HAB: Can You Identify This Tank Attachment?

[Sea Skimmer]

Here's the pic hosted by me. And those look like they could be individual Starstreaks but in dual launchers.

Unfortunately the Radar dish is a fake from what I can make out, so this is likely a deception plan for a vehicle move to make tracking assets by Sat./air more difficult.

Both the "radar" and missiles are without question dummies. When was the last time you saw a sealed box launcher, with a nose cone poking out? That simply makes no sense for a real weapon.

[Sea Skimmer]

In any case, although Olifant main battle tanks were rare, and armored recovery vehicles based on that derivative even rarer, I have seen photographs of one such vehicle. It does make sense that whatever such units did exist would have been deployed to the Angola battlefields for most of the late '80s, and that securtiy regarding their movement would have been high (it was routine for the Apartheid governments to attempt to conceal their actual armored strength, and in South Africa's case, to make especial efforts to extradite Olifants damaged in the field).

From what I've read and heard, would seem few if any tanks went into Angola. The Centurion was simply too slow and short ranged to be suitable, (the Olifants added armor wouldn't help that). In addition the 90mm guns on Eland armored cars combine with anti tank missiles could cope with basically any armor, though a bunch of T-62's would be a real bitch. However a T-34 would be a far more likely opponent.

As for production, I've seen it suggested that a total of 250 Olifants where produced (that's what the CIA fact book thinks anyway) but someone else I was talking too said that was more likely the total number of Centurion chassis imported, and that the true number of in-service Olifant's was probably never much past the double digits.

[Rob Wilson]

Here's the pic hosted by me. And those look like they could be individual Starstreaks but in dual launchers.

Unfortunately the Radar dish is a fake from what I can make out, so this is likely a deception plan for a vehicle move to make tracking assets by Sat./air more difficult.

Both the "radar" and missiles are without question dummies. When was the last time you saw a sealed box launcher, with a nose cone poking out? That simply makes no sense for a real weapon.

The single soldier-carried version of Starstreak was a box launcher in some concept pics.

On a different note, there's discussion of Iron-clad Construction at the bottom of this page, if anyone in the HAB want to lend any knowledge on the subject.

[Sea Skimmer]

The single soldier-carried version of Starstreak was a box launcher in some concept pics.

But the point of the box (protect the missile) is largely defeated if the highly vulnerable nose is exposed. The nose bulge was likely added to the dummy, so that people could tell what the fake was suppose to be.

[Rob Wilson]

The single soldier-carried version of Starstreak was a box launcher in some concept pics.

But the point of the box (protect the missile) is largely defeated if the highly vulnerable nose is exposed. The nose bulge was likely added to the dummy, so that people could tell what the fake was suppose to be.

There's no question it's a fake, I'm just saying that the only SAM I knew of that had a single box launcher small enough was Starstreak (and the decoys are obviously two sets of 2 single boxes put together).

Having the nose sticking out was overegging the pudding to fool Sat./Aerial photo's I would think.

[Axis Kast]

From what I've read and heard, would seem few if any tanks went into Angola. The Centurion was simply too slow and short ranged to be suitable, (the Olifants added armor wouldn't help that). In addition the 90mm guns on Eland armored cars combine with anti tank missiles could cope with basically any armor, though a bunch of T-62's would be a real bitch. However a T-34 would be a far more likely opponent.

As for production, I've seen it suggested that a total of 250 Olifants where produced (that's what the CIA fact book thinks anyway) but someone else I was talking too said that was more likely the total number of Centurion chassis imported, and that the true number of in-service Olifant's was probably never much past the double digits.

You are correct in that the SADF deployed its main battle tanks only sparingly, and although a total of 224 ‘Centurion’ main battle tanks were acquired from Britain beginning in 1953, it is probable that less than forty of the vehicles were present on any actual battlefield at any given moment in time. Both Cuban and South African records make much, for instance, of the loss of three tanks during Operation Hooper. Of course, the Apartheid government was plagued always by a lack of spare equipment – even the routine maintenance necessary to effectively deploy any armored unit were difficult, and squadrons would often “hand-off” vehicles as they rotated on and off the front. South Africans barely operated in anything more impressive than just over brigade strength anyway, and a few thousand men was a large operation.

South African troops used relatively few anti-tank missiles; most of their success against tanks was through the deployment of armored cars or infantry fighting vehicles. The Eland, as you’ve suggested, takes much of the credit, its low-pressure 90mm gun accounting for dozens of kills.

