I’m really wondering why one of the top tanks in the world still uses a loader and not automatic loading. I can see why a country that had lots of people and little money would use labor instead of capital but that’s not the case of the US. Maybe there’s a very good reason but I’m not seeing it.
Firstly, the M1 is a generation-old design (it went into service in 1980). 1970s autoloaders were flaky pieces of equipment (the Soviets ones had a reputed tendency to grab the gunner’s arm instead of the shell) and some of them required the gun barrel to be reset to a fixed elevation between shots.
Secondly, even current autoloaders can’t man machineguns, help fix broken tracks, make the coffee or take over when another crewman is injured. Sometimes, particularly in combat, it’s useful for to have more than the minimum possible crew.
Also, and this is really just a guess, the Abrams fires 2 or 3 different kinds of shells. I think an auto loader that needs to access different shells would probably take up to much room.
Tank autoloaders have a terrible habit of “eating” hands and finger if everyone is not very careful.
Well a person is probably smaller than any auto loader could be and is just better because if there ever a jam you would need someone to clear it so since you have a guy down there anyway whats the point in having an auto loader? Besides one more man in the tank is one more man to fight if the tank gets shot up / breaks down.
From what I’ve read, it’s the maintenance reason. Coupled with the observation, as I roughly paraphrase Tom Clancy, “It’s cheaper to train a 19 year old to be a loader than it is to develop and design an autoloader that won’t feed the crew into the breech every once in awhile.” This will probably change with the adoption of drone tracked weapons systems. (Though I’m still not sure who’s going to do the hideous amounts of maintenance that tracked armored vehicles require.)
Up until recently, a manual loader was actually faster and some autoloader designs required keeping rounds in the crew compartment instead of a seperate magazine,which was safer.
That’s certainly true of British tanks