Tank Chats #107 | T-62 | The Tank Museum

if you do like these tank chats do please subscribe to the tank museum's youtube channel this tank chat is going to be about the t-62 soviet era tank this tank behind me and we've already done a tank chat on the t-54 and the t-55 and in that particular tank chat i've talked about how the soviet union and the warsaw pact were going to potentially use their tanks and what their doctrine was if they had gone to war against the west the nato countries in the cold war so have a look at that if you want to understand the background to these types of tanks and how they thought they were going to be used but i mentioned in that video one of the points i make is that although the soviet union was a command economy almost like a dictatorship in many ways there were still rivalries between the factories and personalities and of course however much the red army was trying to prepare for the war it thought it was going to fight outside influences obviously come into play and that's part of the story behind the t-62 tank what happens is when stalin's deposed when khrushchev takes power even though he's seen service in the second world war he's been at stalingrad actually nikita khrushchev is slightly anti-tank he thinks that the age of the big heavy tank is pretty much over and he starts looking at the idea that perhaps anti-tank guided weapons are going to either mean the end of the tank on the battlefield or we're going to have to fit many more missiles on our tanks to extend the range of their firepower and that you can see is one of the influences that comes into the t-62 tank uh khrushchev by the way he stops in 1960 all the heavy tank development in russia he won't have any more of that done and it also has an impact on why we see the tanks as they do the russians carry on building medium weight tanks but if the weight of those tanks starts creeping up there's always a worry that khrushchev is going to be saying well you're getting into the heavy tank category and he's not going to approve something so it's another one of the reasons why the red army tries to keep its tanks below 40 tons even though they do start creeping up in time another big external influence is when the americans put the m60 tank into service in 1960 and with its 105 millimeter gun that is estimated to have an armor protection level on the m60 tank that the standard t-54 with this hundred millimeter gun is not going to be able to penetrate and that really puts the fright into the red army high command certainly those looking at armor now we've mentioned before about how a tank is put together quite often we see the end result quite often it might well be the part of lots of different development programs that are going on at the same time now one of the russian programs was to develop a gun that was going to supersede the 100 millimeter gun that was on the t-54 and the t-55 tank now you can understand that because inevitably this is still an area where everybody thinks gun sizes are going to creep up because we're going to need more firepower to penetrate more armor in the longer term so developments for guns are going on but also partly in mind of that khrushchev directive to keep the weight of a tank down the soviets are looking at new engine types and they're looking at one point they're starting to look at a gas turbine and they're looking at a much more lighter sophisticated tank and that program's ongoing as well but the conflux of this now all of a sudden we think we have an enemy tank that our standard tank gun can't penetrate we need to get something into service quickly means that the t-62 it was actually under a development term called object 166 basically the t62 is pushed forward very quickly even though there's other projects going on almost similar that we would perhaps think are going to be the the next tank in terms of the major replacement or parallel object as it were going on in in time with the t-54 t-55 tank for example the tank that comes out ultimately of the t-64 is being developed very much at the same time as a t-62 but the russians the red army think they need this tank in a bit of a hurry to get this gun out there to the front line troops so it can take on what they would consider one of their main opponents which would be the american army in nato so what do you get when you get a t-62 tank now the t-62 in many ways you have to think of it almost like an enlarged t-54 or t-55 tank what they're really doing they use the same engine pretty much the same transmission a lot of the same components but they just make the hole longer and wider and they have to build a bigger turret to fit this new 115 millimeter smoothbore gun in and that bigger turret is actually 40 centimeters wider on the turret race and you can actually see when you look closer at this tank it's got a slight overhang from the main part of the hull to support this frying pan shaped turret they're keeping a lot of the ideas coming forward from the t-54 t-55 series but they're only changing the tank when they really have to to accommodate the gun and that means they can put it into production quicker and get large numbers out there now the t-62 is first accepted by the red army in 1961 in essence it's approved 25 are built for trials production starts the following year in 1962 hence t-62 and it's not actually seen in public on one of the may data parades until 1965. that's the first time the west really starts seeing it although of course intelligence been trying to gather information take photos etc a lot earlier than that so what do we get looking at the tank same layout as t-54 the driver is on the front as you're facing forward he's on the left-hand side he's got a hatch that lifts up turns to the left-hand side two periscopes on the front one of which can be removed and fitted with an infrared driving periscope that means he can look about 50 meters ahead and there's normally on this bracket here two headlights one standard white light one infrared