New Type98/99 MBT thread

[A.Man]

China's Chubbier Soldiers Need Bigger Tanks

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After two decades of more meat and dairy, China’s soldiers are getting heftier.

A new study finds China’s soldiers are, on average, two centimeters taller and have waistlines five centimeters broader than their counterparts 20 years ago, according to a report in the PLA Daily. The official paper of China’s 2.3 million-strong People’s Liberation Army cited a survey of 20,000 soldiers that started in 2009 by a research institute under the General Armament Department. The survey looked at 28 different features of the human body, not just height and girth.

China’s bulkier servicemen will need roomier equipment and particularly bigger tanks; those now in use were designed to suit the punier soldiers of three decades ago. A “tank designed and manufactured according to the human body parameters 30 years ago will make normal people seated in the steering cabin feel restrained,” the website China Military Online noted, “and the short rifle stock will affect the precision of shooting.”

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“Larger military equipment is urgently needed,” said the official China Daily, citing researchers. “Armaments and military personnel’s physiques should be matched, because that is the only way to ensure proper use of the equipment,” said Ding Songtao, who led the research.

Bigger soldiers are a boon for the army, too. “The improvement of Chinese people’s physical condition makes it easier to recruit military personnel,” Wang Ya’nan, a military expert in Beijing, told the English-language paper. “Although soldiers do not have to do much manual labor requiring physical strength, unlike their predecessors, many jobs in the military and especially the army still require strong soldiers.”

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Dexter_roberts

Roberts is Bloomberg Businessweek's Asia News Editor and China bureau chief

 

[nabil_05]

It also depends on the propellant as well as the round design. The energy of the round is what determines its penetration, not just its speed, so the tungsten round's velocity is irrelevant here.

Lets keep the round aside for now

Come back to the gun, how much M.J does a zpt-98 gun produce at an additional 45% muzzle velocity? I assume it should be around 10-11 M.J.


A standard 2a46M1 procuces somewhere around 9-9.5 MJs, 10-11 M.J for M256 and Rheinmetall L44 for Leo-2A4-5 series.
L55s are known to give 12-12.5 M.Js

 

[chuck731]

The thing is, it's pretty much guaranteed that whatever fire control computer the T99 had a few years ago would have been replaced by now.

I suspect the fire control computer would not be required to actually do much fundamental ballistic calculation in real time. Instead I suspect it simply interpolate between large library of pre-computed solutions stored as a large look up table in the computer's memory. So I would think the available computing power would not have been the bottleneck since the 1980s. So I doubt whether the computer is new or a few years old would make any difference.

I suspect if there is any difference in the accuracy and first round hit probability between the type 99 and, say, M1 or Leopard 2, the difference would probably stem mainly from the sophistication of the control system governing the physical gun pointing in a moving and bouncing tank.

When a tank is moving and simulataneously tracking another tank, The actual x-y-z planes as seen by the tank is shifting and bouncing all the time in unpredicatable ways. The gun pointing system would have to perfectly compensate for this jerky and unpredicatable movement down to angular precision of arc-minutes while turning and dealing with the inertia of a turret that weight 20 tons. I think the difficulties of making a system of hydraulics and servos that can point the gun quickly and qwth adaquate precision is far greater than the difficulties of making a computer that can accurately determine which way the gun should point.

 

[Phead128]

If Chinese troops intervened upon DPRK request to suppress a "pro-American" rebellion in Pyongyang, what can the US do short of expelling the Chinese troops out of North Korea, thus starting a second Korean War?

China does not need to coordinate or notify foreign powers for approval for unilateral actions with exclusive Chinese sphere of influence. Unless, you want China to go back to 1895 when it had to share her tributary Korea with Imperial JapAn, exchanging troop movement info with each other - utter humiliation.

If PLA generals install a more obedient puppet regime that is less unpredictable and less violent, would that really be a loss for US, or would the entire world win from that scenario?

If faced with "pro-American" rebellion, DPRK would much rather be dominated by PLA generals rather than opportunistic American generals, thus it would nearly fall within the Sino-DPRK 1961 treaty using a ruse that the rebellion was CIA sponsored coup/rebellion.

 

[chuck731]

Appropro of nothing, the cantankerous chest thumps itself.

 

[Phead128]

Appropro of nothing, the cantankerous chest thumps itself.

Right, that's why less than one or two pages ago, there was a full-blown conversation on this exact same topic.

Effort, please spend some.

 

[SinoSoldier]

Lets keep the round aside for now

Come back to the gun, how much M.J does a zpt-98 gun produce at an additional 45% muzzle velocity? I assume it should be around 10-11 M.J.


A standard 2a46M1 procuces somewhere around 9-9.5 MJs, 10-11 M.J for M256 and Rheinmetall L44 for Leo-2A4-5 series.
L55s are known to give 12-12.5 M.Js

Not sure about the gun on the Type 99 (which has been replaced a few times now), but a PLA commentator did say that the Type 96's gun could produce enough energy as a 50-ton tank hitting an object after falling off an eight storey building, or approximately 11759858 Joules.

 

[kwaigonegin]

I suspect the fire control computer would not be required to actually do much fundamental ballistic calculation in real time. Instead I suspect it simply interpolate between large library of pre-computed solutions stored as a large look up table in the computer's memory. So I would think the available computing power would not have been the bottleneck since the 1980s. So I doubt whether the computer is new or a few years old would make any difference.

