I am so tickled by the hubris necessary to use an actual jet engine in your tank. Maybe I’m wrong and everyone does it, but to me it seems like the kind of thing you do if you can’t imagine ever having to hide the tank, you build a giant bridge-cracker with a jet engine inside. It seems like signature reduction in a peer conflict was not something the designers ever thought about when sketching up their Big Gun Imperialism Mobile.
So don’t quote me on this, but I think soviet T-80 also uses a turbine engine (for S P E E D). It also has some kinda angled exhaust, so it doesn’t quite deafen you when you see it frontally, but it roars something fierce when you’re to the side of it
It offers a lot of power in a smaller and lighter package than an equivalent diesel engine, but it tells you something about how much of an advantage that really winds up being when the later Abramses all added batteries to shore up the biggest weakness of the turbine engine (large fuel consumption at idle) and the Russians went back to diesel engines with the T-90.
Both the Americans and the Soviets went to a jet turbine on their MBT at around the same time, but the Russians decided it wasn’t worth it with the next generation and went back to diesel.
in a war that has eaten more than 6,000 Russian tanks and at least 700 Ukrainian ones
Uhh, I have trouble taking those numbers seriously
Maybe if the first number includes tanks of Russian manufacture in Ukrainian service
“Anti-tank missiles seem to be the biggest killers of tanks”
Peak investigative journalism right there 👌
