We’ve already covered why Russia’s T-14 Armata tank isn’t all that. Here’s a somewhat more balanced look from David Willey of The Tank Museum:
The first ten minutes covers the basics of Soviet tank design (the philosophy of favoring firepower over just about everything else, and how political rivalries led to various Soviet tank designs). Then he goes into the details of the Armata.
Much of the Armata comes from the abandoned T-95 project. “Although the T14 is looked at as new, it actually relies on systems and ideas from some much earlier projects.”
“The smoothbore 2A821M 125mm cannon is an upgrade from the weapon on the T-90. Russian sources claim its muzzle energy is far greater compared to the Rheinmetall 120mm gun.”
The unmanned turret means no need for a fume extractor.
Theoretical fire rate of 10-12 rounds a minute. I suspect this is highly optimistic and the fire rate is probably the slower one round every ten seconds we already covered.
“The new Vacuum One armor-piercing, fin-stabilized, discarding-sabot round is fitted with a 90cm [900mm] long rod penetrator. That’s unusually long. It is said to be capable of penetrating one meter of rolled homogeneous armor at about 2000 meters.” That is quite long. The rod penetrator on the U.S. M829 APFSDS round is 684mm long. Western consensus seems to be that the Vacuum One and Vacuum Two penetrator cores are made of depleted uranium or tungsten.
“The A853 engine was a copy of a German x-shaped engine from the war years…the A853 was not however a reliable product, and from all reports it seems to have had major issues.”
When working, it theoretically has twice the horsepower of a T-72 engine and capable of reaching 56 miles and hour with a range of 500 kilometers.
“The T14 has new 70 centimeter diameter road wheels, and an electronically adjustable suspension system on at least the first two road wheels, and possibly the last ones, and [that’s] called an active suspension system but is fitted over a main torsion bar suspension. It also has rubber-blocked tracks.”
The Armata’s sealed crew compartment will have air conditioning, which was introduced in Russian tanks with the T-90M in 2016. (Starting with M1A2 SEPv2, the Abrams has cooling, but it’s mainly geared toward cooling the electronics.)
Digital screens with remote cameras.
“The gunner can see his target, but he can also choose through those screens a relevant ammunition type.”
“The chassis and turret are equipped with a ‘Malachit’ dual explosive reactive armor system, and on the front sides and the top there’s stealth coatings.” Assuming the ERA is actually there and not fake, as on so many captured and destroyed Russian tanks in Ukraine.
“The active protection system has a radar to detect and tract incoming anti-tank munitions it states a maximum speed of incoming interceptable target is 1700 meters a second, or Mach 5.” Let’s just say I have grave doubts that it actually works. The Pentagon went with Israel’s Trophy active protection system over Raytheon’s homegrown Quick Kill system for M1A2 SEPv3, and Raytheon is good at developing reliable, high tech weapons. Unlike Russia.
“The top of the vehicle is still vulnerable to top attack munitions.” So much for defense against Javelin. Which first entered service in 1996.
“However, on closer inspection a number of these technologies and features are not fitted to some of the vehicles. Some you can see there’s covers where the technology or that piece of equipment should be on others is fitted for, but not with.” And that was on parade demonstration vehicles before sanctions. Odds that Russia would have enough parts to fully equip high tech parts to all Armatas supposedly in Ukraine would appear to be slim.
Though reusing a lot of features from the abandoned T-95 project, “the new T14 tank is a radical departure in sense of its scale, its layout, its design features and technology from that era of evolutionary Soviet-designed vehicles.”
“Originally intended to replace all Russian army tanks, the Russian military had planned to acquire about 2,300 T-14s between 2015 and 2020…but by 2018, delays were announced until at least 2025. Subsequently announcements indicated the apparent cancellation of the main production run.” In between it announced it was going to build 100 of them, though that number may have included other armored vehicles using the same platform.
“The [Russian] Deputy Minister of Defense said, quote, there is currently no need to mass produce the Armata when it’s older predecessors, namely the latest variants of the T-72, remain effective against American, German, and French counterparts.” Here the Deputy Minister of Defense is engaged in a time-honored Russian rhetorical device known as “lying his ass off.”
