Interesting fact, whenever a tracked vehicle appears in a Gerry Anderson production (Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet etc), the sound effects are recordings of a centurion
The loader seems to have a very busy job in this. Loading 2 MGs, the cannon, making tea, handing out water, running around with the turret spinning, radio.....
I must admit, I'd be a very wary of going inside idle tanks in Australia. Spiders are bound to find a home in them. The sorts of spiders you don't want to cross.
Fun fact. In the Danish army (we had Centurion Mk 3, later upgraded to Mk 5/1, and later upgraded them to Mk 5/2 standard with the RO L7, and later again Mk 5/3 with the IFCS, Laser-Rangefinder and night-vision optics. This last one is also called the Centurion Mk 5/2DK), the little ammo-bin under the gun was called "Kogeren", or "the Boiler".
The atomic tank's at Robertson Barracks up at Palmerston, unless it's been moved recently. Friend of the family owns one of these machines (a 5/1, IIRC, no LR tank). It saw no combat in Vietnam but was held in Hong Kong as a replacement vehicle, 169129 (formerly 11 BA 76 in British service). He still runs it fairly regularly and it's a blast to ride around in, though it's been a few years since I've been able to see it in action. It's in brilliant nick too, even has the IR spotlight and canvas mantlet cover (which I'm informed by a mate of mine who restored another ex-RAAC Cent is the single hardest item to find, far harder than the spotlights). It took the Brits a while to get their act together with tank designs, but man, did they ever.
The Centurion is personally, my favorite tank of all time. :) She is just such a beautiful tank with n amazing service history. Thank you so much for doing the Centurion Sir Nicholas.
I watch it first on Chieftain's own, and then just let it run in the background on one of the WG channels. I want to encourage both the Chieftain and WG to keep doing them. ;)
centurion was, in my opinion, the best MBT ever made because of its relevance to modern tanks and how advanced it was for its time. it served immediately after ww2 up until the gulf in its AVRE form. that is impressive for a tank.
I was expecting "And on that bombshell..." at the end there, Nick. Still, I agree, Centurion was the best tank ever made, and it probably paved the way for a lot of what we consider tanks today. Great vids!
"Go ask your dad" Nick... there are some dad's that wouldn't have a bloody clue what a Choke. but hey, if you own a classic car, just make sure it has a manual trans and a choke... it will never get stolen
I recently picked up a 1985 Alfa Romeo Sprint and was pleasantly surprised to find a manual choke under the steering column. The few other carbureted cars that I've owned from this era all had vacuum controlled automatic chokes and they were all crap, way too many vacuum lines to control the system and any one line cracking or leaking and the cold start runs like utter crap. Give me a basic cable controlled manual choke any day :D
At Bovington they have a Centurion cut in half lengthwise, well worth a look. They will also have a member of staff, a former crewman, do a talk. If you ever go there it's worth making time for it.
Oh, and while I'm here - something that warrants a mention along with the upgrade potential of the tank is just how easy it is to swap guns, not only for rebarrel purposes but actually physically changing from the two 20pdr variants (A & B barrel, A having a counterweight at the muzzle and B having a bore evacuator and on those tanks with a ranging .50, three fins as counterweights on the evacuator) and the L7A1. Really just a brilliant design all round.
I had the plesure to sit once in a swiss version Centurion, calde the Centi here, with a Laser sim fitted, which was in operation the targets where monted on a few trailers in a distance. was a nice experiance.
I heard you mention the choke. There is another bit of help inside attached to the engine bulkhead. It is called the KI-GAS pump. As for the divers compartment, the was a hood that fitted over the entry point which was made from canvas. It fitted snuggly and also had a windscreen with a windscreen wiper. Great for staying dry if it is raining.
My father was a TC in Centurion. He'd agree with you. He used the stabilization system as a compass for the driver (follow the barrel). Which is fine in open terrain, or when you haven't gone 30+ hours in a tank and there is an unmarked farmhouse cellar.
