Chieftain's Q&A #25. Stabilisers, Science Fiction and Sidearms.

greetings all yes it's time for another exciting episode of randomly pepper the chieftain with questions as ever questions mainly come from the appropriate patreon tier but i occasionally go back to youtube comments and i'd like to tackle anything else interesting which may pop up i am happy to say that there is now a consolidated list of q a questions in the past so if you're looking for anything in particular or to see if a question has been asked previously look for the link in the video description below to start though it is t-shirt time yes this time it's bob semple who gets to nod due to popular demand basically i put a survey out on patreon it's one of the two that came up the other one was if you recall the t28 there you go now what i've told everpress to do is basically just turn on all the old t-shirts so they've been made available for reprinting if you missed it in the past and hopefully you should be able to ease up on shipping and handling if you're looking for more than one t-shirt and you just do it in one order so it's all the previous ones t28 tank is on fire driving me closer significant emotional event all the catchphrases if you have any particular requests go ahead and put it down below if there's something that you have in mind and of course it's also the mugs and hoodies are also still available you'll be able to see it at least you should uh just below the video anyway uh going back to the last video as many people pointed out in the discussion on a boxer or flat engines i did miss a really bloody obvious one the t-64 anyway now on to this month's questions and i'm going to start off with loch ness hamster you feel something impact your tank and the interior fills with smoke what's the immediate procedure well i had two what the f was that moment in iraq one was the loss of an idler wheel whilst trundling along at about 20 miles an hour and you can imagine that the end result of the track dropping under the support arms was kind of disturbing bizarre banging noises tank loss control required canister and stop obviously the first thought was a mine or some such but there was no smoke so we stayed inside to assess the situation for a moment bearing in mind that tanks don't operate alone so we did have cover from behind from the wing tank and when we concluded that we were not actually on the fire or other sort of attack we got out to have a look to see what happened that's where we discovered oh yeah the idler fell off the other was a response to contact so there's there's actually a fight going on we're going to it and in the middle of our response a massive loud bang and to this day we have absolutely no idea what it was about so both myself and the gardener thought it was an rpg not that we knew anybody because we'd never been hit by an rpg before but it sounded like the sort of thing that would sound like if you know if you were hit by an rpg again though no smoke so we basically sat in the tank for a moment to figure out what was going on then after checking the tank and then us of course couldn't find anything wrong and we just went on to continue mission neither of those two incidents had smoke so what happens if there is smoke well first you need to verify that a the smoke is actually caused by a fire and b that the fire is still going because don't forget that the m1 has a fire suppression system inside the crew compartment it's halon if it goes off well gas gets vented from the bottles into the compartment and should in theory smother the fire you do want to open the hatchets and get some air at that point but you can also do a quick assessment to see whether or not it worked if there is still a little burning you can grab a handheld out of the sponson box obviously at that point you then need to make an assessment to see if the tank can still operate or not the other thing to check of course before you stick your head out of the top is that the ammo isn't burning in the compartment behind you although i suspect you will notice that fairly quickly we did actually have a halo bottle go off by accident in the middle one or on one of our road marches sort of blew out onto the driver's hatch you know he didn't suffocate he didn't actually get a bit of a cold burn on the shoulder jay when is it appropriate to give measurements such as armor or guns in millimeters versus centimeters it often seems that millimeters is used even though it would seem that centimeters might be more appropriate for the value given such as 200 millimeters versus 20 centimeters honestly i think it's just a case of institutional inertia it started with millimeters because that was just kind of how thick the armor was and just as the numbers got bigger they didn't change the standard that said i have a personal policy of using whatever measurement was used by the originating documentation so the german 88 is reading 8.8 centimeters american vehicles usually come measured in freedom units and so i'll give measurements that way but even then you'll notice that if a caliber is european sourced such as the 75 millimeter on sherman or the 40 millimeter anti-aircraft gun they will actually use the millimeter designation and so on so using millimeters instead of centimeters isn't wrong it's just a matter of a personal taste hammer of terror the book troop leader by bill bellamy makes reference to a so-called training cromwell which ended up on the front lines but was produced of thinner unarmored steel instead of plate armor is any of this remotely plausible yes likely no but certainly plausible and i've been doing this long enough to know that saying it would never happen is a recipe for being proven wrong later besides it is such an odd thing to claim it's likely true that just for that reason regular steel i on armored vehicles were absolutely built this was a common thing amongst multiple countries after all armoring your steel is expensive and difficult when you're simply trying to figure out if a tank works and is the right shape and so on there's no need to make it you know reinforced armor when you're building the tank now these likely would not have been training tanks but prototypes and pre-production models now for obvious reasons one would not want to mix up a soft steel prototype with a service vehicle and such vehicles would normally be marked see the words mild steel welded on the side of this t-43 for example the british used a red triangular cast metal plate attached to the vehicle you can see it on valiant in tortoise one would think that such a plate would be noticed by the crew of course i guess you could always fall off or be removed by some malicious person so could a pre-production tank be sent to a line unit by accident yes theoretically possible not likely as for some of the other descriptions in the book such as low caliber ammunition being embedded well that's entirely possible with both armored and unarmored steel there are plenty of test reports of ammunition embedded in armor and if you look closely at the is-2 in the american heritage museum near boston or you maybe you pull out some good old photos that you might have taken of the tank when it was at overloon you will see a number of small caliber cannon rounds embedded into the armor i think it's like 23 millimeter so i'm not going to say that that's a defining characteristic of a mild steel vehicle it all comes down to distance angle and metal composition i'm similarly a little suspicious of the idea that the vehicle was lighter because it was mild steel and thus could jump further and dodge faster some engines simply are better tuned than others you take two theoretically identical tanks lined them up next to each other and have a drag race you are going to end up with a winner and a loser i'm not convinced that an inch of unarmored steel masses any notable amount less than an inch of armor steel i suspect the difference is more in composition than density it would also be pretty silly for trials vehicles to test the automotive