Arjun MBT News & Discussions

Some special type of fin stabilizers were used in these sort of rounds (Used in Rifle boared gun) I do not know whether they can be use as it is in smooth bore but with some change in fins, they can certainly be used in smooth bore. Now whether that change can be made in old rounds to modify them? I do not know.

 

3 crew will need an autoloader....
This Upgraded version with 4 crew hits...60 T (From the earlier 68T )(Without an autoloader that is...) which seems to be near the final weight, an autoloader will add more weight...

They will need another complete overhaul to reduce 6 T more...To cut out 8T it took so much time and effort....6 T more is next to impossible...

That will perhaps need an entirely new tank.....

 

Auto loaders may add some weight but tank size can become significantly smaller and weight can be reduced to 55 tons. Avinash chander had said that with new plane cockpit like technology, even 2 crew is possible Armata has 2 member crew. Auto loaders is always good but IA wants too many types of round in a single tank which is not possible by auto loader to be handled.

 

Someone in this country can do that...I guess...

A 55 T Arjun MK2 seems a distant dream as of now...But...Yeah...It Might be possible.... Though...A Completely different tank built to be light weight can fit the bill....Of 55-60 T


PS : How light should the tank be to operate in places where the Army wants it to be operated...!?

 

Indian army says it should be between 50 to 55 tons.

 

Where does it say Army wants a 55T Arjun? AFAIK the Mk.2 is around 68T now and work is afoot to bring it down to 60T.

On topic - the problem with the whole Arjun weight issue is that Army's infrastructure is unable to support a 70-ton class tank (like Arjun or most Western types) in a majority of it's forward deployment areas. The bridges etc. can only support the Russian T-series.

 

EXCLUSIVE: Big New Hurdle For India’s Arjun Battle Tank
Shiv AroorMar 13 2017 12 35 pm


India’s Arjun main battle tank, possibly the country’s longest and most trouble-ridden armament programme, has just hit the latest in a history of formidable hurdles. And it’s a big one. One that amplifies the programme’s inextricable quality as a faraway castle that will never be fully realised by its makers or embraced by its customer, a tragicomic meandering that began with a requirement, stupefyingly enough, right after India’s 1971 war with Pakistan. In the tech world, the Arjun would be veritably vaporware.

If you’ve tracked the Arjun tank’s journey, you know that the platform’s weight has been a key factor slowing its acceptance by the Indian Army. Now, over 100 Arjun Mk.I tanks are operational across two tank regiments in India’s western desert sector. The beefed up, improved Arjun Mk.II, of which the Indian Army officially ordered 118 in 2014, is currently going through the paces to prove the smorgasbord of capability upgrades and add-ons. But a new, yet familiar, flashpoint has now presented itself, providing the sharpest sense of deja vu for the team proving the tank. And it has just been detailed in an easy-to-miss report by India’s Standing Committee on Defence in the country’s Parliament.

The Indian Army wants the DRDO to fully redesign the Arjun Mk.II’s hull and turret structures and use newer materials to replace the conventional structure, in an effort to ‘achieve a reasonable reduction in weight, without removing any of the major improvements’. The Arjun Mk.II currently weighs 68.6 tons — a full six tons over the MK.I, owning entirely to the 73 improvements the Army demanded on the newer tank. The Army has stated, in no uncertain terms, that the 68.6 ton weight of the Arjun Mk.II is too much for ‘seamless application in semi-developed and developed sectors of the Western Front’. In other words, the Arjun Mk.II, the Army says, can’t be forward deployed beyond the deserts, in the event of active hostilities with Pakistan. But more on that a little later.

Livefist can confirm that on September 27 last year, the DRDO was left with no choice but to initiate an exercise to redesign the hull/turret structures on the Arjun Mk.II. At at meeting that included DRDO chief S. Christopher, the Army’s Deputy Chief for Policy & Systems and the Director General Mechanised Forces, the DRDO fought the recommendation, stating that ‘redesign of hull/turret including use of advanced armour material is not recommended considering the long development and validation cycle’. It was a painful blow — while the DRDO was hoping to accelerate trials in an effort to nudge the Indian Army into doubling its order for 118 Arjun Mk.II tanks had just been told even the existing ones weren’t really good enough for full operational use. The DRDO’s Combat Vehicles laboratory near Chennai has begun the weight reduction/redesign exercise, with an ambitious target of March 2018 to demonstrate a weight reduction of 3 tons. The DRDO will need to demonstrate each module separately to the Indian Army.

The story doesn’t really end there. In fact it gets more perplexing. While the DRDO gets busy trying to redesign the Arjun Mk.II’s hull/turret structures and use new materials, the Army has already written off the exercise. In fact, at the very same September 2016 meeting where the DRDO committed to a 3 ton weight reduction, the Army stated, ‘There are no major advantages from tactical and operational point of view with 65 t weight reduction also. It is felt that even weight reduction to 62 tons (equal to that of Arjun MBT Mk-I) may not provide any significant tactical/ operational advantages.’