as there is on the turret there you can see this whopping great big searchlights that's fitted next to the main gun in a coaxial position that can be used for infrared as well now infra red really means that you can see to a certain degree at night the downside of infrared is it's a detectable system in other words as soon as you turn it on if you've got infrared detectors you know where that source is coming from so the drivers there in the front he sits pretty much next to 16 rounds of this 115 millimeter ammunition so 16 rounds are stored there overall the tank takes about 40 rounds into action with it another 20 are stored in the main compartment below the turret line and about four ready rounds are kept in the turret ready to go sort of immediately in the turret itself there's a standard three-man turret layout so you've got the commander you've got the gunner who sits in front of him and you've got the loader on the other side and the loader you can see the station there has got the fitting on the top uh not all tanks had this for the 12.7 millimeter dssk and the heavy machine gun that was used for a protect again aircraft as well as ground targets and co actually next to the main armament was a 762 pkt machine gun as well so you've pretty much got those standard layouts the difference you're really looking at is as we mentioned before this gun it becomes known as the u5 ts gun when it's finished its development it's a thicker barreled gun when you look at it if you're comparing it looks thicker and they move the fume extractor from the front of the barrel that it was on the t-54 to about two-thirds down the barrel so that's one of those recognition features of a t-62 tank is where that fume extractor is on the barrel length now because it's such a big gun and they're still using fixed ammunition in other words the 115 millimeter head of the round and the casing are all one piece what they've now done is yes you've still got a manual loading system so the guy inside is having to round those rounds into the breaches from his 40 rounds he's carrying but there's an auto ejection system at the end so after the gun has fired it goes to about three degrees above the level and as part of its firing process in other words it's automatic the breach opens and the shell case is ejected not just out the end of the breach but through a small hatch that is on the rear of the turret there's a small round hatch there that opens and out flies that empty shell case onto the engine deck behind it so that goes on automatically now that system slows the rate of fire of this gun slightly so if this tanks is sitting level uh static it can fire about four rounds a minute it's slower firing on the move but again if i take you back to that t-54 t-55 video a lot slower than the western allies and nato countries for firing rounds but again the red army's thinking that doesn't matter because we've got many more of these tanks doing their firing than they would be on the nato country side so in other words they're swamping the battlefield with tea tanks so the issue about how slow they are in firing is less of an issue because there's so many of them and this with this brand new type of smooth ball gun what they're now looking at firing is armor piercing discarding sabo fin stabilized rounds and that means basically you're firing now these cylinders with a long metal dart in now the russians this is the first tank that's fitted with 115 millimeter smooth ball gun they've got rid of the rifling this again is part of that project that was going on think back to what we said about khrushchev the russians are looking at how tanks can fire missiles anti-tank guided weapons um that is what the the smoothbore gun enables these tanks to do much more effectively than a rifled gun and so in its development process the t-62 ends up being issued with missiles that can be fired from the gun which extends their range and so they don't only fire those thin rounds or high explosives and again because this is a tank that has been in service a long time obviously the number of countries have done upgrades on them and the ammunition range has has been extended as well now about 20 000 of these tanks are actually made by the soviet union 1 500 are made in czechoslovakia and the soviet union stops making them about 75 the czechs make them from 73 to 78 and most of the czech tanks are the ones that go for export earlier this is a tank did not have much in the way of export success um and that's probably because it cost quarter of a million rubles about 250 000 rubles to buy one of these or to make one rather and that is about 50 more than the standard t-54 tank the other thing they do with this tank as well is they don't make that range of ancillary tanks you know like the engineer variants etc in the same way as they do with the early ones because basically the earlier t-5455 family those ones are adequate in terms of recovery bridge laying etc for the t-62 and being a more expensive tank there's no need to actually therefore develop these tanks into all those other variants there are a serious number with all the soviet tanks improvements and upgrades during its service life with the red army and one of the other things that happens as well with this particular tank it goes through its most major rebuild in 1982 where it becomes a t-62m model and variance after that and what they do there is they put some big pieces of extra armor around the front of the turret and there's various internal improvements a new missile system as well is added um and that's the the the biggest as it were single improvement that goes on again as in many armies not the whole fleet gets improved only parts of it and not all those sold on to other countries get those improvements over time as well there's quite often individual countries have their own upgrade programs which like as i say on the t-5455 talk you know what goes on in is it's very hard actually keeping up to date with every single model and every