components with a vehicle notably less heavy than a service vehicle would be thus even if they did have an unarmored cromwell i'm not sure that the vehicle is faster because of it it may have been for other reasons saskia any trips to switzerland planned no i'm booked out for this year and pretty much next year any plans to do a video on israeli armored doctrine not particularly i have downloaded some english translations of what maybe israeli doctrine but i haven't had the time to dig into them yet and if i recall these are kind of point-in-time doctrinal documents not a full history over time like the video is always doing for the world war ii channel i may yet by the way revisit those for a mid midwar update what do i think of the swiss army still using leopard 2a4s aren't they a little bit obsolescent it is true that the panzer 87s are getting a little bit long in the tooth however these swiss are aware of this and ruag took a look at upgrading the vehicle their overall proposal was fairly significant to include armor packages and a remote weapon station however though the armor packages released can be fairly quickly added the swiss have decided not to actually upgrade their vehicles to that level instead the panzer 87 verta halton or more commonly the panzer 87we is only a partial upgrade this started in the mid 2000s and consists mainly of fitting the commanders independent viewer with a thermal imager improving the controls of that viewer and adding the vehicle integrated information navigation command control system the swiss army's battlefield management system in addition they also purchased the dm 53 apf sds round which is about as good as you can get without going to depleted uranium right now it's not the end of the line it seems for swiss leopards they originally acquired 380 of them they were currently 134 in service 90 were sold off a bunch of others were converted to specialty vehicles and the rest at least 96 are sitting in storage these were not upgraded to we standard however in the last month or so there have been rumblings that it may not be a bad idea to pull a few of them out of storage the number being thrown around being three dozen and upgrading those rurag has developed a much more complete upgrade package demonstrated in 2016 which may interest the swiss or may not either way the panzer 87 was in service for just under 20 years when it received its first midlife upgrade so with the next two decade mark coming up fast you never know sean davis is there any particular reason as to why tanks aren't often seen turning on a dime one track forwards and one backwards in videos i only see track vehicles turning with one track moving forward in reverse and the other not moving at all alright you're talking about pivot steer versus neutral steer pivot steer is locking one track and pivoting around it neutral steer is a steer with no bias so the tank spins in place abrams and bradley grooves i don't care that the position for the transmission selector is called pivot it's still a neutral steer as per tc3-21.60 yes i know the dash 10 for the vehicle says a pivot turn is a turn in its own length but the training circular is correct and the terminology is common in worldwide usage anyway the first reason you may see a vehicle pivot steering instead of neutral steering is that the vehicle simply may not be capable of the latter now the capability has theoretically been around since world war one on some tanks and became a lot more common in world war ii but even then vehicles continued to be built with only a pivot steer capability the venerable m113 for example only received neutral steer capability with the a3 and its steering wheel earlier versions used tillers for normal turns and for pivot steer what they had were actually labeled pivot steer handles and those applied a disc brake to lock that track most soviet design vehicles to include t72 and t90 tanks are still not being built with a neutral steer capability it makes the transmission more complicated more expensive and is something of a nice to have another reason you may not see it is simply to reduce wear and tear it's worth noting the panther crews were instructed to not neutral steer if at all possible to limit breakdown possibilities thirdly it's terrain dependent ordinarily you want to only neutral steer on good ground because as the tack is sliding it's also dragging up dirt into the track system and providing friction you want to do it only on solid ground or concrete one will note that on a modern gunnery range there's usually a concrete turning pad behind the firing points to allow the tanks to spin in place without damage to the ground or the tracks fourthly it takes longer to neutral steer and then go into gear than to simply put the tracking to drive and hold one track when you're pointing in the right direction you just straighten the controls and off you go only in very tight terrain do you really need to spin in place unfortunately that terrain often is also packed to ground or concrete and built up areas or maybe the motor pool so it works out nicely steven britton wonders about fuel tank levels he says that in the civilian vehicle transport world vehicles have as little fuel as possible to minimize fire risk do military transport vehicles work the same way i can't speak for transport specifically but it was standard for us to fill the tanks to the brim when you're done with them the risk of fume explosion you think twa 800 was considered greater than the risk of fire from the fuel and if you think about the size of an afv's fuel tank you know remember the m1 carries 500 gallons in its tanks that's a hell of a lot of space for fumes to accumulate to create a fuel air explosion it's actually come up for wargaming at shows on occasion we will rent a tank first stand at a trade show but the rules from the fire marshals are usually made with more normal cars and trucks in mind you know things were 20 to 50 gallon tanks trying to explain that tank fuel tanks are an entirely different kettle of fish seems and thus far to have fallen upon deaf ears though in hindsight i guess we probably could have just left the fuel caps open to allow the fumes to escape i'll also note that it was standard that when i was done flying in park in the airplane for the fuel tanks to be filled before leaving the airport john kettner congratulations gm has created the mighty bolo mark 1 at last marks 2 and 3 are coming off the line and you've been given the honor of commanding a battalion of the new tanks would you prefer your personal tank to be a mark ii or a mark iii well we're going back in time here since the mark ii entered service seven years ago under mark iii four years ago however as a battalion commander i go with the mark ii lighter faster i can get to where i can best control the battle also i wouldn't have to worry myself about utilizing the capabilities of the mark iii vls systems vls system that's that's one of those things like atm machines is in a vertical launch system system anyway uh if i had to worry about those systems that could be a little bit limiting so for example a mark iii could be used as a point defense system which kind of holds you in place a mark ii is designed for one role only direct fire engagement so let the larger firepower vehicles be run by crews who only need to fight not to command besides the concordia was made by mark ii basically so it has to have something going for it sworn brother of the ballistic order of saint john moses browning i've seen several photos at m48s in vietnam on which the crews have welded an improvised mount with an m2 instead of cupola how does the us army feel about such diy modifications to a tank are there good ones and if so has the army decided to adopt them officially not just one i've seen one tank with a twin machine gun mount well wind walker is correct that the cullen's cutter would be another such example as would the sandbag rails used by seventh armored ditto the wooden planks on pacific theater shermans or the welded plates on the road