#Tank

Several weeks ago we took a look at the five most interesting, rare and unusual firearms consigned to the May 2019 Rock Island Premiere Firearms Auction. As always, RIA’s premiere auction was full of one of a kind lots. The auction ended past Sunday and the company has published the list of prices realized. As usual, we took a look at those prices and found the top 5 most expensive lots sold during the auction.

British historian Stephen Wisdom has built a full-scale replica of a World War One tank from fibreglass and wood.

When the subject is the future of infantry, the conversation inevitably turns to one thing: Powered, armored exoskeletons. Since the publication of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers in 1959, the concept of an armored suit with enhanced mobility from an internal power source has fascinated military futurists, quickly solidifying as a military fiction staple, and even appearing repeatedly in official “future soldier” concepts from armies and companies around the world.

Looking for a new car? Want something… Different? How about, say, an armored car? Well among their catalog of AK clones, AR-15s, pistols and other assorted firearms, Atlantic has recently listed for sale a Fox armored reconnaissance vehicle. Of course, nothing good in life is free, and if you want this Fox to be yours it’ll be nearly $50,000 – which, by armored vehicle standards, is not that bad. Still, try telling the wife that you’re not getting that BMW 4 Series after all, because wouldn’t an armored car be so much cooler? Well, if you still want to try to convince the missus, maybe Atlantic’s video, embedded below, will help:

Working under contract from the Army’s Research, Development, and Engineering Command (RDECOM), AimLock, a subsidiary of Rocky Mountain Scientific Laboratory, developed an actively stabilized weapons chassis for AR-15 rifles. AimLock has been in the news before for their stabilized rifle platform, which was shown off in a presentation at the 2016 National Defense Industry Association conference and subsequently reported on in Futurism and Popular Mechanics, and, of course, here at TFB.

BAE Systems has announced a new robotic unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) that could assist future infantry units with tasks ranging from explosives ordnance disposal (EOD) to casualty evacuation (CASEVAC), and even target suppression. The robot, called “Ironclad”, comes in two variants, and is projected to have at least four modular equipment packages, including a machine gun installation, advanced sensor modules, robotic arm, and stretcher mounts.

A group of Chinese military armament enthusiast made a full-size (1:1 scale) Chinese Type 99 tank model using cartridge cases of different sizes and types. They used almost 50,000 cases (48,356 to be precise) and made this fascinating replica. Once the job was done, they weighed the final model and it turned out to weigh 6.5 tons! The builders gifted this “shell-tank” to a museum located in Shenyang City, China.

As a researcher and history enthusiast, one of the issues I often have to wrestle with is that of eyewitness accounts, specifically when to trust them and when not to. That subject itself is one for another time, but today I want to look at a specific example of an eyewitness account as an illustration of how they can be misleading to someone trying to reconstruct historical events.

The IronVision system is a form of augmented reality for armored tank drivers and their crew. Special visors display what is outside the tank. Where ever the viewer looks, the image adjusts for their POV.

Some people have some remarkable collections in their basements. This guy had a WWII Panzer tank among an Anti-Aircraft gun, a torpedo and other weaponry.

After the Wednesday round of the 2016 SHOT Show, I sat down for an evening of quiet work, to finish up a few articles I had from the day’s show-trekking. Less than an hour later, I was standing in a crowd at Battlefield Vegas, watching a Chieftain tank crush a sedan.

The period from 1945-1970 did not represent the figurative finest hour in US small arms design. From the problematic M60, to too little too late M14, to the disastrous initial fielding of the M16, US small arms design during the time seemed to simultaneously reach to far and grasp too little. One family of firearms that was a product of this period of development was a short-action armored fighting vehicle secondary machine gun design, incarnated in the M73 7.62mm and M85 .50 caliber, and later M219 7.62mm types. (EDIT: I don’t really think the M85 should be thrown in there, as it’s a substantially different design, though it shares some features with the M73 and M219. Mea culpa.)

This is so cool looking. It looks like something out of a video game. It will have thermal camouflage and radar absorbing material to make it stealth. The infrared camouflage technology applied to this tank is very exciting. It is armed to the teeth and has modular armor. Did I mention it looks awesome?
Check out more info over at Foxtrot Alpha

The Russian State Research and Production Enterprise (SPE) have unveiled the latest RPG, the RPG-30. The system has been designed with one purpose: to bypass Western (and no doubt Chinese) active protection systems and possibly reactive armor.