“The gradual tightening of sanctions, and then with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the problem of sourcing the essential microelectronics has come to the fore. Russian industry has been critically dependent on foreign microelectronics and associated technologies. These are no longer available due to sanctions.”
“The sights from France and other components are no longer available.”
“Other issues come into play that affect the wider Russian defense industries. One is the perennial Russian problem of corruption. Since 2011, a staggering 72,000 officials have appeared before the course on corruption charges.”
“The mythic way many Russian military systems and products have been promoted and sold has met a crushing reality in Ukraine.”
Even though there may only be 20 test vehicles available, there is an expectation they will make appearance in the battle. A British ministry defense statement said, and I quote, any T-14 deployment is likely to be a high-risk decision for Russia. 11 years in development, the program has been dogged with delays reduction in planned Fleet size and reports of manufacturing problems. If Russia deploys a T-14 it will likely primarily be for propaganda purposes. Production is probably only in the low tens, while commanders are unlikely to
trust the vehicle in combat.
So even a balanced, objective analysis of the T-14 Armata isn’t particularly optimistic about its chances in combat.
Even though I think the Armata is hot garbage, the concept of a purely hull-focused crew compartment is interesting. It’s very Israeli in the sense that they and I are of the opinion a tanks #1 job is crew survivability. As crews have more and more tactical and technical proficiency foisted on them in an increasingly digital battlefield, the need to make sure they can survive high kinetic environments increases logarithmicly.
Proficient crews will become more and more like aircraft personnel in terms of training expense and invaluable battlefield experience. putting them all together in the most protected part of a vehicle makes sense so long as the crew compartment is sufficiently armored (the armatas isn’t from what I’ve heard). Furthermore, if your TC isn’t going to be sticking his head out with binoculars because of threat environment or better sensor fusion on his display or doctrine, then who cares if he doesn’t and isn’t in the highest spot of ‘the ship’ anymore.
I can see some of the logic and reasoning behind the armada, just the execution is sloppy.
I remain highly, highly dubious of the value proposition presented by the entire T-14 complex.
Post-Soviet weapons systems have mostly been vaporware, because they started shortchanging the military-industrial complex back in the 1980s, followed by even worse damage done during the early post-Soviet era. They simply don’t have the base, in either production skills or engineering to be doing the things they are trying for. Look at the recent decision to prosecute the Kinzhal team for “treason”, when the real traitors are the ones in the Kremlin that cut budgets and then promoted nothing but yes-men to running everything, who looted the already-insufficient budgets for building their expensive yachts in European boatyards. If you were to be able to do a forensic accounting of the Russian defense budget, hoo-boy… You’d have some fun. Most of the money that should have gone to training troops, building infrastructure, and new weapons is sitting in some yacht harbor or European chalet/manorial estate. The oligarchy made out like bandits, and meanwhile, they promoted the most “profitable” (to them…) options, like that freakin’ X-engine that nobody’s been able to make work.
Sadly, a lot of commoner Russians who got not a damn thing out of all the corruption are the ones paying the price, as well as their victims in Ukraine and elsewhere. One rather hopes the revolution comes and they get a chance to get their own back from the oligarchs, but I don’t see that happening.
The T-14 is a bunch of notional good ideas assembled in a loose formation, and sent to drive forward onto the battlefield. There are things in that design that haven’t been pulled off by anyone, as of yet, and I don’t see the Russians being the first to succeed at any of it. That damn unmanned turret? Yikes… Can you imagine being the guy sitting there, going up against a manned turret tank with one of those that “doesn’t quite work”?
The T-14 reminds me of the Gerald R. Ford class of carriers; whole bunch of unproven new tech built in that all has to work, right off the bat. You don’t do that, and expect success. You do things incrementally, one major improvement at a time. The idea that you’re going to increase the length of the penetrator to damn near a meter, integrate that into a new loading system, *and* put that into an unmanned turret that’s inaccessible to the crew without them dismounting…? The details of crew access into the turret compartment are unclear, but everything I’ve seen says “Fix anything in turret, requires dismount…”
The T-14’s first exposure to real combat ain’t likely to be loads of fun for the crews, which will almost certainly be composed entirely of even more “officer seed corn” and specialists from the factory, who’re going to get slaughtered, creating even more damn problems for the Russians.
