New Chinese Military Developments

Re: new Chinese supertank,question....

man overbored said:

The Russian stuff cannot find western tanks at the ranges most Western tanks can score one shot kills on the Russian, nor can the Russian guns guarantee a one shot kill of a western tank. Are Chinese sensors known to be better? Also, does the Chinese tank use an auto loader and bustle carried ammo? Just curious.

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Where on earth do you get this stuff? Do you seriously think a 1991 Iraqi T-72 is equal to a late-Soviet T-72 or a T-80 / T-90?

The Iraqis had stripped down versions of the tanks and ammo, useful for intimidating Iraq's neighbors only. There was never any comparison between that and a Soviet armored division.

Your assumption that the US has a leading ground force service is entirely wrong. On the ground there are at least one or maybe two countries it cannot compete with.

Re: new Chinese supertank,question....

Roger604 said:

Where on earth do you get this stuff? Do you seriously think a 1991 Iraqi T-72 is equal to a late-Soviet T-72 or a T-80 / T-90?

The Iraqis had stripped down versions of the tanks and ammo, useful for intimidating Iraq's neighbors only. There was never any comparison between that and a Soviet armored division.

Your assumption that the US has a leading ground force service is entirely wrong. On the ground there are at least one or maybe two countries it cannot compete with.

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Where do you get the notion that the Soviet versions of those tanks were significantly better? They weren't. They all had the same steel hull that even an old fashioned HESH round could deal with. Their first generation reactive armor could defeat hand held weapons and for a brief while Hellfire ( a warhead change fixed that easily ) but it could never defeat a DU round. Kactus came later and that would defeat what we shot in the Persion Gulf in 1991, but there have been three running upgrades of that round to the point where we now have enough energy to defeat Kactus. Under Kactus is an old fashioned steel hull, not modern laminated armor.
What you saw in Iraq is indicative of the quality of contemporary Soviet equipment at that time. The Soviets really didn't have a tank to compare to the best Western designs. For combat the M-1's engine is ungoverned and it will hit 70mph with the governor removed. Yes that is hard on the turbine but it's what happens when live ammo is shot in anger. And it could shoot and hit at those kinds of speeds, something the Russian tanks couldn't do.
Point in fact, Russian rangefinders at that time could not find an enemy tank out to 1700 meters. We have modern Soviet tanks at Fort Irwin. The Red Force uses them, they wore their T-72's out. They had BMP and BDRM's too. I have seen some of it myself, they used to park them out by the public road leading to the main gate. Row upon row of late model Soviet/Russian equipment. An M-1A2 could routinely make first shot kills of T-72's beyond 1700 meters, the T-72 could not even detect the US tank at those ranges. Soviet and Russian armored forces even back then still used big infrared lights on their tanks like an old M-60A3 did. Those just made their tanks even better targets for the M-1's thermal imager.
I will give you an unrelated example of Soviet kludge. There are two Foxtrot class submarines on display in California, one in Long Beach alongside the Queen Mary and the other at the San Diego Maritime Museum. I have visited the San Diego boat. As a kid I was on a project to restore the old WWII vintage USS Roncador SS-301. It was a Balao class sub that had been used as a stationary training vessel for the reserves until we got our hands on it. It was tied up at Redondo Beach to be on public display, and I have painted or scrubbed just about every surface of that old sub. The Russian boat was a dissappointment. Aside from the major watertight bulkheads, the interior is wooden ! The passageways and various internal divisions were made of wood. Same for various doors, shelves, cabinets, tables. Amazing, what a huge fire hazard. US subs, and combat ships, have zero wood inside. The old Roncador was entirely steel inside, not one piece of wood. The Russian boat didn't have even one shower so the crew could not wash on patrol unless they used sea water. The boat was no where near as well built as American subs, and oh, no air conditioning either. Don't laugh, when Russian subs went south to Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis the interior temps of their boats exceeded 140 degrees F and they had crew passing out on watch from the heat. Their main engines all overheated and failed. Only one of those boats returned to Russia on both engines. Gulf Stream sea surface temps are low to mid 80's F. USN boats had A/C way back in the 1930's to make long tropical patols possible. Even on a surface ship with air conditioning, the combination of hot outside air and hot sea surfaces can make for miserable conditions and lead to equipment failures, I know that first hand from tropical deployments. When a Slava class cruiser visited San Diego our guys visited it and photographed it inside and out. This was towards the very end of the Cold War and Perestroika. A Slava visited Norfolk too. Noteworthy was the complete lack of damage control and fire fighting equipment inside. On US and Japanese combat ships especially you are tripping over firefighting applicators and heavy shoring equipment eveywhere you go. There are battle lanterns in every space, individual breathing apparatus, thermal imaging devices for fire fighting, de-watering and fire fighting pumps, it can be cluttered. That big Russian cruiser has little to no equipment available if there was a fire or flooding. They did have a pool with a fake rock water fall however!

Take the virtual tour of USS Bowfin on display in Pearl Harbor to see an example of a typical USN WWII sub



Now have a look at the interior of a Foxtrot. Kludge!