In other words, the Army believes the weight reduction exercise is fundamentally useless. Worse, the Army projects that the ‘cycle time for 65 ton weight reductions of Arjun MBT Mk-II and validation will take about four to six years for successful acceptance by user after trials/procedures.’ The Army clearly has a real problem here — and this could be indicative of government pressure to press on with the programme.

The DRDO, which was hoping the Arjun tank had finally turned the corner, transforming an adversarial relationship with its main customer into one of comfort, has hit another stone wall with the Army. While insisting that the Arjun Mk.II has ‘exhibited the required performance in all aspects of agility, mobility and other operational/functional parameters in the desert and semi-desert terrains during various phases of user trials’ and that it is ‘confident that that Arjun Mk.II will have requisite agility, mobility and other operational/functional parameters in various developed and semi developed terrains also’, the DRDO is also wondering why the Army is averse to a proposal to operationally compare the Arjun Mk.II with the T-90 (a comparison that was conducted over a decade ago on the Mk.I). According to the DRDO, “As directed by Hon’ble RM (Defence Minister), DRDO requested Army for mobility comparative trials with the Arjun MBT Mk-II even with 68.6 t’ along with T-90 to prove its tactical and operational mobility aspects in all envisaged terrains (including developed and semi developed terrains) for its future employability. However, Army intimated that Arjun MBT Mk-II and T90 are of different class & weight classification and their deployment is as per assigned operational roles. Arjun MBT has operational employment restrictions to specific sectors (desert/semi desert) being heavy tank. Therefore, Army intimated that the conduct of comparative mobility trials is not required.”

Even if all goes well, it is now clear that the Arjun Mk.II will only be fully deployable if the government beefs up road/bridge infrastructure to able to handle the tank’s heft. That alone is an alarming development that adds pressure on a system beyond the Army’s direct control. The Arjun family of tanks are principally for a potential war with Pakistan. The tanks are too heavy to be airlifted to any of the sectors India currently shares with China. And the new deployability concerns rule out moving them there by rail either.

What has further eroded the DRDO’s case for the Arjun is the fact that over 100 (of 124) Arjun Mk.I tanks have remained grounded since mid-2015 over a shocking unavailability of foreign spare parts — a deeply ironic situation for a platform that was meant, in part, to preclude precisely such a pitfall. While reports suggest the grounded Mk.Is are to begin rolling again soon, the grounding has slung additional mud on the overall Arjun ownership experience. It was the last thing the DRDO needed as it attempted to build a case for more Arjun sales to the Army.

The redesign exercise on the Mk.II shackles the Arjun tank to its endless, looping development and proving cycle — one that it hasn’t been able to break out of for decades. Top sources in the Army say that while there is government pressure to endorse the Arjun tank as an Indian product, the Army doesn’t believe it makes sense to buy more of a tank that will be operationally restricted to the desert/semi-desert sectors of the west. A maximum of four or five Arjun regiments across variants is what the Army believes it needs, given what the tank has been proven to be capable of. If the weight reduction exercise doesn’t work out, the Army takes delivery of those 118 Arjun Mk.IIs on schedule and will certainly not order any more. If it does work out, it remains to be seen if the Army will sign up for additional units. Couple this with larger numbers of the T-90S and the preliminary Future Ready Combat Vehicle (FCRV) effort, the Arjun’s onward roll gets infinitely steeper.

The Arjun programme, as the DRDO has said before, is a dead loss if the Army doesn’t order more than 500 tanks in total. Right now, the numbers are nowhere close. Nothing is.
https://www.livefistdefence.com/2017/03/big-new-hurdle-for-indias-arjun-battle-tank.html

Road ends for Arjun Tank.


@Levina @Abingdonboy@nair@MilSpec @Gessler@Robinhood Pandey @randomradio@vstol jockey@Hellfire @NS52@BlackOpsIndia @Rain Man @Grevion @Nilgiri @GSLV Mk III @SrNair @dadeechi @Ankit Kumar 001 @kaku1@Golden_Rule@IndiranChandiran @Lion of Rajputana @thesolar65 @Sathya@Butter Chicken @AbRaj @Agent_47 @bharathp @Aqwoyk @GuardianRED @PeegooFeng41 @Indx TechStyle @Ved Mishra @ni8mare @A_poster @Kalmuahlaunda @zebra7 @Marqueur @PARIKRAMA

 

Sigh .. predicted 09 years back @nair

 

Arjun Mk.2 MBT Now A Firm Reality



Contrary to widespread speculation, the Indian Army (IA) has not forsaken or given up on the Arjun Mk.2 main battle tank (MBT). Instead, for the past four years, the IA’s Directorate General of Mechanised Warfare has been overseeing a collective developmental effort involving the DRDO, and the MoD-owned defence public-sector undertakings and private-sector OEMs that will in the near future result in a fully-loaded 60-tonne MBT armed with a 120mm smoothbore cannon while retaining the existing 1,400hp powerpack.

