jackson wyoming uh in about three weeks two weeks again keep an eye on the facebook page for that one if you happen to be in jackson i suspect not because it's not a massive population density but you never know you could be there on your yellowstone holiday uh right i think that about does it don't forget t-shirts are on sale now for the next three or so weeks and you can always buy the book on amazon that's can openers plug plug all right take care lads

Channel: The Chieftain

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Id: souSLCw5HQ0

Length: 74min 17sec (4457 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021