Even a WWII vintage US sub was a better sea boat than this Russian thing.

Re: new Chinese supertank,question....

The T-64 was never exported because its turret armour contained ceramics and its hull contained boron-fibre sheeting (early production examples had fibreglass in the hull); the turrets of T-64/72/74/80/90 flatten vertically somewhat around the base in order to accomodate the fitting of ceramic and special steel blocks. They do not have the "pure" inverted frying-pan turret shape that commenced with the IS-3. The pseudo-IS V-glacis on these tanks concealed a boron-fibre layer.

In the 1970's or early 1980's, BRIXMIS secretly took armour samples from inside the turret of a Soviet T-64 in a tank storage shed in East Germany. The lab results were revealing. In a similar operation a few years later, the Brits also took some Russian tanks manuals from inside a Soviet T-72; interestingly, one of the Brits left his torch behind inside the turret! (See Tony Geraghty's BRIXMIS: The Untold Exploits of Britain's Most Daring Cold War Spy Mission).

The West had access to much about the real capabilities of Soviet tanks; the 125 mm was an over-powered, glorified shotgun, couldn't hit with consistency much beyond 1,800 m because of a light projectile (often of mediocre quality) fired at velocities that degraded accuracy and wore the the barrel out after only about a hundred or so rounds. Much of the publicly-published data on 125 mm performance was (and is) misleading, or just rubbish. But, Soviet tanks with ceramic armour could beat the original TOW, and anything lesser. Nevertheless, the Soviet tanks were still cannon fodder for both the 105 and the 120 mm sabots.

As a result, T-64, and the minority of T-72s and T-74s that were issued to certain elite Soviet tank units, such as in GSFG, and of course T-80, were more or less immune to early TOW and other chemical energy antitank warheads. Most T-72s in Soviet service were the same as those that they exported, and contained no special armour. The 1980's Soviet copies of Blazer ERA afforded reasonable protection against many (but not all) NATO CE antitank warheads, and were relatively cheap and easy to manufacture on a large scale, unlike composite armour; for most T-72s in Soviet service, the ERA afforded the only protection aside from RHA (and the alloy layer that provided radiological protection against nukes, especially neutron bombs). But the T-64, T-72s in certain elite units, T-74s and T-80s were fitted with ceramic armour in their turrets and boron-fibre under their glacis - good enough against original TOW, but of little use against certain later heavier ATGMs and of course KE weapons. Type 90 is undoubtedly a tough beast; but it is unlikely to match up to Challenger 2 or even M1A2 or Leo 2 (which the PLA is quite taken with).

The unstated but implied point here is that the PLA almost certainly has the capability to fit ceramic composite armours to its more recent tank models, and may well in fact do so. However, given that the PLA has opted for "cheaper" 125mm smoothbores in preference to the superior 120 mm rifles that it also produces for experimental models, as well as the clear resort to advanced ERA capable of substantially mitigating (perhaps even stopping some) KE weapons as well as CE weapons, the PLA may have judged that ease of production, training, and cost of a 125mm, auto-loaded gun in an ERA-fitted vehicle was preferable to going for a manually-loaded, but long-range 120mm in a composite-armour vehicle.

We'll see what succeeds Type 99; priorities may have changed by then, and the small production number of Type 99 suggests that if and when it and Type 98 and Type 96 are replaced (never mind the remaining Type 59 and 69), the PLA may have something rather more radical in mind.

Re: new Chinese supertank,question....

Well, that's your point of view. According to Russian tank experts, the T-80 (the contemporary to the M1*) is more than a match for the Abrams. The Russians have a solid history of making great tanks. It wasn't until the M1 that the West came close to matching them. Recent western experiments with non-monkey-model upgraded T-80s from Ukraine were an eye-opening experience . The T-80s were much better protected than previously thought. The T-90 has 75% the mass of a M1, while having 50% of frontal surface area and internal volume. Where does all that mass go? Armor. That's the advantage to using an autoloader. You save space and thus your tank can be better protected for the same mass. Your "facts" about the ability of Russian and former Soviet armor are outdated and incorrect.

Re: new Chinese supertank,question....

Aren't there more advantages to a smoothbore than just cost?

Re: new Chinese supertank,question....

RedMercury said:

Well, that's your point of view. According to Russian tank experts, the T-80 (the contemporary to the M1*) is more than a match for the Abrams. The Russians have a solid history of making great tanks. It wasn't until the M1 that the West came close to matching them. Recent western experiments with non-monkey-model upgraded T-80s from Ukraine were an eye-opening experience . The T-80s were much better protected than previously thought. The T-90 has 75% the mass of a M1, while having 50% of frontal surface area and internal volume. Where does all that mass go? Armor. That's the advantage to using an autoloader. You save space and thus your tank can be better protected for the same mass. Your "facts" about the ability of Russian and former Soviet armor are outdated and incorrect.

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I'm not sure whose "facts" this post was meant to address, but T-80 is not a match for M-1A2, though those fitted with advanced ERA may approach or equal its protection. In any case, the upgraded tanks of the 1990's and today were not present in the 1980's. Even T-80 did not have KAKTUS at the time. It is not accurate to consider that the protection levels of such upgraded tanks are similar to what earlier versions of the same tanks had back in the 1970s or even 1980s.