wheels or stuarts infantry telephones on the back of sherman's were originally bodged field modifications before the army came up with an official version in the case of the m48s the problem was that the cupola was designed for operation in slightly more open terrain than the tanks were being used in in vietnam so that's the why obviously the welding would have been done by ordnance branch folks at the request of the cruise it seems likely that no higher approval would have been necessary and that there would always be some bright spark who first comes up with an idea at lower levels consider the field armored humvees in 2004 or the gun trucks also a vietnam or iraq i'm trying to think of some field applied modification to the m1 which garnered full approval and the closest thing i can think of is the use of the front left of the a-bombs to stow a road wheel the bolts that you find the four bolts they're actually used for lifting the turret not stowing wheels and the troops were damaging the threads inside the turret when they tried mounting the road wheels instead of telling the troops to stop doing it the solution was basically to develop new bolts specifically for mounting the road wheels without damaging the thread inside the turret perhaps the ultimate idea of a troop modification to a tank is the british street fighter program they basically put a tank at the disposal of the troops and said okay lads if you can modify the tank what would you do to it some of the ideas to me at least seem pretty silly like mounting a twin brimstone missile on the top but maybe i'm missing something in the capabilities it seems to me that they're trying to get the tank to do everything itself instead of relying on friends however i am not read in on the test reports so who knows ed a to z wondered about the concept of a tank resupply vehicle maybe an ammo hauler where the vehicle connects to the back of the turret of the tank such vehicles do exist for artillery consider the m992 phasovy which basically has a conveyor to the back of em-109 however no such vehicle exists for tanks to acknowledge for it to work for a tank unless you're pushing rounds in through an ammo port and turret's side you probably want to tank with a bustle autoloader like the clerk or type 90. it should be possible to create an automated loading system which pushes ammo forward into the bustle and then for the autoloader to move around to a storage position however since we're only talking 40 or so rounds i'm not sure it's entirely worth it a simpler system was developed for the m1 which of course is manually loaded on some tanks built around the 1990s you will see three attachment points on the top of the blow-off panels these were very annoying because they ruined a perfectly good sleeping location the theory was that the ammo rack was attached to the blow-off panel when it came time to re-arm a vehicle where the crane will come along simply lift the empty ammo rack straight up and replace it with another ammo rack which had a full load of ammunition looking at the model actually has them the idea never entered service in the end and i guess the army just didn't think it was worth it felicity longus if the u.s had continued on with operation downfall what projects being worked on would likely have been continued would u.s tank development have continued to be dictated by the demands of the eto or would tank development have been put on the back burner because of the type of fighting that downfall would have seen this of course is the invasion of the japanese home islands i don't think that there would be any particular change the new generations of vehicle to include pershing and hellcat were starting to arrive in the pacific but really what would be happening that the shermans wouldn't have been perfectly capable of dealing with reminded of the use of shermans but five years later in korea and they worked fine in the meantime the joys of the peace alongside the ussr pretty soon changed hang on maybe we're gonna have to deal with these guys no matter what happens in japan so the us's tank development undoubtedly would have continued regardless simply to face the soviets at multibearis why did the british stick with a multi-fuel engine for so long especially when chieftains were so notoriously unreliable and did the multi-fuel capability of any practical benefits oddly i was talking to a chieftain crewmen the other day and he was saying that with the mark 13 l60 upgrade it was quite reliable make that what you will but we are talking early 1980s here in any case the decision to fit chieftain with a multi-fuel engine came about 1957. some grand european multinational plan that the british government got on board with but for whatever reason only the british really tried to run with it the l60 wasn't a true multi-fuel in the same manner that the turbine in the m1 is you would have to drain the fuel tanks of whatever was in at the time then the remy mechanics would have to fiddle with the engine for up to eight hours before it could then run on whatever new fuel type you had of course in reality the british just surrendered chieftains on diesel like everybody else except with a big cloud of blue smoke following the tank everywhere it wasn't the only such multi-fuel engine at interservice the american m35 deuce and a half and the 54.5 ton for example also came with a multi-fuel at least as long as you mix a little bit of diesel in with it you can run it without preparation technically it was a hyper cycle engine the technology was developed by man however the idea of multi-fuel was certainly present in u.s thinking as early as the early 1950s part of the reason that the u.s moved to diesel engines was because they were usually fairly simple to modify to a multi-fuel capability if necessary there was a concern that there would be a shortage of diesel because of a sudden increase in diesel use from anything else from locomotives on railways to ships so the army required all its diesels to be able to operate on cite fuel as well cite is compression ignition turbine engine and it's a form of jp4 jet fuel the avcr 1100-2 for the mbt-70 project was another multi-fuel type using a variable compression ratio hence vcr in the name as a result it can be argued that with the move to the turbine for the m1 the us kept with multi-fuel for decades i should add the u.s looked very hard at anything there's even discussion of the merits of steam engines which notably are multi-fuel the report concluded that despite the various advantages of steam turbines to include stupidly good torque ratings they tended to be space inefficient have a poor conversion rate of energy and were a little bit heavy for the horsepower in any case the hyper cycle truck engines were eventually reconfigured or replaced just run on diesel and today pretty much everything just runs off a jp8 which is technically a form of jet fuel but the compression engines seem to run them anyway alexander h can i elaborate on the development of soviet tank ammo during the cold war not particularly no i don't seem to have anything to hand which isn't freely available online sorry tank axe wants to know about the spell shields and us turrets he's seen documents that state that the m26 had a manly protection of eight inch in bases which implies a nearly nine centimeter spell shield just behind the gun shield this might also explain honeycutt's claim that the t29 mountlet was 279 millimeters when i measured it is only about 203 he's always theorized that this is just honeycut taking into account the spell shield inside the t29 turret can i impart any thoughts on this t29's mantlet was about eight inches over most of it but it was in a ring closer to the gun itself it actually measured the full 280 millimeters or so i would also point out though that i've seen some documents in the archives rating t29 is both eight inches and whatever the 280 comes out as i accept that ordinarily one needs to calibrate for the exact material being measured by my ultrasonic gauge that i was using but