Inside the Chieftain's Hatch: AEC Mk II, Pt 2 

He forgot to pop smoke.

He's applying the " don't get hit" layer in the survivability onion🤣.

Dam I was not reday for that last joke, that was funny 😂

took cover behind a crate of premium Belgian beer and chocolates, all fine

Hopefully he knows how to make full use of that cover. ​@@-r-495

Yeah I would have preferred to JUST HEAR THE ENGINE tyvm

Theres an AEC at Bovington and it never ceases to amaze me how tall the thing is, much bigger than you'd expect, so that willamplify the effect. something big you expect to be small next to something small you expect to be big.

I was looking at it when AEC driving up to be beside it and thought "What kind of TD is that? Almost looks like the T28 with out the extra tracks" Then it got closer I noticed the turret and thought "They have an IS-3?!"

I've seen this (?) IS-3 when it was still on display in the Royal Belgian Military Museum in Brussels. They had a StuG III and a Comet close to it. It is very compact indeed. Without checking references, I'd say it is more compact than a Leopard 1. Because I've worked on Leo 1, I also say that IS-3 might be very cramped inside. I can tell you that a T-72 looks tiny next to a Leopard.

Having no turret basket saves a LOT of space in height.

Amen 🙏🏻🙌🏻🙏🏻

That multi-fuel engine was a bit dodgy though.

How dare you insult my hottie?

Not bored out. New production changed to the 75mm barrel and matching chamber. All QF 75mm guns were new made as such.

​@@johnfisk811yes they were new built machined from the the same forgings as the 6lber the breach blocks were identical barrels & presumably recoil cylinders were different see the crusader episode it was a 6lber but it's block was marked 75mm

i think that was the OQF that was that one, but i could be wrong. i know british gun performance more than the names.

According to what I read, Royal Ordnance was in the process of developing a completely new 75mm that used US shells but a new cartridge case and someone noticed that the complete US 75mm cartridge was very close in base diameter and overall length to the 6 pounder cartridge. So they could greatly speed up development and manufacture and concentrate development resources into improvements and follow ups to the 17 pounder.

And the crew would have side arms ( normally a pistol, some sub machine guns).

Logistics!

@@fishingthelist4017 more adaptability and availability. With longer supply lines the US would not transport below standard equipment. With proximity to manufacturing the British could adapt and update superseded material. Outdated aircraft became trainers, transport and towing aircraft. Obselete tanks were repurposed as SP guns, "Kangaroos", Bridgelayers and Engineer/Recovery Vehicles. Shadow manufacturing took place on four continents(including in the US). Munitions were much the same guaranteeing availability. All units had a variety of weapons. Most (larger) weapons required different types of ammunition of the same calibre so it was a matter of distribution rather than logistics. A single tank had the same requirement as a troop, a troop the same as a Squadron, a Squadron a Battalion, a Battalion a Division. Each unit a wider range of requirements for specific equipment.

That's excellent haha

Quarter pounder... Something Something McDonald's.

Except we know what they called their various autocannon and it wasn't that. :)

The British kept the calibre used by the designers; 20mm-Hispano Suiza (Spain/France), Oerlikon (Swiss), Polsten (Poland/UK). 40mm-Bofors (Sweden). 75mm-(US originally French "75"also 105mm and 155mm)

@@AgentB7 It's a Scottish gun ! The McDonald 1/4pdr pom-pom.

that's because the test house has no skin in the production game and were encouraged to be entirely truthful. If the factory chose not to listen to them, then the end user got a bit of junk to work with and they often ended up with the required mods not appearing until the Mark 2, 3 or 4 of something.

The British were generally aware of deficiencies in ergonomics. Since there was a war on and they had no time after Dunkirk to waste on making things more than barely functional it often got pushed aside. Also, their factories were getting bombed, which made production changes hard. The pre-war designs suffered from bad budgeting and being designed to bad doctrine. The political end of the war office would rather have bought 10 light tanks, instead of the 5 heavier tanks they actually needed. David Fletcher writes well about it in *The Great Tank Scandal*.

It was a multi facetted problem which can mostly be sumed up as this: necessity. The British switched to a war economy almost instantly at the start of WW2. That meant distributed production across a wide range of companies that had wildly variable capabilities and available tooling. Designs had to be able to be produced across any of those. A good example of this is the Comet where the initial designs had a sloped front glacis, but this had to be changed to accomodate the engineering capabilities of the subcontractors. During the design approval process it was felt that the ~3 months or so it would take those subcontractors to get up to speed/tooling on building a sloped front glacis was not worth the delay, so it got the stepped design they'd been using since the A10. You see the same kind of thing happening with the Germans when they switched to a war economy in 1943. Things like the Jgdpz IV suddenly get a 3rd "simplified" version for production because the new subcontractors coming into the production cycle in 1944 can't handle the "proper" design and production out the door *now* was more important than waiting for them to upskill or build new plant/tooling to handle it.

The Directorate of tank design, possibly the only entity with all of that research at their fingertips and the ability to talk The war office out of antiquated requirements was responsible for armoured perfection in the form of centurion, the downside of the embodiment of that knowledge was it missed the war.

