Ambivalent
Junior Member
Here is what you are missing Lion. A tank like the M-1 and Leopard can depress their main guns further than Russian style tanks. This allows an Abrams crew to mask their turret better than the crew of a T-72/80/98 or T-99 can. Western tanks can approach the crest of a hill upslope and aim the gun over the crest while keeping the rest of the turret and the hull glacis hidden and protected from shot. The crews of Russian or Russian style tanks cannot lower their barrels enough to take as full advantage of such cover as an Abrams can.
To achieve similar hull and turret protection, T-80 style tank crews must dig a fighting position.
The Russian style autoloader is failure prone. Keep in mind we operate a good many modern Russian made tanks. I have seen and photographed them at my work. The autoloaders fail in excess of 20% of the time, while hand loading is essentially fool proof. Hand loading 120 mm ammo can be done at a rate of one round every four seconds, that is the minimum standard. A hot crew in battle can halve the time to load for a short period of time. The Russian style autoloader requires 22 rounds to be placed in a carousel inside the turret, where it is incredibly vulnerable to a hit. Western tanks put all ammo in the bustle behind the crew, and the crew is protected by a titanium blast door that must be opened to remove each round. Blow off panels on top of the ammo bustle protect the crew from direct hits to that spot, so an ammo explosion does not destroy the tank or harm the crew. With the Russian auto loader a hit means a deadly ammo explosion.
The last fault with the auto loader is that it's achingly slow. It requires 6-7 seconds to load a round, and during this time the turret may not traverse nor may the gun be elevated, meaning during the loading cycle of 6-7 seconds the next target may not be aimed at. Compare this to a western gun with manual loading where the turret is in motion and the barrel raised or lowered at the next target as the gun is loaded.
The US Army has a version of the Stryker in testing with a 120 mm gun using the French auto loader. In our estimation it is unreliable. Manual loading in combat is faster and more reliable, which is why the US Army has never used an autoloader.
The US Army resists going to any caliber above 120 mm as the weight of the shell would require an autoloader and the extra size would cut down on the number of rounds carried, to the point with some proposed calibers that the tank could not carry enough reloads to be useful in combat. The current 120 mm round with our best propellant load will defeat any known armor, including that of the T-80 as well as Kactus and Kontact.