the different types of steel are likely close enough for ballpark estimates and besides i also tried a slightly more old-school method to confirm the readings however the shield inside really is just a spell shield with reinforcing ribs indeed i'm not even sure it's technically a spell shield as much as a mounting system for the gun components which happen to have a secondary shielding function to a small extent the metal just seemed too thin to me i'm also suspicious that would be made of armored steel i'd also observe that the inner shield such as it is for an m4 is also sufficiently thin then i don't think it contributes all that much of the ballistic protection properties as to the pershing with the eight inch bases i'm wondering if you're referring to the t26e2 which entered services the m45 as the 105 millimeter gun on that tank was much shorter than the 90 millimeter they needed to put more weight forward of the trunnions in order to balance it and that turned out to be about eight inches worth of armor s face wants to know if the u.s entered the draft has the percentage of bodies that goes to each branch of the army being decided also how long would training take for a draft d to become qualified as fit for combat in an armored unit i'm sure the such figures have already been calculated but i have no idea what the percentages might be obviously we have world war ii to draw upon as a president and draftees were given assessments upon accession much like we were on the azerb today to determine what sorts of jobs you may be good at the technical services always tended to get first pick the army air forces ordnance engineers and so on tankers as i recall were somewhere in the middle and the infantry were down at the bottom this may explain the quoted statistic that german infantry were better than u.s infantry on a one-for-one basis but on the other hand u.s infantry only needed to be able to get on the radio net maintained by the more intelligent single core signal core troopers and calling the strike by the even more intelligent artillery and aviation guys so it worked out it's another example as to why you need to be very very careful about taking comparative statistics in isolation and out of larger context as for how long it would take a draft d to become qualified the official answer is presumably 22 weeks which is how long it takes to consider a current volunteer as being qualified to go to a line unit in actuality of course i suspect a couple of weeks might be able to be shaved off if they had to okay it's been absent for a while but it's time for gun of the month i have shown the sig p365 sas before but it has been replaced as my everyday carry in favor of the 365 xl with the hollis on site and i am told i mean you can see the difference in size when it's decidedly a bit bigger than the other now i am told that when they started designing the 365 series they actually started with the magazine because that was sort of the trick to getting such a large capacity so you take the magazine from the xl and it fits into the sas the the smaller version now it's uh the smaller version uh smaller magazine for the xl is considered the extended magazine for the sas so there is actually a longer version so this is a 12 round you can get a 14 round which sticks out a little bit and i have found it sticks out a little bit too much for the purposes of staying concealed so i i just run with the 12. i mean 13 rounds it's enough to deal with most things and of course uh being larger with a frame you could put an optic on it upon reading all the various reviews the hollow sun is winning um i've only fired it a few times seems to do exactly what it says on the tin another advantage to the xl is that you actually have proper external controls instead of the anti-snake system here um i mean yeah you could still use this as a pocket gun or something you know for when you don't want to have to wear a proper holster uh just get a little pocket holster uh but uh i think the 365 ses is actually more of a specialist pistol and uh i'm just going to run this i mean there are other channels that will that will give you a much more thorough breakdown of the 365 internal striker system it it does exactly what it says on the tin i mean i i can't complain it's 13 rounds and 9 millimeter that doesn't get in your way so there we go the other thing i've noticed actually with and this kind of happened with the sas as well is that um i tend to wear the holster routinely whether or not there's a weapon in it simply because it keeps my trousers from falling down so every time i go out let's say i'm going to carry the sidearm i holster the weapon and it's actually starting to affect the finish already even though it's uh even though it's uh pretty brand new which is a little bit surprising uh but no matter uh so there you go gun of the month is another sig i like sigs i did another weapons call incidentally with the m17 so it's my second weapons call with it which is the if you're not tracking it's the army's replacement for the beretta i can't complain i mean i honestly i didn't have any complaints about the beretta either the brett did exactly what it was supposed to do uh just they were getting a little bit old and the m17 i mean it puts rounds more or less where you want them to go and i do like the modular grip size but anyway would i buy one personally don't see a need to the army lets me shoot them if i didn't have them from the army would i get a say m17 probably it works i have other things in my shopping list though when i have the money to buy them thunderchild opinion on a giraffe or cherry picker-style atgm vehicles basically a tank chassis with a large arm instead of a conventional turret with a missile launcher on top the basic concept goes back quite a few years famously the praying mantis machine gun carrier the british of course it didn't take too long for people to realize that it might be worth putting missiles on top instead of a machine gun such designs often came with a giraffe arm prototypes were built and trialled over the various years one of the earliest was the m113 elevated anti-tank missile launcher which was basically a twin launcher on the end of a very long boom at 1972 the problem with that was that the launch could only be reloaded from outside the vehicle which is considered an undesirable trade eventually the hammer head as found on the m901 itv was selected it may not have been quite as high but it seemed to be high enough especially if you take into account the issues of complication and weight indeed the complication of the elevating mechanism versus need seems to be the main reason such things haven't been adopted at least as far as i can determine certainly such systems have entered service for surveillance purposes and are commonly found with radars and cameras on top and some of them do seem to approach the weights of a missile system the most recent attempt in the west seems to be by a danish company called fox schmidt their elevated toe system 2 was trialled in the late 1990s if it has entered service anywhere i can't seem to find a reference to it but the company website says that over 150 have been built make it that way you will the most recent example i can find was a concept vehicle from china the gt6 from 10 years ago near as i can tell if you really really need to fire a missile from high up there are aircraft which can do it and if all you want to do is just keep your vehicle hidden a normal hammerhead and the light will do adequately ralph over on the panzer museum website on youtube has a full half hour on the subject as they happen to have one of these prototype giraffe missile vehicles in their collection i'll put a link to the video below the catch is that it's in german and there are no english translations so only four percent of you according to my youtube analytics will be able to understand it i am not one of that four percent rights beer minister regarding the god damn it having those muppets learned anything question how could the shark be won