Jump to content

Armata soon to be in service.


Lee_Vincent

Recommended Posts

I see what you did there! Ha-ha-ha!

Oleg Sienko says that T-14 costs ~250-300M (in rubles).

Yup, until there's either a political or military change of the Crimean situation, for all practical purposes it is not part of Ukraine.  This is different from the Donbas regions currently occupied by Russian forces and their proxies.  That is occupied territory by all reasonable definitions.

As for the price of the T-14, that's the same numbers that have been quoted for awhile now, right?  Roughly $4m USD?

Steve

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Steve,

I put the tank spill in the thread because the thread seems to be way past the nominal topic and is embracing many other issues, one of which is the evidence of Russian involvement in Ukraine.  Since I don't read Russian and was going from what I saw exclusively, I put it up because it seemed significant. Guess I need to start putting text through Google Translate to avoid further mishaps. As for the status of Crimea, from the standpoint of international law, de jure, Crimea is occupied territory of the sovereign nation of Ukraine. Its de facto status is as a kind of extension of Russia. Putin, of course, views it as Russia.

Regards,

John Kettler

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

LOckAndLOad,

I tried to post the other day about the Armata video, but the computer didn't cooperate. Having watched the whole Armata video, it's a wonder I'm still coherent. Stunned and more than a bit overwhelmed! Watching manufacturer's video of a SAM launch is one thing, but being taken inside the factory, inside the design bureau, inside the tank under construction, inside every Armata AFV but the T-16 BREM, not to mention being able to see what goes on inside the T-14 during a shoot and see the radical new steering configuration--that's something else altogether. Also, for the Armata family, the Russians have done something remarkable, based on their history. Gone is the power one track and brake the other to turn, replaced by neutral steering with one track going forward and the other backward. Rechecked the video to make sure I wasn't imagining things. Wish there'd been some coverage of the turret, the innards and the ammo storage and loading, not to mention the ammunition proper. You can take it as an article of faith that US, NATO and other intel entities are poring over that video, and I'd expect many reports to result. If the tanks on the line that we saw aren't the Victory Day Parade tanks being reworked, then it looks to me as though some pretty serious production has begun. Like you, I wish there'd been more on the defensive suite, and I'm especially interested in hard kill vs high diver top attack weapons. Is there an upward looking radar antenna on the turret roof? How I wish I'd bookmarked the Russian radar manufacturer's site in which they had exactly that sort of radar (turret mounted with hemispheric coverage).

Regards,

John Kettler

Edited by John Kettler
Link to comment
Share on other sites

sovereign nation of Ukraine

Sovereign my... couch :) Just to let you know, since you've brought it up, people from Republic of Crimea (yeah,everyone always forgets to call Crimea a Republic, especially the full title, with "Autonomous" in the front, but that's what it is), or from Eastern Ukraine, they are not allowed to vote in Ukraine. Found out about this yesterday. Nicely adds to everything they've done to us so far. My love to that "sovereign nation" grows day by day! Glory to Ukraine, and all that.

You can take it as an article of faith that US, NATO and other intel entities are poring over that video, and I'd expect many reports to result.

That's literally the first thing they've said in the episode.

then it looks to me as though some pretty serious production has begun.

I've been seeing signs of that for quite a while. Still skeptical about their will to go on with everything. It should be clearer by the end of 2016 as to how serious about this they are.

Like you, I wish there'd been more on the defensive suite, and I'm especially interested in hard kill vs high diver top attack weapons.

My point always was - if it can't "tank", then it is not a tank, but rather a tank-destroyer. And, most likely, only hard kill system will make that difference on T-14.

Is there an upward looking radar antenna on the turret roof? How I wish I'd bookmarked the Russian radar manufacturer's site in which they had exactly that sort of radar (turret mounted with hemispheric coverage).

Like I've said, there's been no mention of APS whatsoever.

As for the price of the T-14, that's the same numbers that have been quoted for awhile now, right?  Roughly $4m USD?

There's been a fresh interview, but I haven't actually watched it myself, just saw the numbers.

Edited by L0ckAndL0ad
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sovereign my... couch :) Just to let you know, since you've brought it up, people from Republic of Crimea (yeah,everyone always forgets to call Crimea a Republic, especially the full title, with "Autonomous" in the front, but that's what it is), or from Eastern Ukraine, they are not allowed to vote in Ukraine. Found out about this yesterday. Nicely adds to everything they've done to us so far. My love to that "sovereign nation" grows day by day! Glory to Ukraine, and all that.