Root problem here is a severe mismatch between vision and actual capabilities; they think they’re still technologic giants, bestriding the Earth, making things that nobody else can. Raw performative fact, based on observed performance? They’re barely capable of getting out of their own way; I strongly suspect that a lot of their nuclear arsenal hasn’t been maintained, and that a lot of that capability has been pissed away and into yachts somewhere on the world’s oceans. Not inside Russia, that’s for damn sure.
I’ve no idea what will transpire in the coming weeks of this war, but I’m gonna be highly surprised if there’s even a modicum of professionalism and success demonstrated by the haphazard and half-ass Russian military. Same-same with Iran, who may actually wind up with Afghan warlords at the gates of Tehran, which’d be richly poetic justice. Not to mention, highly funny.
Couple of things vis-a-vis the crew-in-hull and crew-maintenance deals…
One, the sensors are nowhere near good enough, yet, to substitute for a commander in nametape defilade at the highest point of the vehicle. The human eye/mind needs to be fully present in order to really get the full Coup d’œil that an effective tank commander has to have. The sensors may be getting there, but they’re not there yet. I will wager that situational awareness for the poor bastards in the T-14 will be horrid, and that maintenance and the general poor reliability of Russian tech in general is going to leave them blind to both threats and possibilities. I’d also lay you long odds that commanders who want to stay alive are probably going to be laying atop those turrets with intercoms, talking to the gunners and drivers inside the vehicle…
The small-crew maintenance thing is a huge factor; the Russians really should have created their tank units along the lines of aviation, where there are extensive ground-crew supporting elements to keep the birds in the air. Relying on tank crews to do the maintenance is just stupid, and probably why so many tanks wind up abandoned for the Ukrainians to capture or drop grenades into the hatches of… From what I’ve read and seen reported, many of those abandoned Russian tanks are left where they are because of really stupid stuff like minor mechanical breakdowns and injured crew. You don’t have any freakin’ slack in the system, with a three-man crew; one guy’s down, your tank’s essentially inoperable. From what I’ve been told, many of the T-72 series tanks have issues with the gunner’s position being taken over by the commander; he can’t fire easily from his station, and his sights really suck, but the gunner’s position has really lousy situational awareness… The tanks are simply not designed to be manned effectively by less than the full three-man crew.
I think we’re coming up on an era where the ground vehicles are going to wind up massively different than what we’re used to… One thing that will certainly affect everything is the burgeoning “UAV” deal, and I think what will eventually happen is that the entire concept of an armed and manned vehicle will go the way of the dodo. The weapons will be on unmanned platforms, and the command center will basically be a heavily armored and entirely unarmed capsule that you have rolling around from cover to cover while the UAV assets do both observation and firing the weapons. Tanks with main guns? Going away; you’ll see some cute little wheeled or flying thing with what amounts to a satchel charge replacing them. Why worry about hauling around a heavy-ass kinetic energy weapon when you can deliver 20 or 40 pounds of high explosive with an expendable unmanned platform…?
War is at an inflection point, right now. I don’t think we’re very far off from having a lot of the fighting done by unmanned platforms that are operated from well behind the battle lines, and you may even see gamification of the whole proposition to the point wherein you have nation-states or polities within them selling “screen time” on the weapons platforms to interested outsiders in the name of playing games… Imagine being able to be able to sell control of a live tank on a live battlefield to someone who enjoys playing World of Tanks…?
Which also opens up a whole realm of other potential problems, but, hey… It’s the 21st Century, what the hell were you hoping for? Rationality?
Still waiting for the Armada to debut in Ukraine. I’m sure Yuri and his mates from the pub look forward to some field-testing exercises with Putin’s latest and best mobile target system. Saint Javelin anticipates fun times.