single upgrade that's happened but underneath it all um it's quite rare nowadays to actually find a t-62 that hasn't had some form of upgrade and certainly in the red army tanks will also go back to the factory to be rebuilt um to the latest standard that was another thing that went on that way in the back you've got the transverse mounted v12 same v12 diesel engine that was in the t-54 down the side you've got fuel tanks on the outside and there's an internal fuel tank you could range about 430 kilometers with just a standard fuel but if you add two extra drums that's another 200 kilometers so think of one of those big drums of fuel on the back about another 100 kilometers range there it takes its power to the rear drive sprocket it's got five sets of double uh ringed road wheels and again between the third and fourth road wheel there's a gap a longer extension and that's another identifying feature of the t62 and the first and the last road wheel have an id hydraulic bump stop as it were sort of a suppressor there as a shock absorber the tracks you can see have no rubber pads on in the west we tended to call those aggressive track it was just metal lots of cleat to dig into the ground again i've mentioned before if you drive that on a on a tarmac road on a days pretty warm here today that would quite happily eat into the tarmac that again was not a concern of the soviets at the time in the red army um they just wanted as uh as good a grip on the ground as possible 96 links on each of the sides of the track there and a set of tracks is about 1 386 kilograms you know so that's a lot of weight um no return rollers it's uh just sags over those road wheels as it's going along that way part of that track system one of the distinctive features of soviet tea tanks is the noise they make when they're going along you'll hear this very distinctive you can hear the engine though but this tac-tac-tac-tac-tact titan always going on that dates back to the t-34 where what's going on is because the pins on the track holding the links together they're actually there's nothing to secure them on the outer edge only on the inner edge and what happens they drift inwards and there is a wedge on the back just behind the rear drive sprocket that comes out from the hull and as that pin comes past it's pushed back into its place in the track and that gives that distinctive tac-tac-tac noise as it's going along another one of those recognition features for a t-62 or any of those soviet t-tanks really other issues about the tank just like the t-5455 they can make it sort of deep weighed up to about 1.4 meters but they also carry a snorkeling system and this was because again if they'd been attacking in the west they knew the nato countries would be blowing up many bridges it takes about eight hours to fully set up the snorkel system when they're training they have a wider snorkel it's a narrow one when they're going on operations eight hours to set up and that means it can literally drive across underneath a riverbed and it follows a compass and radio direction to actually get it to the other side of the river um they trained with that a lot because they tried to keep that as an effective wood actually sort of you know could be used uh method of uh river crossing and gap crossing that way on the back of the turret next to that exit hatch that actually the rounds the empty shell cases come out of there's a small dome and that's a radiation detector and the idea here again is as soon as it senses that first part of a nuclear burst it causes a trigger inside the detector to set off a number of little explosive squibs around the vehicle which will close down hatches and seal the vehicle and so they were hoping this was going to be able to survive nuclear contamination interestingly it doesn't have a filtration system until the much later models um to take out chemical weapons as well so you were still vulnerable there um to chemical attack in this vehicle this particular t-62 was captured in the gulf war and brought back from the iraqi forces for analysis in the uk t-62s are now in service with about 10 countries around the world so again as we mentioned before even though it seems to be a dated tank because it tends to be reliable because there's a good spare system because it works on the day you want it to this is a tank that again even though it's dated still sees action and as we mentioned in the previous tank chats if you've got any sort of tank and the enemy doesn't necessarily have a tank you have an enormous superiority so even though it may not look like it's up to this latest generation of tanks and their levels of sophistication still a powerful beast still lots of them out there 20 000 as i mentioned were made um so there will be vehicles that we will still see in service for many decades to come so this is a tank that you can see why some countries in the world are going to want to have because its range is good it is relatively simple to use reliable which is really important and those extra levels of sophistication are not necessarily needed in the conflicts they might be fighting in so it still has an effective role to play in these difficult times obviously your support is really valued so please do keep following us on social media do subscribe to our channel and and if you've got the opportunity perhaps order something from our shop join one of our schemes like patreon or our friends organization and we'll try and keep going with giving you some content to keep you informed and entertained

Channel: The Tank Museum

Views: 806,021

Keywords: the tank museum, tank museum, bovington tank museum, david fletcher, david willey, military tank, david fletcher tank chats, tank chat, tank chats, tank chats david fletcher, the tank museum tank chats, t-62, t-55, russian, russian tank, cold war, cold war tanks, soviet, soviet tanks, cold war tank, soviet tank, russian tanks

Id: ORTP3a7fErM

Length: 20min 19sec (1219 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020