Wow those tracks are narrow! Why not just go with wheels instead?
Chinese infantry fighting vehicles
- Thread starter Broccoli
- Start date
Its airborne, so its unlikely to be dropped where roads are available.
Because wheels (that fit the ZBD-03 hull size) will be even worse ... I mean 4x4? I can't imagine the ZBD-03 hull going 6x6 let alone 8x8.
Eyeballing the track width on the ZBD-03, it's about 15~20cm wide and maybe 4.6m long which works out to a roughly 0.5kg/cm2 average ground pressure. This is about half that of an M1 MBT or about 2/3 that of a Leo2 MBT and very comparable to that of most APCs. 0.5kg/cm2 is also about BMD-3 (which it is suppose to replace) territory, which has similarly narrow-ish tracks. It helps if you first look at the ZBD-03 with perspective - it is a fairly small and very light AFV - it doesn't need massively wide tracks to achieve low ground pressure.
Also, the wider the tracks, the heavier the tracks, the heavier the unsprung mass - which means more beefy suspension requirements, bigger engines, bigger gearboxes and heavier parts to service and replace. This is an airborne platform, they are trying to keep the weight down.
That said, I don't think the BMD-03 is meant for soft ground. The road wheels are kinda small and spaced quite far apart, which probably means Mean Maximal Ground pressure is not quite as good as Average pressure which means trafficability across very soft-crusty ground is going to be suspect.
All said and done, it was designed for a purpose and within the trade-offs required, this is what you can get within the budget and specs required.
Interesting vehicle from the journal of Military Engineering looks like a self-propelled gun in a truck and has some canisters of the side, for rocket artillery?
Those canisters hold arty rounds for the gun not rockets.
That's just a regular PCL-181/SH-15 155mm SPH.
The canisters are for ammo/charges.
Interesting that this is on the ZBD04A chassis.ZBD-08 armor recovery variant.
I am surprised that you said it is a ZBD08. I thought it is ZBD04A and not the ZBD08
Also the first image that has the recovery vehicle in the lead the Medic vehicle is still based on the ZSD89A chassis. This would lead me to wonder if this (the ZBD04A recovery variant) is a new variant of the medium armor recovery vehicle or a vehicle going through testing.
Do you happen to know or can you post the source or is this just images from Weibo and we can only conjecture from what we can see in the images?
by78
General
My mistake. It's ZBD-04.