The Ukranian BMT-72 - Insanity.

[MarkSheppard]

Those crazy Ukrainians took a T-72, lengthened the hull, and turned it into a sort of 5-man heavy infantry fighting vehicle, retaining the 125mm gun and missile armament.

Linka

Diagram, you can see the new hatches for the troops

Close up of new hatches

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Oh my god, they did it with a T-80 too!

Linka to the BTMP-84

The BTMP-84 is based on the chassis of the T-84 main battle tank. This retains the two-person turret armed with a 125mm gun fed by an automatic loader.

The specific feature of the vehicle design is that there is a troop compartment for five infantry soldiers.

A door at the rear of the vehicle opens to the left, steps fold downwards and the hatch above this is raised to allow the troops to rapidly leave the vehicle.

A firing port is provided in either side of the troop compartment, as are roof hatches.

[pdoktar]

Finally somebody got the IFV concept right. Now there�s adequate protection and firepower in one IFV package. Also supply and maintenance is simplified drastically. If they�d only make the 125 able to do some serious indirect-fire, it would be even better.

[JaM]

Nothing that Israeli Merkava didnt had before and better... (rear doors...)

[pdoktar]

But do the Israelis really use it as a MBTIFV-concept. Or only on occasions. Seems to me that the Ukrainian thingy is dedicated to MBTIFV-duties.

Boy, I hope that I can make this MBTIFV acronym permanent..

[Marek_Tucan]

Bah. Nothing beats MerkaGavin

[PlasmaKrab]

pdoktar said:Finally somebody got the IFV concept right.

Yes, except for the whole infantry part
The problem you have on this design that you don't have on the Merkava, is that the engine is on the rear of the vehicle.
The whole seating arrangement looks even more cramped and unpractical than on a BMD. The idea of a narrow foldout armored causeway alongside the engine block, well... it may sound good on paper, but I'm not sure how the troops supposed to usse it would take it.

Best bet IMHO would be to re-engineer the tank that little bit further, flip the chassis back front and retain the front armor (at least) to keep a decent troops compartment at the rear.
Or reverse, go at it like with the Achzarit, put the troop compartment and exit ramp on the front. But I'm not sure the gunbarrel would like the whole ramming-into-buildings assault tactic.

[MarkSheppard]

The russians have actually looked at the engine in front idea, and rejected it because of damage to the engine in case of a penetrating hit.

They wanted a tank which can drive from East Germany to France, despite being knocked out and having their crews killed 3-4 times; a lot of minor hits can kill a lot of the crew, without significantly impairing the tank's mobility or firepower; allowing it to be repaired and put back into action once more after hosing out the dead crew.

Replacing an entire engine compartment after it took a APDFS round and stopped it is a bit more complicated than slapping armor plate over a 105mm APDFS hole and repairing spall damage in the driver's compartment...

[PlasmaKrab]

OK, I get the point.
I was more familiar with the Israeli idea that a trained crew is the hardest thing to replace in a tank, meaning that the engine was there to buffer shots for the crew, not the other way around.
Given the Soviet doctrine of that time, the idea that the crew is more easily replaced than major systems makes some sense, except regarding troops morale... (and electronics-rich control systems that might not be very spall-proof, by the way)

Anyhow, isn't the whole point of these tank-IFV hybrids and the heavy APC BTR-T/BMP-T series about protecting the infantry and the crew?

[loktarr]

PlasmaKrab said:

Given the Soviet doctrine of that time, the idea that the crew is more easily replaced than major systems makes some sense, except regarding troops morale... (and electronics-rich control systems that might not be very spall-proof, by the way)

After all, it's a WW2 proven doctrine. T-34s were back in combat up to 10 times before being disabled. Cost was something like 10.700.000 deads, more than the total of Israel population.

[Marek_Tucan]

To be fair most of these deaths didn't come to crews of T-34's. They had a significantly better chances of survival than the cannon fodder.