Actually the Radios are: A C42 for tank to tank communications and a B47 for talking to the Infantry. Ammunition is APDS, Hesh, smoke and option to take canister (No fin). Driving, the gear change in the middle was very handy, changing gear flicking the steering levers (called a stick change) was very easy and was twice as quick as double clutching and was standing practice. Note also later marks had a floor basket that rotated with the turret!
love these vidios you have fantastic access. please do a bmp1 i saw one at puckapunal tank museum in victoria and have no idea how so many ppl go into it
The Nuke Centurion that the Aussies cent to Vietnam is located out front of the Pukapunial Tank Museum in Victoria. You would've seen it when you visited the museum there about 4 years ago now Chieftain.
Too right, the side with Centurions pretty much always won. RE: The 20pdr vs 105mm firing APDS there wasn't much difference in penetration (they were the same length and used a similar case), later 105mm rounds were better at dealing with slope but that was the round design rather than the power of the gun. Going to 105mm will however have made the HESH/HEAT much more effective.
Excellent tour! I am old, I started on driving with one of the last cars featuring a "choke", few years before fuel injection becomes universal. Curiously, we call it "starter" in Spanish, using an English word that neither English or Americans use.
great video as always . thanks. how come you didn't drop in and close up the drivers position. also any chance we will get to see you driving some of these tanks at any time .
#TheChieftainWoT Some points to note is the drivers hatch will lock down to about 20 degrees but you have to swing the periscope visors outboard so they slot into the right position to enable it to lock down. I think this is one of the 2 Centurions, this we knew as "052" being Mark V I think. I refurbished this one including a complete engine rebuild before it was was sold later to the museum. This tank in the video is not a "Vietnam tank" as those had extra armour welded to the glacias plate and other night vision improvements. Our other Centurion was a Vietnam tank with those other upgrades. As this was meant to be an operational tank for a private adventure team building exercises I removed the internal fuel tanks as they made servicing with a small service crew very difficult. The Australian army used an external rear bustle fuel tank for longer range in jungle which also had and it became our primary fuel source (Simple Morris lift pump and drag car flow pump to charge the V12 Meteor engine).
Its MAGIC That's what I like about war thunder, but the time you get to tier IV where you need to grind for vehicles you actually have the skills necessary to get good games so grinding isn't a chore
Its MAGIC besides I sometimes get a months permium account. I've been there since the start and only this year actually spent money on the game, I feel like after 4 years I should give them some financial support for their service
Thank goodness the happy clappy stupid music was removed in later videos. It's like watching a tank chat in Wayne's World. The Chieftain deserved more respect that that!
Radio looks like a larkspur C42? My Dad brought it into service in Germany with the Bays and Grays. He said it was a super tank and streets ahead of anything else at the time. He also went to Isreal with the first cents and said the Isrealis put a Diesel engine from a bulldozer in it.
88 Set replaced the short range B set capability of the 19 set, which was used for visible tank to tank communication, it didn't replace the 19 set completely. The Cent in the video is fitted with the Larkspur C42 and B47, which replaced the 19 set completely. Also can you tell Wargaming to stop making the B set antenna on vehicles longer than the A set, the B set was 1 foot long, the A set 2.5M :)
There is a tragic comedy element to British Cruiser tank development, misquoting a classic British comedy routine, Britain had - all the right bits, not necessarily in the right order. Firepower: when they came out the 2pdr, 6pdr and 17pdr were cutting edge armament. The problem being the later ones just couldn't be tank fitted because the tail was wagging the front line with turret ring/railway restrictions. Protection: British tanks often had good armour, but its potential was wasted by the insistence on a limited arc bow gunner and that silly porthole from Cavalier onwards. Mobility: excellent Christie suspension - probably too good. If you're gonna limit the speed because the crew couldn't take it, why install so much suspension to handle redundant mobility? Reliability: why oh why did the British go and put a twenty year old engine like the Liberty back into production? In 1939 you couldn't sell a 1917 truck design, tank design or aircraft design so why trust a propulsion unit from that era? Especially as the British government was offering huge incentives to keep the RR Kestrel in production from 1938 onwards. A mature yet modern engine, huge power reserves, ready for the taking. We were building some awful aircraft to accommodate Kestrel's expensively developed successors - Peregrine, Goshawk etc...? Because it was good, it was there, in production and needed a home. So why not stick it in the Cruiser A13 and its successors? Even use Goshawks evaporative cooling system? No desert dust in there, plenty of tea production, although I wouldn't want to get too close to it. If the design principle had been front line first, you could have had a Kestrel (Komet?) powered, Horstman suspended, full-fat turret ring, 3inch sloped armour Crusader designed from the outset to house the 6pdr (with HE round) in 1941. Which with some tinkering could have accepted the 17pdr with an extra road wheel and a wider body. Kestrel could have given you 525hp with ease, maybe as much as 700hp at a push. Enough to uparmour and upgun at leisure. All the bits were there to be used, but never in the right order till Centurion.
