The recent new tank concepts are pointless designs

Does any European country have serious plans to induct any of these next generation tanks? Inducting them in three digit numbers is going to cost a fortune for countries that have had nearly 2 decades of zero economic growth.

It's the same problem Russia/USSR had. Why spend 10x more to induct a new platform when you can pull out older tanks out of storage and refurbish them for 80% of the capability.

Finally, one more thing - these new tank designs are means of revitalizing industrial base that has eroded. The reason why they have a specific set of elements that might be new or old - but with the intention of being replaced by all new products - is so that within the bounds of a government contract the funding will be directed to all the necessary components.

They simply want to fund the re-establishment of a fully functional tank production line because there are none left.

In the west (that excludes Japan and Korea) only the US has an ongoing large-scale production of MBTs and it achieves it at the cost of constantly modernizing the tanks regardless of whether it makes sense or not. All the SEPs are there to keep pumping money into Lima and GDLS.

France, Britain and other countries lost the ability to make tanks without external cooperation. They can't make tanks on their own because they lost both the production line and the technology.

Germany has wound down its industry as Leopard 2 firesale didn't work as intended. It was meant to sustain the industry through upgrades but instead the countries decided to forgo upgrades and just kept the tanks as they were - which was was logical considering the security situation at the time. Germany still has an industrial base, particularly with KMW involved which has the chassis/suspension technology from Puma, but the efficiency of production is lost and they struggle to deliver tanks for their own army.

This was the main reason why support for Leopard 2 was lost in Poland. Unlike in other areas the military was strongly in favor of Leopards but the Germans simply couldn't deliver and on budget to counter the lobbying of Americans and Koreans. Leopards perhaps could be saved if Poland chose KMW as partner for Leopard 2PL upgrade but Rheinmetall undercut them by promising something they couldn't deliver in 2014. The consequences were such that Germans were defeated in detail by competition and Poland is buying M1A2 and K2 and probably will pass Leopard 2s to other countries in the region (Baltics, Czechs etc). Which is not ideal as we already had developed an entire logistical system but those are the choices available if you want a lot of tanks.

Poland wants some ridiculous number of tanks. We've ordered 250 M1A2s but current plans are that those will go to three battalions (58 tanks each) in the newly formed 18th Mechanized Division in the east of the country (bordering Belarus and Ukraine) and the rest will go to training and reserve. All the other tanks - which includes 232 (of 247 total) Leopard 2s, 232 PT-91 and 174 T-72M1R (which may or may not have been already transferred to Ukraine) will be replaced by K2. That's more than Poland needs but probably some of the orders will be reduced in the future or some tanks will be put in reserve. The number that is being talked about is 600-800 K2 apart from the 250 M1s.

But at the same time our mechanized infantry rides around in BMP-1s because it's not like we have our own IFV program that can't get an official order from the government... Instead we'll buy tanks that are most likely dead ends considering the role of UAV/UGVs in the future and K2 lack of fourth crewmember.

Poland is the largest MBT market in Europe/EU and these are the conditions in which both the KF51 and the Eurotank are being developed. The funding for both is still restricted because both governments (France and Germany) focus on other areas and are not willing to move beyond 2% GDP. The primary target of funding in Germany for example is aerospace - both support and development of industry and purchase of new equipment. Purchases of F-35 or CH-47 are relatively unimportant in the overall picture. Second comes the navy. Ground systems are considered of least importance.

There are potential tank markets in Italy (Arietes will have to be retired in the near future despite upgrades) and some of the other smaller countries and Koreans are hoping to get into them with the help of Norway and Poland which both plan to procure K2. Korea has ongoing tank production and they're finally independent from German technology (transmission). They want to grab the markets as they did with K9 and they are so eager that there are voices inside Korea that are worried that production of K2 for ROK will be delayed (as if that was a problem).

This is a table from an Italian white paper some 2-3 years ago exploring the potential for international cooperation on MBT between Italian and other industries.



When you have a major threat to existing markets you have to make a play for them. That is another reason why KF51 was recently revealed although they still hope to get a back door to Eurotank, but being a major company are as amenable as Dassault in FCAS. It's all negotiations.

All in all the design of future MBTs is clearly converging on common characteristics which are as logical and obvious as those in 5/6-generation fighter jets or future stealth bombers. There's a job that a tank is doing and there's one way of doing it right. The rest is evolutionary convergence.

TerraN_EmpirE said:

The PL01 View attachment 90826
It was a Polish concept but it wasn’t an MBT it was a light tank a scout tank packing a 120mm main gun with 45 rounds total 16 in the automatic loader in an unmanned turret. Crew of 3 in a capsule.
Hard kill APS and low profile smoke grenade launchers, RMS with a 7.62x51mm mg. Thermal and reduced radar cross section. Look familiar?
The South Korean take is newer dating as far as 2020. The technology is emerging it might not be as crazy as it seems.

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PL-01 refers to "pathologically low - zero one" and refers to the IQ level of people who circulate the pictures over the internet and believe it's a stealth tank.

