On the news recently, I’ve heard on a couple of occasions that tanks are expected to break down quite often: the figure given was that if 100 tanks go 100 miles, about 10 will break down.
What the hell? At the risk of being flippant, it seems my Metro is way more reliable than an Abrams (So maybe I can mount a 120mm, and…)
I assume there is some unavoidable reality of tankness that makes these behemoths so quick to break down … what is it? Does “break down” mean “any mechanical problem needing repair” or “grind to a halt”? If the latter, that seems to me to be pretty dangerous – for every 1 mile you travel the thing might conk out and leave you a sitting duck.
Any armor people out there (exTank?) who can enlighten me?
With all due respect to your metro, try driving in desert sand that is fine as talcum powder and every bit as gritty as sandpaper. Since your metro probably has about the same max speed as an M1 Abrams tank, you would need to drive it as hard and as fast as the abrams were driven to get that kind of failure. Its not that that the Abrams are fragile, The Iraqi desert is very much considered harsh conditions.
This was what I suspected at first, but the teevee guy clearly stated that this was NOT just because of the desert, that this was an everywhere thing. So CNN has their facts wrong once more?
The desert probably adds to it, but as someone above mentioned, try puting 65 tons of equipment/metal on your metro and then driving for a hundred miles at 60 mph and see how long it takes for it to break down.
I would think 10% per 100 miles sounds high - but I am damn sure that the official figure used for operational planning is classified.
But as bradministrator points out: Move 70 tons at high speed off-road, and things start to break.
If you’ve ever been in a tracked vehicle at speed, you’ll know that it’s a very bumpy ride indeed - the crew doesn’t wear helmets to protect themselves from the enemy’s weapons, but to prevent getting hurt simply by riding in their own vehicle. 70 tons diving into a pothole or hitting a big rock just so can easily break a suspension component or force the track of the roadwheels.
Track work in particular is universally detested by AFV crews, and for good reason: It’s heavy, dirty and always happens at a time where you have to be somewhere else.
The Abrams has a turbine engine which requires a massive amount of air intake. All that super fine sand in the Iraqi desert tends to clog it up and wear it down.
I used to drive tanks at the NTC, and they do need a lot of maintenance to keep running. Tanks break down for a lot of different reasons, everything from broken torsion bars to worn out track shoes.
In basic they showed us some footage of things like Apache’s engaging a mock tank column, and an Abrams jumping over a ditch (not bmx jump, more like postal truck jump). While I would hate to have been in it when it landed, it did continue right on it’s merry way. I would imagine that even a little (approx. 1 foot vertical) hop at 40+ mph would leave the metro bus with it’s wheels splayed out to either side. Humvees are made to be able to drop out of c-130’s flying at about 15 ft. with only little drag chutes to slow them down. (good footage at www.hummer.com)
To sum up, military vehicles are much tougher than civies, but the military asks things of it’s vehicles that you just would not try with a Cadillac Escalated Price or a Ford Excessive.
All tank crewmen wear CVC helmets, not only to protect their heads from banging up against some heavy metal, but also as noise protection(tracked vehicles are very noisy inside)
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Hmm. I’d would have thought that after the ast gulf war, the US military would have realized that thier equipement needed to be upgraded to handle sandy conditions better…
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Tracked vehicles have always needed high maintenance, even in the first tanks. Tanks are kindof like tractors, but tanks get driven much harder and faster than bulldozers ever do. Military vehicles haven’t really benefited much from modern lightweight materials, since antitank weapons have gotten better, tank armor has gotten thicker and heavier. Their weight has only increased over time.
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And there’s been stories I’ve seen over the last few years that simply because the treads are such a maintenance headache, new military vehicles are to consider using regular wheels rather than tracks, and there is great discussion among concerned parties how much this will lower their usefulness in the field (I personally can imagine solid metal wheels, kind of like what trash-dump tractors use, but regular-style wheels, with inflatable tires? -forget it, no way).
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Historically speaking, a 10% per 100 miles rate is actually pretty exceptional reliability - previous generations of tanks were often more prone to failure.
There are tons of things to break on a tank that don’t apply to other types of vehicles - the running gear is fairly complicated, with hundreds of little places things can go wrong, in the treads, road wheels, etc. Just the strain of moving all that metal makes it extremely tough for all those little parts - and it’s not surprising that one of them happens to break during such a trip.
In fact, if you really think about it, it’s remarkable that such a huge beast has a 90% chance of driving 100 miles without any of those little components breaking.
I had a lot of experience with the Bradley, and they broke down all the time. Once we didn’t even make it to the motor pool gates…we’re talking a trip of 70 feet here. Maintenance in the military is shoddy at best.
Also, you don’t want to know what it’s like breaking the tread on a M1 in 3 foot deep mud, at 20 degrees F, when the tank driver unwittingly drives over Constantino wire. You just don’t.
In World War II, the German tank fleet regularly had 50-75% of its tanks out of service for maintenance difficulties. German tanks were notoriously crappy in terms of reliability, but the other armies had the same problem. The Russians built twice as many tank engines as tanks, because the engines burned out so often they had to have lots of spare engines on hard to switch out.
Tanks break down. It has nothing to do with the desert; fighting in Europe provides lots of other problems, like mud, hillier terrain, and freezing temperatures. Tanks just do that; it has been that way for eighty years. They’re operating at the extreme ends of the capability of the engine, chassis, suspension and transmission to keep the things moving, because they’re carrying as much weight as they possibly can and moving it as fast as it can possibly go. The equivalent in your car would be to load your Civic with four passengers and 700 pounds of luggage and then drive it around a twisty dirt road at 90 miles an hour. It’s unlikely your Civic would survive 100 miles of that.
Sam Stone, they do ride well - but you wouldn’t take a Cadillac off road at 45 mph, while you are standing up inside it, without wearing a helmet, would you? You have to realize that there is NO padding inside a tank. Even the foam on the seats is hard, and like I said, the TC and loader are usually standing up.
I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve banged my head on something hard inside my tank while it’s sitting still, in the motor pool. For all that they are huge on the outside, they are awfully cramped on the inside.
It was also a logistic issue. The British and the Americans (I don’t know about the Soviets) had specialized vehicles that would transport tanks. The Germans did not, so they had to drive their tanks everywhere. A result of this was that German tanks had much higher “mileages”, and consequently more break downs, than American or British ones.