panzersaurkrautwerfer

It's supposed to be ACU which was pretty bad, made me pine for WW2 tankers (pretty much khaki or dark green there) to paint. I might have skipped the figure except for I was painting it for a friend, and it was a way to make it "modern" vs just another M2A2. ACU is tricky. Even for camo patterns the older US desert was much easier.

Cool. I've got the same weathering kit, I'm just not as adventurous in applying it. I've actually mostly used it as a sort of layer, like I'll do legit drybrushing around the tracks with tamiya's flat earth, then some of the "mud" from the weathering kit as a sort of a semi-drybrush. Then I used to go for a light wash to sort of mute the colors. Doesn't look horrible, but it's like better than nothing vs quite what I want to get down.

Neat. What'd you use for the dust and the cargo straps?

I spent the last bit of my active duty career (or at least the useful part!) in Korea. Some comments: 1. The primary goal of the DPRK leadership is the best off person in the worst country in the world. Milton had it right in that it is "Better to rule in hell than serve in Heaven." Whatever they will do, it is for regime preservation. The biggest danger in terms of chances of the regime being toppled is brought by B-2s flying wingtip to wingtip over Pyongyang, and Third ROK Army blasting a breach through the DMZ with 1st CAV and 25th ID in tow. Pushing the ROK too far, or large scale military action will end the DPRK as we know it. Caveat A. However, where the playing with gasoline comes in is in the immortal words of the respected poets, Tears for Fears, in that Everybody Wants to Rule the World. There's lots of the ruling elements that want to be Kim Il Song. Kim keeps them in line by shooting them with rabid dogs fired from a tank, but there's always a chance one of them gets lucky or Kim gets complacent and we're looking at a total breakdown of order in the DPRK. This is honestly the most dangerous scenario I can think of. Caveat B. If pushed to the point where regime survival is less likely with status quo than success in military conflict the DPRK might roll the dice. This is doubtful however as if the DPRK was that weak, the odds of military success in a conflict against Latvia, let alone the ROK and her allies would be remote. 2. A significant part of being the DPRK requires appearing both dangerous, and crazy enough to be really dangerous while not being too dangerous to live next door to. It's two parts, the first being to made invading the DPRK seem too daunting to even consider, while also never being so dangerous as to overcome ROK and UN resistance to offensive military action. A bit part of this is asymmetrical attacks that are blatantly obviously DPRK origin but to a degree DPRK allies can still ignore the burden of proof. The mine wasn't there to kill ROK military, it was there to show what the DPRK could do. They want sugarplum visions of thousands of NKPA ninja warriors planting mines on every surface of South Korea because the God-Emperor demands it be so! This is something that is not so egregious as to be worth starting a war that will cost thousands (tens of thousands perhaps) of military losses to ROK and Allies, but it's designed to make the idea of starting a war so spooky as to make putting up with another 20 years of DPRK being terrible preferable to open warfare. Same deal why they love nukes, they don't plan on nuking a hole through the DMZ, they just want to make attacking the DPRK so daunting they can more or less do enough shady stuff to keep the Kim family rolling on Johnny Walker and caviar without fear of invasion. In regards to China, they want the DPRK to shut up and behave, and buy Chinese stuff/give China natural resources. They don't want to deal with a full spectrum bloody conventional war on their border pumping thousands if not millions of starved, functionally uneducated North Koreans who will turn into a humanitarian disaster in short order once they cross the border. Status quo, and if not status quo, the least chaotic outcome. So in that regard I would suggest a Chinese intervention would be to establish a buffer zone to keep DPRK refugees south, secure possible high value Chinese investments in the Northern parts of the country. Likely they'll coordinate some level with the ROK-US elements (possibly stipulating how far north the US goes in exchange for keeping intervention limited, while allowing the ROK all the way to the Chinese front line). . That said at least the way I'm reading it, this isn't an incident worth getting too excited about. It's higher tension than usual, but not quite the highway to hell.