and the lack of optics for german gunners in their tanks happen i have no answer to the german optics question they obviously were very well aware of the concept and simply chose not to implement them on their turreted vehicles i have seen no explanation as to why as for the b1 i think it was just a matter of the sunk cost fallacy remember the b1 is in effect a 1920s design with a long development process caused not least by the question of whether heavy tanks would be banned by treaty the french put a lot of time effort and money into the design over the years the lack of visibility for the crew was noted in pre-acceptance trials of the later 1930s but it seemed that as the best heavy tank design that the french had arguably the only heavy french design available somewhere notwithstanding it was go with the b1 or start over from scratch and it seems that the french didn't think that starting over was a viable option given the time constraints and well even though it was known that the b1 was really just an interim tank the order was placed anyway while improvements were developed such proposed solutions such as a 12 degree range of traverse for the hull gun and a better turret were planned for the b-1 tear but of course the invasion of france put paid to both that and to the prototypes there was one last proposal the b40 which was basically a derivative of the tear but that never made it to completion big d there has been a lot of discussion recently about the effectiveness of molotov cocktails against modern afvs how effective are they against modern armor also is there an o bugger the tank is on fire drill for the m1 as the molotovs not very the best bet might be if you can get it to land on an air intake and have the filters start to burn but i suspect the airflow would have a good chance of snuffing out the flame the assessments seem to be the advantage to setting a vehicle a light and remember it's really just a superficial burning on the outside of the armor is that it distracts the crew usually keeps them bottled up and may prevent them from noticing or simply obscure a follow-on attack by someone armed with something a little bit more dangerous and i seem to recall i talked about napalm tests on the pershing and napalm didn't have much of an effect so you can imagine that the molotov cocktail probably wouldn't however if the hatchets are open then you're talking about an entirely different kettle of fish and vehicles can be knocked out in my day m1 crews were indeed tested on the old bugger the tank is on fire drill in actuality it was officially named tank crew gunnery skills test station number 13 crew evacuation the crew would have 28 seconds to perform the designated actions which included the tc traversing the turret to the left so the driver could get out the loader stowing the ammo door switch and the gunner disconnecting the fuel line quick disconnect coupling and then getting 30 yards from the tank interestingly though it's in the fm 3-20.12 2005 which would have been valid for the last time i fired a tank i do not see the test in the current tc 3-20.12. apparently it is no longer tested robert henry elston as a former tc who rode around with various important bits exposed what would i have preferred to have quick access to at the hatch a heavy machine gun like the 50 cal a lighter machine gun in 762 or 556 or maybe like cannon or perhaps something a bit more exotic like an automatic grenade launcher believe it or not the rifle [Music] if you think about it if it's something that i'm really worried about killing or at least suppressing right the hell now it's probably very close a longer range is sure the 50 cal will do nicely but you can imagine driving along in this sort of terrain even the loaders skate 240 can't react as quickly and as the same range of elevation and depression as it takes to spin with a light shoulder fired rifle keep the target from killing you just long enough for your buddy with a better angle behind to finish the job or for you to get some distance between you and the threat as a result i normally rode with my rifle to my right between the hatch and the sponson box it would take some pretty serious off-roading for the rifle to fall off kazuki k was the usual twofer some tanks have smoked launchers in a single row others have a cluster any reason why not that i can think of the cluster seems to take up less real estate and i'm not sure i can think of a downside to them other than maybe being a little bit more difficult to produce i guess it may be possible to individually aim launchers that are mounted in a single row maybe if you want to have a smaller thicker arc coverage at the front or some such as for fusing what you asked about vehicle grenades normally start smoking as soon as they're fired modern ones come in two categories either ones which arc upwards and then they create a curtain on the way down before continuing to smoke or those which are fired outwards and explode with the current goings on in ukraine this is the second question will that affect work or museum visits with russia well i strongly doubt that there will be any more visits for me to kubenker or patriot park in the next decade unless there is a dramatic change in government in russia for now belarus is similarly on the no go list for those who are not keeping track my civilian employer wargaming.net has severed all ties with russia and belarus and it is moved to being an entirely western company given that the employees of our large ukrainian office are a little bit distracted right now the main development center seems to be in vilnius there has been little effect on my end we are still planning trips to do more filming at museum north america and other western countries and we have indeed filmed more which are yet to be edited and released for those who don't actually follow it i only tend to cross post certain notable war gaming videos such as inside the chieftains hatch and those usually come out on wednesdays there are a good number of my historical videos which are only on the world of tanks north america channel grimm did anything come out of the mgv and lost vehicles and why were they cancelled mgv was the manned ground vehicle for those not keeping track the us is currently working on the optionally manned combat vehicle but mgv was manned it was supposed to be a lightweight series of vehicles yes even the xm1202 mounted combat system which was supposed to replace the m1 was a lighter vehicle and they all used a common chassis which used a diesel hybrid powertrain officially the weight limit was about 20 tons the reality led to it being closer to 30. the n-loss variant non-line-of-sight cannon which was the only one to actually be made had a two-man crew an autoloader obviously an advanced fire control system and other goodies the program was cancelled officially for cost reasons although i suspect also because of the stupid idea you can't replace a 70 tonne m1 with a 25 ton vehicle that looks suspiciously like the cv 9120 of which basically not have been sold did anything come of it no idea i've not seen the test reports do i think mraps are going to stay in inventory or will it be slowly phased out in favor of smaller lighter vehicles i suspect the matvs are getting around for a while yet the older rg's and cayman vehicles are all but gone as they really were just road vehicles with armor the matv was designed to be a little bit more off-road capable the jail tv is so stupidly big partially because it's supposed to have a good amount of the matv's resilience but the bottom line is that the u.s was caught short-handed once before on ied-resistant vehicles and m-atvs in particular are expensive enough pieces of kit with quite a few miles left in them which are not incompetent off-road overall the army bought about 25 000 mraps the last figure i saw had about 8500 of them retained at which 5600 were m atvs and the remaining 3000 or so were max pro dashes some 5000 of these were placed in pre-positioned stocks around the world just in case sebastian