The Russians were great at designing and building tanks up into the 1960s and 1970s, but appear to have more or less rested on their laurels, so to speak, ever since; T-64 was a real revolution in tank design, but nothing since has made quite the same impact.

Soviet guns and ammo are of rather lesser performance, and even the Ukrainian 125 mm is claimed by its manufacturer to be accurate to only 2,500 m, versus the published figure of 3,000 m for the German 120 mm. The Chinese themselves claim a 25% improvement (and an increase in barrel life to 700 rounds) for their 125 mm over the Russian (1,800 m), which puts it in roughly in the same league as the Ukrainian gun. All these 125mm smoothbores use gun-launched missiles to reach out to 4,000-5,000 m.

The US Army, by comparison, has been developing similar weapons for the 120 mm, such as the , with a range of up to 12-13 km. The Ukrainian manufacturer provides some performance table for its versions of the and smoothbores. They also provide performance specifications for the on the original T-72's and on the upgraded Ukrainian T-72 AG (brought out in 1997). Even the upgraded 125 mm with the ballistic computer has an effective range of only 2,500 m, compared to the original's 1,800 m.

All this said, once again, I'm not sure what "facts", provided by whom?, were considered to be outdated or incorrect, in the previous post. Or for that matter, how this really has much to do with speculating on future PLA tank design. As the PLA has its own 120 mm rifle, for example, and almost certainly a certain degree of composite-armour production capability, if it were to decide that (if) it were preferable to advanced ERA (which the PLA appears to have advanced to a very high level, roughly comparable to composite armour protection levels), it seems that China could produce a very advanced follow-on to Type 99 if it saw a reason to do so.

It would not suprise me in fact, given the PLA's admiration of the Leo 2, to see something with many of the same characteristics to take form in the not so distant future, if such an event were to occurr. Perforated armour has certainly emerged as an alternative to composite armour, and China undoubtedly has the ability to produce both though the latter perhaps not quite up to Dorchester standards (even the US doesn't have it, only the Brits).
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Sorry Sargon, I didn't see your post until I'd finished mine. The original reason to go to the smoothbore (invented by the Russians) was to get the highest possible velocity out of sabot rounds. But ever since the Brits invented driving bands for sabot rounds fired from rifles, the penetration performance gap between smoothbores and rifles has practically disappeared; plus rifles have a longer accurate range and can fire rounds like HESH, which is great for destroying field fortifications.

Re: new Chinese supertank,question....

man overbored said:

Where do you get the notion that the Soviet versions of those tanks were significantly better? They weren't.

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You neglected to mention the fact that the Iraqis didn't even have actual T-72 tank ammunition. They only had training rounds!

And where do you get your information about the specs of T-72 or other Soviet tanks? These are just NATO estimates, understated to give its troops a false sense of confidence. They are not based on an actual T-72 from the Soviet Army itself.

The late Soviet Union kept all the first-tier equipment to itself, and only gave the second-tier equipment to Warsaw Pact countries. Other allies (like Iraq) got the third-tier equipment.

Norfolk said:

We'll see what succeeds Type 99; priorities may have changed by then, and the small production number of Type 99 suggests that if and when it and Type 98 and Type 96 are replaced (never mind the remaining Type 59 and 69), the PLA may have something rather more radical in mind.

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Apparently, the Type 99 has been inducted in limited numbers since 2002-ish. But only in 2007 has a final "production version" been mass produced. I believe there are more than just a small number of Type 99's. They are being inducted into RRF units at a quick pace.

Clearly, the Type 99 is a tank created with mass mobilization in mind.

Re: new Chinese supertank,question....

the real revolution was electronic.
here ,soviet main achilles heel.the west(specially the US) superiority in electronic allowed them overtake the soviet.
according to west german army after examine ex-east german T-72 tank conclude the tank FCS specially her computerized FCS were mediocre.

Re: new Chinese supertank,question....

These were posted on CDF. Something about a PLA 4th Generation MBT. Can anyone translate?

Re: new Chinese supertank,question....

Well as you know, there is even a T-59 upgraded with a 120mm. One of the reasons why I think the T-98/99 went to a 125mm is that the PLA has already seriously invested in the 125mm for the T-85/88/96. With a large logistical and trained base on the 125mm, whatever ballistic advantages the 120mm had, would not compensate for the logistical diadvantages. For that reason, I expect the PLA to continue with the 125mm for a while, although they're probably researching for a new round that is superior to both the 125mm and 120mm.

I can understand that having a carousel autoloader reduces the tank's height, creating smaller tanks for the same weight, which means more armor per surface area. Size is a critical consideration for China, and there are specific requirements on the tank sizes. It must be able to be loaded into a rail car, move inside narrow tunnels, pass through narrow roads, go over narrow bridges.

My personal preference is manual loading because it is inherently fool proof and my philosophy is to support simplicity rather than complexity. War must always be viewed in the eye of Murphy's Law, and the less chances you give failure to happen, the better.