Snarky jokes aside:

PL-01 Concept was a "design concept" that was made using painted cardboard and a CV90 chassis borrowed from Bumar-Łabędy which was the company that was trying to get the contract for license production of CV90.

Back then Poland was reducing its ground forces significantly and the goal was to maintain eight armored battalions (8x58 = 464 tanks) which would consist of Leopard 2A4/A5 and PT-91 Twardy. The other armored battalions were to be kept as reserve or reformed as mechanized. That didn't sit well with the military which came straight from Warsaw Pact culture and just a decade earlier retired ~1500 tanks (T-55A, T-55AM and oldest T-72). So the idea for a "fire support vehicle" came up and that would be a tracked IFV chassis with a large caliber tank gun.

The program was called "Rydwan" (chariot) and the vehicle was UMPG - Uniwersalna Modułowa Platforma Gąsienicowa (universal modular platform tracked). It was Polish "Armata" just on a medium weight platform - between 25 and 45t. Because the government did not approve of the program and it was a private venture by Bumar looking to gain funds they couldn't develop a whole family of demonstrators. The situation was made worse by the financial situation of the company which was without orders. So they decided to go for one traditional IFV demonstrator using their own chassis design from a previous program (heavy IFV "Anders")



and one "flashy" demonstrator using CV90 chassis that would bring attention in the media. And that's how the single cardboard mockup of "PL-01 Concept" was made.

I found one more thing:

Regarding new guns - here's a good example of why gaining 50% of kinetic energy might be highly desirable. MBTs are reaching the upper limit of mass, not only in absolute terms but also in terms of what logistical infrastructure can support their movement. This is an US Army table describing whether an M1 with different kit can cross US Army bridging and transport solutions:



Considering how important logistics is to warfare at some point the shield won't be able to follow the sword (better gun) and other methods will have to be developed instead of just adding more armor. And that will give an advantage - perhaps temporary, perhaps permanent - to the vehicle with a "pointless" new gun.

All right. I've already written enough nonsense. Time to get back to work. It's a holiday in Poland but I have plenty of things to do. Take care.

What's the point of having reduced radar cross section on tanks? I don't believe any anti-tank weapon system relies on radar tracking. Unless it's a by-product of reduced thermal and shell deflection needs?

T-U-P said:

What's the point of having reduced radar cross section on tanks? I don't believe any anti-tank weapon system relies on radar tracking. Unless it's a by-product of reduced thermal and shell deflection needs?

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ISR like the old E8 and attack aircraft like the long bow Apache use ground scan radar, increasingly tanks do as well. Not so much for targeting but for long range identification allowing forces to be vectored to counter. This said the Hellfire Longbow and Hellfire II, JAGM, Brimstone, Mokopa, MpatMG, HJ10 missiles at least include variants designed with millimeter wave radar guidance.

T-U-P said:

What's the point of having reduced radar cross section on tanks? I don't believe any anti-tank weapon system relies on radar tracking. Unless it's a by-product of reduced thermal and shell deflection needs?

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Nowadays stealth is not much more than a finish and a slightly modified exterior. Aerodynamics is much less of a factor for tanks than planes, and a lot of stealth elements like oblique angles work well against shells. If you are going to the effort to redesign a tank it makes sense to at least consider it.

I don't think it will last 5 minutes in the field once it gets some mud on it, but that's another point.

BoraTas said:

1- The 130 mm gun serves no purpose

There is no tank in the world that couldn't be penetrated by a good 120 mm gun. And tanks can not match the range of ATGMs without getting turrets that allow high elevation angles. For infantry support and anti-structure work (what tanks do nowadays most of the time) the difference is very small. So the 130 mm gun brings little benefit for anti-infantry and anti-structure tasks, doesn't solve the ATGM range problem, and solves a non-existent problem in regards to armor penetration.

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Erm.
While i agree with the notion itself - it is constructed on the wrong premise.
There absolutely are tanks which are hard to penetrate with 120mm gun. Heck, even protecting against full power 140/152mm guns is perfectly achievable when we're talking about front armor only. So at least this reason to add caliber absolutely exists.
The problem is not this, the problem is the separation of form.

Tank is meant to do a few things, that can realistically be summed up to two things:
1. maneuver and exploitation.
2. infantry support
3. countering point 1.

Two of these functions primarily rely on HE round, and only in 3 (and, consequently in (1) when it meets (3)), APFSDS is paramount.
The problem is a simple one: larger calibers currently don't really get you anything useful other than more kinetic power(anything more powerful than 100/105 in direct fire HE is realistically redundant for a numerous tank), but they take ammo from you.
In both 1 and 2, ammo is extremely valuable. In 2 - it's primary ready racks (i.e. ammo directly accessible in combat, preferably - safe one). In 1 - every shell count, because the first thing you do when you get behind enemy lines is you get almost encircled yourself. At best your ammo supply will be iffy, at worst (and quite typically, actually) - your formation will be cut off, maybe even caught and encircled.

