The article "Object 490" has been published on the site. The USSR could create the most powerful tank in the world. " I read the article and was surprised: how could this be written?
The article describes that as if in the KMDB them. Morozov in the 80s, a two-turret tank was developed with two engines and four tracks and a crew of two people. At this time in the design bureau we were developing a promising tank "Boxer", and we had never heard of any two-tower miracle. The person who wrote this article has little idea of what a tank is. How can you design a tank with two towers on the same level? How to ensure a circular sweep of the main cannon?
Four tracks and two engines. There were no such projects in the design bureau. The author calls this tank "Object 490".
When developing a promising tank "Boxer" at the stage of search work "Topol", "Object 490" was considered, which died without being born. It was a variant of the tank with two crew members. There were never any two towers, two engines and four tracks. At the very beginning of work in 1982, at the stage of R&D "Rebel", this project of the tank was closed due to the impossibility of high-quality control of the tank by a crew of two people, and my units were engaged in justifying a crew of two and three people. They never returned to this option.
The author refers to the source in the article without specifying what kind of source it is. Here is this link: “In October 1984, the leadership of the GBTU and GRAU arrived at the Kharkov Mechanical Engineering Design Bureau, headed by General Potapov and Bazhenov, to get acquainted with the development of the development of a promising tank. A 125-mm cannon was installed on the Object 490A (a 130-mm version was being developed), and talk of raising the caliber has been going on for a long time. Disputes began about which caliber to choose - 140 mm or 152 mm. At this point, General Litvinenko, head of the NKT GRAU (Scientific Committee of the Main Artillery and Missile Directorate), made a diagram very well and clearly demonstrates how effective the 152mm caliber is for a tank. From that moment on, the 152 mm caliber was adopted for a future project, and no one ever returned to this question. After the decision was made on the caliber of the gun of the promising tank, the existing variants of the Object 490 Topol and Object 490A Rebel required a complete re-arrangement."
And now a phrase close to this in my book “The Last Breakthrough of Soviet Tank Builders. (Diary of a participant in the development of the "Boxer" tank) ", published on the Internet in 2009:
"10.9.84. The leadership of the GBTU and GRAU, headed by Potapov and Bazhenov, came to watch "Rebel" with a large retinue. The attitude of the military to the car was wary, and Bazhenov was prejudiced against everything.
In Shomin's office, a report was reported on the tank, and heated debates began about what caliber the gun should have. The Buntar had a 130 mm outrigger cannon, and there had been talk of increasing the caliber for a long time. An unfounded debate began as to which caliber to take: 140 mm or 152 mm. At that moment, General Litvinenko, the head of the STC GRAU, spoke very competently and clearly, drew a graph and in just three minutes proved how effective the 152 mm caliber is for a tank. (From that moment on, the 152 mm caliber was adopted for the Boxer, and they never returned to this issue.”And this tank had the code“Object 477”. - Yu. A.)
As you can see, the quotation from the book is the basis of the phrase in the article, but changed to the point of complete absurdity. We are not talking about some kind of miracle tank "Object 490A". Such a tank did not exist, and the project of a tank with such a code was already closed. Nobody was involved in the rearrangement of this tank. Nobody needed this, the "Boxer" ROC began, and it was based on a different layout of the tank - with a crew of three people.
The author makes even more original conclusion at the end: “First, the promising tank should have been as similar as possible to the previous generations. After all, the use of such a motley fleet of MBT would be not so much technically difficult, but also incredibly expensive "pleasure". Secondly, a promising tank had to be relatively cheap in itself in order to comply with the Soviet doctrine of the use of military equipment."
A promising tank can in no way be similar to the tanks of the previous generation, that is why it is a promising tank. I do not remember. so that during the development of the Boxer tank we were also given conditions for the cost of the tank, everyone understood perfectly well that it is possible to achieve a fundamentally new quality only by introducing new systems and units of the tank, which will inevitably require costs.
Written in the article by I. Legat - just banal fabrications of a man who heard something about the development of a promising tank in the 80s, distorted the development time, tank ciphers, search, research and development work on tanks of that time, along the way affairs attributing to the KMDB the development of some mythical tank. In addition, for the sake of reliability, he referred to some source and did not indicate it, citing a phrase taken out of the context of my book, in which we are talking about a completely different tank.
But most of all I was amused by a tank with two turrets: it was necessary to think of it before!
