"Team Yankee Oddities" Topic

Now I know Team Yankee is attempting to portray a work of fiction and thus has no responsibility to match real history, strictly speaking, but I also found the following things somewhat odd (given Battlefront's usually decent historical research).

Why exactly does the M1 have twice the rate of fire as the T-72?

Also, the new previews show that an NVA Mot-Schützen Kompanie has an integral machinegun platoon (like a Soviet BTR company). As far as I know, however, no such thing ever existed?

Of course there may just be no answer, but I'd like to know if I am missing something (since I consider myself a complete novice to Cold War history).

Because we could/can fire much faster then auto loaded Russian tanks. We could fire, roughly, 1 shot every five seconds. I believe that the T72 was doing good with one per 10 seconds.

It's why Western tanks still use human loaders. They are just much faster when it comes to feeding the main gun.

Is it really only about reloading speed?

I think it would be more of an abstract concept of all of the attributes of the tank. How hard is it to see targets, how easily can you range in on them and send something down range.

Then there is play balance involved.

As a fellow 'novice' to Cold War history, several months ago I got curious to the ROF and other facts about armor of the period.

The main interest were autoloaders.
Of the various systems tested by the Russians, it was reported that one from time to time (somehow) would try to 'load' a crewman into the breach.

In general, "they can maintan a consistent ROF for longer periods". (they dont get tired).
However for short engagements or early in a battle, humans were faster each and every time.

I think the main concept of armor warfare is "Hit, Kill and Run" and not get caught up a prolonged fight if poosible.

The only way to achieve the kill ratios TY attained in the book is to give the M1 a significant fire superiority. Exactly same approach AHGC took in Panzerblitz.

On a European Battlefield the old ROF is a bit of a mute point. A couple of lines of tanks firing at each other for prolonged periods of time would have been highly unlikely.

Most likely, for the British at least and probably other NATO countries, a couple of rounds at the most then jocky to a new fire position, couple more rounds, move, etc.

The old auto loader loading loaders was a bit of a problem early on, but by the mid 80s the problems were pretty well sorted,

Tally Ho!

I did my loader's course while in the reserves in 2001. There are lots of advantages to having the loader as a fourth crewman, not least being able to fix things if it goes wrong, such as a misfire.

With regard to speed of loading, it wasn't difficult – I could certainly reload the gun within 5-10 seconds.

An autoloader works fine when it works. Modern Russian designs are pretty good AFAIK. Back in the 80's they had major problems. If the AL packed up the rate of fire dropped to one or two RPM. To do even this reuired the gunner to manually load the gun, trying to work around the stalled autolader.

Barrie

I was going to say… the T-72 autoloader gave it a faster rate of fire than the Abrams in some sources (8 rounds per minute in comparison to 6, if Global Security is to be trusted), but I suppose it would be much slower if the autoloader stopped working.

I have also read that the T-72 autoloader became slower as the carousel emptied out, but I guess the same could be said for different reasons about human loaders (that they became slower as the firefight went on).

I believe the most important thing in an armor engagement, based on what I read about WW2 and Israeli studies, getting off the first shot was most important.

Of course, I have never been in a large scale armor engagement.

The fourth crewman also made mundane tasks like maintenance, radio watch, etc. easier.

The problem with the early auto loaders was that the gun had to return from it's last 'aimed' position, to its 'at rest/neutral' position for thee auto loader to work, in between shots.

@Achtung Minen

I wouldn't trust Global Security. They are WAYYYY off. An Abrams crew tossing 6 rounds a minute is SLOW… very SLOW. A well trained loader should have the gun loaded and armed in 3-5 seconds, tops. The speed killer is target acquisition, and a well oiled crew is going to be on-target very quickly.

Now I'll grant, the idea was to fire 3 or so rounds from one position then scooting to the next, but even then the crew is finding targets and lining up for the next shot.

As one poster said, it's all about getting off the first round, and we were drilled into the GROUND with crew drills aimed at squeezing every last second out of engagements. The rule was to be throwing a round down range, on target, in just a handful of seconds.

Osprey has a book titled Tank War Central Front that covers the Team Yankee period. The book covers the various tanks available at that time along with crew training, the CAT (Canadian Armor Trophy) competitions, rate of fire etc. As Timecast and Tgunner noted from their experience the book states that NATO crews could easily fire three rounds in 10-12 seconds (one loaded at the start followed by two additional loads). NATO ranging equipment was also better and faster than the Soviets plus the auto loader did have to return to a specific position to load the next round.

Lots of really interesting points here. My take on it.

Physical reloading times are only part of the equation- although all the evidence (Global Security isn't even worth opening the tab) is that well trained human loaders will perform their task much faster than an autoloader- at least for the short intense periods that characterised actual tank to tank engagements.

But the ACTUAL time that matters is the complete engagement cycle from spotting, ranging, computing a firing solution, laying, firing and finally reloading. The expectation of NATO crews for actual rounds aimed and fired was much higher than for the Soviets. Of course Soviet numerical superiority could well mean that the total number of fin rounds flying in each direction was more equal!

Tank for tank though, I'd say that in normal engagements, the combination of a human loader and far superior fire control would give an M1 about twice the practical rate of aimed fire as a T72.

The reason the Soviets introduced autoloaders from the T64 onwards was that it offered them a way out of the design problem of creating a fast, reasonably well protected tank tank with a great big gun but not weighing more than about 40 tons. That meant a small chassis with no space for more than three crew- and that meant an autoloader.

The autoloader was never intended as an improvement on a human crewman. It was just one of many design compromises necessary to get the package the army wanted.