I suspect if there is any difference in the accuracy and first round hit probability between the type 99 and, say, M1 or Leopard 2, the difference would probably stem mainly from the sophistication of the control system governing the physical gun pointing in a moving and bouncing tank.

When a tank is moving and simulataneously tracking another tank, The actual x-y-z planes as seen by the tank is shifting and bouncing all the time in unpredicatable ways. The gun pointing system would have to perfectly compensate for this jerky and unpredicatable movement down to angular precision of arc-minutes while turning and dealing with the inertia of a turret that weight 20 tons. I think the difficulties of making a system of hydraulics and servos that can point the gun quickly and qwth adaquate precision is far greater than the difficulties of making a computer that can accurately determine which way the gun should point.

I'm no tank expert but I know a lil bit about guns

You are correct in your analysis... but I can sum everything up in one sentence.


Dual Axis Head Assembly (DAHA) with a stabilized Multi-Axis Head Mirror and gymbal mount.
This is one of the primary components of a modern tank's FCS.

On top of that you also need a pretty robust and powerful hydraulic system to keep the gun centered and straight when the tank is moving over uneven terrain otherwise no matter how sophisticated the gun stabilize system is or the gyros of the FCS, if the mechanical part of it doesn't perform up to task or breaks, the gun is useless or becomes very innaccurate.

The main gun is extremely heavy especially where the pivot point is. The larger the caliber obviously the more strength and power you need. Incredible amount of stress! It goes w/o saying the hydraulics need to work overtime just to hold it extremely steady and straight when a tank is going at 50 mph and suddenly comes to a halt, hits a large hole or go over a large rock while shooting at the same time.

That's the difference between a world class thank and a wannabe world class tank.

 

[SinoSoldier]

I suspect the fire control computer would not be required to actually do much fundamental ballistic calculation in real time. Instead I suspect it simply interpolate between large library of pre-computed solutions stored as a large look up table in the computer's memory. So I would think the available computing power would not have been the bottleneck since the 1980s. So I doubt whether the computer is new or a few years old would make any difference.

I suspect if there is any difference in the accuracy and first round hit probability between the type 99 and, say, M1 or Leopard 2, the difference would probably stem mainly from the sophistication of the control system governing the physical gun pointing in a moving and bouncing tank.

When a tank is moving and simulataneously tracking another tank, The actual x-y-z planes as seen by the tank is shifting and bouncing all the time in unpredicatable ways. The gun pointing system would have to perfectly compensate for this jerky and unpredicatable movement down to angular precision of arc-minutes while turning and dealing with the inertia of a turret that weight 20 tons. I think the difficulties of making a system of hydraulics and servos that can point the gun quickly and qwth adaquate precision is far greater than the difficulties of making a computer that can accurately determine which way the gun should point.

The computer mainly calculates where the gun should point, but doesn't it also control the gun pointing system? I would disagree with your analysis that it's the actual machinery that accounts for the accuracy, or lack thereof. I think the main issue would be whether the computer is able to process all the "bumps", interpret them into actual commands, and send them to the machinery in time. That's also been an issue with many CIWS and other systems that require sharp and unpredictable movements. With very precise civilian machinery I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem for the actual machine to make those gun direction changes. You can't have a an accurate weapon if the computer that controls it is a few seconds slow in responding to changes in its surroundings.

 

[chuck731]

The computer mainly calculates where the gun should point, but doesn't it also control the gun pointing system? I would disagree with your analysis that it's the actual machinery that accounts for the accuracy, or lack thereof. I think the main issue would be whether the computer is able to process all the "bumps", interpret them into actual commands, and send them to the machinery in time. That's also been an issue with many CIWS and other systems that require sharp and unpredictable movements. With very precise civilian machinery I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem for the actual machine to make those gun direction changes. You can't have a an accurate weapon if the computer that controls it is a few seconds slow in responding to changes in its surroundings.

Computer is digital, the movement of the gun is physical. In between the digital must first be translated into the analogue, the analogue must then be magnified to effect the physical. In real life the computer controls nothing. It issues digital suggestions, which may or may not be faithfully translated into analogue instructions depending on the state of the servo controls. If analogue instruction is generated, The machinery may or may not respond to the analogue instructions depending on the state of the machinery. It may also attempt to respond, but is overwhelmed by other inputs, such as a big ditch the tank just ran over. When the machine is brought to respond it would react to its own inertia, the inertia of the fluid and the valves in the hydraulics, etc, etc. By the time the machinery has carried out the computer's suggestions what it carried out would in fact bear at most only vague resemblance to the original suggestion.

Now the computer must detect what actually happened with the machinery, and issue a new set of suggestions to coax and humored the machinery into doing something closer to the original suggestion, and the cycle repeats until the computer decides what the machinery has done is good enough. By which time the enemy tank may or may not have already skewered your own tank with its computer controlled gun firing its own armor piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot round.

How you design the machinery, how embedded controllers in each part of your machinery works, has an overwhelming influence on how fast your fire control computer can coax, if it can coax at all, the machinery into doing something like what the computer wants done. This is the real engineering. Not writing high level codes for the fire control computer.