Under the supervision and guidance of the DRDO’s Avadi-based Combat Vehicles Research & Development Establishment (CVRDE), and with the help of the MoD’s Directorate General of Quality Assurance (DGQA) and the IA’s Corps of Electronics & Mechanical Engineers (EME), a number of key decisions have been to achieve a weight reduction of 8 tonnes in the existing design of the 68-tonne Arjun Mk.1A MBTs, 118 of which are now in delivery.

For starters, the baseline hull of the Arjun Mk.2 will no longer be built with imported low-carbon, nickel-chromium-molybdenum rolled homogeneous armor (RHA) steel, but with lighter high-nitrogen steel (HNS) whose production technology has been mastered by the DRDO’s Hyderabad-based Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory (DMRL) and has been transferred to Jindal Stainless Steel Ltd (Hisar). HNS will also be used by TATA Motors Ltd for producing the 83 Kestrel 8 x 8 armoured personnel carriers already on order.

HNS is produced in a four-step processrimary melting of the steel can carried out in either induction furnace or electric arc furnace by using appropriate raw materials; secondary melting can be carryout in by nitrogen gas-purging in to the metal; under ladle refining, ferro-nitrates are added to molten metal for obtaining final nitrogen content in the alloy if it is required and hot-rolling is carried out in a single heat, without reheating. Minimum percentage of reduction should not be less than 75% of the slab thickness. To be placed in strategic locations in both the hull and turret will be the DRDO-developed ‘Kanchan’ ceramics-based composite laminate armour tiles as well as indigenously-built explosive reactive armour (ERA) tiles developed by the DRDO’s High Energy Materials Research Laboratory (HEMRL) on the front and sides of the hull and turret sections.

To ensure optimal weight budgeting during the production engineering stage, the CVRDE has contracted Dynamatic Technologies Ltd, which specialises in complex, five-axis robotic machining, as well as in converting two-dimension paper blueprints into three-dimension computer model that are more precise, and have tighter tolerances. Digitising the drawings creates a baseline configuration for greater accuracy. This in turn streamlines manufacturing, since conventionalmanufacturing based on two-dimensional paper blueprints tend to leave tiny gaps between the different components of an assembly that were filled with shims, leading to increased weight. But by digitising blueprints, those tiny gaps can be entirely eliminated during the manufacturing process.

Under another weight-reduction exercise, the CVRDE has contracted the Alicon Group for building all-aluminium road-wheels and ventilators for not only the Arjun Mk.2, but also for the IA’s existing upgraded T-72CIA medium tanks. They will replace the all-steel road-wheels built by Sundaram Industries for the Arjun Mk.1A. Similarly, TATA Power SED has been contracted for producing all-electric turret stabilisation/traverse systems, in place of the existing electro-hydraulic system.

Improvements have also been made to the 1,400hp powerpack (comprising the MTU 838 Ka-501 diesel engine and RENK’s RK-304S gearbox) through the usage of indigenously developed cooling systems.

However, the area that will see the Arjun Mk.2 emerging as a true new-generation MBT will be vectronics, and in particular the battlespace management system (BMS), which has been designed to operate at the unit-level and below, and which will synthesise the battlespace situational awareness picture for the unit commander, whether it be a mechanised infantry regiment or an armoured regiment. The MBT and selected infantrymen will thus become situational awareness platforms.

This project, which was started only in 2008, has since been pushed at a faster rate as this constitutes the cutting edge of the IA’s theatre-level Command Information Decision Support System (CIDSS) programme that is being run by IA HQ’s Directorate of Information Systems. The Future Infantry Soldier as a System (F-INSAS), which is also a part of the CIDSS project, is being progressed by the IA HQ’s Directorate of Infantry but will be a part of the overall BMS and battlespace surveillance system (BSS) network of the IA.

The BSS and BMS are in turn being integrated by IA HQ’s Directorate of Signals with other components of the fourth-generation Tactical Command, Control, Communications and Information (TAC-C3I) system through the CIDSS channel. Through the BMS and BSS the IA wants to provide a Divisional-level command-and-control system spanning the entire tactical battle area (TBA) spreading across individuals, detachments, combat platforms, sensors, sub-units, units to the Brigade Commander/Regimental Commander; achieve faster reaction capability and flexibility in command and control by providing information automatically in the right place at the right time, thereby compressing the OODA loop; provide a strong foundation for making decisions based on near-real time situational awareness and battlespace transparency, providing consistent and well-structured information, thereby enhancing the information handling capability of commanders at all levels; and strengthening information exchange by having a strong messaging and replication mechanism.