kranen in redstone rising tc sergeant mccall calls target tank 12 o'clock sabo shu as he orders the gunner to engage as well as hit when the target was hit was this the proper engagement phraseology for the period or is it simply minor inaccuracy in an otherwise well-researched book well it seems that the phraseology hasn't changed much over time you can find the gunnery manual for 1961 available easily online fm 17-12 and the verbiage is extremely similar to modern use with the main exception being that sensings don't need to be called unless appropriate they are considered a mental exercise a sensing is the assessment of where did the round go the sequence in that manual is alert ammunition range direction target execution so gunner sabo front tank fire somewhere along the lines the direction and range were moved to after the target description so i personally have said something like gunner sabo tank front fire i should add that 12 o'clock is a perfectly legitimate thing to say and it is approved in the manual but it's an awfully long-winded way of saying front the identified and on the way calls by the gunner remain the same from 1961 as they do today similarly the sensing description for a good shot in 1961 is the same as today target the other sensings long short and doubtful and lost also remain today as they were 60 years ago now what i really need is the fm from the 1980s but i can't seem to find it online offhand on a related question some folks in comments from the last video were asking me if i read team yankee by harold coyle i have i read a number of his books i think the heroes have a little bit too much plot armor and the opposition is a little bit too consistently stupid or incompetent that said the premise of the 10 000 was interesting on the subject of techno thrillers i shall detour and tell you about what is undoubtedly the worst one of these i've ever read dark rose by mike london wood here's a cliff's notes aversion and irish viewers will appreciate this arabs decide to hold ireland for ransom in exchange for palestine libyan arabs who emigrated to chile pretend to be spanish students and overrun ireland in conjunction with the plo with the aid of tanks abcs and whatever else got smuggled in and probably the most valid point in the book was that most irish people couldn't tell one of their own vehicles from a foreign one the irish defense forces surrender without a fight ethna the flagship is scuttled in harbour one peacock escapes to the uk a free irish battalion remains in uniform instead of simply going around the corner of the palestine and cracking heads they also go to the uk the first act of resistance is caused by an old man on a tractor who blocks the road of a libyan convoy they used to block me all the time no idea why it wasn't considered a militia act against me the peacock goes around acting the pirate to any libyan cargo vessels when one cargo vessel shoots back it is then reliant on an escorting british destroyer so for whatever political reason the us uk etc cannot take sides they do however grant leaves of absence for any troops of celtic descent or who dated an irish woman had to go be mercenaries in effect the british sas finds the last remaining descendant of the high king zitara and she is declared queen of ireland and commander-in-chief of kilt force some equipment tanks fighters aircraft carrier battle groups get reflagged under irish military colors for the duration cue counter invasion general high intensity conflict mullengar gets hit by some faes no loss there and the free irish battalion filled with blood loss takes no prisoners end with victory parade to college green good luck arc key t-y-e t-y-i sorry he has heard an argument that one of the reasons that the soviets pushed for the development of autoloaders was a manpower shortage after world war ii they wanted to automate as much as possible is there any weight to this argument that's a new one on me i've heard to account for weakened loaders on the radioactive battlefield which i think is a bit dodgy as well the explanation which makes most sense is that they were simply trying to keep size and weight down they are very definite advantages which exist no matter the conditions of the battlefield wind walker 57 bob semple may have designed the worst afv of the war but he almost hit on a good idea could an up armouring kit for bulldozers to be used as bulldozers have been of use in world war ii the seabees amongst others might have bought a hundred or so the answer is sure caterpillar bulldozes of course were normally unarmored uh they were usually the d4 the d6 and d7 they had army terminology like light tractor m1 however a little over 100 were indeed locally equipped with armor there appeared being two general designs used in europe armored by the uk's caterpillar importer not by the military specifically however the u.s of course tended not to do things by half measures if you were going to use a tracked armored bulldozer on the front lines why not start with something tracked and armored and oh equipped with cannon and then stick the bulldozer blade on that and the sherman dozers proved extremely useful and successful it similarly wasn't impossible to fit a cat with armor locally in the pacific this photo taken on saipan most vehicles of course were unarmored the best that would happen might be if a tree fell on the bulldozer then the headache bar that long beam which carried cabling over the top of the vehicle could perform a protective function the slaven of all the tanks and spgs which turned out to perform better than expected which one and why it's difficult to answer but the m3 and m4 medium have definitely got to be up there simply because of the sheer variety of roles that the vehicle's chassis ended up performing designed as a gun tank it turned into anything from artillery pieces to a beach recovery vehicle hillary doyle's suggestion for this is the drilling which in afv terms is the sdk fz-251-21 though originally intended for anti-aircraft purposes they discovered that the things were just plain scary to any opposition even tanks due to the incredible volume of fire and troops were asking for as many as they could get dirk what's the deal with the sherman comb ever since laser pig did a 30 minute video on this thing i've been asked about it and it's exactly what he said it was at the end it's a brake locking and release fixture for shipping why he made a mystery out of it i have no idea christopher ryan what's the feasibility of using third-party spotting to spot and derive solution for tanks in pre-prepared positions to fire through smoke or other concealment for high explosive machine gun fire not improbable allow me to introduce you to da form 5517 and whatever the counterparts are in other militaries it's the range card it's actually interesting how many of these questions are being asked and you realize when you dig into it the army's actually thought about them before so when you settle into a new position you're supposed to draw up a range card or you say donald but you got it so in it you note the terrain features and you can also place azimuth and range on these on these cards precisely so you can tell what's where on the battlefield without necessarily having good visibility to it normally this is for night but it works just as well for smoke or anything else in fixed fortifications such as bunkers this information may be painted directly onto the wall just below the embrasure if there are avenue likelies of approach to be covered they can be set up as target reference points thus if the firing position gets smoked it's still possible to have another position call out something like troops trp3 you would then go to your range card aim accordingly and that would at least cause some caution to the target in today's world with more rapid and accurate artillery and mortars though the requirement to use armored vehicles to do this is reduced gareth farlow wants to know which tank from the last 50 years or so would win a tug of war well if you're going