The war in Ukraine has been followed practically in real time on television and social media. One of the curious facts, which we see in the images, is the tower of Russian tanks exploding like pressure cookers. This flaw has been lethal to soldiers.
When this happens, there is no chance for the occupants to get out alive. But what will be the problem with Russian tanks?
Soviet-era armored coffins
These tanks, or tanks, as they are commonly known, used in Ukraine by the invader, bring a lot of obsolete technology, some from the time of the Soviet Union.
As we have seen, the turret of Russian tanks, the T-72 and T-90 used in the war, is a 12-ton piece. So for this unit to go off like a cork, there has to be a powerful catastrophic event.
When these events began to be observed in the images, the problem was immediately recognized. Incidentally, this problem also exists in Ukrainian tanks, in the versions of the T-72 inherited from the USSR.
Russian technology to take advantage of American M1A1 Abrams
Several tweets appeared a few days ago indicating the strangeness of this behavior and several specialists, American miliktars, explained the reasons.
According to a US anti-tank infantryman, this is the explanation:
Interesting little video about why Russian tanks so often lose their turrets pic.twitter.com/l2fYr2qxAJ
— Peter Leonard (@Peter__Leonard) April 7, 2022
The explanation allows us to understand that there are different concepts for building armored vehicles. The M1A1 Abrams cannon is loaded manually, by a soldier, while the T-90 has an autoloader.
This means that the Russian tank gains an advantage as it can fire faster, and can be even more compact.
Second information, The T-90 weighs 44.5 tons empty and 46.5 tons loaded. It has a length of 6.86 m (measured at the shell, not the cannon). Next to it, the American tank is a brute: the M1A1 weighs 73.6 m and is 7.93 m long.