The Olifant Mk1A – the last variant used before heavier fighting in the Angolan theater of war was complete – was South Africa’s best attempt at a total rebuild. Whereas earlier versions had mounted a 20pdr cannon, the L7 105mm gun was introduced. A V-12 diesel engine rounded out complete replacement of the power pack, and the vehicle could travel some 500km at a top speed of 45km/h. Additional armor has been added to the Mk1B and Mk2 variants, but this consists largely of side-skirts, shaping, and additional bolt-on sheets under the hull to reduce mine penetration. Rumors of “composite” are unfounded. The Centurion could manage 205km/h at a speed of just over 43km/h. As for armor, the Centurion sported better; the Olifant Mk1A carried 118mm maximum; the Centurion had 152mm. It wasn’t that the Olifant wasn’t sufficiently equipped – it was that South Africa lacked an experience and resource pool worthy of its full exploitation.

[Vympel]

The problem with IR Spotlights is that they make you a shining beacon for anyone with a TI sight (like NATO tanks ) also they are so over-the-top as a defense it's ludicrous, especially when the addition of a filter to the front of a MIRA makes them utterly useless (unless they hit the exact spectrum bandwidth for the IR light from the back of the missile ). Smoke does the job perfectly well.

Think of the Soviets as the troubled trader at a marketplace. His items don't last as long as others, don't have the tech specs of others, but he needs to sell them to make any money. So he adds glitz and glamour to them in order to help them sell. Got a surplus of IR spotlights that are near useless on the modern battlefield? Got some smoke grenades? Then why not make your item look really special by adding one to the other and calling it an upgrade?

As to the grenades... Tank smoke grenades actually burn dirtier than the Infantry versions (they pack in more, but want it to cover a larger area faster so they ensure a large portion of the powder agent doesn't start to burn until it's actaully a fair distance from the grenade - therefore there is a significantly larger amount of particulates and the smoke screen tends to be much thicker over a larger volume. I'm guessing the soviets just put some small pieces of metallic foil in the grenade and claimed it would reflect the Laser away... unfortunately to make that fit in (if that's what they did) they have to remove some of the Smoke agent, plus the amount of foil when dispersed has to follow the N Squared law so the larger the volume it is dispersed in the larger the gaps between the foil - meaning the chances of a Laser striking foil is small and the real deterrent (smoke) is actually thinner. A literal case of trying to fool buyers with 'Smoke and Mirrors'.

I'm hoping that isn't what they've done, but you never know.

I'd heard of anti-jam filters for some wire-guided SACLOS missiles, but I didn't know much about them- what little I know of Shtora is it transmits "spurious signal into the guidance circuitry of the incoming missile through continuously generated coded pulsed infra-red jamming signals" (JA&A)- whether it's capable of overcoming jamming or hitting the specturm of the flare on the back of the missile, I don't know. Also don't know to much about the smoke grenades

EDIT: From Armor Magazine, May-June 1998

"The electro-optical jammers, designated TshU1-7, introduce a spurious signal over the 0.7-2.5 Em band, into the guidance circuitry of the incoming ATGM through the use of a coded pulse IR jamming signal ... According to the manufacturer, the system reduces the hit probability by the following factors: TOW and Dragon, Maverick, Hellfire and Copperhead laser seeker systems by 4-5:1; MILAN and HOT by 3:1; Artillery and tank projectiles fired from systems with laser rangefinders by 3:1. There is no reference to success against the Russian AT-4 and AT-5 ..." (no need to continue, save to say there's a video of a BMP-2s AT-5 being foiled by Shtora, so this is not in question any more).

Anyway, unless I've misunderstood, it seems to have some frequency agility, right? Regardless, I prefer Arena, as it makes the tank less vulnerable to detection and has a greater chance of success against a wider variety of munitions, being a hard-kill.

What a brilliant idea, turn on a torch in a dark field and let everyone with eye's shoot at you. No wonder they have to add gimmicks to their tanks to make them sell. Hopefully they will get some TI sights on their tanks soonest.

Nothing like that- it's only the domestic service tanks that don't have TI- the Russians have a law where all defense equipment used by their own forces must be equipped with 100% domestic gear (so as to avoid dependence on foreign suppliers)- unfortunately, Russia doesn't have a large infrastructure to produce thermal imagers yet- so the ones they do make are very expensive. Export equipment doesn't have this problem- e.g. the Indian T-90S tanks all have French TI (ESSA, IIRC) with a greater acquisition range than even those on the M1A2, according to some- there's a joint Belarus-French venture that normally supplies all the TI for export equipment (Bolomo-Peleng Catherine-E TI, IIRC), but it doesn't fit under Russian domestic gear requirements.