to exclude vehicles whose primary function includes attractive effort such as arvs i have a strong suspicion that the answer would actually be the m1 it has 70 tons of weight pushing down on the tracks to provide grip and the torque band for the turbine is very much in its favor when starting off tim del rimple what modifications might have been made to ram if the us had been forced to take it due to some problem with the m4 probably not many that have kept the machine gun turret because americans love machine guns at least initially the real question is whether or not that it kept the 57 millimeter this was a weapon not in favor with either the armored force or the tank destroyer branch the former because of the small high explosive content of the shell and the latter due to concerns about the smaller projectile losing too much velocity at range not to say that the gun wasn't considered the best analog for your question i think is the history of the m7 lite medium tank which went from a 37 millimeter through the 57 millimeter to the 75 millimeter in final production i suspect that if they had to use a ram the americans would do the same thing as they did in m7 and just figure out how to stick the 75 onto it josh conte why did the u.s drop development of a stabilized gun after the m4 if they couldn't come up with a dual axis stabilizer for later design or updates surely a single axis stabilizer would have been better than nothing the us was certainly well aware of the possibilities of dual access stabilization in 1948 they imported into the us two centurions for testing one was the centurion 2 with the metrovic 2-axis stabilization system generally they liked the system insofar as it did what it could within the balance of its expectations and installation into centurion they concluded that they could not easily install the metrovic system into a u.s tank design it just wouldn't fit right however it seems that the u.s did indeed conclude that if they couldn't do the job right they weren't even going to try even in the 1949 report on centurion they were observed that the gun stabilization system only stabilized the gun it did nothing for the input of data from a ballistic computer the u.s had a number of systems in development at this point which was supposed to do something of that nature of inputting the ballistic solution into the system in 1955 ordnance did a study on the merits of different types of stabilization system and the conclusion was that they needed to develop a system which is effectively the system used in modern vehicles today that the stabilization be applied to the site and that the gun would simply follow the site as best it could and be combined with an alignment trigger disconnect so when the trigger is pressed the gun doesn't fire unless and until the gun has caught up with and is aligned to the site by 1958 the us had developed a dual axis stabilizer for the t95 tank which also automatically incorporated super elevation input from the rangefinder system of course t95 was a test engineering vehicle in the end it but it still took over a decade for the add-on stabilizer to be fielded to m60a1 now in josh's question he observes that the soviets had implemented dual axis stabilization much earlier on t55 and t62 interestingly the year after the aos started being fielded to dm-60s the u.s obtained some t-62s for testing and they conducted a direct comparison test between the t-62 the older t-55 and the m60a1 now bearing in mind that these were tests of the installed system so gun control equipment and vehicle suspension were also factors in addition to the basic stabilizer technology but still the bottom line is that as stabilized tanks went the t-62's system sucked it actually proved to be a little bit worse than the t-55s the thinking being that was probably due to the larger mass of the gun the system itself seemed to be more or less identical so from the us's perspective it seems to have been that it was a combination of waiting for the right system which was just around the corner any day now and putting money and effort into inferior stabilizers which were about to be made obsolete just wasn't a good idea the problem is it just seems to all taken a lot longer than expected robert neborney i would direct your attention to the reports generated during the war as to why many tankers disabled the stabilizer insurance with the exception of only a few units who swore by the stabilizer the big problem was that nobody was probably trained or properly trained forgive me on its operation and maintenance when they took a sample unit and ran them through stabilizer training suddenly they were all converts the colonels and generals of ordnance branch of the future who were lts and captains of world war ii would have the same access to such investigative reports as we do now who the [ __ ] is alice it reminds me of my college days and the smoky song that anyway he wants to know or she what does a modern saber round passing overhead sound like i have absolutely no idea i have never been shot at by one he also wants to know in 2072 why tanks are no longer in existence what happened to them in the 50 years prior to make them disappear i have no idea this sort of question has been asked before on q a such as can we invent power armor to make infantry as tough as tanks and more maneuverable unfortunately any advances i can think of to non-tank type systems such as power plant miniaturization railguns or whatever can be applied just as well to tanks except at a larger scale so the relative advantage of the tank will remain the only situation i can think of might be when one side is so utterly overwhelming capability let's say they completely dominate the skies or the orbitals with all-weather sustainable precision strike systems combined with targeting systems from the ground that there is no longer need for a tank but any country or planet which can make such a force pop up can also make a tank for far cheaper to do the same job in the various worlds of sci-fi books from hammer slammers to bolos and cyber tanks i can only recall encountering one postulation of tanks having been actively eliminated and that was one of the surface books by sherman and craig in this the last tank was the m1d7 super abrams of 2049 in service until at least 2052. what defeated it was the 75 millimeter m72 straight arrow no relation to the chinese missile of the same name which by its description was a shoulder fired low set type hyper-velocity guided kinetic energy missile capable of acquisition after launch from behind terrain obstacles according to this future history tankers threw in the towel and tanks were removed from the battlefield for 300 years with no tanks to shoot at m72s went out of service again until someone decided to start a war with a new main battle tank and had quite a bit of success until the m72s went back into production now i have some issues with this hypothesis mainly that tankers just threw in the towel to use the words in the book and of course the premise is very similar to that which we've been hearing recently from ukraine but i reject this premise i would refer you to my no the tank is not dead video in the unlikely event that you haven't seen it another issue i have with the premise is that armored personnel carriers are apparently still considered viable in this hypothetical future which seems a bit silly as if you can kill a tank you can probably kill an armored personnel carrier dave077 question on archiving i have talked about various things in the archives what was deemed worthy of being archived and what was the process what does it look like now when my counterpart 100 years from now browses the archives what sort of things are they going to find it's an excellent question and it is one that i have pondered upon myself back in the day when making a copy was a deliberate effort obviously not everything was recorded on the other hand it also meant that the first layer of filtering was already conducted for the historians if something was in the archives