Arms Development Proposal to Commonwealth Armed Forces
Midwest Armor Workshop's MBT-80 Mk. 0 "Schwarzkopf"- Commonwealth AFV
The CAD's nice.
Way better than anything I can do, that's for certain. And as someone who actually did look into the effort required to build a competitive tank, I appreciate some of the effort that took.
But I really can't agree with any of the design decisions that went into this proposal.
The design is too small.
Mass matters in AFV design.
Both for armor alone, and for the structural strength to mount weapons and additional systems. I dont think it's a coincidence that the new Armata is 55 tons, only 7 tons less than a Leopard 2A7, even with an unmanned turret saving a significant amount of weight.
I don't see how you're going to put a full-fat high velocity 120mm smoothbore on a sub-40 ton hull.
33-37 tons is where most modern IFVs seem to start in the 2010s.
The 1985-vintage T-72B tank which is being used as a benchmark here is 44-45 tons, and is the design of an experienced weapons design bureau with all the optimizations thereof, and even then the compromises remain a cause of complaint.
Consider the weight of a selection of other AFVs.
- The Boxer MRAV wheeled IFV is 36-38 tons combat weight.
- The Puma tracked IFV is 31-41 tons
- The Rheinmetall Lynx tracked IFV starts at 35 tons and can go as high as 50 tons depending on variant and armor configuration.
- The Leopard 1 MBT, which was infamous for being very lightly armored but fast and heavily armed, had a mass of 40-42 tons.
- The Indonesian light/medium tank project MMWT, designed for jungle/island territory, is 32-33 tons with a rifled 105mm.
- The Chinese ZQT-15 light tank, which is designed for fire support in mountainous country, is 33-36 tons, also with a rifled 105mm.
Commonwealth foundational myth even makes it clear that tank weight is not a dealbreaker in disgoverned America's shitty infrastructure. The Abrams, at 66.8 metric tons for the current model, is still the heaviest MBT I am aware of in service. But Hellfire Burns spent the last two decades running around this country with a battalion-strength unit of armor, composed of Abrams and Strykers, and assaulted across the river into the Vic lines around Leamington.
The defenses are inadequate.
550-650mm RHAe on the turret is inadequate in anything hoping to go up against enemy armor, or even well-equipped infantry. The 125mm smoothbore on Sovbloc tanks and the 120mm smoothbore on Western tanks will murder it, and that's assuming neither side has adopted larger calibers (130mm for the West, 152mm for the Russian Empire).
Then there's the missile threat.
The
PG-7VR tandem HEAT round for the RPG-7(yes, that old thing), was designed in the Soviet Union in 1988, has a reported penetration of 600mm RHA with ERA, and 750mm RHA without ERA. That's the basic man-toted AT launcher out of the ex-Soviet bloc, and in the hands of an infantryman it will one-way the glacis of the MBT-80 as described at 100m.
Something a decade more advanced, like the
FGM-84 Javelin, which entered service in 1996, and which is distributed from Ukraine to Georgia to the Middle East, has penetration of 600mm RHAe+ behind ERA. Or 750mm+ without ERA. AND can do top-attack.
And a range of 2-5-4.5km.
Those are the manportable missiles carried by infantry squads.
That doesn't include the actual seriousface ATGMs like the Kornet-M fire and forget anti-tank missile(entered service 1998, license produced by Saudi Arabia and Iran), which have penetration of 1300mm RHAe+ after ERA and a range of 8km, and which we see in the hands of Hamas and Hezbollah IRL, either mounted on trucks or just carried by infantry.
Let alone TOW. Or Spike.
Add to this the lack of APS and passive jammers on the design post-ATGM proliferation, and they'll just end up as expensive targets.
Too heavily armored to be cheap, too lightly armored to resist actual anti-tank fire.
The cost is too high.
Not just the production cost of individual tank units. The opportunity cost of setting up a design bureau for domestic-build tanks out of our skilled manpower base, who could be involved in other portions of our industrialization or rearmament. The intelligence cost of determining what the current armor threats are like, so that you are designing for the right threats.
The investment cost in setting up production infrastructure, all the way from manufacturing the right steel and hull composites and gun stabilizers to establishing the power infrastructure for said factory to design and production of the ammunition to maintaining quality control; locally made ammunition in Iraqi T72s was allegedly a major problem for Iraqi forces in Desert Storm.
The experience does not exist in the Commonwealth.
Experience in not just building the right hulls, but in building subsystems and integrating them at a reasonable cost in time or resources.
Even today, despite a stockpile in excess of eight thousand tanks stockpiled in the desert out in California, the United States keeps the Lima Tank Plant in Lima, Ohio running, upgrading and remanufacturing existing tanks in order to maintain manufacturing experience in building and integrating MBTs. Because its hard to reacquire once lost.
Turkey, which license-builds its own F-16s, is still not capable of building a robust enough diesel to power it's indigenous Altay MBT project, and its attempts at importing a design for local licensed manufacturing, or just full units have stalled since relations cooled with much of the West. It's currently trying to source them from South Korea.
Essentially, committing to this would have us designing an AFV hewing to design principles that have already been proven to be obsolete at the end of the Cold War, using resources we can better spend elsewhere, in order to build an original AFV which is inferior to any product on the market and hideously vulnerable to the very threats its supposed to be facing.
Meantime our enemy will be license-building T90s, a well documented design which are basically refined late model T72s.
Or importing T-14 Armatas.
Or doing both, with a spearhead of Armatas in elite units supported by mass-produced T90s.
No Third World country that isn't North Korea builds it's own tanks.
Most Second World/middle-income countries don't either, unless they're someplace like Iran and literally had to fight a major war under an arms embargo.
Why would we be designing and manufacturing our own tanks?
This.
Its worth remembering that even as a pure value proposition, a new US Abrams is still less than 20% the cost of a new fourth generation fighter, and thus relatively cheap as military aid to a
pawn proxy ally goes. Not as cheap as a planeload of ATGMs, but much flashier.
And because tanks have a much longer shelflife than aircraft (seriously, Russia got back 30x working WW2 era T-34s from Laos IRL in 2019) you can buy a refurbed tank off the shelf for a steal if you are dealing with someone favorably disposed to you. The Great German Tank Fire Sale post-Cold War had the Germans selling off Leopard A4s for less than a million dollars apiece IIRC to friends and potential friends.
For instance, the Indonesians bought 103x Leopard 2A4s, 41x Marder 1A3 IFVs, 11x engineering vehicles, logistical support, an initial stockpile of practice and service ammunition, and an undisclosed amount of technological transfer for
216 million euros.
In 2013.
Before that, in 2007 Germany sold the Chileans 140x used Leopard 2A4s + training vehicles + training from German units + logistics support. The price tag?
125 million dollars.
Refurbishment was half the value of that contract.
Even if we can't import them whole for some reason despite securing the Mississipi being essential for survival, importing them in kits and assembling them onsite remains an option.