[Vympel]

A subscription to JDW? Ouch, that's gotta burn a hole in the pocket. That wouldn't get you the information you want to know- JDW is kinda like "surprise, here's something you care about!" every couple of weeks (I'm not a subscriber, but I'm registered, so I get the 'blurbs')- Jane's Armor and Artillery would be better, but it's more expensive.

[Rob Wilson]

I'd heard of anti-jam filters for some wire-guided SACLOS missiles, but I didn't know much about them- what little I know of Shtora is it transmits "spurious signal into the guidance circuitry of the incoming missile through continuously generated coded pulsed infra-red jamming signals" (JA&A)- whether it's capable of overcoming jamming or hitting the specturm of the flare on the back of the missile, I don't know. Also don't know to much about the smoke grenades

EDIT: From Armor Magazine, May-June 1998

"The electro-optical jammers, designated TshU1-7, introduce a spurious signal over the 0.7-2.5 Em band, into the guidance circuitry of the incoming ATGM through the use of a coded pulse IR jamming signal ... According to the manufacturer, the system reduces the hit probability by the following factors: TOW and Dragon, Maverick, Hellfire and Copperhead laser seeker systems by 4-5:1; MILAN and HOT by 3:1; Artillery and tank projectiles fired from systems with laser rangefinders by 3:1. There is no reference to success against the Russian AT-4 and AT-5 ..." (no need to continue, save to say there's a video of a BMP-2s AT-5 being foiled by Shtora, so this is not in question any more).

Anyway, unless I've misunderstood, it seems to have some frequency agility, right? Regardless, I prefer Arena, as it makes the tank less vulnerable to detection and has a greater chance of success against a wider variety of munitions, being a hard-kill.

That's not frequency agility, that's blanketing those specific frequency ranges. But the spectrum for the IR beacon on the back of the MILAN is easily changed by the manufacturer/armourer by fitting a different flare and a filter to the MIRA making the Spotlights obsolete instantly, plus small changes to the control software in the Main unit can obviate the blanket optical effect. In short this would have been effective for about a year against Western Nations and however long it took customer nations to afford the necessary upgrades.

What a brilliant idea, turn on a torch in a dark field and let everyone with eye's shoot at you. No wonder they have to add gimmicks to their tanks to make them sell. Hopefully they will get some TI sights on their tanks soonest.

Nothing like that- it's only the domestic service tanks that don't have TI- the Russians have a law where all defense equipment used by their own forces must be equipped with 100% domestic gear (so as to avoid dependence on foreign suppliers)- unfortunately, Russia doesn't have a large infrastructure to produce thermal imagers yet- so the ones they do make are very expensive. Export equipment doesn't have this problem- e.g. the Indian T-90S tanks all have French TI (ESSA, IIRC) with a greater acquisition range than even those on the M1A2, according to some- there's a joint Belarus-French venture that normally supplies all the TI for export equipment (Bolomo-Peleng Catherine-E TI, IIRC), but it doesn't fit under Russian domestic gear requirements.

You know I've always wondered about that, every modern export version of Russain Tanks I've seen has TI sights on them as standard apparently, so why they deliberately hampered their own has puzzled me no end - especially when they have an open-market now. I thought the 'Home-grown only' mentality would have gone along with the USSR itself.

[Rob Wilson]

A subscription to JDW? Ouch, that's gotta burn a hole in the pocket. That wouldn't get you the information you want to know- JDW is kinda like "surprise, here's something you care about!" every couple of weeks (I'm not a subscriber, but I'm registered, so I get the 'blurbs')- Jane's Armor and Artillery would be better, but it's more expensive.

Up until 2000 I had a Full Jane's subscription but I let it go while I was paying my medical bills, and never resarted it. I'll look at what they have on offer now and see what I want.

[Axis Kast]

What is a 'TI' sight?

Are those IR spotlights on most modern (and all Russian) tanks a form of missile defense? I always thought they were for night fighting.

[Rob Wilson]

What is a 'TI' sight?

Thermal Imaging. Passive only, works by seeing all the thermal gradients as visible wavelengths. So cuts straight through most Smokescreens (with a little distortion), but blinded by White Phospherous. Think of Predators vision in the film, but in Greyscale.

Basically the whiter something appears, the hotter it is. So spotting Engines and just fired barrels is easy, as is an active IR source - like a spotlight.

[Rob Wilson]

Are those IR spotlights on most modern (and all Russian) tanks a form of missile defense? I always thought they were for night fighting.

They were developed for night-fighting years ago (60's), but some the Soviets, needing something to use as a gimmick, noticed they could fuck over Optically guided Missiles.