@@jrdougan Too expensive, Too late, or Good enough, pick one

Yeh, and probably a STEN gun or two as well. Your more concerned about some Hitlerjugen with a panzerfaust.

Is the Bren usefull for AA. It feels good doing something. but you are not going to hit anything important. if you for some strange reason do. you are not going to destroy that. in a way that. it´s going to stop it. do harm to you.

@@exploatores I believe there were free standing tripods for the Bren specifically for AA use, so I think it was definitely something the Bren gun was used for. As you say it wouldn’t have been particularly destructive or accurate but when combined with other Brens in the troop/squadron, might have put enough rounds in the air to have a discouraging effect.

@@Badbunny666 yes you're right, they did exist - the AA mounts - as a part of the SF tripod kit, and I trained with one once. Effectiveness - more complex, but gives the enemy reasons not to loiter too long or too close and gives the troops a feeling they are fighting back. Probably minimal, but if a rear echelon soldier burnt off a 100 rounds of .303 and got some hits on an expensive plane, it's a good trade off?

I tried mounting a tabby once. It didn’t really like it.

@@bebo4807 well….I left it open and you went there, both barrels. 👍🏻

At least according to Wikipedia, it indeed was the Ordnance QF 75 mm in the Mk III. , with a 4 man crew.

Different service, but it's often claimed that the reason the RAF persisted with the inadequate .303 machine guns (rather than 0.5s) was logistics, even though it's a completely different supply chain. It's probably compartmentalised decision making and differential effects of inertia, like in everything.

I believe one's an M75, the smaller one's an AMX-13 VCI.

That is a good question. The one on the right makes me think MT-LB by the doors, but _everything else_ is wrong. The GT-MU is about the right length, but the doors are different, and so is the track geometry.... But I think I know what it is, after looking up former Belgian equipment: AMX-VCI. The one on the left I have utterly no idea about.

The official American designation for the 6pdr was m-1 57mm

@@matthiuskoenig3378They are wrong. It is a 2.24" gun, so a duce-and-a-quarter.

That is not true. 1stly CS tanks were only armed with smoke and HE yet were *not* part of the artillery. 2ndly regular tanks and anti-tank guns started receiveing both HE and AP shells by 1943/4 for most calibres. 3rdly he only reason the matilda in the desert campaign did not have an HE round was because wpdr didn't have 1 yet. Matildas in the far east got he rounds. An he round was only made for the 2pdr in late 1942 by which time Matildas had been pulled out of North Africa. 4thly speaking of the 2pdr, the towed 2pdr was part of the arillery since 1938. It was not part of the infantry. 5thly the towed 17pdr entered service as part of the artillery in October 1942, despite not getting a HE shell untill June 1944. Similarly the 2pdr and 6pdr guns also entered service with the artillery without HE.

From what I am aware, the BESA is a licensed produce CZECH machine gun. As a result it was 8mm. What is odd is the Birmingham Small arms company did not modify the gun to fire .303.

The BESA was adopted in 1938; when war was already looming: There wasn't time to adapt the gun from 7.92x57mm to the rimmed .303". Especially without the co-operation of Zbrojovka Brno; which was cut off when the Germans occupation Czechslovakia. It had taken five years to develop the Bren from the ZB-27.

When you see how long it took for the Bren to be changed from Czech 8mm Mauser to .303” you can see why. Plus the separate RAC supply change.@@Duke_of_Petchington

I bet you are deliberately irritating the majority of us by bringing up the fact that you're a War Thunder player >:/

Centurion?

Weirdly lacking in skill then. Milions of British and others around the Commonwealth world have no problem with switching left to right and back as they travel the world.

​@@iatsdI think the problem WAS the gear shift. A whole other addition to driving skills that had to be learned by someone bought up on automatics, not a criticism of the man's ability but just an observation.

@@CrusaderSports250 If he was American then, yes, possibly or even likely that gear shift was a problem for that reason. But that that would be a problem whether it was right or left hand drive. I read the phrasing as meaning that having to shift gears with a *left* hand was a problem - the implication in it was that right hand wouldn't have been a problem - which just strikes me as odd given, as I said, millions and millions of people in other countries have no problems switching right to left.

Yup. The QF-75mm was the QF-6 Pounder, bored out to 75mm to use US Ammo'... with the result of worse AP performance but at least a decent HE.

If I remember correctly, it was because they didn't have time to convert it to .303 before the war started and it didn't matter much anyway since the RAC's supply chain was independent of the rest of the army's anyway.

As the best preserved Rolls Royce armoured car, it's always been in the back of my mind

My Grandfather served in Sliabh na Mban. I have been in it and I am slightly shorter than Nick and I can get in and out easily.

To be fair it's an amoured car. Ammo capacity really shouldn't be a concern. At best it's a recon vehicle. At worse it's a hit and run sort of affair.

@@clothar23 It was used as SP artillery - every Squadron had a Heavy Troop of either 75mm Mark III AEC's or 75mm M3 Tank Destroyers passed on from the US Army after it was declared obsolete (but used as SPG's rather than TD's) Since the M3 mounted the old M1897 field gun, it had come full circle. Here is a Heavy Troop imn action with their M3's. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3_Gun_Motor_Carriage#/media/File:The_British_Army_in_Italy_1945_NA22387.jpg

😄 Good one!