Does one tend to be faster than the other?
What are the advantages to autoloaders aside from saving the recruitment, training and wage of 1 guy,
There’s a doctrinal debate in tank design, represented by the different turret designs seen between Russia/SU and most Western designs.
Russian/Soviet turrets tend to be little more than small domes, just big enough to fit the main gun and necessary crew to run it. Almost all the ammo is stored in the hull, infamously in several designs inside of “honeycombed” fuel cells. The reasoning for this small turret is to reduce the visual profile on the battlefield; smaller target, harder to hit. There are also some production savings to this type of design; simpler to manufacture, less material used, etc.
Western designs don’t wory about that quite so much. Ammo is typically stored up in the turret close to the main gun; there may be a few extra rounds stored in the hull, but at least in the Abrams, all main gun ammo is stored in separate compartments behind thick bulkheads, with blowout panels to vent any ammo explosion away from the tank and crew compartment.
The autoloader lets the Russians/SU further reduce their tank’s profile by doing away with one crew member. Several online sources say the T-72 autolader can load a main gun from 7.5 seconds, the T-80 to “…between 7.1 and 19.5 seconds to load the main weapon, depending on the initial position of autoloader carousel,” and the T-90 is 5-8 seconds.
Abrams crews drill to a 5-second standard. In my experience, they tend to be able to keep that up, notwithstanding the occasional loader that gets totally FUBAR’d. They also cross-train in all positions on the tank. If an Abrams Loader gets taken out in combat somehow, the Gunner can replace him with the TC now acting as Gunner from his station, since the TC’s station has some duplication of the Gunner’s Controls.
So there’s little to no trade-off in loading speeds. The Russian design takes away an extra pair of hands that might be very usefull during periods of heavy maintenance. They add a piece of complicated electromechanical machinery that, from what I’ve heard and what little I’ve seen, is a breakdown just waiting to happen. They also eliminate a “replacement” or “spare” in cases of battlefield injuries/mortalities.
Additionally, did you look at some of the pictures of the dead Iraqi tanks in my album? Those are “catastrophic kills,” where the entire tank pretty much blows right the fuck up and shit flys everywhere. That’s from the Russians co-locating their two-piece rounds (projectile and propellant charge) right underneath the turret. There is no separate compartmentalization of ammunition propellant in Russian designs, at least as late as the T-80. Since the T-90 uses the same gun system, I have a sneaking suspicion it has the same vulnerability to catastrophic kills.
So all-in-all, I’ll take compartmentalization and an organic Loader in exchange for being a slightly bigger target on the battlefield. And IMO, the Russina philosophy is a bit of a false dilemna; firing hull-down (from slightly behind a crest such that only the turret is showing) at typical battlefield combat distances, the difference in difficulty of hitting an Abrams-sized turret and an T-whatever-sized turret is effectively (for a human Gunner) indistinguishable.
And finally, the best argument for having a four-man crew on a tank is that you can’t play Spades with three people.
Well, you can, if you must. But who the fuck wants to!?