As mentioned in Lazerpig’s eviscerating video on T-14, this tank was build around the engine. They’ve yet managed to make it reliable enough to trust it not break down during any maneuvering. They cannot swap in any other engine and expect it to work. Hell, in one of the early Victory Parade practice, one of them broke down and have to be towed.
“The A853 engine was a copy of a German x-shaped engine from the war years…the A853 was not however a reliable product, and from all reports it seems to have had major issues.”
Entirely false.
The SGP Sla 16 engine under development by Simmering in 1944 was an air cooled (actually oil cooled), push rod, naturally aspirated diesel engine. The ChTZ 12H360 engine is a water cooled, SOHC, two stage turbocharged diesel engine. The only similarity is the X layout of the cylinder banks.
The ChTZ 12H360 engine is 725 kg lighter than the MTU 873-Ka501 engine in the Leopard 2 with the same power output. Its weight is within a few kilograms of the Honeywell AGT 1500 turbine in the M1 series tanks. The ChTZ 12H360 and the Honeywell AGT 1500 are also very close in volume. Both are substantially smaller than the MTU 873-Ka501.
The Honeywell AGT 1500 has developed a good reputation for reliability and serviceability, albeit at the cost of extreme fuel consumption. The MTU 873-Ka501 is now a legacy engine as MTU has developed the 880 series diesels to correct the shortcoming of the 870 series.
Not certain the authors of this video really understand armored vehicle components and manufacture. A bunch of liberal arts majors with no engineering knowledge.
I ain’t certain that anyone, to include the Russians (outside the various design teams…) themselves, has a good handle on what the hell the design background on that engine is.
I did a deep dive on that a few months back, due to insomnia. With extensive use of Google Translate, and a bunch of sites in Russia that are no longer visible from my part of the internet, I’d say that the whole issue is opaque as hell. Even apparently well-informed Russians were arguing the points and presenting contradictory evidence. It’s like the arguments over Kalishnikov copying the StG44, but even more esoteric and pumped-up on steroids.
There were X-format diesels under evaluation in the Soviet Union as far back as the 1970s; one was a competitor for the T80 engine. They’ve been trying to make these things work for a long, long time. It appears that the idea first came over from captured German technology represented by the German engine mentioned above, but that the Soviets did extensive work on it.
The current series of engines are derivatives, and what it seems to look like is that they attempted to solve the massive heat problems that plagued that air-cooled German engine by doing about what Subaru did to the air-cooled VW/Porsche flat-4 engine, which was wrapping it all in a water jacket.
This has apparently not worked out, and it hasn’t been working out for a fairly long time. There are signs that the engine factory in question tried making this engine format work for industrial use in pipeline pumping stations, but that didn’t work out, either.
I would suspect that the root problems go back to the very thing that makes this engine desirable: The compact size. You’ve got too much heat in too little space, and designing the cooling system is beyond Russian capacity, and from evidence, just about everyone’s. There are reasons that the Napier Deltic format failed, and why every other “interesting” engine format winds up having massive problems, and that boils down to thermodynamics and heat transfer. One of the sites I found when I looked this up showed a diagram of the cooling system for the latest iteration of the design, and it looked about like you’d expect, horribly complex and with lots and lots of fussy seals required all over the place.
If you’ve ever worked on a Subaru engine, with its VW-like replaceable cylinders and the water jackets? You get an idea of what this engine looks like in that regard. I suspect that a lot of the Russian problems stem from two major issues: Materials technology for the seals, and their utter inability to do really high-quality serial production of anything. This is an engine of highly refined design, needing to be produced by someone like Rolls-Royce or MTU.
And, I believe that they’d write the design off as uneconomical, too expensive to produce for the supposed benefit.
I suspect that this is another one of those cases of Russian design tripping over the realities of Russian industrial capability and the production realities of the Russian economy and workforce. They can probably build a few of these in the lab, onesie-twosie, but serial production in an actual Russian industrial plant, under their normal conditions? I think that’s where the problem is. It’s like they’re a small-time engine tuner who’s used to beefing up people’s hobby motors suddenly being jumped up to building F1 racing motors for a major racing team’s campaign year. They can do well enough at that lower level of production precision, but this is several bridges too far.
