T-90M Breakthrough

6 comments

1. Specifically as to why they blow up. T-72/80/90s uses an autoloader so it can be crewed by three soldiers instead of four. The ammo is stored in a round ring at the base of the turret without shielding in order for the autoloader to access it. If a weapon manages to penetrate the tank and hits any of the stored ammo, the ammo often will detonate – if 1 of the rounds detonates all of the remaining rounds will also explode.

   Western tanks (mostly) use a crew member to load and store the ammo in a shielded storage area that if hit directs the explosion out and away from the crew.

   The reason each tank is designed this way is reflective of the philosophies of the nations making them – Soviet Union wanted more tanks to be crewed by less trained more expendable crews and Western armies focused more on quality over quantity which meant crews were less expendable/replaceable as well as democracies tend to be less tolerant of high losses.

2. There is not a real problem tbh, it’s just design decisions of the past that are less fortunate for the current battlefield realities.
   These tanks are now very dangerous for their crews but that is due to how they were being designed for very different battlefields then they find themselves on now, not that their designers were babbling idiots.

   The T-90 is the most modern iteration of the basic T-64 design from the mid 60’s. In that day and age the tank was the primary enemy of the tank so they made the choice to make the tank have a low as profile as possible with max frontal armor and with an autoloader (less crew, smaller tank) to make it perform well in tank against tank gunbattles at range. (Low profile makes it harder to hit, strong frontal armor etc.)

   The choice for an autoloader means however that the tank ammo is in the crew compartment (open tank ammo carrousel, the crew is literally sitting on top of a ring of tank ammo) so that serious damage to the tank leads very easily to igniting some of the tank ammo and thus easily to ignite all the other ammo and thus to cataclysmic explosions, totaling the tank in spectacular ‘turret tosses’, and as you may imagine many crew fatalities.

   More modern tank designs make a point to seperate crew quarters and ammo storage and/ or use blast-vents to direct ammo explosions blasts away from the crews to vastly improve battlefield survival ability.

   And to add, on the current drone infested battlefield the strong frontal armor is less of a benefit then imagined. A lot of tanks are now hit in side/rear/top armor.

3. Nice try, Ruzzian Military “Complex”!

4. T90 breakdown

5. Scraaaap

6. T 90 Down-Syndrom

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