tank questions

It seems that there are some people here who have served in tanks, or know quite much of them.

http://www.inetres.com/gp/military/cv/US_tank_doctrine.html

Thats a semi correct site. At least gives a general idea of American tankers and saves me time of typing

thanks Cezar, the '2.machine gunner/radio', which machinegun operates?

Originally posted by xristar thanks Cezar, the '2.machine gunner/radio', which machinegun operates?

Originally posted by Cezar Originally posted by babyblue most tanks today DON'T have the fifth crew i.e: radio operator/machine gunner. That's more common in WW2 tanks. � Actually the Germans first appearead with a 5 crew tank. It was a better solution for WWII in terms of job assignement for tank crewmembers. Modern tanks have much better equipment to do some of the jobs people did back then. It seems that the planned T-95 will have only 2 crewmen.

The T-95 is a 3 man tank with no one in the turret. The americans are designing a 2 man tank but I dont think the funding will be there for it in the end for production.
    

As has been stated most modern MBTs have 4 members and MBTs with autoloaders have 3.

The Soviets introduced the autoloader and 3 man MBT crews due to a shortage of qualified personel. Although(or maybe because) the Soviet army was huge it had serious problems holding onto experienced troops. Most conscripts did their 2 year service then got out of the military. The autoloader was supposed to reduce the manpower requirements of tank forces by 25% while still retaining the same capabilities. Like aghart says tho it never really worked and the tank commander often ended up acting as loader.

Edited by DukeC - 30-Jul-2006 at 18:35

@Aghart
The nature of conflict has evolved though, what you say is 100% true for real and large combat situation, but today we are in a new era of warfare. It is better for tanks to require less logistic and to have better communication devices.

Into a real war of a large scale, it's hard to tell how tanks would act. A lot of them would be probably destroyed by guided missiles, artillery fires and anything designed to destroy tanks (and most powerful countries develloped a lot of weapons specificaly to destroy tanks).

I think, personnaly, in a large war like WWII, that it's better to have a large production capacity and research centers. "No matter what you thought before the war, new weapons systems will soon assert themselves with superior or unexpected performances" says the highly contested James Dunnigan (but who has a very strong point here) in WWI it was tanks that changed the war (first designed as a support to infantry they bacme the main weapon), in WWII it was aircraft carriers (first designed as a support to battlecruisers they became the main weapon).


That is, of course, if a new war broke out between major powers. And considering how bound we are to each others it would damages the world economy too much for any major country to proceed to a "casus belli" so we're really arming ourselves to fight martians. We'll most likely stick to banging 3rd world countries and terrorists for a while. This is why weapons like the Typhoon or F-22 are so contested, they were designed to counter a soviet plane that was never built... and the use of air-superiority planes of that power against third world nations may not be obvious.


Edited by Exarchus - 31-Jul-2006 at 09:31

The problems with the auto loader were worked out by the T-80 and T-84.

Actually most Western tanks were desined in the 1970's, when the auto loadr argument held true. All tanks designed in the mi to late 80's have auto loaders, no longer even a question.