""You're Doing It All Wrong"....." Topic

"You're doing it all wrong"….

Where have you heard that before?

Never mind, we really don't want to know, it's just a rhetorical question. Just used the line as an attention grabber, so please keep that to yourself.

So, been doing a bit of research into late Cold War era tanks, armor, tank-gun ammo, reactive armor, etc., etc., of late.

Turns out most of us are doing it all wrong, for our armored engagements.

A bit of post-war testing has revealed that most T-64s, T-72s, and T-80s had frontal armor that was proof against virtually all 105mm ammunition, of both the kinetic (KE) and chemical energy (HEAT, or CE rounds) variety, much like the M-1 tanks, and/or M1IPs and M1A1s were proof against Soviet/WP ammo. I imagine the same can probably be said of Leopard 2s and Challengers as well.

Also, it's been determined that for those Soviet/WP tanks fitted with ERA during the late Cold War period, they were also proof against 105mm AND 120mm ammo of both the KE and CE varieties, as well against many ATGMs from the period too (including even tandem warhead designs).

American and West German personnel conducted the testing on 25+ T-72 from the period, in the early 1990s, and Jane's has confirmed the findings.

I was surprised to read that the Kontakt-5 ERA used by the Soviets was even proof against the latest APFSDS, and D.U. (depleted uranium) rounds, instead of just against HEAT rounds.

Granted, ERA doesn't provide 100% coverage for the front and sides of vehicles, but does provide it to 50% – 60%, or more of the most likely surfaces to be hit, and/or those needed to ensure crew protection and the survival of the vehicle.

So, those scenarios where your NATO tank commanders sit back and just plink at the oncoming hordes of Soviet/WP armor need to be revised, unless you want to just watch those oncoming armored behemoths shrug off your fire.

Looks like WWIII will be a bit more like those close in scrums, from Kursk, where each side attempts to close the range quickly, and get off flank or rear shots, hoping to find a weak point in the enemy's armor, while avoiding have the same happen to them.

Thought you'd want to know……..

I think the Canadians helped find that out too.

Any Janes links?

We trained that we could not kill a T72 from the front. All the rules were based on "Best Guess" from unclassified sources.

But then I field T72 for my GSFG armies because that is what I have and what we thought we were going to face. On the table I see no real difference in the 3 (T64, 72 and 80), at least enough that I would need to buy more tanks.

Just found their one-page letter, stating the above.

All the links I've found for Jane's seem to not work, unless you pay hundreds of dollars a year for one of their "memberships".

Yea, they do look very similar.

I've got some plastic 1/144th T-72s and T-80s (wish I had a few more of both), and am coveting some T-64s too, but my T-72s can serve as proxies for them in the meantime, since their overall shape is pretty similar.

The swedes took part in the testing as well, no effect from firing the then used "pil 80" APFSDS, leading to the development of "pil 90".

Meanwhile tests of redfor APFSDS found the round ending up in the wall to the magazine storage of the s-tank (at the very back of the tank), giving final proof that the sloped armour no longer deflected modern APFSDS.

The US took it upon themselves to upgrade M829A1 to M829A2 after conclusions from the tests if memory serves me.

We always trained to take flank shots. Our battle positions were all selected for flanking fire. We didn't know for sure how good the other guy's frontal armor was, so we assumed the worst.

I've heard of rounds going through the front and rear of the S-Tank.

Of course, given it's very low profile, and integral dozer blade for making a hull-down (literally) position, it would probably be harder to locate visually, and to hit that many other, much taller vehicles.

Post what link you have Mako, I may know someone with access ;)

Now comes the fun
If this new info is correct, then what to do with TY or modern CD most any game??
Remember that the designers of these games thought they has realism in not only the OoBs and uniform colors but also the weapons and armor stats
Three options
Ignore the new data
Defend and keep the old data
Embrace the new data with errata or new editions

I am waiting for the new info for the paint schemes
which ought to blast the simulatiob from the games
.

Thing is, none of this info is really all that new.

Just play the games and have fun, thats what I'm going to do.

I think a lot (most, if not all, in many cases – especially 105mm ammo vs. Soviet/WP top-line tanks from T-64 to T-80) of the attacks on forward arcs should bounce, depending upon what's being fired at them, and the targets.

Older kit is more vulnerable.

Perhaps, given them a 10% – 15% chance for a lucky hit from that arc, depending upon the vehicle, weapon(s) used against them, era, etc., etc..

What as the kill ratio in actual combat in 1967 and 1973?

We're those "like" generation vehicles?

When, if ever so far, have those vehicles in the OP actually faced off against each other? What were the kills then?