There are reasons why all these exotic engine layouts have generally failed on the market; they all have issues, and most of those issues have come down to cooling, which is a hell of a lot harder than many people even suspect.
Korean K2 Black Panther block 1 uses MTU MT883 Ka-500. For Block 2 and future production they’re using essentially a reverse engineered MT883 Ka-500 (albeit, long stroke instead of short stroke) produce by Hyundai Doosan Infracore. It’s a bit heavier, but they don’t have to pay MTU licensing fee, and more importantly, they can export Block-2 tank to anyone they feel like, starting with Poland.
Conventional engine formats are conventional for a good damn reason: They work, they’re easy to make work, and they’re easy to work on. There are lots of reasons why the in-line six cylinder design became ubiquitous, along with the V-6 and the V-8.
One of the things I’ve heard again and again about the X-format is that they’re prone to hot spots and lubrication failures at the bottoms of the cylinders, much like the upside-down V-engines in aviation were.
Engine design ain’t simple; you have to be aware of the limitations inherent to the design, and what are inherent to your industrial plant/workforce. I think the T-14 engine is probably several bridges too far for the current state of the Russian engine industry, but we shall see.
Like a lot of Russian military stuff, the theory falls down on execution. I had a guy working in my unit years back, early 2000s. He’d actually been in the tail-end of the Soviet military, there at the transition between Soviet Union and Russian Federation. His take on the situation with that army, having served in both theirs and ours? “Nothing they tell you happens, nothing they promise gets to you… They tell you you’ll eat on the train? You won’t… They tell you you’ll get water? You won’t… American Army? If it’s in the order, it happens, down to the last detail… I’ve never gone hungry or thirsty in this army; I had to steal to eat in the Red Army…”
Great theories, lousy execution. That’ll be the epitaph for the Soviets and Russians both.
Ours will be something else, I’m sure. Maybe “But… They did so well on the tests…”
Diesel engines are almost adiabatic. Why diesel cars and trucks generate inadequate passenger compartment heat in the wintertime.
The actual advantages of water cooling a diesel engine are 1) maintaining uniform clearances amongst the combustion facing components at the high BMEPs which occur during torque rise and 2) minimizing valve seat wear under those same high BMEPs.
It is fairly clear that the ChTZ engineers have devoted considerable thought to these issues and delivered a reasonable solution. Time will tell.
Even though I think the Armata is hot garbage, the concept of a purely hull-focused crew compartment is interesting. It’s very Israeli in the sense that they and I are of the opinion a tanks #1 job is crew survivability. As crews have more and more tactical and technical proficiency foisted on them in an increasingly digital battlefield, the need to make sure they can survive high kinetic environments increases logarithmicly.
Proficient crews will become more and more like aircraft personnel in terms of training expense and invaluable battlefield experience. putting them all together in the most protected part of a vehicle makes sense so long as the crew compartment is sufficiently armored (the armatas isn’t from what I’ve heard). Furthermore, if your TC isn’t going to be sticking his head out with binoculars because of threat environment or better sensor fusion on his display or doctrine, then who cares if he doesn’t and isn’t in the highest spot of ‘the ship’ anymore.
I can see some of the logic and reasoning behind the armada, just the execution is sloppy.
Back in 2018, some Abrams crewmen were quite skeptical you could keep the tank running with the smaller crew. “All I do is maintain tanks … and these tanks still go down.”
I remain highly, highly dubious of the value proposition presented by the entire T-14 complex.
Post-Soviet weapons systems have mostly been vaporware, because they started shortchanging the military-industrial complex back in the 1980s, followed by even worse damage done during the early post-Soviet era. They simply don’t have the base, in either production skills or engineering to be doing the things they are trying for. Look at the recent decision to prosecute the Kinzhal team for “treason”, when the real traitors are the ones in the Kremlin that cut budgets and then promoted nothing but yes-men to running everything, who looted the already-insufficient budgets for building their expensive yachts in European boatyards. If you were to be able to do a forensic accounting of the Russian defense budget, hoo-boy… You’d have some fun. Most of the money that should have gone to training troops, building infrastructure, and new weapons is sitting in some yacht harbor or European chalet/manorial estate. The oligarchy made out like bandits, and meanwhile, they promoted the most “profitable” (to them…) options, like that freakin’ X-engine that nobody’s been able to make work.
