if you want to destroy a heavier western tank why dont you just increase the calibre of the rounds and the ammount of warhead in them??? instead of beefing up the system just beef up the weapons....heck you can stick the cannon on a 8x8 truck and still kill the tank. most of china soils are soft and no matter how wide your tracks are its still gonna exert more pressure then the soil can take. dunno what game was called but they had a mini tournament in a computer gaming arcade lounge....(PS: i got slaughtered in the game)
There is a very good reason. The US Army has studied this in depth. Increasing the caliber of the gun to 140mm from 120mm has two major drawbacks. Number one, it will reduce the number of rounds the tank can carry. The M-1A2 carries a lot fewer rounds for it's 120mm gun than the original M-1 carried for it's 105mm main gun. The Army doesn't feel it can afford to reduce the number of ready service rounds any more than this for a tank to be tactically relavant.
The second problem concerns loading. The US Army will not use an autoloader. A 140mm round will require one, it is too heavy for a human loader to lift out of a bustle and place in the gun. The experience the US Army has with autoloaders is based on direct experience with Russian equipment it has either captured or bought from for Warsaw Pact nations. We have at least one example of everything the Russians use, and the aggressor force at Fort Irwin trained other Army units with T-72's for many years. Here is what our Army found. Number one, the Russian auto loader takes six to seven seconds to load a round. During this time the gun must be level and the turret cannot rotate. This means that in combat there is a six to seven second period of time where the tank commander cannot aim at the next target, the tank is essentially defenseless during this time. By comparison the standard for the M-1 is to load a round every four seconds and well drilled crews can load and fire every two seconds. The main gun of the M-1 is being aimed at it's next target while the gun is loaded, so rapid rates of fire are easily accomplished while the tank is on the move.
In actual practice the Russian autoloader has a failure rate exceeding 20%. It limits the maximum and minimum elevation the gun may obtain, a fact exploited by the Chechens in Grozny when the mauled Russian T-80's. Former Red army vets simply taught the rebels to hide in basements or on the top floors of buildings. The Russian gun could not be elevated or depressed sufficiently to engage these rebels and the Russians were badly defeated.
Last, their autoloader put rounds inside the hull, twenty two of them. One hit to the hull and the propellant charges detonate, blowing the turret skyward and also blowing the engine out the back. By comparison, M-!'s in Iraq have taken advanced anti-tank rounds through their thin side armor behind the wheels with little effect. Hits to the ammo bustle detonate the ammo in the bustle, blowing the blow off hatch out but the crew is protected by a titanium blast door. The crews walk away. No M-1 crew has been lost to another tank. The badly blown up tanks you will see from time to time are all ones that had engines or tracks disabled and were taken out with Maverick missiles to prevent them from being compromised.