The story about Kontakt-5 defeating APFSDS and virtually everything else was written by a Professor Richard M. Ogorkiewicz of Cranfield University, about the time money was drying up for research on AT weapons against Soviet hardware.

Believe it if you like, but if it was true why did the Soviets field so many tanks against the West?

If they were that good they'd need a fraction of the numbers they fielded.

Just sayin' …..

Bystander, NATO vehicles with 1980s era ammo never faced off against Soviet equipment of the same era. The M60 series was a generation older than the T-64. The M60 was supposed to be a temporary fix to the M48 to tide the US Army over until the new MBT that would be fielded in the mid 60s. The mid 60s became the mid 70s, then the early 80s as project after project was abandoned. Some of those "temporary" M60s soldiered on for over 30 years. Meanwhile, the Soviets kept building newer models, but they exported cheaper versions of their new tanks. They never exported the T-64, so we had very limited reliable data on it until 1989. Most of the Soviet ammo was likewise a mystery.The 105 mm was a great gun and fun to shoot, but was outdated by 1980. We could get incremental improvements from better ammo, but not the kind we needed against the newer generations of Soviet tanks.

Have a look at what has been happening in the Ukraine for 'Red on Red' encounters. Artillery of all sorts seems to be more effective than arm chair pundits predicted.

It won't make any difference to Team Yankee stats. There's already only a 50% chance of M1 rounds penetrating T-72s from the frontal aspect.

The Soviets built that much hardware because that was the only thing they brought to the table as a"super power".

0% chance and 50% chance of penetration from the front aspect are very different.

…But if ERA only covers 50-60% of the front, and that's what's providing the 0% penetration, then it sounds right to me. Add 1 to the frontal armour value if you want to make it 33% penetration.

Play the game as it is. Plus while I realize that the Soviet kit exported to the Arab nations was not top of the line neither was most of the kit Soviet forces had as only the top outfits trained enough and to know what they were doing. So it kind of balances out. The result we saw from the Yom Kippur War was that Western tactics and kit beat out Soviet tactics and kit. Granted Soviet advisers complained bitterly that their Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian and Iraqi allies did not follow Soviet Doctrine but given the overwhelming odds the Arabs had against the Israelis and catching the Israelis flat footed you would think that would have carried the day for the Arabs. In retrospect I think we can use the Yom Kippur War as a good measure of how things might have played out if the balloon had gone up in Europe. Well sans the nukes anyway.

Yeah, the desert regions of western Europe would have seen 3GSA destroyed in minutes by NATOs uncontested control of the skies.

Yea, I can see that.

Seems to me most of the coverage of the vehicles to the front is a bit better than 50% – 60%, so perhaps that's an average figure they're using for the whole vehicle.

Gee are you really really saying that for all of the discussion and debate over various historical data that TY is only a game, that these discussions are irrelevant, abd that more time should be spent on playability issues, rules issues.
No matter what new data is discovered, no one who has spent time and money on TY is going to houserules and will only change when authorised by new editions of tbe game

Apparently, you are unfamiliar with me, and my gaming group.

My replies are not addressed only to one writer, but to the lot of you and others who read TMP but either dont post or have posted but not on this exact topic board.
I raised the question of departing from the novel, which I argued the current TY game does, to be distinguished from say the Chadwick boardgame, and was met by an argument from realism, that argument being absurd as, as noted above, there had not been any European land war in the 1980s
And so, as the novel is a huge counter factual, what are we doing trying to make jt more real, as it isnt

As far as I am aware, research doesn't say anything like as conclusive as is suggested in the OP- and there is a great deal of generalisation and time slip in its assertions.

Kontakt 5 is not a cold war system in any meaningful sense – no matter how (debateable) effective it is against Chem and KE rounds. In fact ERA even in its earliest Chem only (Kontakt 1) configuration was only deployed on a minority of Sov tanks. Even the Sovs didn't claim any appreciable effect for Kontakt 1 against KE rounds- the plate is too light and its HE charge is too small.

I mentioned in another post elsewhere that CFE records show only 400 T80U with Kontakt 5 were available by 1990 (none in Europe) . Also in 1990, just over 600 T8BV with the original (and much more primitive) Kontakt 1 were in service. So in 1985-6 only c15-20% of T80s would have had any form of ERA.

As to the number of T64BVs with Kontakt 1 ERA within the Europe based T64 fleet in 1990, I don't know. Lets be very generous and say they were ALL equipped with it- just for arguments sake. Let's also say in 1985 the MAJORITY of T64s were ERA equipped T64BVs. That's being really pretty generous too re the efficiency of the Soviet military-industrial complex, given that Kontakt 1 only came into service in 1984- but lets say they really bucked the trend and managed it. Kontakt 5 was only retrofitted to the few remaining T64s in service after 1990.