it was because somebody thought it was important enough to sit down with a typewriter this includes transcripts of telephone calls between general officers so for example in general barnes telephone general endeavors to tell them that there was this new 76 millimeter gun that they had invented which they could put into sherman's there was a stenographer listening in on the line typing it down i have the transcript on one of my written articles see link in the description below reports telegrams etc would be sent to a physical archive and eventually would find the way to narrow or other such records collections such as regional archives or branch archives however today everything is a matter of record now i have no idea if voip calls between seniors are recorded somewhere or not but everything sent in an email is stored on a hard drive or server somewhere which worries me as a historian if you're an office worker think about the volume of short emails would you send on a daily basis sure some of it is actually relevant but if i'm in afghanistan and i send an email to my buddy over in the s5 section asking if he wanted to go get lunch at the local national food stall in half now and this was done on the sippernet because that's what we had then that has become a communication of historical record and a historian digging through the email archives is gonna have lots of those sorts of things to dig through to find anything useful there is going to be some very serious ai needed which is going to be able to sort out the wheat from the chaff now that said there are still unit historians who will record things but i haven't actually seen what they produce so i can't tell you on the plus side test reports and research papers are still being created and are now placed online on sites like dtic and if you have access ngc not everything on dtic is unclassified but at least it tells you that the document exists and you can file a request for declassification christian b would i rather command an m1 abrams in world war ii or a sherman in iraqi freedom well for the main combat definitely the m4 in iraq all the supporting assets on the other end of the radio are worth much more than the 40 stowed kills that you get in a modern tank if you can get the 70 ton tank across any of the engineering bridges of the era besides filling a 500 gallon fuel tank with five gallon cans every day doesn't strike me as being pleasant no i haven't read clancy's armored calf book in years i cannot give you an opinion because i simply can't remember it josh nichols did my m1 hank have a name barely legal the tank was already named when i joined the crew in place of the previous lt who had been fired for inability to make a decision my second tank which i didn't have long enough to take a photo it seems was a diplomatic incident my first bradley was hangmai which was on the vehicle when we received it as a hand-me-down this was a pre-ods in 2009 or so and i believe at the time one of the oldest m3s in the army sleep deprivation was the second bradley that was an ods but although i could have sworn i was a photograph of it taken somewhere i cannot seem to find it ben lothrin is curious about reconnaissance from what he understands armored formations have a bit more in the way of mechanization than foot sluggers true enough does this cause doctrinal changes for reconnaissance are there additional recon needs for an armored formation that an infantry formation may not require the us army wrestled with this idea in the early days of mechanization in the 1930s it was obvious that the higher speeds of armored cars and greater limitations on mobility meant that it was necessary for a form of route reconnaissance to be performed before the armored cars got there to this end very early in the development of the seventh cavalry brigade mechanize aircraft were added to the order of battle to determine roads bridges and the likes which the armored vehicles would want to utilize or check out today we still have aircraft that can do the work but also satellites a division headquarters will have a bunch of folks whose job it is to take satellite and aerial photographs and try to translate that data into some sort of practical information for the recon guys on the ground however the basic concepts of reconnaissance don't change on the basis of your transport via tracks or lpc indeed the basic concepts of tactics don't change at all either the main difference is that instead of bounds of 10 to 30 meters you're doing bounds of 300 to 500 meters the principles however remain the same john zabalet do i have any ambition of attaining the rank of general considering i've made it as far as lieutenant colonel well let's see if i make full bird first i've only made an o5 for a year and a half the minimum timing rate is three years i have absolutely no idea where is rack and stack with my counterparts the first order merit list report for my new rank hasn't come out yet at least not that i've seen i am short two hard prerequisites for full colonel and a soft one i haven't had a baton in command and i don't have a master's degree i'm about halfway through the latter and the former is out of my hands and sort of reflects a bit of my soft problem i don't believe i'm well known amongst the various decision makers in austin since i came in from out of state and frankly i'm not the sort of person to network well i'm really not very sociable plus besides i'm far from the flagpole in el paso on the plus side i'm advanced operations course complete which is a battalion command prerequisite and a surprising amount of my colleagues are not and texas is converting from light to heavy which means that my experience on tanks and bradley's is both a bit rare in a state and useful for battalion command so certainly full colonel is within reach although i wouldn't like to place money on it in the meantime i'm not in a huge hurry to push the issue i've got a couple of war fighters scheduled for the next year and those are always fascinating to partake in and are excellent training the last one i was plugged into our french division headquarters although i don't expect anything is awesome this time around once i'm done with those i might start nosing around a bit we'll also see if i make one of the senior service colleges i sent in my applications a couple of months ago if approved it's a step in the right direction it'll also likely mean that my youtube production is near to stop for a year if that happens though climbing the greasy pole takes quite a lot of legwork it seems lots of boxes to check and only about five years to do it in robert allweiler observes that one of the casualties of the peace dividend was a lot of the next generation equipment the development of which was killed off once the ussr collapsed he would like a brief overview of these technologies and i have to say that's actually a very interesting question which i think is probably worthy of a video of its own i shall add it to the to-do list somewhere after the us autoloaders part two and maybe part three and in front of painting that bloody chiha and chiri that i've had on my waiting list upstairs for many many months and right that's the end of that oh by the way people keep commenting on the bookshelves i think they came from creighton barrel because people want to know where the hell i got them and the reason that they're such a mess is because those aren't books for show i grab them routinely every day i'm pulling something down and that's you know i put them back up eventually but they're not about to fall down there's no earthquakes here in central texas at least if there are we got some serious problems and the wood is strong enough to hold so there you go okay uh that is that i hope you found it interesting and informative and i shall talk to you on the next one take care more merch

Channel: The Chieftain

Views: 152,572

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Id: gSxkn30DnJo

Length: 69min 47sec (4187 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 12 2022