The BMS will be a highly mobile and integrated system with high data transmission rates, comprising a tactical hand-held computer with individual soldiers, tactical computers at Battle Group HQ, and armoured vehicles employing application/database servers connected via a data-enabled TAC-C3I communications network, all of which generate a common operational picture of the TBA. The software-defined radio-based communications nets will optimally utilise the bandwidth available for military communications, and will not interfere with the legacy communications hardware. They will be fitted to MBTs, ICVs and APCs and will be scalable to ensure their availability to all elements ranging from man-portable SDRs to high-power SDRs for armoured vehicles.

The original proposed time-lines for implementation of the BMS and BSS were as follows:

Phase-1: Integration of the system, establishment of the testbed lab and field-trials at testbed locations (one Combat Group and three Infantry Battalion Groups) by 2012. However, this timeline was subsequently stalled for two years due to indecision in the delimitation between the BMS and the F-INSAS.
Phase-2: Equipping of all armoured and mechanised infantry formations commencing in 2017.
Phase-3: Upgradation of the system by 2022.

Both the BMS and F-INSAS will make use of a host of digitised GIS-based tools (pertaining to both friendly and enemy territories) that are now available (work on them began in 2009) for the IA’s South-Western, Western and Northern Command HQs and that can be readily uploaded on to any armoured vehicle’s autonomous land navigation system (ALNS) and BMS terminal. Military Geospatial Information System (MGIS) helps in generating terrain trafficability maps, commonly referred to as Going Maps (GM), when data pertaining to five thematic layers, viz., soil, slope, moisture, land use, and landform is fed into the system. It is then integrated to produce the GMs in a three-level hierarchical manner. Terrain Feature Extraction System (TFES) is used for extracting terrain parameters or themes (land-use/land cover, landform, and soil type) from satellite images and associated knowledge base in an automated mode. The land use, landform, and soil layer has 10, 28, and 12 classifications, respectively. For land-use classification, a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) is used for training and subsequent generation of corresponding themes. The landform classification uses a texture-based method for creating a database that is used for training MLP. Terrain Reasoner System (TRS) helps decision-makers (troop commanders, wargamers and mission planners) in a combat development setting for arriving at route alternatives that are largely determined by the threat capability of the obstacles and strategic nature of the regions to be negotiated for a pre-specified mission accomplishment risk factor (MARF). The problem of navigation and route planning of vehicles or troops is defined as the final behavioural outcome of a sequence of complex decisions involving several criteria that are often conflicting and difficult to model. A fuzzy inference system has been built to implement the perceive-reason-act decision cycle of a moving agent representing a vehicle or a foot soldier in a safety-critical tactically driven scenario. Terrain Matching System (TMS) is an intelligent decision-support system based on the integration of CBR and fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making.


The F-INSAS project will be implemented in three phases—Phase-1 includes weapons, body armour, clothing and individual equipment; Phase-2 is the target acquisition system and Phase-3 comprises the computer sub-system, SDR sub-system, and operating software integration. Since the Directorate of Infantry has been developing Phase-3 of F-INSAS on its own, rather than being part of the BMS project, this has amounted to re-inventing the wheel. Instead, what should have been done was to develop Phase-3 of F-INSAS as part of the overall BMS developmental effort.

Prasun K. Sengupta at 4:56 AM

@Hellfire PKS busted almost every goofy hypothesis given by shiv aroor.
BTW Shiv aroor has history of misleading reports like gripen saga

 

@AbRaj and I had busted them all about a decade back .. can't re-start.

Arjun is dead. you need a lighter air mobile tank .. period.

Infrastructure does not support a DCB crossing in Rajasthan and Punjab

Until and unless the aim of GoI, DRDO and everyone concerned is for Indian Armoured Divisions to be roasted on own side of the border.

 

We can't depend entirely on medium weight battle tank for eternity due to lack of poor infra.Things are improving with time on this area.
Every modern MBT is above 60 ton so is Arjun

 

DCB operations @AbRaj

Please read up the topography opposite India in Punjab and Rajasthan.

Head over to other forum and find thread on Arjun. You will find hellfire posts there of 2009-10 .. read. any query come back.

 

Manohar Parrikar resigns and news about ingenious projects starts poring in.

Good going.

 

Looking at the map, there is possibility of deploying heavyweights in Rajasthan and some parts of Punjab border. Am I missing something?
Of course I don't have much knowledge about borders as you have ,sir

 

@flanker143 are you referring to the indigenous power pack?