Well, if Russia hadn't invaded and annexed Crimea, then invaded and messed up Donbas, there wouldn't be a problem now would there? Oh, I forgot.  Russia isn't to blame for anything it does.  My mistake.

Steve

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

Two points one technical the other I am afraid political.

firstly if the Armata really does use an radar system at the core of it's APS then that is fine and effective for almost all potential opens until it comes up against the US when it will be electronically lit up like a Christmas tree and last minutes.

 

Any realistic BS scenario with a Regiment of 30 Armatas against the US would have artillery and air support cut that to less than 10 before the US force even entered the map.

 

On the political, be it the Ukraine or Syria it is now pretty clear that Russia is operating outwith the norms of international behaviour, simply creating whatever version of the truth suits it's purposes.

This would be a real concern if it actually had the economic capability to back up its boasts..

But it doesn't!

Peter.

Edited by Peter Cairns
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I dunno...I think millimetric radars are hard to jam. Also, it's not like jamming a normal radar. With a Regiment, You have 30 inividual tanks, each with its own system, possibly with minute wavelength differences, each with its own LOS. It's not like air war or radio waves where you have either LOS or can just white out the frequency. Of course I'm planning on majoring in history, not STEM, so this could all be BS. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

firstly if the Armata really does use an radar system at the core of it's APS then that is fine and effective for almost all potential opens until it comes up against the US when it will be electronically lit up like a Christmas tree and last minutes.

Any realistic BS scenario with a Regiment of 30 Armatas against the US would have artillery and air support cut that to less than 10 before the US force even entered the map.

Assumptions much? You also forget Peter, this is Black Sea, air support cannot into interdiction before a battle.

Edited by Stagler
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I dunno...I think millimetric radars are hard to jam

I don't think his point was that it was jamming, it was that the regiment would have a significant emissions signature, and given what we know about NATO electronics intercept capabilities, I think his point was you'd know about where the Armatas were at a given time.  

As far as jamming, dedicated EW assets tend to have the ability to cover several frequencies at once.  Jamming a Regiment's worth of APS however is likely not as effective as taking their FM coms, sat communications and GLONASS offline (or rather, filling those spectrum with garbage transmissions, bad data, and the like).  

It is however worth noting that given some of the Electronic Emissions Collection assets though that the spectrum used by the APS might be discovered, and loaded into some manner of reactive jammer.  Which interestingly enough might be the great undoing of APS, simply that at the same time a round is fired, some sort of reactive jammer kicks in on the launcher side and degrades the APS sensor systems.  I imagine you'd even get away with some sort of directional antenna thingy because you're not looking to jam a platoon's worth of APS, you're looking to get the one tank you just shot at.  

Dunno.  Likely a reason someone hasn't done that yet anyway I don't know of.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Creating power supplies that can output useful jamming is hard without tapping into high-energy sources. (Airborne jamming pods frequently use generators which are spun by the airstream. That adds drag and requires more thrust from the engines.)

The one benefit of UAV's is that they can get closer. Jamming power requirement generally has a squared relationship to range. Cut the range in half and you only need about 1/4 of the power for equivalent jamming.

A shell which has a jammer inside it would be interesting. The shooting unit would have LOS to the target and, theoretically, could pick up the APS transmissions. That could be programmed into the shell as part of the fuzing data. (Similar to airburst ranging data transfer from the targeting system to the projectile.) The projectile would only have to transmit for a few seconds, at most. Piezo-electric? An internal moving mass? A gyro, spun up by the propellant/rifling? Batteries? As the projectile gets closer, it gets more effective. Well, at jamming, anyway.

Not sure how effective an electronics filled, flying antenna would be at penetrating armor once it got past the APS.

Or, have guided munitions (81mm, 120mm, 155mm) which home in on APS frequencies. THAT would be interesting. ;)

Ken

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dunno.  Likely a reason someone hasn't done that yet anyway I don't know of.  

It has definitely been considered and may even be worked on as we speak. So much milltary development is not heard of until a way down the line from it first being considered as a possible idea let alone a dedicated project.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Eh...relying on artillery as your only counter APS system sounds a little dodgy. What if the tanks don't want to cooperate and move away? It's hard enough to even keep LOS on tanks to direct artillery on them in CMBS. Also, barring a direct hit, I feel like near misses and airburst might not do a whole lot. And if your rounds are hitting the tank...well, you probably don't have to worry about APS anymore.