Sadly, a lot of commoner Russians who got not a damn thing out of all the corruption are the ones paying the price, as well as their victims in Ukraine and elsewhere. One rather hopes the revolution comes and they get a chance to get their own back from the oligarchs, but I don’t see that happening.
The T-14 is a bunch of notional good ideas assembled in a loose formation, and sent to drive forward onto the battlefield. There are things in that design that haven’t been pulled off by anyone, as of yet, and I don’t see the Russians being the first to succeed at any of it. That damn unmanned turret? Yikes… Can you imagine being the guy sitting there, going up against a manned turret tank with one of those that “doesn’t quite work”?
The T-14 reminds me of the Gerald R. Ford class of carriers; whole bunch of unproven new tech built in that all has to work, right off the bat. You don’t do that, and expect success. You do things incrementally, one major improvement at a time. The idea that you’re going to increase the length of the penetrator to damn near a meter, integrate that into a new loading system, *and* put that into an unmanned turret that’s inaccessible to the crew without them dismounting…? The details of crew access into the turret compartment are unclear, but everything I’ve seen says “Fix anything in turret, requires dismount…”
The T-14’s first exposure to real combat ain’t likely to be loads of fun for the crews, which will almost certainly be composed entirely of even more “officer seed corn” and specialists from the factory, who’re going to get slaughtered, creating even more damn problems for the Russians.
Root problem here is a severe mismatch between vision and actual capabilities; they think they’re still technologic giants, bestriding the Earth, making things that nobody else can. Raw performative fact, based on observed performance? They’re barely capable of getting out of their own way; I strongly suspect that a lot of their nuclear arsenal hasn’t been maintained, and that a lot of that capability has been pissed away and into yachts somewhere on the world’s oceans. Not inside Russia, that’s for damn sure.
I’ve no idea what will transpire in the coming weeks of this war, but I’m gonna be highly surprised if there’s even a modicum of professionalism and success demonstrated by the haphazard and half-ass Russian military. Same-same with Iran, who may actually wind up with Afghan warlords at the gates of Tehran, which’d be richly poetic justice. Not to mention, highly funny.
Couple of things vis-a-vis the crew-in-hull and crew-maintenance deals…
One, the sensors are nowhere near good enough, yet, to substitute for a commander in nametape defilade at the highest point of the vehicle. The human eye/mind needs to be fully present in order to really get the full Coup d’œil that an effective tank commander has to have. The sensors may be getting there, but they’re not there yet. I will wager that situational awareness for the poor bastards in the T-14 will be horrid, and that maintenance and the general poor reliability of Russian tech in general is going to leave them blind to both threats and possibilities. I’d also lay you long odds that commanders who want to stay alive are probably going to be laying atop those turrets with intercoms, talking to the gunners and drivers inside the vehicle…
The small-crew maintenance thing is a huge factor; the Russians really should have created their tank units along the lines of aviation, where there are extensive ground-crew supporting elements to keep the birds in the air. Relying on tank crews to do the maintenance is just stupid, and probably why so many tanks wind up abandoned for the Ukrainians to capture or drop grenades into the hatches of… From what I’ve read and seen reported, many of those abandoned Russian tanks are left where they are because of really stupid stuff like minor mechanical breakdowns and injured crew. You don’t have any freakin’ slack in the system, with a three-man crew; one guy’s down, your tank’s essentially inoperable. From what I’ve been told, many of the T-72 series tanks have issues with the gunner’s position being taken over by the commander; he can’t fire easily from his station, and his sights really suck, but the gunner’s position has really lousy situational awareness… The tanks are simply not designed to be manned effectively by less than the full three-man crew.
