"Here lie the husbands of 114 Libyan women"

[P. Clodius Secundus]

Randi mechanical devices are prone to failure usually when are most needed.
Alaways s***t hits the fun when you are low on maintenance.

I know of a country where they substituted the T80-U autoloader with a crewman. It works better trust me.

Kind regards.

I'd be interested to see the new turret configuration. IMHO The autoloader on the T-64/72/80 tanks was ill-concieved. In theory, by reducing the number of crew it would reduce the internal volume of the armored "envelope" of the vehicle. That would raise the HP/weight ratio and improve performance. All it really did was add another mechanically complex system and reduce the number of people available to maintain it. Another drawback was that it required the gun to return to a neutral or "index" position each time before loading. They included a similar loaders override switch on the M1A1 Abrams. I've loaded hundreds of rounds and never had any use for that feature. The time standard for loading the 120mm is 5sec for AP (sabot) and 7sec for HE (heat). I'd be embarrassed if it ever took me that long to reload. We had one one run in Germany where we took less than 3sec to hit our second target. The evaluators accused me of holding a round in my hands the way we used to on the older tanks. I disputed it and forced them to review the audio and showed them the entire sequence was by the book. I had learned on the oldest tank in the inventory, the M48-A5. It's turret was designed for a 90mm but they had upgraded them to 105mm. I'll bet that the loader on a T-80 is even more cramped. I've seen today's M1A1 crewmen loading my way in a number of shows, maybe I started something... Regards,
Randi