A Quora answer from someone who had a lot of good posts about tanks in the past. Mostly echoes my thoughts. It is KF51 specific.
"The greatest thing about the KF51 is the marketing of it, as I find it highly amusing. I’ll go through some of the things that Rheinmetall has said about this vehicle, and we can see if it actually meets the promotional claim that it is a radically different tank.
Let me start off with just mentioning how absolutely ridiculous the wording for everything regarding the promotional material is. Overselling literally everything for example, Laser Warning Receivers are not a new thing, but they enable a tank to detect when someone paints them, described by Rheinmetall as:
The Panther is configured with a pre-shot detection capability, enabling it to strike first.
Whew. However it’s nothing compared to how they describe their smoke launchers:
The ROSY smoke obscurance system is provided as part of the survivability system, which fully integrates with the digitised architecture to allow additional defence measures.
I find this endlessly funny, and could easily write this whole thing about how they advertise features that has been common in tanks since the 1980s. But let’s get down to looking at the main radical changes!
We’ll go by the above picture which highlights various features, is any of it radically new?
- The 130mm gun, we don’t know it’s stats but it is better than the 120mm gun, it’s 5mm bigger than the 125mm of Russia, it has a KE round and it has a programable HE-FRAG round, mind you this not new, as both Russia and America already have this for their current gen tanks. It’s a bigger gun, that’s not radical.
- They have put the 12.7mm machine gun, into the coaxial position. Most people put this in a top mount as it has better range and is better suited for engaging aircraft and drones. Is it radical? I mean, kinda, it’s a little weird, almost like it’s a mistake in the promotional material.
- A remote control weapons station (RCWS) with a machine gun, essentially replacing the commanders or loaders MG, except this is a 7.62mm gun meant for hitting drones. Congratulations, it is worse than the American or Russian RCWS which have 12.7mm versions, the Russian one also can be equipped with a grenade launcher. For something meant for hitting drones it makes no sense to make it the smaller gun with less range.
- Commander sight with laser range finder and thermal imaging. Very standard for modern commanders sights. Not radical.
- EMES sight, it’s literally a gunners sight.
- An autoloader, now this is pretty new to German designs, of course French, Korean, Russian, Japanese and Chinese tanks have all used autoloaders for a substantial time. The autoloader is a bustle type, according to their schematics, it is located to the right of the gun breech not aligning with it, which means it is either wrong, or it uses some kind of sophisticated machine arm to lob the shells into the breech at an angle. It can hold 20 rounds, compare this to the 32 rounds in the T-14 autoloader. It also says it can be reloaded as a feature, which is a very sad feature to promote. Was the alternative an autoloader you could use once?
- A drone launcher for 4 HERO-120 Israeli anti tank drones. I take particular issue with this feature, and I think this is one of the worst decisions in the design of this tank, let me tell you why:
A tank is a direct line of sight weapon, which engages the enemy with it’s devastating main gun while being very difficult to destroy. A loitering ammunition drone, is a cheap drone with a limited service life that can attack indirectly relative to the operator, who can be far away. Essentially this gives the tank the ability to sit back out of sight and fire 4 cheap drones at people. Why? So just put the drones on a fucking truck and have it be in the rear? What a useless thing to make the tank do.
But it gets worse, the drone operator has a seat in the tank. Technically it only requires 3 people to use, but if you don’t have a drone operator this is an empty seat, and that drone launcher is also just wasted space. The whole point of an autoloader is to reduce the weight and size of the tank. The Germans have here decided to reduce the weight to 59 tons, which is still heavier than the 55t T-14. While the T-14 has a pretty small turret with a massive gun, the KF-51 has the biggest turret of any tank ever as far as I know, and this is in no small part because they insist on having 4 crewmen when they don’t need it , and a drone launcher that is the size of the autoloader, thus making the turret bustle twice as big as it needs to be, so that it can launch drones you could easily launch from a truck 10 km back. The turret could be reduced by 75% if the crew wasn’t in it, and the drone launcher was not there.
Let’s talk a little bit about protection. This tank has no AESA radars by the look of it, which means it’s active protection system is almost certianly not as sophisticated as the M1A2C Abrams with Trophy, the K2 Black Panther or the T-14. Each crew member has a personal fighting compartment, which is a safety upgrade granted, but it is highly inefficient space wise, compared to the T-14 layout which has 1 compartment capsule which is very heavily armored. In contrast, the KF-51 has 4 compartments, none of which is as heavily armored. The front turret of the tank is very heavy on KF-51 by all accounts, however the compartments in the hull has 3 times less space, so unless the KF-51 breaks the fundamental laws of the universe, the armour thickness for the hull crew is just a fraction of the turret crew. Again this could easily have been fixed by putting the entire crew in the hull, which also has the advantage that the crew isn’t in the area most likely to be hit.
The first MBT adopting an integrated survivability concept of on and off-platform sensors coupled with active, reactive and passive protection and a dedicated top attack protection system.
Except it isn’t, the T-14 does all of these things, and from what we can tell it does it better. In case you’re wondering, the dedicated top attack protection system is the smoke launcher.
One last thing, this tank adheres to the NGVA, which isn’t really explained by Rheinmetall, however it stands for NATO Generic Vehicle Architecture, and I was able to find a presentation regarding it. It looks to me like this is an attempt to standardize vehicle components through NATO. Which in theory is a good thing, this is what the Soviets did, but they had the advantage that all their weapons were made by the same people, NATO weapons are not made by the same people, and I think this will cause trouble, trying to get different people to do the same thing might limit what some of them can do.
For a tank that is specifically made to be a counter to the T-14, this vehicles advertised features are underwhelming and a little baffling, very inefficient use of space, no AESA active protection radars, most features are already exsting, yes I am sure the gun is good, indeed, this might be the most expensive tank destroyer with anti tank redundancies built in for extra price ever to be made. I am really looking forward to seeing the price tag on this.
A small post scriptum, if you want to put drones on your tank, why not put a small quad copter, that doesn’t require a launcher, but has a laser designator, and then make it so that you can slave the gun of one or several tanks to the drone, so that a drone commander can remotely fire the tank turrets at a target he sees with the drone. Does this not sound like a pretty awesome tool, compared to carrying 4 long range anti tank drones you could potentially launch from anywhere else?
Also tiny note, this is a prototype technology demonstrator, I don’t think the final tank will look like this, additionally, just because the APS isn’t explained doesn’t mean it isn’t there."
