It is quite an old design. It was the other competitor of Type 15 tank but it lost......
PLA Next Generation Main Battle Tank
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But if next generation tanks are going for light weight unmanned turrets why is this tank's turret so massive?
Well in hindisght its always easy to pick up on the mistakes. But back in the 90s if you would even suggest that China would one day rival or even surpass the US at anything they would just laugh in your face and send you to a mental hospital. That was the mentality back then, so US engaged in all sorts of colonial warfare everywhere with no thought given about overstretching, because again, at most they would be fighting people barely armed with rifles. They thought they could do whatever the f they wanted and that was that.
This is the same mentality that got the US to exhaust its resources on useless programs. New toys just for the sake of new toys. And look at their situation now. They failed at every new AFV development program for the last 30 years or so, with the last one (M10) proving to be an absolute mess from the doctrinal and requirement point of view. So they end up with a platform thats inconvenient for any kind of practical use they could give it. The Chinese have been wise enough to just sit back, watch them fail and learn.
Because again, the 99A at most would be used against a country that is today the most important ally China has (it wasn´t all that clear at all 15 years ago, when the tank was in development), who by the way has and will retain the bulk of its military capabilities deployed literally on a different continent altogether.
On the other hand, the Chinese can look at the Russians literally squeezing all the value as they can from their limited budget and succesfully modernizing the T-72 platform in a way that is relatively very cheap and also reaching current top performing tank capabilities. There is no reason the Chinese can´t exploit the 99A platform growth/modernization potential to a similar extent.
We have seen multiple box and case on turret blowing up diminishing HEAT round effect in Ukraine that having a huge turret full of empty space for tool, cammo net, supplies, etc is not a bad thing by itself.
It does make a bigger silhouette if it out of proportion.
any idea if this is still a crew capsule remote turret design? that hatch is really close to the front. It doesn't look like there's much armor there
What if it's actually giant cope cage/spaced armor made to look like a solid turret?
Personally I believe ERA is only useful if your fighting other tanks, ERA on Russian tanks seem to be not very useful, because once it "intercepts" a single drone carrying a RPG, usally they hit the same spot with another drone. But with NERA it isn't a single use, and it's even worse on the type-99a with the large ERA blocks. A true 4th generation would be able to swap out ERA with NERA on the go, depending on the threat. And all autoloaders should be bustle, it allows larger single AP rounds and blowout panels. And one thing the Abrams X has over other 4th generation prototypes is it 30 mm grenade launcher system, as it can launch proximity fuse grenades, thus being able to better handle drones.
Best you can get is electrochemical
IMO, I think future MBTs/light tanks would require atleast a 30mm RWS with a large degree of motion independent of the turret to fire 30mm proximity fuse shells against drones as a hard kill system until other close in defenses like direct energy weapons become mature enough to be mounted on tanks. It would also provide adequate anti-personnel coverage with 30mm cannon. I agree with the part about ERAs being single use and capable of being defeated by advanced penetrators which I assume is one of the reason no visible ERA is used on the new tank.
IMO the current bustle loaders have issues with ready rack capacity, I'm pretty sure Leclercs can only mount 24 rounds inside the autoloader with extra rounds placed inside the crew compartment. I'm also pretty sure most ETC guns fire use shells with similar propellant as normal shells hence are still capable of cooking off when hit even when using advanced insensitive propellants. It's just more difficult to set off but doesn't reduce the risk completely. I think the biggest thing with 4th gen tanks would be fully seperating the crew and ammo with enclosed capsules and unmanned turrets so even if ammo is setoff crew will still have a high likely chance to survive.