VT4's barrel life is 500 rounds for standard temperatures according to the manual.
Chinese Military Exports (Land Systems)
- Thread starter navyreco
- Start date
That's not so good. The 120mm L44 gun has roughly 3 times higher barrel life.
It does match.
Seeing how they are using their light tanks currently its probably likely the barrel exploded after launching so many HE rounds for days on end with probably not much care from the crew due to the current speed of operations. Also a real possibility that it couldve been loaded wrong, with autoloaders theres always a chance of it malfunctioning and perhaps loading it wrong. It could also be the barrel may just not be fit for this climate either and they warp alot quicker, highly hot and humid environments have nasty effects on barrel warping. Still Norinco needs to get their barrel game better, the American light tanks that have been there for 20 years are doing fine, after all, so there's no "Thai didn't do it right" excuse.
About this, I found a bit more info, turns out that particular VT4 has been shooting basically non stop since day 1 of the conflict, over 200 rounds in this conflict alone, so it never had the chance to get its gun replaced, so there's a gun explosion.
That's still under the 500 rounds advertised (Which is already obscenely short for a modern gun) and it's a tank, what'd you expect? This is just how tanks are used in active battlefields, not perfectly maintained, if NORINCO did not account for this then it's absolutely on them.
500 rounds per day, per month, or per year?
Per barrel, as a reference Rh120 L/44 is usually cited at 1500 rounds and L/55 at 1200 rounds despite having higher chamber pressure than the Chinese gun.