Bydax

https://russianmilitaryanalysis.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/vostok-2018-pre-exercise-review-of-events/
Review by Kofman, a good read as always.

Yes, it is that time of the year and the big annual exercises begin.
I would try to cover them, as it seems to me that they are not covered otherwise here and that they may be of interest to the public here.
While they may not be as exciting as Zapad-2017 or Kavkaz-2016 to certain observers in Europe (as we can remember said observers claimed that those exercises are a cover up for an attack on Baltic and Ukraine)  they do seem to be the biggest exercises since Zapad-1981 with 3 MDs (East, Central, North) and various centrally commanded assets (VDV and others) participating. Overall it appears that the overall event can be split into 3 main parts:
- surprise alert drills
- logisics/rear area exercises
- actual final exercises
Between the three above it appears that around 1/4 (some 262k servicemen) participated (and/or will participate, as final exercises would be in September) in the event,
The scenario appears to be combating a mass attack by a peer adversary, with a lot of emphasis placed on:
- mobilisation
- rear services such as repairs and logistics
- inter theatre and local relocation of forces (especially aircraft), dispersal (ie to back up airfields or road strips)
- counter sabboteur exercises (by some VDV air assault units and by Navy)
- cruise missile strikes (by Tu95MSs, Iskander-Ms, Bastions)

Overall it is unclear who is the adversary, as large scale invasion, which would warrant the scale of the exercise, by Western Forces seems implausible in the East and China is participating with some 3200 troops as an ally rather than as an enemy.
Some footage by Zvezda:
https://tvzvezda.ru/news/forces/content/201808210347-s1gh.htm/player/
https://tvzvezda.ru/news/forces/content/201808220534-z7b1.htm/player/
https://tvzvezda.ru/news/forces/content/201808211749-lo17.htm/player/
https://tvzvezda.ru/news/forces/content/201808230431-koxp.htm/player/
 
 

A bit late (but then I don't really post here much anymore):
https://ria.ru/defense_safety/20160906/1476182016.html
A new contract for 132 Armata based vehicles has been sighned, so it seems that Armata is moving towards LRIP and brigade sized IOC.
Full scale rearmament, however, indeed has been pushed beyound 2020 with all the delays, which creates a need for the T90A->T90M upgrades, as the Ground Forces need more tanks than the 1000+ run of T72B3s can provide.

So, we know that MoD ordered 132 Armata-based vehicles. Previously we knew that they were to sign a contract of two tank and one IFV battalions which was to be "more than a hundred" vehicles so these two things match. Under regular ToE this would mean the following - 
41x2 Т-14 + 2x Т-16 = 84
44x1 Т-15 + 1x Т-16 = 45
If we count an IFV battalion with AGL support platoon. This comes to 129 vehicles. If we include organic battalion recon platoon of three T-15s which were planned in 2008 but never realized we get the 132 vehicles we need.

T-72B3 obr.2016  production ≈ 150 per year.

68th Tank Regiment 150th Motorized Rifle Division.

5th Tank Brigade.

1st Tank Regiment 2nd Motorized Rifle Division.

6th Tank Brigade.
T-72B3M ≈ 20 in 2nd Motorized Rifle Division.
T-80BVM* 10 (2017)

61st Naval Infantry Brigade.
*Tanks for Naval Infantry don't have additional side armor.
Contracts for T-80BVM/T-90M:
T-80BVM  62 (2018-2019).
T-90M ≈ 60 (2018-2019).
 

This is a bad argument. They keep all relevant information (sales figures, cash flow, etc.) secret ostensibly to "protect it from competition." Just pointing to longevity is ridiculous, for all you know they could have been limping along for 20 years, it's literally impossible to know how successful they are. 
I'll tell you what's not a sign of a good company, releasing an update with a game breaking bug (I consider it game breaking because it effectively makes the single player unplayable, unless you enjoy effortlessly gunning down fleeing AI troops) and charge $10 for it. Then going over a year and a half without any sign of a fix on the way. Bonus points for the fact that the update to fix 4.0 will also likely require you to pay for it because BFC loves its customers so much that they nickle and dime them for basic bug fixes. 
But hey, I gotta give some credit to BFC, they've clearly mastered the art of building up a dedicated fanbase. Paying customers are demanding some action to fix their game, and we got @IanL throwing out terms like snowflakes, because screw them for wanting to be able to play their $60 game without using janky workarounds. 
 

Quit reminding me that I haven't finished that yet!
Not just direct hits.  Nearby hits too - particularly with APCs and IFVs.

That 152mm shell that lands five meters from your BTR is going to ruin its day!  A Bradley may only have a few holes, though.
Man... now that I brought this up I need to go back to coding... pfah. 

You miss the point - its the Abrams unrealistic reaction/acquire/fire time that bothers a lot of "us". Not the T-90's. It , for now, is a reasonably dangerous beast, not the magical psychic 6-eyed unicorn that the Abrams can sometimes feel like.