The practical tank/IFV anti-air engagement capabilities is pretty low. Against either very oblivious helicopters, or as a last ditch thing (there's a HIND-D at 1 KM coming in hot towards my BP), yeah 25 MM AP. MILES performance should usually be discarded out of hand in terms of measuring weapons performance over crew performance (it's possible to kill a tank with .50 cal fire on the older systems, as it basically locks up the system as it registers a "hit" and evaluates it as kill/nokill, so the tank cannot engage while being peppered with MG fire which then allows for massive silliness in terms of allowing a M113 to "suppress" an MBT and then allow the infantry squad to dismount then plug the tank with a law at the APC's leisure*) I think given the way CMBS handles air defense, it'd be a capability much more potent than the reality that it is a very poor anti-aircraft tool (even if it only worked 1:100 times). The one caveat I'd like to include would be CROWS/high angle MG fire against small UAVs. Things like Ravens are going low, slow, and non-evasive, and especially with optics, or unbuttoned crewmen watching the skies, are not especially stealthy. This doesn't seem like a stretch, and would make the "medium" UAVs that fly a bit higher more useful. *Maybe? I'm going off of one of my former soldier's "back in the day" story. Never tried it with our 2000 era MILES.

No worries man. We are all (or were) on the same team, and honestly you're better off than those light infantry dudes. The amount of "the tank is no longer relevant" they talk is only rivaled by the amount of armor they request when stuff gets real. There's a certain element of "they don't build them like they used to." The older generation Abrams (mostly the M1A1 family, the M1 and M1IP crewmen still in the Army are all Colonels/higher and CSMs now) get pretty rave reviews for reliability. Like there was a lot that could break because simply put, it's an armored vehicle, but they had a reputation for running pretty well. The newer M1A2 SEP V2s are a bit less reliable but it's in part due to a lot of the newer electronic widgets that have been added. Most of those bugs have been worked through by now, but there was a period of teething issues. We had one tank that was nearly returned to the contractor under the lemon clause we had in the contract, but after a few months and some of the second run parts, she came up online and was fully mission capable until I left command. On the other hand, having gotten near Strykers and MRAPs, I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of money we've thrown at them for the quality of equipment received. My second trip to Baghdad started with a shock when I rolled by a compound with a couple of totally carbonized MRAPs. I was of the mind that stuff had gotten real, and it was going to be a rough go. But no, it just wasn't designed with enough cooling for the radio stack, and the fire suppression array wasn't especially well suited to an electrical fire in that area of the vehicle, so some MRAPs would just self ignite in the radio area for no loss in life, but constructive vehicle loss at a few million a pop. Strykers also used to suffer simply because the way their doctrine was written kept mechanics at the Brigade level and no lower, and until recently all work was performed by contractors, and we're just seeing the 91S MOS stand up over the last couple of years. So in that regard the Abrams and the Bradley always felt like a military vehicle designed to be worked on by a collection of 19 year olds led by a 24 year old. The MRAP and Stryker feel sort of like British Leyland products if you get my drift.

Think of it like, tanks are awesome and everything else is stupid and the shaft of the spear. When doing the penetration and sort of high mobility fight armor is the forefront of the fight, as unlike infantry and artillery it can basically fight on the march. So the tippy point of the spear is the armor and mechanized type forces for that fight. If something that can stop the armor (enemy in complex ground, heavy fortification, natural barriers) is found then the other supporting arms (and services) become much more important, but if you're speaking in terms of a combined arms offensive, right at the front of it will be the armor, (with armor supporting tools like SP artillery, tank riders/armored infantry/mechanized infantry etc) which makes the spearhead description apt. Artillery and infantry have major momentum penalties that come with anything but "tactical" type deployments (so tank riders hopping off to clear low level objectives, short fire missions from SPGs). They're not really the spearhead nearly as much as they're the tools that allows the spearhead to overcome obstacles (which makes them just as important as the 1939-1941 experiments in tank heavy-infantry light formations will show).