So, counter APS. Maybe the jammer will be like a precursor round - it flies in front of the APFSDS/missile warhead, jams the APS, and then the munition is safe to hit the target. Of course, I'm sure there are some physics laws which may make a precursor warhead flying faster than a 120mm sabot round a little tricky.

All I know is that the APS and counter APS evolution is going to be interesting.

Edited by Currahee150
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Currahee 150,

 

I suspect the US would identify the T-14's radar from about 150nm using JSTARs as they can detect a cars ignition at long range, let along an active radar. That then gets handed off to MLRS closer to the front with a range of 40-70nm. These things would shower the area with thousands of bomblets which would take out the Armata or fully deplete their APS.

Thats the dilemma for the Russians...In order for their ground forces to survive US surveillance and airpower they need to rely largely on stealth but they seem to be at least in part relying on an active radar for protection which negates stealth. 

As I said at the start the Armata would be good against almost any opponent but the US because the radar that gives it an advantage over almost any other Tank makes it vulnerable specifically to the US's superior C3I.

The way to simulate that in the game as well as the problems they Russian economy will have making them in any numbers would be to make them cost more than twice what an M1 does for a tank that is, even if a lot better than a T-90AM, probably still inferior.

Peter.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Unless they drive all the way into the battle zone with their APS radar blasting away, the US is unlikely to use MRLS in close battlefield conditions.  The JSTAR may be able to detect the unit once active, but at that point they couldn't do much about it in the tactical zone.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Unless they drive all the way into the battle zone with their APS radar blasting away, the US is unlikely to use MRLS in close battlefield conditions.  The JSTAR may be able to detect the unit once active, but at that point they couldn't do much about it in the tactical zone.

Maybe not MLRS, but its smaller brother, HIMARS would be used for sure. Marine RCT's in Afghanistan deployed with a HIMARs battery each, in addition to conventional 155mm artillery. Individual HIMARs rocket shots were used very effectively against fortified compounds and HVTs. If a Marine battalion was in Ukraine with a column of enemy armor bearing down on it, especially one tracked for several nautical miles out by JSTARS (and possibly already subjected to deep strike packages of various sorts) it would then be hit by artillery (including HIMARS) and CAS before they came even in TOW range.

But a countermeasure might be to simply turn the Armata's radar off until there is direct contact with the enemy. The lead tanks might eat the opening salvos at first contact, but then the rest of the tanks could go 'active' at that point.

Interesting discussion though. The classic technology and tactics cycle ever evolves!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Although they are being phased out for a unitary warhead, the Army ATACMS has a range of 160 miles and can scatter 570 bomblets with a CEP of 10-50m. I'd say that getting  all your submunitions in a 200m circle 80%+ of the time could be done in all but the smallest CMBS maps and if I remember correctly with 8m boxes in the game grid an even distrust ion of bomblets would be pretty close to one each if 570 were all live. 

The ATACM has it's origins in the late seventies "Assalt Breaker" programme designed to come up with ways of disrupting and defeating Soviet Armoured formations so it may well be valid today. I know they were used in both Gulf conflicts but don't have any info on what the targets were and how effective they are.

It could well be that the threat alone would force a Russian force to disperse them widely making them less effective and perhaps creating another reason to make them expensive in the game..... You just wouldn't find a lot of them in the one place.

Peter.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So, counter APS. Maybe the jammer will be like a precursor round - it flies in front of the APFSDS/missile warhead, jams the APS, and then the munition is safe to hit the target. Of course, I'm sure there are some physics laws which may make a precursor warhead flying faster than a 120mm sabot round a little tricky.