I think we’re coming up on an era where the ground vehicles are going to wind up massively different than what we’re used to… One thing that will certainly affect everything is the burgeoning “UAV” deal, and I think what will eventually happen is that the entire concept of an armed and manned vehicle will go the way of the dodo. The weapons will be on unmanned platforms, and the command center will basically be a heavily armored and entirely unarmed capsule that you have rolling around from cover to cover while the UAV assets do both observation and firing the weapons. Tanks with main guns? Going away; you’ll see some cute little wheeled or flying thing with what amounts to a satchel charge replacing them. Why worry about hauling around a heavy-ass kinetic energy weapon when you can deliver 20 or 40 pounds of high explosive with an expendable unmanned platform…?
War is at an inflection point, right now. I don’t think we’re very far off from having a lot of the fighting done by unmanned platforms that are operated from well behind the battle lines, and you may even see gamification of the whole proposition to the point wherein you have nation-states or polities within them selling “screen time” on the weapons platforms to interested outsiders in the name of playing games… Imagine being able to be able to sell control of a live tank on a live battlefield to someone who enjoys playing World of Tanks…?
Which also opens up a whole realm of other potential problems, but, hey… It’s the 21st Century, what the hell were you hoping for? Rationality?
So it’s got “stealth coatings” but also has an active radar blasting away all the time looking for incoming antitank missiles?
Okay then.
@FM,
It’s Russian magic…
Just go with it. I expect we’ll be putting radar-seeking heads on top-attack munitions before long.
Still waiting for the Armada to debut in Ukraine. I’m sure Yuri and his mates from the pub look forward to some field-testing exercises with Putin’s latest and best mobile target system. Saint Javelin anticipates fun times.
As mentioned in Lazerpig’s eviscerating video on T-14, this tank was build around the engine. They’ve yet managed to make it reliable enough to trust it not break down during any maneuvering. They cannot swap in any other engine and expect it to work. Hell, in one of the early Victory Parade practice, one of them broke down and have to be towed.
“The A853 engine was a copy of a German x-shaped engine from the war years…the A853 was not however a reliable product, and from all reports it seems to have had major issues.”
Entirely false.
The SGP Sla 16 engine under development by Simmering in 1944 was an air cooled (actually oil cooled), push rod, naturally aspirated diesel engine. The ChTZ 12H360 engine is a water cooled, SOHC, two stage turbocharged diesel engine. The only similarity is the X layout of the cylinder banks.
The ChTZ 12H360 engine is 725 kg lighter than the MTU 873-Ka501 engine in the Leopard 2 with the same power output. Its weight is within a few kilograms of the Honeywell AGT 1500 turbine in the M1 series tanks. The ChTZ 12H360 and the Honeywell AGT 1500 are also very close in volume. Both are substantially smaller than the MTU 873-Ka501.
The Honeywell AGT 1500 has developed a good reputation for reliability and serviceability, albeit at the cost of extreme fuel consumption. The MTU 873-Ka501 is now a legacy engine as MTU has developed the 880 series diesels to correct the shortcoming of the 870 series.
Not certain the authors of this video really understand armored vehicle components and manufacture. A bunch of liberal arts majors with no engineering knowledge.
I ain’t certain that anyone, to include the Russians (outside the various design teams…) themselves, has a good handle on what the hell the design background on that engine is.
I did a deep dive on that a few months back, due to insomnia. With extensive use of Google Translate, and a bunch of sites in Russia that are no longer visible from my part of the internet, I’d say that the whole issue is opaque as hell. Even apparently well-informed Russians were arguing the points and presenting contradictory evidence. It’s like the arguments over Kalishnikov copying the StG44, but even more esoteric and pumped-up on steroids.
There were X-format diesels under evaluation in the Soviet Union as far back as the 1970s; one was a competitor for the T80 engine. They’ve been trying to make these things work for a long, long time. It appears that the idea first came over from captured German technology represented by the German engine mentioned above, but that the Soviets did extensive work on it.
The current series of engines are derivatives, and what it seems to look like is that they attempted to solve the massive heat problems that plagued that air-cooled German engine by doing about what Subaru did to the air-cooled VW/Porsche flat-4 engine, which was wrapping it all in a water jacket.