It might be that if you loaded the troops for bear earlier the AI cross leveled load across soldiers with carrying capacity. Generally crossloading for weapons systems isn't uncommon. I haven't seen it done for 40 MM grenades, but wouldn't rule it out especially if the unit was carrying over its allocation. Re: M320 It's just the modern M203. In terms of performance there's not much difference, loads break action from the side, optics are fancier, grenade is same 40 MM as always. It can be fitted with a stand-alone kit though which is helpful when you're looking to use it for less than lethal means* Re: Scouts Two man scout team isn't exceptionally uncommon these days, but it's distance from other elements is meant to be short. Think of it like I'm going to hold up with the Platoon about halfway up this hill, and we're going to send SGT Smith and PFC Smithe about 200 meters forward to see if the hill is clear like the S2 said it was. Lower profile for looking ahead, but not really intended to go too far was sort of the jist of it from my understanding. *As you had to point your lethal rifle at someone to fire a M203 less than lethal round, which often gave the "we're here to shoot you all dead!" vs the "RETURN TO YOUR HOMES IT IS NOT SAFE HERE" message

Perhaps unrelated, but maybe there should be varying degrees of minefields? Either replicating the fact that this one AS is literally just a layer of dirt over a few dozen mines that are all touching each other, down to it's part of a wide area that's been impacted by FASCAM type mines (so very low chance of a hit, but it makes a much wider area dangerous)*. Paying a low price per AS to turn a whole hilltop into a FASCAM impact area, or the same price to make about 3-4 AS certain explosive doom (and options in the middle) seems like a thing that wouldn't be too bad. *Also that setting would be useful in replicating a battlefield that's been hit with a decent pile of sub-munitions or even just a variety of victim initiated IEDs. It's not safe, but nine times out of ten it's less dangerous.

The ville. There's juicy girls they need to catch new and interesting STDs from/to fall in "love" with, and try to marry after knowing them for two weeks. Like I said, they get away with a lot, just the AFV joyriding doesn't seem as likely.

re: Mech Gato I feel you on the lack of LRF. When I was a brand new 2LT I had to do Bradley gunnery on a vintage M3A2, with sensing rounds and all. Always take words from Stryker dudes with a grain of salt. I mean, take what I say with a grain of salt too, but there's a certain amount of anti-armor feelings from that community. I can distinctly remember hearing how "doomed" armored units were given what the Strykers brought to the fight, and yet, tanks and Brads remain. Also ensure you check your wallet if you ever talk to him again. 19Ds after all (of course I was a scout too so watch out). If it's any consolation, looking at the sort of folks we got back from Master Gunner's course these days, I'm not sure the folks you dealt with would have graduated though.

The US Army term for a dirty bomb would be a "radiological" weapon in that it uses radiation as the primary effect vs a nuclear reaction. This is now reflected in the change from the old NBC designation (nuclear, biological, chemical) to CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear) given the possibility of dealing with dirty bomb contamination.

Donestsk is neither a nation, nor a dirty bomb strictly a nuclear weapon. It also knocks a lot of people off the fence. There's doubtless some Ukrainians who really don't care what happens in the eastern part of their country and the war indirectly affects them at best. You place them under threat of all sorts of radiological funtimes, and their opinions will doubtlessly change for the worse.

I like the armor attack part of Fury. It's a bit condensed in terms of ranges and spacing, but it just looks awesome with real tanks churning real mud, infantry jogging behind and tracers (CGI, but still good) everywhere. The follow on attack to the village was also awesome in capturing both the apocalyptic feeling of 1945, and did well in terms of bypassing the movie stereotype of what the end of the war looked like. Also dead nazis. More movies need dead nazis.

In 1991, there were no losses to enemy action. I believe a few were "mobility" kills from mines and friendly fire, and I think one was badly damaged in a self-destruction type action (the tank got stuck, no recovery assets were available, tank defended itself against Iraqi tank attack, then follow on unit picked up crew, tried to destroy the tank as they couldn't recover it either. They failed to do inflict lasting damage besides triggering the blow out panels. A real recovery team came along and salvaged the tank, and it is likely still in service somewhere in the Army). The only Abrams crew member KIA was lost due to being outside of his hatch when a nearby Iraqi tank cooked off. Any claims of no Abrams being lost result from the 1991 conflict. The loss of Abrams in the 2003 conflict were quite openly admitted and recorded throughout the US campaign in Iraq.