How difficult would it be? It wouldn't need to fly faster necessarily if it is fired very shortly before but with enough time to set of the APS and allow the main round to hit the target. Something like the RPG-30 is supposed to do.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Seems to me there are some gigantic assumptions underlying the sweeping assertion that JSTARS will be able to listen in on the MMW systems associated with Arena. Why gigantic? For starters, JSTARS uses an active GMTI (Ground Moving Target Indicator) radar and is not an ESM bird. Period. Also, it appears the material I posted on the propagation ranges and atmospheric attenuation windows for MMW radar was either not read or was totally ignored. For the application envisaged, MMW is a weak signal with poor long range propagation characteristics. This is not to say long range MMW radar is impossible, but operating to satellite orbits with one in the 94 GHz range takes 1.6 KW of peak power emitted through a 45' diameter antenna (p. 274). So says MIT in 

• CAMP, MAYHAN, AND O’DONNELL

Wideband Radar for Ballistic Missile Defense and Range-Doppler Imaging of Satellites 

By contrast, the Arena radar has, given the myriad constraints attendant with its installation on a tank already heavily loaded with vetronics and with severe space limits, to be operating at peak power of the order of a few watts, since it isn't designed to pick up targets until they are only tens of meters away. Thus, we're talking ERP which is only a tiny fraction of what, say, the MMW active seeker on the Hellfire 2 Long Bow has. This is for a system good (under parameters I don't know) out to 8 kilometers. The notion of collecting the Arena radar signal, given the atmospheric attenuation plots I've previously presented, from 200 km+ standoff range is well past ludicrous. Nor am I aware the RC-135V/W ELINT collection platform par excellence known as RIVET JOINT can collect such a signal at all.

As for some of the jamming statements made, they evince considerable lack of technical understanding of the issues. There are, though, EXJAM (Expendable Jammer) systems in use by Russia, and the US, at the very least, has been playing with them. Regardless, these are COMJAM systems, not something directed at very short range highly directional radar. 

Regards,

John Kettler

Link to comment
Share on other sites

MJohn,

As ever thanks for the technical stuff.

If I follow you correctly what you are saying is that although the T-14 has an AESA radar based on that developed for the T-50 stealth fighter it would operate at a low power set to limit its effective range for APS use to dozens of meters, which makes sense.

The Russian "Super tank" blurb mentions the range of the radar as being able to detect targets at 100km which is what lead to my "Christmas Tree" comment. I double checked JSTARS  and as ever you are correct in that it isn't specifically equipped for long range radar detection.

None the less I am still pretty convinced that a tank equipped with an active radar would be vulnerable to the US with it's networked C4I, as even if the T-14's radar was short range the US can still in a short enough time rely a detection by a hand launched drone back all the way to a ATACMS unit 200 nm away that could saturate the area effectively.

 I am of the view that the best tank ever is the T-54/55 as it has proved it's worth in conflict after conflict doing what tanks are best and and mostly supposed to do.....killing infantry. The focus on Tank v Tank we often get misses the point. Rather than head to head it is more like Rock, Scissors, Paper...... Tanks beat Infantry, Helicopters beat Tanks, Infantry beat Helicopters. The T-14 will be great against Infantry but may well be more vulnerable to airpower if it rely on radar for detecting for it's APS.

Peter.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think the assumption that the all powerful JSTARs/US airpower will save the day and be able to coordinate a rain of fire on advancing T-14s a little far fetched. Russia may not be on par with the US on a lot of things, but in terms of EW capability, its a different story. I feel if we got deployed to a hot war with Russia or China a whole lot of out tech (or at least command and control/communication stuff) would go out the window. Not saying we'd be screwed, but the ever lasting assumption that US technological superiority will allow waves of A-10s, F-35s, and ATACMs to reduce a Russian tank regiment to few pitiful platoons before it reaches the front is a little optimistic. And lets not forget about Russia's air defense systems. That's whole other bag of worms (not that it is necessarily an insurmountable one).

 

The Russian "Super tank" blurb mentions the range of the radar as being able to detect targets at 100km

 

 

Yeah, and I also dress up in a black costume at night and go fight crime and the Russian mob. Why on earth would you even want that capability? If I want to detect something 100km away, I'll use a dedicated AD radar. Giving that capability to a tank that only has a machine gun for AA defense is silly. Not attacking you, just the Russian claim, which to me sounds a little absurd.

Edited by Currahee150
Link to comment
Share on other sites

None the less I am still pretty convinced that a tank equipped with an active radar would be vulnerable to the US with it's networked C4I, as even if the T-14's radar was short range the US can still in a short enough time rely a detection by a hand launched drone back all the way to a ATACMS unit 200 nm away that could saturate the area effectively.

The US does not have a hand-launched UAV with that capability. The RQ-11 Raven is equipped with optical and infrared cameras, it is not a signals intelligence gathering platform.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...