In Ukraine, tractors are deadly enemies of tanks. BTW, the Uke version of the IRS has declared that if you capture a Russian tank and tow it home, you do not have to declare it as a capital gain.
draw me an o! yes sir! draw me an upside-down U! yes sir! Draw me an o! yes sir! what did we make? A portrait sir! -that is how you knock out all leaves for a month.
On Chieftain we had a turret mock-up with a .22 mounted. Then we had a set of rubber targets that would be dragged around the indoor range, on a sand base. Everything was to scale. The gunner would then aim at the rubber targets and fire. You knew you’d hit when the rubber target flew up.
@@alangordon3283 I'm aware of "why". It would be interesting to know how many times some forward observer looked over his shoulder at the Church steeple exploding because the FO didn't choose the obvious and inescapable location.
This reminds me of the British Swift Model B training rifle that worked on a similar principle during WW2, which was known for the shenanigans that soldiers got up to with a rifle-shaped needle-projecting device, usually combined with another unaware soldier's backside.
cheap never means bad, in this case, cheap just means financially efficient. spend where you NEED to spend, cheap out on what you can get away with without losing quality.
They sold the tanks but probably the buyers didn't want all this junk gathered in the about 40-50 years the Leopard was used. So, it ended up in the museum.
As a mid ranking officer in charge of training the costal artillery AA crew conscripts, my father went on a tour of the local hobby, toy and hardware stores and bought up one or two plastic scale models of each pact and Nato military aircraft. He then gave them to the conscripts along with glue and paints as well as ID photos taken by our own airforce border patrols as barracks homework for each bunk pair to assemble, paint and study the aircraft they got and then hold a short presentation of it in front of the others in the AA training hall a week later. Once the presentations was done, he had them attatch drinking straws along the spines of the models and the following week, those models were pulled on fishing lines stretched crisscrossing across the celiling of the AA training hall as the 40mm/L60 AA crews progressed through both manual and central automated aiming drills while calling out each plane type as they identified the models in their sights!😁
The British developed something like this for Naval gun training training, I think in the late 1800s. It became necessary when guns started getting actual long effective ranges but before automatic gun stabilization was a thing. The gun trainers had to manually track the target by compensating for the pitch and roll of the ship to give the range finder operator a chance at getting a good reading and to keep the target in the sights. The gun trainer trainee looked through a sight while the instructor bobbed the paper ship target up and down and left and right and the trainee had to "fire" when he was on target and a needle would pierce the paper and show how he did.
How does that even work? You can't write in one constant motion without removing the pen, even in cursive. How do you lift the pen full the paper between words, to dot your i's, etc?
@@justforever96 You can always write the letters and make a line between them, and it's not neccesary to put dots. Just write mikka in one motion, don't need to won a caligraphy award, only to be readable.
In Canada we had a system called the IMR - Indoor Miniature range. We'd lay out a cloth terrain model on the floor about 25 to 50 m in front of the vehicle and there was a laser on the turret that would shine a light onto the model and you could see if you hit or not. It was mostly about learning turret drills I imagine.
In fairness, tankers tend to like mechanical arts to start with, and since tank units have lots of tools lying around, they tend to start playing with them. Same on Navy ships: they tend to have amazing tool rooms and yet probably less than half of their output is for official navy purposes. 🙂
When I went through the 11D school they would put up a row of targets on a brick wall, give us all 1911 pistols and a pencil. With the pencil dropped into the barrel the hammer would hit it hard enough to make a mark on the target and that, along with disassembly and reassembly, was our familiarization class.
I seem to remember a video about a British training rifle with a very long needle attached to the firing pin, where you would aim at a piece of paper at the muzzle, and when you pulled the trigger it would shoot out and leave a pinhole. I also remember it saying those rifles were used to stab people in the butt.
They also had an analog driving simulator, it was a tiny roughly 1/300 scale diorama with a tiny camera slaved to the controls inside a tank driving simulator. The system would allow you to drive around towns and villages. Sadly the whole thing was dismantled but the building and some parts were salvaged by a friend who uses them for his 6mm Cold War wargames.
I think the first price for overly-complicated, overly-sophisticated and overly-expensive solutions goes still to us Germans😆 But I agree: The US military is also very, very good at that. I think the Belgians (like the Dutch, in particular) are a lot more pragmatic. Like - it doesn't need to be fancy, it doesn't need to be pretty: If it does the job - good enough. I truly admire that.
Very true but in the US military it's not about cost efficiency, it's about profit margins. Suppliers have to make things complicated to justify the cost...😂
The Pricker is quite interesting, I'm aware of the British using something similar for riflemen with dedicated facsimile rifles to punch paper targets for off-range practice. Naturally hijinks ensued when not in use
I was just about to say this. Ian of Forgotten Weapons even did a review of those training rifles. Whether it's inspired by, or merely great minds thinking alike, it's an interesting system.
You're having a secret competition with Ian from Forgotten Weapons on who can find the coolest stuff to make videos on, aren't you? Very cool Nicky me lad.
This was really interesting. Unrelated, I recently saw a photograph of an M5 Stuart on anti-sniper duty in a German urban area during 1945. I was a little surprised since I had only seen Shermans involved in urban fighting at that time and it doesn't seem like an obvious job for the cavalry -- I could be wrong. But the more I thought about it the more sense it made. The M5 was more maneuverable in tight urban spaces and was a less valuable target and not much more vulnerable to panzerfausts. The coax was just as useful as the Sherman's while the 37mm -- whether firing HE or canister -- would be up to the task of taking out snipers or MGs without also bringing down entire buildings. Now I'm wondering why M5s weren't used instead of Shermans for this kind of work.
I remember reading that the Finns crew training for their Stug-3 included having the gunners writing their names on paper using a pencil attached to the gun barrel. Unfortunately I can't provide an actual source for that.
I am sure the instructors at the Training Center, were all like, how do we provide effective training, to the crews but without breaking the budget, cause Brussels (Government) won't be adding any extra to our annual military budget for the Army to purchase some fancy Training aids.
The "pricker" seems like a descendant of the naval "dotter" which used an offset pencil to mark shots fired on targets. I can't remember if it's a USN or RN invention.
Make sense Sir since you’re talking about the. Leo 1. As i remember it the worm boards were more common back in my dinosaur days up to m60a3. When I became a jedi tanker cdat those training aids fell off focusing more on ucoft running 24/7 if crews are available.
The Brits actually came up with their own version of the pricker, but for infantry rifles. Although in practice it was more of a hepatitis distribution device than a training aid. It was called the Swift Model B, and Ian has of course done a video on it. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ZvCJoGyiqbw.html
The Belgians theoretically HAVE to be much more accurate and faster on target than Americans, in a head to head comparison. 1 tank loss for the Belgians must be the equivalent of 1 or 2 companies lost for the Americans.
Why does the chieftain not talk about his favourite tank the chieftain? Can we get an inside the hatch? Or a long detailed review? It’s arguably the biggest leap in technology from a tank since the tiger 1