Seems like US commanders do not share your opinion that Abrams does not need ERA.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/8144/u-s-army-m1-abrams-tanks-in-europe-are-getting-explosive-reactive-armor

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My understanding is by saying "infantry held AT weapons being fired from complex geometries" you meant ligher hand-held RPGs as an antithesis to heavier tripod-based ATGMs. No doubt Trophy provides protection against RPGs as well but I believe your statement that was the main intention of Trophy development is invalid. Here's an excerpt from "Hezbollah anti-amour tactics and weapons. Assessment of the Second Lebanon War By Col. David Eshel":
Realizing the capabilities of the Merkava 4 tank, Hezbollah allocated their most advanced weaponry to combat this advanced tank, engaging these tanks exclusively with the heavier, more capable missiles such as 9M133 AT-14 Kornet, 9M131 Metis M and RPG-29. RPG-29 and 9M113 Konkurs (AT-5) were employed mostly against Merkava 3 and 2 while non-tandem weapons, such as Tow, Fagot and improved RPG 7Vs were left to engage other armored vehicles such as AIFV My points:
In many interviews after 2006 Lebanon War Israeli said that they underestimated the threat posed by modern heavy ATGMs and Israli tanks sustained considerable losses. Second Lebanon War's battles was fought mostly in rural rather than urban settings. Israel dispatched a special diplomatic mission to Russia to compain s"pecifically about Syria's passing of its Russia's supplied Kornet heavy ATGM to Hezbollah. Israel sped up testing and system selection for APS right after the war. Since hard-kill APS poses a considerable danger to nearby infantry Israel changed their urban warfare doctrine after the Trophy was inducted into the armored force. Infantry now follows tanks at a distance. This difficulties in infantry-tank cooperation was actually one of the main criticism of the Trophy implementation. So I do believe your statement that "TROPHY is intended to protect tanks in urban environments from infantry held AT weapons" is misleading.
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Can you provide specific names/models for those "most modern and lethal ATGMs, which only exist in double digit numbers"?
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Kornet vs. American Abrams, 2003 Iraqi War: from 2 to 4 reported penetrations, tanks disabled. Iraqi military possessed limited number of Kornets as they have never been officially supplied, only few were smuggled from Syria. RPG-29 vs. American Abrams, 2003 Iraqi War: 3 reported penetrations, crews wounded/killed. RPG-29 vs. Challenger 2, 2003 Iraqi War: one known FRONTAL ERA penetration, crew wounded. RPG-29 has way less armor penetration than Kornet yet American military prohibited post-Saddam Iraqi Army from buying them http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/weekinreview/big-guns-for-iraq-not-so-fast.html.
"He [General Jassem of Iraqi Army] also complained that the United States wants to supply his troops with RPG-7's, the Soviet-era rocket-propelled grenade launcher. 'Why are they always giving us the oldest models?' he asked, saying he likes the more modern, larger caliber RPG-29, which penetrates armor better. But such weapons could raise a threat against the United States if they fell into the wrong hands ... "The RPG-7 is more versatile than other antitank weapons, which really only have one use -- destroying armor," the senior American officer said."
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Israel is well known for putting specific emphasis on tanks protection. If we put aside the argument that a way more modern Merkava-4 is less protected than American Abrams just by pure magic of it not being American then 2003 Lebanon War may be a good proxy for evaluating modern tanks protection level against current ATGMs.

Abrams armor plates


Chobham/Burlington armor of Chieftain

Merkava armor

And the last but not the least... T-72B armor

@IICptMillerII, I believe we can be fairly sure no one passed the "dreaded secret" of Chobham armor to the Soviet Union. It's just the laws of the physics are the same be it US, UK, Israel or the Soviet Union so the engineers come to the same designs when concieving similar things. I can tell you even more:
The effect that forms the basis of the spaced composite armor / NERA (Chobham armor) was first used in the armor of the Soviet tanks albeit in a different, considerably less efficient setup And even more, the way Kontakt-5 ERA works is the same as NERA, it's just NERA uses the energy of incoming projectile while ERA - the energy of chemical explosion

Not quite right... Ehhh... CMBS' LWR-equipped tanks (like M1) acquire ATGM-launchers almost instanteniously. What is the basis for such a behaviour when real life LWRs (Thales, Leonardo) give you 30/45 degrees sector??? Instant target acquisition in a 30/45 degrees sector at a distance of 2-4km??? Why not have an Abrams with an ion-gun then?
And it has profound impact on the gameplay. In real life (Yemen, Syria) we see tanks being burned every time they are careless enough while facing an ATGM-armed opposition. In CMBS a platoon of Abramses can simply drive through the whole map blasting everyone around.

Say what?

740
Even the BMP-3 is respectable:

600 (and it'll likely throw a guided missile at your shiny & oh so expensive helicopter)

Some odd criticism getting bandied about here:

-seating in BMP-3 "Dragoon" appears better than in Bradley, including more room for personnel seated forward of turret to exit.