To be fair Matilda II was a good tank, as were the early Cruisers in comparison with the competition at the time. 6 pdr was good, but one thing that always get missed is how many 3 inch AA guns we had lying around. All were replaced very early in the war by 3.5 inch AA and 40mm Bofors. Certainly in the Desert if given a carriage like the 18pdr would have massacred German armour at range.
Would you ever be going back to "The Tank Museum"/Bovington? There is a Lovely Crusader MkIII there, which is my favourite tanks, simply because it looks damn good.
I wonder how big a detriment to the crew performance the small and cramped conditions in the tanks were. The drivers hatch periscopes look like they're waiting to take a chunk out of you as you get in and out. It seems like the crews of these machines would be constantly bruised and battered and scraped and quite literally cramped so often that trying to operate at peak performance would be extremely difficult in any kind of extended operation.
Hm.... You stated that only the scales for the coax and RMG were shown on the gunner's range-drum. This puzzled me a bit, because from my Mk5/2 days, I distinctly recall the HE(sh) and AP(ds) as well as the sMOKE scales by which you could manually set distance (elevation) for the respective weapons and ammunition-types. So I went back in your otherwise excellent production and reviewed this and sure as gehenna; there they were. This scale would also be used when firing indirect by means of a gunner's quadrant (scaled bubble-level). Also, a minor thing: The link between the gunner-elevation wheel and the commander elevation spindle (for lack of a better word) was not by a band, but by a metal chain, much like a length of bicycle-chain. (in fact, I actually employed a piece of bicycle chain as replacement when the one in my tank failed and no spares ot that particular part appeared available.). As to your treatise of the .50 RMG; True, this was only meant for 3 shot bursts range-finding with each round having tracer and explosive flash element tipped bullet but..... In case of dire necessity one could add some melodramatics by having the gunner aim it and let the loader manually fire it on fully automatic. If I would be on the receiving end of that, I'd take cover really fast and deep as well as keep a fire-extinguisher handy. Out of personal experience, I can say that this is a patent method of settings things ablaze really fast. Oh, and the driver access hatches do lock into place if you press them far enough (admittedly with some force). The periscopes will rotate and allow for the hatches to lock into a safe position. In other words, you were too gentle with them and so deprived yourself from the joys of even easier and more comfortable passage to and from the driver's station. When I served as a TC on a Centurion MK5/2 in the late 1970s, we did have the Mono-trailer with absolutely no indication that these would not be used if need be. We even had electrically activated explosive bolts so that we could jettison the trailer from inside the tank in case expedience for such would arrive. How that would work out with a full (or worse a partial) load of petrol in it, I will leave to imagination.
I got the Centurion on WOT-Blitz, and I know that blitz is to some people, sort of laughable compared to the PC version, but I absolutely love the Centurion on Blitz, and I love WOT-Blitz.
Have you done an inside the hatch for the tiger? I can't find it. Edit. I found the panther one very interesting... and the Sherman one. Very different tanks. Edit. Tanks advanced so quickly in the WWII period.
I cannot recall any discussion of armor thickness in this video. if it was at least adequate, this seems a great tank for the day except for fuel capacity and gunner's station.