Firstly, you are an infantryman and thus your opinion is invalid. Kidding aside however: The HEAT fusing has been adjusted to be more sensitive. It will now go off when striking pretty much anything more solid than loose mud. Same deal with the MPAT. The next step is the AMP which will allow you to "dial" a target, with either HEAT-type fusing (for killing PCs), a short of shrapnel approach (replacing cannister), airburst, or anti-building sort of thing (basically PD with a slight delay so it bursts after going through the wall. As far as Canister, it's actually pretty good against buildings, it'll knock a huge hole in a wall (the pellets are tungsten), cars, most all things you'd find inside a structure etc. Firing against some dismounts inside a house it'll cheese the target area pretty good. Against a dedicated bunker it won't do much obviously but that's why the OR round was made and is retained for missions that entail taking the Maginot line 2.0 (which is basically a HEAT round with a penetrator tip and short delay so it goes off inside a target building). Machine guns on a tank are actually vastly superior to infantry machine guns. As yeah I want your M240B teams to advance in the face of intense small arms fire for 500 meters with enough ammo to be effective. The M240 on the coaxial mount has something like 8,000-12,000 rounds "ready" depending on the model plus whatever 7.62 is stashed on the tank. The newer CROW type system is also very effective considering the other options for bringing a .50 cal to the fight, and the effects of an accurate stabilized M2 (and having it on a platform that'll shrug off all small arms and most AT systems from the front). So in that regards in terms of pulping infantry, tanks are still pretty good! Also I don't know how your unit worked, but usually we'd have a Company Team concept, so we'd lose four tanks in exchange for an infantry platoon, which gave us the fun stuff a Bradley carried too (sort of the whole point of a company team, Tank heavy teams gain dismounts+some potent anti-infantry weapons, Infantry heavy teams gain a lot more AT capability and a much more resilient fire support system). That was not my experience. The proliferation of heavy cargo hauling trucks and the need for bridges to often support large amounts of traffic has meant most highway bridges, and nearly any that are paved can support a tank. We took tanks through Baghdad with no significant mobility hazards and considering the state of those roads, that's an accomplishment. Further my company in Korea rolled over Korean roads, bridges and all sorts of things and as a rule, anything but the smallest bridges could handle it a tank at a time. The real comment to take away from this is how reliant the Stryker is on "good" terrain, and how much its mobility is threatened by even modest damage to roads (because if you want to talk about mobility problems, boy howdy let me get started on Strykers). Further in terms of bridges and recovery assets, the M88A2 has been in service for some years and is capable of towing a broken M88A2 with an M1A2 attached. Seriously. Planned that way. The new AVLB (M104? Dunno the Wolverine) also is rated to handle M1s. The weight creep has been a simple reality of armor design. I'm sure Sherman supporter folks lose their collective minds when the first M26 rolled up. However the payoff in increased armor protection and firepower was worth it. Same deal with the Abrams, although weight reduction measures are part of the next "block" from my understanding (chiefly reducing the weight of the main gun, and replacing a lot of the wiring with fiber optics and reducing wiring harness redundancy, should save something like 7-10 tons based on whatever estimates you like). It goes more places than the Bradley. True story. The tank is heavier but has better power output by a long shot. Also my limitations on approaches were: 1. Terrain unsuitable to any sort of armored vehicle (swamps) 2. Terrain the Army did not let me use (PROTECT THE WOODPECKER/WHATEVER IS THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ON THIS POST!!!!111oneoneone) 3. Terrain that was inherently a bad idea (wide open, limited hull down positions, had deep gullies that would either force us to expose our flanks, or leave us exposed) I've driven up and down icy roads, across small streams, I've kicked up 30 foot tall rooster tails of mud, crossing terrain that was eating HMMWVs (1025s mind you, not uparmors) like it was the blob. These mobility issues, I know not of what you speak. There's a lot wrong in this statement, so I'll address what's correct: 1. The engine produces a lot of heat. Much of the problems that result from this (setting the Prairie on fire at Yakima Training Center) can be addressed using the heat shield (which is usually made from scrap-metal with some rebar handles, it's not high tech). 2. Gas consumption is a problem, however in terms of operational range and refueling requirements, it has similar duration to the Bradley and other Army equipment. So while it requires more fuel, the resupply frequency is on par with mechanized infantry units. The only engine fire I saw were a result of an electrical short. It was extinguished with no great difficulty*. I have seen tanks operate in the deserts of Eastern WA, NTC, Korea during the "hot as balls I want to die" part of the summer (between monsoons), Kuwait, Iraq and overheating and catching fire was not something I'd heard of. The newer diesel engines still take significantly longer to reach max capacity power output, and involve significantly more moving pieces (our tanks went down much less frequently than the Bradleys and M113s in terms of engine faults). I have no idea what you're talking about with the engine spool up. I don't have the literal times beside me but the greater delay cold start was waiting for the optics to cool (so the thermal would "see") and the computers to run up. If you're doing a "powered" start (like you already have turret/hull power on, just the engine is off it's pretty darn fast (I killed my engine and hid my tank while playing as opfor, the delay from "engine off" to "exploding from the treeline like an angry dinosaur** was negligible) I think she's doing fine. The Abram's infantry murdering abilities are still very capable, and there's a lot of piles of rubble in Baghdad that attest to the ability of the main gun to ruin faces. During the "Thunder Run" and Falluhjah the Abrams functioned very effectively against infantry and building type targets. I sat on the DMZ in Korea more than reasonably confident that: A. If I had to shoot people it was going to be dismounts mostly B. My tanks (and tankers) were more than up to the task. There's this persistent mythology that the optimal tank should be something like the old ARVE, or assault guns. Something like that wouldn't be half bad as an auxiliary. But tanks, and their ability to eat enemy armor for breakfast, and then smoke the crunchies all on the fly is an essential piece of combined arms warfare. Trying to relegate armor to the infantry support role as a primary mission went out of style in the 1940s. As much as you can bring up the fate of British Cruiser tanks, we can also point to how equally the infantry tanks failed***. At the end of the day you resulted in the Main Battle Tank which MUST include both missions, and as I have, and will likely continue to illustrate, the Abrams can smoke armor and dismount alike. *The conversation still went "Sir one of the tanks caught fire" followed by me getting about 50% of the way to losing my mind until it was explained only the short circuted component suffered any fire damage. **It was one of the cooler things I've done in a tank, as the thicket just disintegrated around us and we MILEs a few tanks before anyone knew what was happening. Took a while before we lose all the branches off the deck though. ***The Churchill only really becoming successful because it eventually was outfitted with the same sort of weapons package other "cruiser" type tanks had at the time. As much as the various CS model tanks, or things like the M4 105mm were useful, they remained as specialist tools for a reason.

