For you armor nerds
Guess I am showing my age and Cold War roots on this one. Ran across a The War Zone article on rare armor vehicles seen in Ukraine.
I am guessing many remember the old BMP – they pretty well lead the way in armored fighting vehicles (as opposed to armored personnel carriers. The , aka BMP-1 (Infantry Fighting Vehicle-1), carried troops in relative safety and came equipped with a main gun, anti-tank missiles, a machine gun, and had firing ports on its sides and back. It’s also amphibious, a nice feature to have when fording streams or traversing bogs.
Here’s a rarity – the BMP-55. Photos circulated this week on Telegram show what appears to be a one-off BMP the Ukrainians made by drastically altering an old T-55 tank chassis to make a heavy IFV. On a battlefield filled with armed drones, maybe all 28-29 tons of armor is comforting?
The view of its rear is amusing – it says M113? Have to suspect that is a reference to our M113 personnel carrier. There are a lot of semi-obolescent T-55s around, so if the Ukrainians did decide to make this a production model, they would have a lot to work with.
They also made a BMP-64, based on the ubiquitous T-64 Russian tank. Again, remove the turret, make it a squad carrier capable of causing some damage.
Armed with a 30mm auto-cannon, to my non-expert eye this sounds more analogous to our Bradley IFV, albeit at 40+ tons it obviously took much of the tank weight with it even though it, and the BMP-55, lost the turret.
And let’s not leave out the opposition – the Russians have made a few surplus T-72s into IFVs as well.
Inspired by city counter-insurgency operations in Chechnya, the BMPT looks to retain more of its original aspect than the others above. Although rare it least it is not a one-off; according to the article at least one Russian unit fighting Ukraine has been equipped with these.
This is very exciting to me, especially how the Russians modified their T-72 to carry troops. The Russian IFVs always had very thin skins. Wonder if they will continue this trend and develop a more practical IFV from the ground up.
Given the number of kills on regular tanks by Ukrainian drones, I doubt the armor thickness is going to be much help.
Not to mention those by Bradleys.
Thumbs down? Russkies suck– we don’t agree?
Didn’t the BMP1 store its fuel in bladders located inside the rear egress doors?
Nothing like a burning diesel shower as you try to exit.
The main fuel tanks were between the benches in the back, and in the rear doors.
Sounds like some of our automobile engineers went to work for them.
Must have used those engineers who design the ford pinto.
Armored vehicles…or as we refer to as…”targets”…are going to be more and more rare on the modern battlefield. Once again, technology is defeating “The Art of War”. I guess that with the attrition rate the ‘kraines and the Russkies are seeing they’re bringing to bear whatever type of weapon they can cobble together these days. Better them than me.
Yeah, all of the robotic systems are fast and light. They don’t waste time on armor, because that makes it need a bigger engine and fuel source (or batteries)!
Just better and smarter mines. “The Art of War” is very much intact, and Armor only has itself to blame if it failed to consider it might one day have done to it what it did to the horse.
Is that an SPS-49 ship based radar on the ground in the first
photo?
If so, why?
I would say it is more likely one of these https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/military-russian-radar-station-against-blue-246945151
it’s an Air Defense radar
Tnx (pun)…can’t see the feedhorn details behind the
the tracked vehicle. Never know what you will find in a
junkyard or a museum.
The Israelis have a T-55 APC as well, the Achzarit. Apparently, they like it, though the new Eitan AFV is overshadowing everything else they have these days.
The Ukraine war is more and more resembling a Twilight 2000 campaign, now in the “Bubba built” combat vehicle stage.
Played quite a bit of Twilight 2000 back in the day.
The later T2K editions are so much easier to understand and gameplay is so much clearer. (You do need maps and counters / figures to figure out attacks and tactics, but they have digital and online stuff for that.)
You can get pretty much all the game books of each edition in PDF format. Frees up a LOT of shelf space.
Kinda like how one of the first APC’s, the WW2 Canadian Kangaroo, was born, out of the not-so-succesful Ram tank.