Autoloader started with T62.
In addition most NATO tanks have a rotating commanders cupola which he can use to spot and select the next target while the gunner is engaging the previous one. The gun is then laid on to the next target, already selected by the commander, and so on.

Just for the sake of full disclosure, I was an Abrams crewman for 4 years and served in both the M1IP and the
M1A1 as principally a loader and driver, but I got some time in gunning too.

I agree with what seneffe says about tank battles. We were told that we would easily face 3:1 odds in Germany and that platoons were EXPECTED to engage and win against full Soviet companies. We had fewer tanks but we were going to be faster and more accurate than the enemy. With luck, a full platoon should be able to engage and totally kill a Soviet tank company in 10-15 seconds! That is assuming one hit equals one kill. They weren't too sure about the SABOT on the M68, but there was absolute certainty about the M256.

My outfit, 2/34 Armor in Kansas had the M1IP for training, but we were going to use the M1A1 in Germany, in fact we actually got our A1s in Saudi back in '91.

I think Battlefront did a pretty good job here matching up the book with the tank stats and reasonable with the real world stats that I know about. Now I would be curious to see what the T64s stats will look like, and that's coming next year! I think a T64 vs M1A1 grudge match would be a lot of fun. Who knows, maybe we'll get the T80 too.

Interesting. For the sake of argument, would two shots in the time it takes a NATO tank to fire three shots be a reasonable rate of fire for Soviet armour (specifically the T-62, T-64, T-72 and T-80 in the mid-1980's)? I'm trying to figure this out for TW&T, which has rules for vehicles that may fire up to three times, twice or only once per round (so a 2:1 ratio is not strictly possible with these rules unless I impose an artificial 2 attacks per turn limit on NATO vehicles).

I don't know about the rules you play Achtung, but I like the feel that Battlefront has. The Abrams is superior in armor, range, and in rate of fire. But the T72 has better hitting power and has superior numbers. So in an exchange between a M1 platoon and a T72 company you're going to have a similar weight of fire going on because the M1 makes up for numbers with its better rate of fire and accuracy, but it is in for a hard fight with a Soviet company. If the Abrams company gets off the first shots and has some luck it is possible for a platoon to take down a Soviet company in one round of shooting. So the Soviet player wants the big companies when he goes up against a full strength US platoon.

Who knows, maybe we'll get the T80 too

Hopefully bearing in mind the majority of the MBTs facing the US in Germany were T-80 in the mid 80s.

Tally Ho!

Yeah, but the Russian tank in Team Yankee and most of Red Storm Rising was the T72.

Jarrovian- I think that the T62 pioneered auto-ejection of spent cartridges rather than auto-loading. AFAIK all T62s in actual army service had 4 crew inc human loader.

Nor sure that bringing T64s and T80s into the equation alters the balance decisively. Despite the fact that all three were products of fiercely competitive design bureaux- they were actually quite close cousins.

T80 quite a bit faster than T64 and T72, Fire control as per basic initial spec was a little better for T64 than T72, and T80 was a bit improved on that, but all were way behind the M1 and M60A3 TTS in this respect.

Also, the gradual in-service improvements which all three late Sov MBT models received led to frequent leapfrogging in effectiveness- so it is actually really hard to say one model was better than the others at any particular time. It's true that the basic T64 spec was better than the T72 for eg, but by the 1980s there would be some units with T72s of better spec than some T64s and even T80s- it all depended where they were in the upgrade cycle at the time.

Auto-loader reliability:

I found numerous videos of auto-loaders in action on YouTube, obviously shot unofficially with cell phones. In the most impressive, the interior of the tank looks absolutely awful: flaking paint, rust even. There's no ammo, but they turn on the auto-loader to dry-cycle it. It runs for a cycle or two and then jams. They guy kicks it a couple of times, turns it back on, and it just cycles endlessly.

Anything that can even get running in that condition is pretty reliable. Being able to unjam it by kicking it is a bonus.

"Yeah, but the Russian tank in Team Yankee and most of Red Storm Rising was the T72"

Written at a time when that when the US believed the replacement for T-62 in GSFG was the T-72,

Tally Ho!

thanks seneffe, I stand corrected.

On the autoloader: all Soviet tanks, since the T-64, the gun reload time the same – about 7-9 seconds. At T-80 is no different.
With regard to the unreliability of the automatic loader (T-72) / loader mechanism (T-64, T-80): it is quite reliable and easy, and break it really difficult (though some woodpeckers it turns out, and they can break stainless steel ball). Problems with them are only at the initial stage (very early T-64 of the first series), and were quickly eliminated. Because of problems there is only one – when laying charges in the roundabout do not need to mess with different types of shells – there is installed a primitive "computer", which automatically selects the projectile, and the confusion can be charged, for example, high-explosive, instead of the cumulative.

By the way, here's a video with the loading mechanism of T-64
YouTube link

UsmanK, you must remember many of the problems with the tanks in their initial stages, mechanical reliability, auto loader problems that were put right by the late 70s were often still reported as a problem in the 80s!

Tally Ho!

Huh, I wish that film was a better edited. I really couldn't be sure if it was showing one tank totally cycling through an engagement. From what little I saw it looks pretty slow loading system.

Doesn't the main gun also elevate to a reload position? I remember hearing that the T62 did that.

YouTube link

Yikes… that is SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW.

Even those videos of Abrams loaders creeping along look like Roadrunners compared to that thing!

In addition to the actual speed, there's probably also some factoring that the M1 is more likely to get an accurate shot off.

i.e. that T72 may well have fired another shot or two, but the ones you roll for are the ones that have a chance to kill something.