Talk:T-64

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1 Main battle tank
2 Armour
3 Reason for its creation?
4 History of Soviet tanks/armour

[edit] Main battle tank

I've changed the description of the T-64 as a "medium tank" to a "main battle tank", as that fits the tank better. "Medium tank" is more of a historical term than something that is used for modern tanks, as the distinction between heavy and medium tanks has all but disappeared.

--Martin Wisse 21:51, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I strongly recall seeing footage of T-64s in action during the early 1990s in the Nagorno-Karabagh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Is there any objection if I add that information to the T-64's service life?--MarshallBagramyan 19:32, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Go ahead, but I'd feel more comfortable if we had a reference to support this. —Michael Z. 2006-01-3 20:42 Z

EDIT*

I found the video, if you wish, I can send it to you and you can watch it for yourself and judge if those tanks truly are T-64s. --MarshallBagramyan 20:09, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Armour

Surely someone has to know what kind of armour it uses. T-64s have probably been captured at one time or another and taken apart to analyze a better way to defeat them, right? I thought, though I am not sure, that Saddam used T-64s during Desert Storm, when surely at least one was taken for analyzation. I'd also think the US isn't that prone to sharing data they've found out though. PirateMonkey 06:54, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

The T-64 use composite armor made of high quality steal and ceramic plates as stated in the article. It has a thickness of 200mm but is as efficient 600mm of homogenous steal armor. Secondly, the T-64 was never used by Saddam because the T-64 was not exported. The iraqians used a old version of the T-72 which was a kind of simplified T-64 (although it was not the same design bureau and factory that built it. The T-64 is designed by the ukrainian Morozov design bureau (the creator of the T-34), but the T-72 is designed by the Ural tank factory diriged by L. Kartsev. --Kovlovsky 01:04, 04 june 2006

[edit] Reason for its creation?

I find myself wondering why the Soviet military wanted two separate and distinct tank designs, both with 125mm smoothbore guns, both with advanced composite armor, both with advanced diesel powerplants, both built with the most advanced night vision equipment and electro-optical target acquisition and fire control equipment available at the time (and both continuously retrofitted with improved versions as time went on), both seemingly for the identical role (MBT), yet sharing almost no parts in common and surely increasing the expense of maintaining two equivalent but far from identical designs in service simultaneously.

What was the reasoning behind this? It is as if the US military had decided in the late 1970s that it would not be satisfied with anything less than purchasing both the M1 Abrams and the MBT-70 simultaneously, with all the budgetary and logistical problems this would have imposed. In the 1950s the US military went through four roughly similar tank designs in rapid succession--the M26, M46, M47, and M48 all had very similar armor protection and all around performance, and all had equivalent 90mm armament, but as far as I know they were produced sequentially and each newer design was considered an improvement. As far as I know they were not produced simultaneously. Why did the Soviets manufacture the T64 and T72 simultaneously?

A mix of issues, mostly. There's politics, which you can read in the newly attached "Why Three Tanks" link. Then there is the high/low design paradigm, and besides, it introduces competitive pressure (good). It isn't so bad for the Soviets, because they build so many tanks, and the production type is segregated by factory, so they might not have lost all that much efficiency due to loss of economies of scale. Kazuaki Shimazaki 00:16, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit conflict, you beat me to it, but I'm just going to paste what I had typed already]

Note that the two tanks are not identical, and were not developed simultaneously. The T-64 was developed first over a very long period, at the Ukrainian Morozov bureau, as a high-tech successor to the T-54, pioneering the autoloader, gun-launcher, superior fire control, composite armour, and possibly reactive armour. It was considered more sophisticated technology, and it and its further development, the T-80 initially produced with a gas turbine engine, were never exported by the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Uralvagonzavod took over T-54 development and upgraded it for the nuclear battlefield as the T-55, and later created the T-72, incorporating many similar features from the T-64. Low-tech versions of the T-72 replaced the T-54/55 as the main Soviet export tank.

I don't think there is a single clearly-defined reason it went this way, but in the USSR many factors could have been important: politics, internal competitiveness, secrecy and disinformation, decentralization of military manufacturing, etc. The two tank lines could have been a continuation of the same philosophy that had previously employed medium tanks in most units and heavy tanks in independent tank units for exploiting breakthroughs, the heavies being replaced with higher-tech MBTs (this seems to be implied in some literature, but I've never read it stated explicitly). It could also have been a way to keep several major tank design shops and production facilities at the top of their game, letting them have very long design cycles while still producing new models by leap-frogging their releases every few years. Have a look at the Sewell reference for some insight, including the table showing the dates and places of production of the different models.[1] —Michael Z. 2006-09-07 00:32 Z