Strictly speaking, even 120/125 shells are really hard to get to the necessary number - they're big boys (and that before even mentioning that for firing HE it's better to have a rifled gun in the first place!). 130s are really huge - KF51 gets only 20 of them in the whole tank(and just 10 shots when it carries 4 loitering scouts)!
EMBT and Next Gen Abrams at least address this problem(30mm on top), but Panther is just doing a Pikachu face.

The K2 tank with South Korean transmission has not been put into production and in service yet.

I would not discount the French tank building industry. The Leclerc is basically the most modern tank project that Europe has. It was delivered in the 1990s and in fact did not enter service in time for the First Gulf War. The French also had some limited success with foreign sales and there were upgrade programs made for it. Most of the people who worked on Leclerc are probably still alive and could help mentor the new tank development. This is likely not the case for the Leopard 2. Macron is an idiot since the French could have easily developed a successor on their own. It could have been as simple as slapping the 140mm turret on the Leclerc. The K2 is not that much better as a tank design than the Leclerc either despite being over a decade younger design.

I know some people don't like the engine in the Leclerc. It was supposedly finicky when it came out. But the original design problems supposedly were solved.

BoraTas said:

Since yesterday I have been thinking about new tank concepts we saw in Eurosatory 2022. These tanks are apparently ultra high-tech designs. Some of them and their common features

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Now, to the features themselves.
First of all, I'd remove Hyundai - it really smells the same way PL-01 does - battlefield 2142-looking attention grabber. Instead, i'd add two more obvious candidates - T-14(well, the original thing everything began from) and Next Gen Abrams.

T-14 stands somewhat apart (much like T-64 50 years before it) as an earlier product, and as a product from a completely independent design house. Still, it does belong to this generation, even if it is an outlier. But so are T-64/72/80 among their generation, and so are other tanks like ZTZ-96/99/99A which follow similar design principles.

And Next Gen Abrams, while we only saw a few details as of now, spots all the same quirks as the other western tanks:
-getting back to a reasonable weight, through radical solutions if needs be;
-replacing dedicated loader with autoloader;
-getting an operator into the hull.
Furthermore, like the EMBT, it also gets a secondary 30mm gun to compensate for probably lower available ammo in combat.

With guns it is complex right now, so it's too early for conclusions:
-EMBT retains a modern gun, probably satisfied with it for now(the french are developing a 140mm gun thou!);
-Abrams is satisfied with the current performance but goes for a massively lighter XM360;
-T-14 gets a far more powerful 125mm gun(and actually increases available ammo compared to T-72 series);
-KF51 goes for powerful 130mm and reduces ammo load to 14-20 rounds(I'll count Hero 120 as rounds to make it sound less bitter).

Protection: probably aims for something similar to modern MBTs, but actually more consistent(lesser weak zones, more opportunities for side protection), lighter, and with integral active protection suite.

Sensors: tanks built essentially from scratch finally ensure that all those new sensors, more sensors, guns, radars, antennas, datalnks and more finally fit onto tanks properly. On previous-gen tanks, they were basically impossible to get right (only Merkava 4 sorta did, but it's a pretty new tank in its own right) - things didn't fit, things obstructed each other, things obstructed tank mobility or got installed in worst possible places(AESAs on the exposed turret front).

Weights: as of now, new western proposals still struggle to get to the ideal 55-57 tons - though KF51 came quite close; also, configurations shown for EMBT and Abrams NG are still kinda "light" - no full side protection, for example.
T-14 does everything, but it's a completely new and more radical design, furthermore - with just 3 stations.

Overall - we shall see yet ... but frankly speaking, now we can say for sure we more or less know how late 2020s MBTs will look like.
And yes, MBT evolution is finally going out of slumber once again.

Now that we are on this topic, what are peoples thoughts on what the next gen tanks for China will look like?

Like what might they adopt and do in comparison to European designs, more of the same? Or would there be something new radical?

Like I dunno, maybe EM cannons? Or some other type of gun?

BoraTas said:

3- They don't solve the three fundamental problems that tanks are facing today

The first one is the fact that ATGM teams and vehicles are a lot more mobile, harder to find, have more range and are extremely lethal. IR camo will help in avoiding detection by such teams but ATGM teams will get the same camo technologies too, making it harder for the tank to spot them. APS is effective but methods to defeat them already exist. The second problem is enemy artillery. Artillery will still be as deadly to these high-tech tanks as it is to current tanks. The third problem is enemy airpower which became an even bigger problem because of cheap drones. These tanks offer no solutions to that problem too. So they have very low firepower compared to their cost and they offer very little survivability improvement against the top 3 tank killers on the battlefield.

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^ Misunderstanding of armor in combined arms maneuver warfare.

1) It has never been, nor will ever be, the MBT's job to clear the skies above.
2+3) If your tanks are getting wrecked by ATGMs+Artillery, that's because of bad tactics/doctrine/training. Don't blame the tank.

BoraTas said:

Loitering munitions are long range munitions...

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Those mini-ucavs aren't "long range".

A Global Hawk is "long range".