The T72 fleet began to receive Kontakt 1 ERA starting in 1987-88, with T80 and T64 still taking priority. So given this, and given where the T72 fleet was based- it's hard to imagine NATO encountering many ERA equipped T72s in any realistic timeframe. Kontakt 5 on T72 only well after the cold war.

So in the 1985-6 timeframe, it's likely that a some/many/most T64s (depending on how efficient we think Soviet industry was) in Europe would have early pattern Kontakt 1 ERA fitted, a few T80s (something less than 600) had it, and no T72s at all. As for the (somewhat) KE capable Kontakt 5- none at all as far as I have been able to discover before a few pre-production types in c1988.

The suggestion that Sov MBTs were frontally proof against either NATO 120 or 105 hits using the best ammo then available- is also quite misleading.

Looking at the stats, and taking the Kontakt 5 red herring out of the cold war equation- the best frontally protected Soviet MBT of the late cold war period against KE rounds was the T72B "Super Dolly Parton" which began production in 1986. This leapfrogged the frontal protection of the T64A/B and the T80B of the time significantly, but it was not deployed in GSFG as we know.

The T72B up-armouring programme (significantly superior to the T64/T80 at that time remember) was initiated by first hand analysis of the vulnerability of the Syrian T72M to Israeli 105 penetrators in the 1982 Lebanon conflict. The Syrians said their tanks were invulnerable and had only been lost to mines etc, which some of the Western press believed. The Russians though knew that their tanks were indeed very vulnerable to high quality 105 penetrators. Even allowing for the often quoted 'inferior' quality of the export T72M, the Soviets themselves were very alarmed by ease of 105 penetration and what that meant even for their own tanks. The T72B was intended to redress that- but there was a significant time gap in 1983-5 between the discovery of the vulnerability to 105 penetrators and the introduction of the T72B. Apart from the T72B programme, the Sovs also began to add some extra armour to T64s and T80s in European service when they cycled back through the factories for capital rebuild- but this was a slow process, and still didn't give much hope against 120mm penetrators of the time.

I've seen claims of various post cold war tests in Wikipedia etc, but I've never come across anyone who has any actual detail of these. If anyone has- it would be very interesting. But I do know from first hand post cold war conversation that the Sovs in the 1980s were genuinely concerned that NATO tanks had made a generational jump on them in pretty much all respects, and the numerous individual expedient up-armouring programmes were a product of this growing concern.

BTW- the glowing reports of the surviveability of the T64 in the current Ukrainian conflict due to its ERA refer in fact to an indigenous Ukrainian produced ERA system dating from the mid 2000s.

Returning to the original post- I would contend that we haven't all been doing it wrong at all, and that if we take out anachronistic red herrings like Kontakt 5 armour, the qualitative difference between NATO and Sov MBTs was indeed quite significant.

If we then add factors such as mean engagement times, mean first round hit probabilities and the catastrophic explosive vulnerability of all Sov MBTs once penetrated (think WWI British Battlecruiser….), the Sovs would really need all of their numerical superiority to prevail. A meeting of the best Soviet MBTs and the best NATO MBTs at any point in the 1980s would have been far from equal……

From what I've read, even the bog-standard T64s – T-80s were proof against virtually all 105mm ammo from the Cold War, even without ERA, due to excellent armor angling, better models than those exported, newer composite armor construction, etc., etc..

I did not state the same about their resistance to 120mm weapons.

Clearly, the West Germans and British were far ahead of the US army on tank weaponry, which even an amateur teenager could see, back in the day, that the switch to 120s needed to be made for their MBTs.

Not sure how many M-1 tanks were upgraded to 120mms by the end of the Cold War, but apparently they started getting them in around 1986, with the M1A1 model.

Kontakt-1 was apparently sufficient for considerable protection against HEAT rounds, resulting in NATO's need to seek new technologies and weapons to penetrate their armor. Even the venerable, and much touted early TOW missiles were believed to bounce, or fail to penetrate against some of the latest communist tanks.

A lot of incredible strides in weaponry and armor were created in the 1980s, and really came on strong from the mid-80s to the end of the Cold War in 1989.

My main desire in posting this thread was to get people to consider that it is/was very possible that many attacks vs. the frontal armor of both sides' main battle tanks might indeed fail, since the wonder weapons weren't expected to live up to the marketing hype of the manufacturers.

Obviously, you're free to agree/disagree, as desired.

Seneffe – 'Target'!