-recoil on Armata does not induce a stability problem. You can see that gunner's sight stays right on target when firing. The system does not care if barrel moves relative to sight because the barrel has to move after firing for auto-loader regardless. Also, comparing to recoil on M1A2 is somewhat silly. Bigger gun on lighter tank = more chassis movement. Recoil on the chassis appears in line with, or less than, previous T-series tanks.

-MFDs with touch functionality are pretty much standard in modern AFVs

-decision to stick with cheap, gap-bridging upgrades on BMP-2, BMP-3 and T-72Bs was I believe intentional to free-up funding for the next-generation vehicles, not a cut-back of a more ambitious upgrade program.

The question I have is whether existing BMP-3s can even be upgraded to "Dragoon" level, or if that requires new-build hulls?

Right. I was told by my Russian sources (who are by no means an ultimate authority on this, but do happen to have more inside information than any of us) that there are around 100 Russian active duty KIAs from that conflict. However, that number does not account for Russian volunteers (i.e. not active duty) that had traveled to Donbas either independently or as part of Russian voluntary training/deployment system. There is also an ambiguous category of Russian volunteers and advisors that were recruited from active duty personnel, but deployed to Donbas as either PMCs or volunteers independently of their organic units. Those numbers are likely to be much higher, and I am not even sure that they are fully accounted for.

The Abrams side turret armor is set too high, IMO. It will resist PG-7VR even without the ERA. It has been reported as a bug and will hopefully be adjusted in the next patch.

(Click on it to Enlarge)
 

The most recent example. Today, Horlivka. Civilian houses and a freaking kindergarden get shelled. Zero military targets.
 
https://youtu.be/frrbvD14QYo?t=49s
 
 
Right? Those seps shell themselves all the time.

Face-desk at  "...Russia deployed about 150,000 soldiers on the Russian-Ukrainian border. Around half of the forces were paramilitary forces of Russia’s Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry for Emergency Situations. ", and then it just got worse from there.
 
Not only is the number utter BS, unless 500-600km deep into Russia is considered the "Russian-Ukrainian border", with most of the Western military district included, but calling the Russian EMERCOM paramilitary and lumping them with soldiers is just too much. Reminded me of the infamous  headline in the Ukr media from a few months ago - "Terrorists are rebuilding the railways in occupied territories".
 
I suspect the article drew from the same LSD induced sources that "buried" whole brigades of SpN in Donetsk airport and "destroyed" Armata columns on weekly basis all over the line-of-contact. For anyone reading Russian sources with plenty of first hand accounts at this point, including both anecdotal and analytical, it's hard to take such articles seriously. 

Over the engine intake? Really? Must be that VERY invisible ceramic composite armour.
 
Methinks the Bradley hit boxes need to be adjusted or altered.

I did this a while back, and even though most of you read this, I got too lasy to include actual pictures I managed to dig up of how different sights actually looked from the operator's perspective. Sorry for those images being so small. They show what next-gen thermal domestic thermal optics (currently available) are capable of doing. 
 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gfvptz_WOH8jLBMOaFk4CXWK05JWNXX1oFxBBwNknSw/edit

Here we can see how glorious HATO force field fitted on M2 protects the engine deck against all similar 122mm top attack artillery munitions. Part of next generation armour system developed by DARPA utilising the pure power of freedom to deflect the blast. Visible is the dust clouds as superior fighting complex M2 drives away unscathed from its encounter.
 
http://imgur.com/9whd04C
 

A 122mm 2S1 round hitting intake grill on the engine deck of anything would destroy the engine. No questions asked, I don't care if its an M1 and M2 or a F'ing space chariot. The vehicle should be mission killed, the driver should be wounded, never mind the vehicle be able to drive away. Im sorry but I call BS on this one devs.

Maybe these are "unsupported proclamation"...as "unsupported" as your assumption that it was tons of work to include these "features".

Actually i like the game, but dont like the lack of progress and BFC's business model...ever considered that ?!
For you, everyone who does not love the game and says "WOW, GREAT" to everything BFC does and releases is a sad troll who does have no clue how much hard work (should we all pity BFC...) they put into these games.
Someone who loves a company and cheers everything they do is usually called a fanboy, now i dont say you are one but many here at the forum are very very close...

I most likely will buy the Bulge game anyway...why you ask ?
Because i dont have to care about 55$, simple as that.
If they would release a massive improved CMx3 engine i would pay 150$ for it !
I want BFC to move forward, you want them to sit in a corner selling the same game with a new varnishing forever.

Iam ranting about CMx2 since 2007 and i will carry on because to improve they need guys like me who DONT cheer them like 14 year old cheerleaders.
Oh, and i know they dont care about the forum "troll" with his "rants"...but they are ignoring their cheerleaders too so i can live with that.

I wonder what the hit boxes for the vehicles look like.

I come to Russian military forums, it's a circle-jerk of bouncing similar opinions on a one side loop. I come to US oriented forums like this one, and it is exactly the same circle-jerk of high an mighty opinionated posting, just the other way around. Such a shame mp.net has died. It felt like the only place where two camps would actually meet and have a discussion.