Not the same. Deepwater Horizon was a lot of "whoa okay something is wrong" then progressing to "crap this is really a lot worse" with the ensuing progression tracked more or less in real time by a free media. Chernobyl was pretty much massive disaster from the start that was simply not discussed at all for days, and then continued to be deeply downplayed well after it was apparent that a significant nuclear incident has occurred. You can look back and see the progression from "whoa man, oil derrick just blew up" to "hey think there's a leak, better go check it out" to "crapcrapcraphugeleakunderwater" and the follow on repercussions. While the degree of spread remained uncertain for some time with Chernobyl, the degree of damage, and certainty of radiation release was known quite up front. Re: Nidan I have no idea. We had no "real*" EFPs in our sector, and no tanks either. You mostly had the EFPs in the Shia dominated parts of the country, and I was in the very Sunni part of Baghdad (who preferred RKG-3s, and mortars/rockets, and then IRAMs, carbombs and RPGs when they could get their hands on them). I was just making a half educated guess on a half remembered story from a coworker. *Our local insurgents had gotten the plans for EFPs, but did not fully wrap their head around the concept. As a result they were using non-ductile metals instead of stuff like copper for the penetrator, so the actual results were lacking to say the least. When the IEDs went off at all. Bluntly our local IED dudes were pretty bad at what they did. Thankfully.