Basically, the first generation SACLOS missile used the engine flare, and the hot exhaust port after burn out, to track the missile in flight using an IR scope. You have to know where the missile is, to give it meaningful corrections.

By flooding the spectrum with an IR Spotlight, suddenly the missile tracking system thinks the whole screen area is the missile and loses all hope of successfully guiding it (the missiels go into huge spirals until they hit the ground).

However by introducing a small IR beacon/flare of a known frequency to the rear of the Missile and adding Filters to the IR scope Lenses, that particular trick is completely obviated.

Still saying you have it is a nice Marketing gimmick and you can still include the successful tests in the marketing pamphlets... just make no mention of the fact it's been made completely obselete. You'll also note the Marketing of them made it look like Soviet produced missiles were unaffected so they could get more sales of them out the door.

[Sea Skimmer]

Basically the whiter something appears, the hotter it is. So spotting Engines and just fired barrels is easy, as is an active IR source - like a spotlight.

Which is if anyone's ever wondered, why some tanks are listed as having or having had added a "thermal sleeve" to the gun barrel. Its basically insulation, so your hot barrel isn't a bright bacon on thermal. You can hide the rest of the tank using an advanced camo net, most of which now incorporate materials and or coatings to help mask thermal signatures.

[Vympel]

Thermal imaging is also what gave the M1 Abrams it's most important advantage over the Iraqi tanks in Desert Storm- they could fight at night and hit targets up to 3,000m away, in day or night, perfect in those desert conditions, while the Iraqi tanks could only even discern a target at night, with their searchlight activated ("hi, kill me now!"), at a little over 1,000m.

In a WW3 scenario, it wouldn't have been as massive an advantage, due to engagement ranges.

Are those IR spotlights on most modern (and all Russian) tanks a form of missile defense? I always thought they were for night fighting.

I think the Russian tanks left over from Soviet development cycles are the only ones that retain IR spotlights- I don't think I've seen them on any Western tank since the original M60A3. Even by Russian standards they're quite obsolete- newer image intensification sights are offered that do away with the searchlight completely and have greater acquisition range than the old ones with the searchlight.

Rob is definitely onto something- the Indian's didn't bother buying any component of Shtora when they bought the T-90S; not even the laser warning recievers and the smoke grenades; I hear they intend to fit domestically produced laser warners.

Which is if anyone's ever wondered, why some tanks are listed as having or having had added a "thermal sleeve" to the gun barrel. Its basically insulation, so your hot barrel isn't a bright bacon on thermal. You can hide the rest of the tank using an advanced camo net, most of which now incorporate materials and or coatings to help mask thermal signatures.

The latest tank paint job on the latest variants of the T-80, T-90 and a few of the AFVs also incorporate thermal signature disruption features.

Basically the whiter something appears, the hotter it is. So spotting Engines and just fired barrels is easy, as is an active IR source - like a spotlight.

IIRC, isn't there a toggle for the gunner to switch it so it's vice versa (i.e. black instead of white for hot)? Can't remember where I heard/saw that ...

[Rob Wilson]

The latest tank paint job on the latest variants of the T-80, T-90 and a few of the AFVs also incorporate thermal signature disruption features.

The only problem there is any wear or tear to the paint work and you've lost all that money spent. Most modern vehicles tend to use heat redistribution internally for main compartments/engines, so the heat is well out the back, and the outer layer of the Armour is normally a composite because it holds and reflects heat less than metal does. All things that normal wear and tear cannot quickly remove.

Basically the whiter something appears, the hotter it is. So spotting Engines and just fired barrels is easy, as is an active IR source - like a spotlight.

IIRC, isn't there a toggle for the gunner to switch it so it's vice versa (i.e. black instead of white for hot)? Can't remember where I heard/saw that ...

There might be, if there's a lot of ambient heat, switching the Tones over might bring the shape into sharper relief. Not sure though.

[Sea Skimmer]

There might be, if there's a lot of ambient heat, switching the Tones over might bring the shape into sharper relief. Not sure though.

I'm fairly sure that can be done. In addition some thermal imagers don't go off grayscale at all and use shades of blue, the M2 Bradley used such a sight for example. Though I don't know if that was continued with the A3 variant.

[Rob Wilson]

There might be, if there's a lot of ambient heat, switching the Tones over might bring the shape into sharper relief. Not sure though.

I'm fairly sure that can be done. In addition some thermal imagers don't go off grayscale at all and use shades of blue, the M2 Bradley used such a sight for example. Though I don't know if that was continued with the A3 variant.

I should have been more acurate and said Graded mono-colour, but grey-ascale got the idea over well enough I hope. And the only Tank scope I've looked through was a Challenger and it used Graded whites for heat.