This has apparently not worked out, and it hasn’t been working out for a fairly long time. There are signs that the engine factory in question tried making this engine format work for industrial use in pipeline pumping stations, but that didn’t work out, either.
I would suspect that the root problems go back to the very thing that makes this engine desirable: The compact size. You’ve got too much heat in too little space, and designing the cooling system is beyond Russian capacity, and from evidence, just about everyone’s. There are reasons that the Napier Deltic format failed, and why every other “interesting” engine format winds up having massive problems, and that boils down to thermodynamics and heat transfer. One of the sites I found when I looked this up showed a diagram of the cooling system for the latest iteration of the design, and it looked about like you’d expect, horribly complex and with lots and lots of fussy seals required all over the place.
If you’ve ever worked on a Subaru engine, with its VW-like replaceable cylinders and the water jackets? You get an idea of what this engine looks like in that regard. I suspect that a lot of the Russian problems stem from two major issues: Materials technology for the seals, and their utter inability to do really high-quality serial production of anything. This is an engine of highly refined design, needing to be produced by someone like Rolls-Royce or MTU.
And, I believe that they’d write the design off as uneconomical, too expensive to produce for the supposed benefit.
I suspect that this is another one of those cases of Russian design tripping over the realities of Russian industrial capability and the production realities of the Russian economy and workforce. They can probably build a few of these in the lab, onesie-twosie, but serial production in an actual Russian industrial plant, under their normal conditions? I think that’s where the problem is. It’s like they’re a small-time engine tuner who’s used to beefing up people’s hobby motors suddenly being jumped up to building F1 racing motors for a major racing team’s campaign year. They can do well enough at that lower level of production precision, but this is several bridges too far.
There are reasons why all these exotic engine layouts have generally failed on the market; they all have issues, and most of those issues have come down to cooling, which is a hell of a lot harder than many people even suspect.
Korean K2 Black Panther block 1 uses MTU MT883 Ka-500. For Block 2 and future production they’re using essentially a reverse engineered MT883 Ka-500 (albeit, long stroke instead of short stroke) produce by Hyundai Doosan Infracore. It’s a bit heavier, but they don’t have to pay MTU licensing fee, and more importantly, they can export Block-2 tank to anyone they feel like, starting with Poland.
Conventional engine formats are conventional for a good damn reason: They work, they’re easy to make work, and they’re easy to work on. There are lots of reasons why the in-line six cylinder design became ubiquitous, along with the V-6 and the V-8.
One of the things I’ve heard again and again about the X-format is that they’re prone to hot spots and lubrication failures at the bottoms of the cylinders, much like the upside-down V-engines in aviation were.
Engine design ain’t simple; you have to be aware of the limitations inherent to the design, and what are inherent to your industrial plant/workforce. I think the T-14 engine is probably several bridges too far for the current state of the Russian engine industry, but we shall see.
Like a lot of Russian military stuff, the theory falls down on execution. I had a guy working in my unit years back, early 2000s. He’d actually been in the tail-end of the Soviet military, there at the transition between Soviet Union and Russian Federation. His take on the situation with that army, having served in both theirs and ours? “Nothing they tell you happens, nothing they promise gets to you… They tell you you’ll eat on the train? You won’t… They tell you you’ll get water? You won’t… American Army? If it’s in the order, it happens, down to the last detail… I’ve never gone hungry or thirsty in this army; I had to steal to eat in the Red Army…”
Great theories, lousy execution. That’ll be the epitaph for the Soviets and Russians both.
Ours will be something else, I’m sure. Maybe “But… They did so well on the tests…”
Diesel engines are almost adiabatic. Why diesel cars and trucks generate inadequate passenger compartment heat in the wintertime.
The actual advantages of water cooling a diesel engine are 1) maintaining uniform clearances amongst the combustion facing components at the high BMEPs which occur during torque rise and 2) minimizing valve seat wear under those same high BMEPs.
It is fairly clear that the ChTZ engineers have devoted considerable thought to these issues and delivered a reasonable solution. Time will tell.