In terms of Chernobyl: The point was not to debate if concealing the event had merit or not. That is a sort of incident that much of the Western World would expect to know at the outset, and its magnitude was global. The fact it was suppressed for as long as it was, and then in many cases understated to a western observer, makes more modest disasters (that the brand new tank of the Soviet Army eats arms if you are not cautious) entirely reasonable to have simply been erased from history. It's not really a strong position to argue from simply because it's very hard for an untrustworthy/has a history of concealing information source to prove an event did not occur (as after all, if someone was lying about it occurring at all, the "evidence" that there's no evidence could be considering equally indicative of the event not occurring, or a good cover up!). Just because the Russians deny having a secret base in the Urals where they are keeping Elvis hostage does not mean they have that base. On the other hand, it does make lesser, more "believable" denied events seem more probable at least at a glance. In terms of T-72s It's not strictly a M829A1 thing. The carousel did not seem to protect from many penetrations, regardless of KE or chemical energy (such as HEAT) type rounds. If something gets into the interior of thetank it becomes a pretty high risk for a major ammunition fire as the knocked out tanks in the Kuwaiti desert, burned out shells in Syria and other places where T-72s have been shot at seem to attest to. In regards to M1s I honestly can't remember. Someone I used to work with told the story, but the highlight was talking about the "oh crap" factor of a small inferno going on behind the ammunition bay doors, followed by driving the tank back to the FOB (where it was doubtless flown out of country and spent several months* being worked on before returning to the force). Just guessing, might have EFP someone had set up in hopes of getting a tank (you have to "aim" EFPs, so to hit the turret you'd need to angle it right or mount it higher up). *I imagine if there'd be a war in which every Abrams counted the turn around time would have been much faster. As the case was most of the heavily battle damaged vehicles got rebuilt at the pace usually reserved for DMV employees.

In any organization I was in, the amount of fired that Bradley crew would be would not be measurable by science. The American Soldier gets away with a lot, but I've seen much less silly stuff done with pretty drastic results to one's career (the amount of phone calls I got when one of my tanks was spotted with the commander sitting on the edge of the cupola while the tank was in motion was impressive). . The tank just looks like it's someone who sucks at turning. Terrain looks like Benning or Knox, likely a basic training (or god forbid tank full of 2LTs) crew.

Among other topics. I mean it took some days to even announce there was a problem at Chernobyl (to the west at least). Given these sort of delays and deceptive tactics it reduces the credibility of "official" reporting and leaves this weird grey space in which there's suppressed truths* and believable lies cohabiting. Which is why I hedge my bets on autoloader arm feeding as that's the sort of thing that isn't totally out there, and could have happened (especially had it been on a small scale), but also could be a total BS story made up to encourage new gunners to respect the inherent danger to sitting beside a cannon. In terms of escaping a BMP or BMD, that's still problematic. They don't have a good record of crew survival after being struck regardless of how kickable the door is. In regards to T-72, I am dubious to if it's just a matter of loose HE rounds. The T-72 wrecks I had the pleasure of being told to stay away from all had their turrets popped (if not separate from the tank, the turret had been knocked off the turret ring and now rested on the deck). A sympathetic detonation of loose rounds certainly might cause some of those results, but there's enough flipping turrets to lead to questions if all T-72 operators stow excess HE rounds inside the turret. I'm partial to the armored bustle stowage myself. There's been some total ammo cookoffs from Abrams stuck by IEDs that the crew walked away from**. Unsold on autoloaders until we start talking about larger rounds (the sheer size of the various 140 MM experimental rounds rule out conventional manual loading). *Not to imply moon bases or lost cosmonaut level suppression, but three or four loaded arms could easily fall through the cracks **Which should not be taken as a good chance to show times it did result in a tank loss anyway. Simply that usually catastrophic ammo fires on most tanks almost always mean "tank explodes everyone dies" while on the Abrams there's a high chance of crew survival and respectable chance the tank might be salvaged and restored to action with depot level work.