Hull was 76mm and turret could get to 150+ it was supposed to be able to withstand an 88 frontally, however that was in 46 later variant would up armored and eventually it would see ERA added... At it's time of release it's armour(at least frontally) was quite good for such a mobile vehicle.
I would have liked to see this using diesel. You'd think that the tech had come along far enough (in terms of size and weight) to make it a more viable option. I'm not particularly mechanically inclined but I've always been under the impression that diesels were more rugged and economical than their petrol counterparts.
grr point I wanted to make is, TD is about ground and airborne in harmony to take and hold ground and does that not make armor extra cost for same gain?
Sorry to break it to you Chieftain these days there are a large number of dads with kids old enough to watch this video who are themselves too young to have any idea what a choke is.
I think 'strangle' must be an Australian thing. I learned to drive in England in the late 80s - when fuel injection was just starting to be a selling point and we were looking in bemusement these new-fangled carburettor-less engines - and we called it a choke. And expected it so much that the manuals for the first fuel-injected cars had to explain that they had an 'automatic choke' and we should stop looking for the control for it.
Not an Aussie thing sorry, only ever heard them called a choke here down under. The only time I've ever heard it called a 'strangle' has been in this video and in some of the other British tank video tours conducted by The Chieftain. As a sidenote I've owned two carburetted cars that had automatic chokes, horrible vacuum operated things with half the engine bay filled with vacuum lines, any one of which springs a leak and your car starts running like crap. Good times :D
To be fair, I mostly said Munster because I've been there, and just wrote that without necessarily looking into whether or not other museums had an LK II, although I figured that there would be more than one S103 on display out there.
+Nick Bana That was one of the later versions. Most were Sho't Meteors when they were first used (a mix of British Mk 3 and Mk 5 Cents with original petrol engine and 20pdr). They were used in the 1967 and 1973 wars (as well as the clashes between), finally all converted by 1974 to Sho't Kal standard with new engine and drive train with the L7 105mm.
It was the centurion used by the Israeli armed forces that saved Israel from defeat by the Arab forces. For the loss of one cent they destroyed seven Russian built tanks.
Wow. True that everyone loves Centurion, but I wish it was a Mk I. It's hard to compare a postwar tank with a wartime tank. I'll bet your Mk V was a much cleaned up progeny of that first generation.
Ironically, during the Indian Pakistani war back in 60s. Both were using the american and british tanks. one of them was Centurion. After the war, india sold the centurion tanks to Singapore coz they purchased the T-54/55 and T-55. Singapore used the centurion tanks until the late 90s before gradually replaced with Leopard 2A4 MBTs.
Any info on whether the ranging gun was rigged to fire more than a 3 round burst? I have seen references to Cents in Vietnam hitting NVA with bursts of 50 cal with the night sight
So, the Centurion had a full-fledged stabilizer, but didn’t the Sherman have like a half-stabilizer? Wasn’t it like a counter-weight system? Just asking. I feel like I just asked a rhetorical question.
In lots of tank documentaries I hear them talking about brewing up,yet I've never seen a single kettle in any of these tanks.Curious.Don't forget to point out my ignorance.
Can`t you do Japanese tanks? There are quite a bunch of Type 61 and Type 74 that you can go see...not mentioning if they will let you in but considering anime Girls und Panzer is such popular, they might...
Hey Nicholas, just wanted to tell you this, since you might be interested; Did you know there is a couple of T-55's with L7 105mm cannons on them? It's the Slovenian M-55 S1. Its an upgraded version of the T-55 done in 1997/98, where they replaced the 100mm with the 105mm. They also installed the Israeli "Super Blazer" ERA armor, a modern ballistic computer and Laser IR-radiation Detector and warner system. They also upgraded the sites with a two axis stabilized day/image intensification sight with a laser range-finder. I think its one of the most interesting T-55 variants out there. (here is the link to more info www.army-guide.com/eng/product1398.html) Would be cool if you could do a inside the hatch review, but i dont believe there are any on public display, and the army is considering selling them in the near future.