There's two flavors of TRPs IRL: 1. Unit internal. These are usually used for direct fire planning. Instead of trying to figure out which white building Blue 3 is reporting contact by, ahead of the battle we all agreed the white building is TRP 2. They're also useful for maintaining sectors of fire (I only shoot the tanks between TRP 1, the windmill, and TRP 2, the white house). 2. Pre-planned fires. These are less common. It's not just the grid, it's the grid being entered into the joint fires network, all the "math" done in advance etc. In practice for Company type missions we'd usually get allocated 1-2 artillery targets per phase of the operation. Sometimes you'd get more, sometimes you'd get less, but generally there's a finite limit to how many "targets" you can put into the system (not exactly a hardware problem, as much as a time and resource management issue). I find the price quite reasonable for the reasons previously mentioned.

Concur with Ian, I've only seen it referenced on this forum, and in no western media outlets worthy of note. Additionally interesting in terms of mentioning western media as a monolithic organization. On the other hand, enjoy a fun lesson in the dangerous of "intercepted" phone calls (and the importance of good casting) https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/12/propaganda-watch-listen-to-two-russians-badly-impersonate-cia-spies-to-pin-mh17-on-u-s/?utm_content=bufferaf772&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

The simple reality is that sitting inside of any Soviet armored vehicle will frequently result in the crew being ingested into the exhaust system. The autoloaded arm story is at the very least, a very persistent urban legend. I'm willing to concede it might have never happened, or it was the corruption of an actual event (as getting caught in the recoil of the main gun is quite the possibility anyway, it could have been an incident along those lines that got "telephone" gamed into an autoloader problem). The degree of secrecy, and often of active coverups historically committed by the Soviet Union also gives legs to these sorts of stories both in terms of providing a reasonable reason why we haven't heard of folks being fired out of a T-64, and why an urban legend may continue to exist in a grey area. It's equally reasonable in the absence of open press that the Soviet Union covered up a small number of injuries/deaths due to mechanical malfunction, or that the historical cover up of similar incidences merely gives a total fabrication enough legs to keep running after 30 years. Regardless of arms being fed into things or not, Soviet-Russian vehicles are often an ergonomic nightmare, and make crew safety compromises that western forces would not condone. Again for a totally not made up/really interesting story, see the unified German state's attempts to bring BMPs up to code, and the ultimate failure of same effort, the ability to escape a burning BMP, the BMD-1's service in Afghanistan, and carousel style autoloaders. While it's not as interesting as autoloaded arms and such, at the core of the story there is the nugget of fact that inside of an armored vehicle can be quite hazardous, and in the case of many Soviet-Russian platforms, it might be additionally dangerous.

Very doubtful. The shootdown of MH17 did enough damage to Russian efforts in Eastern Ukraine. Detonating a for real dirty bomb would bring the sort of consequences as to make whatever "progress" the Russians had made in dismembering the Ukraine moot. Also it has very limited military value (it's not like it's a bigger bomb, it just has follow-on area denial aspects and a higher incidence of effectively "died of wounds, 20 years later"). In terms of blackmail it's just...not really enough. I mean if you irradiated part of Kiev or something I can't imagine the war ending until either full-on Russian intervention (in support of nuclear terrorists because that won't totally and utterly make Russia a North Korea level pariah state), or a field of Russian insurgent skulls on spikes outside of the ashes of Donbass. It's worth remembering while Russian reporting is fairly devoid of truth, Ukrainian reporting should also be triple checked (especially when asserting fairly out there information). This is especially true with "big" claims.

Honestly, T-64 is pretty much off my radar. They were out of frontline service long before I was required to know much at all about Russian tanks, and it's not like there's many T-64s out there in the hands of third world nations. In terms of arm eating behavior or lack therefore of, there's plenty of safety hazards in most armored vehicles, it just happens Soviet designed ones are especially infamous for them (see the fate of the DDR BMPs when taken over by the unified German government).