BT-7
} The BT-7 was the last of the BT series of Soviet cavalry tanks that were produced in large numbers between 1935 and 1940. It was lightly armoured, but reasonably well-armed for the time, and had much better mobility than other contemporary tank designs. The BT tanks were known by the nickname ''Betka'' from the acronym, or its diminutive, ''Betushka.'' The BT-7's successor was the famous T-34 medium tank, introduced in 1940, which replaced all of the Soviet fast tanks, infantry tanks, and medium tanks then in service. Development The first prototypes of the BT-7 had a distinctive canted-ellipse shaped turret mounting both the main gun and a coaxial machine-gun. The specification also called for the project to allow for the installation of new guns without any significant change to the framework: the 76 mm KT-26 or PS-3 main gun (a short-barreled howitzer) and the 45 mm 20K model 1932/38, a long-barreled, high-velocity gun useful against tanks, but less effective ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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BT Tank
The BT tank (, lit. "fast moving tank" or "high-speed tank") was one of a series of Soviet light tanks produced in large numbers between 1932 and 1941. They were lightly armoured, but reasonably well-armed for their time, and had the best mobility of all contemporary tanks. The BT tanks were known by the nickname ''Betka'' from the acronym, or by its diminutive ''Betushka''. The successor of the BT tanks was the famous T-34 medium tank, introduced in 1940, which would replace all of the Soviet fast tanks, infantry tanks, and light tanks in service. Design The BT tanks were "convertible tanks". This was a feature that was designed by J. Walter Christie to reduce wear of the unreliable tank tracks of the 1930s. In about thirty minutes, the crew could remove the tracks and engage a chain drive to the rearmost road wheel on each side, allowing the tank to travel at very high speeds on roads. In wheeled mode, the tank was steered by pivoting the front road wheels. According to histo ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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BT-5
The BT-5 ("Bystrohodnyi tank" or "Fast Tank type 5") was the second tank in the Soviet BT series of tanks. The BT-5 improved on the previous BT-2, such as a new turret fitted with a 45 mm anti-tank gun that was also used on the T-26 and the BT-5's younger brother, the BT-7. The BT-5 would enter service in 1933, with the Red Army first seeing action with the Second Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 until the end of World War II, with between 1884 and 2108 units being produced with production of the tank beginning in March 1933 with production ending in 1935. Design The BT-5 had no armor improvements over the BT-2, with its thickest armor being 13 mm at its thickest and the thinnest being 6 mm thick. The suspension was a Christie suspension, which could have the tracks taken off to have road-wheels to use on the road. To turn the tank without the tracks, the driver had a steering wheel that turned the first wheel on each side. It took about a half hour to t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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BT-42
The BT-42 was a Finnish assault gun, constructed during the Continuation War. It was constructed from captured Soviet BT-7 light tanks and British 4.5-inch howitzers (114 mm-calibre light howitzer, model 1908) from 1918, which had been donated during the Winter War. Eighteen vehicles were constructed, yet only 1 survives to this day, housed at the Parola Tank Museum. Development and use As the Second World War progressed, the Red Army were fielding better and better tanks. The Finnish Army, on the other hand, had to make do with a large number of captured tanks, which were for the most part lightly armored and armed. The Finns decided to redesign the BT-7 Model 1937 tank. They constructed a new turret fitted with 76 K/02 gun sights and armed it with British-made 114.3 mm howitzers that had been supplied by the British during the Winter War (Q.F. 4,5 inch howitzer Mark II, also known as ''114 Psv.H/18'' in Finland). Eighteen BT-42 were built between 1943-1944. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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T-26
The T-26 tank was a Soviet light tank used during many conflicts of the Interwar period and in World War II. It was a development of the British Vickers 6-Ton tank and was one of the most successful tank designs of the 1930s until its light armour became vulnerable to newer anti-tank guns.Franco, ''El Tanque de la Guerra Civil Española'', p. 74. It was produced in greater numbers than any other tank of the period, with more than 11,000 units manufactured giving it the title of the most produced tank during the interwar period. During the 1930s, the USSR developed 53 variants of the T-26, including flame-throwing tanks, combat engineer vehicles, remotely controlled tanks, self-propelled guns, artillery tractors, and armoured carriers. Twenty-three of these were series-produced, others were experimental models. The T-26 and BT were the main tanks of the Red Army's armoured forces during the interwar period. The T-26 was the most important tank of the Spanish Civil War and pl ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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T-34
The T-34 is a Soviet medium tank from World War II. When introduced, its 76.2 mm (3 in) tank gun was more powerful than many of its contemporaries, and its 60-degree sloped armour provided good protection against Anti-tank warfare, anti-tank weapons. The T-34 had a profound effect on the conflict on the Eastern Front (World War II), Eastern Front, and had a long-lasting impact on tank design. The tank was praised by German generals when encountered during Operation Barbarossa, although its armour and armament were surpassed later in the war. Its main strength was its cost and production time, meaning that German panzer forces would often fight against Soviet tank forces several times their own size. The T-34 was also a critical part of the mechanized divisions that formed the backbone of the Deep operation, deep battle strategy. The T-34 was the mainstay of the Soviet Red Army armoured warfare, armoured forces throughout the war. Its general specifications remained n ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Diesel Model V-2
The Kharkiv model V-2 () is a Soviet and Russian family of diesel tank V-12 engines, the V angle at 60°, with dual overhead camshafts per bank, four valves per cylinder opened by bucket-style followers and direct fuel injection. Designed at the Kharkiv Locomotive Factory by Konstantin Chelpan and his team, it is found in the BT-7M (BT-8), T-34, KV, IS and IS-10 (T-10) tanks, and by extension, the vehicles based on them, such as the SU-85 and SU-100 tank destroyers based on the T-34 and the ISU-122 and ISU-152 self-propelled guns based on the IS-2. Throughout its production life, output ranged from roughly . Successive variants of the V-2 have been used in multiple Soviet and Russian vehicles ever since. Heavily modernised derivatives of the V-2 remain in production, with the T-90A tank, Koalitsiya-SV self-propelled gun and BMPT Terminator armoured support vehicle equipped with a 1,000 hp V92S2, while the latest T-72B3 and T-90M tanks feature an upgraded 1,130 hp V- ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Teletank
Teletanks were a series of experimental wireless remotely controlled unmanned tanks produced in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and early 1940s so as to reduce combat risk to soldiers. A teletank is controlled by radio from a control tank at a distance of , the two constituting a ''telemechanical group''. While never in common use, the teletanks were used by the Soviet Red Army in the Winter War against Finland, with at least two teletank battalions at the beginning of the Eastern Front campaign in the Second World War. Design Teletanks were equipped with DT machine guns, flamethrowers, smoke canisters, and sometimes a special 200–700 kg time bomb in an armoured box, dropped by the tank near the enemy's fortifications and used to destroy bunkers up to four levels below ground. Teletanks were also designed to be capable of using chemical weapons, although they were not used in combat. Each teletank, depending on model, was able to recognize sixteen to twenty-four differen ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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45 Mm Anti-tank Gun M1932/38 (20-K)
The 45 mm anti-tank gun model 1932 (factory designation 19-K and GRAU index 52-P-243A) was a light quick-firing anti-tank gun used in the interwar period and in the first stage of the German-Soviet War. It was created by factory No. 8 which was located in now Korolyov city, under leadership of engineer V. Bering. History The gun bearing factory designation 19-K (Cyrillic ''19-К'') was a combination of a modified carriage of the 37 mm anti-tank gun model 1930 (built according to a documentation bought from Rheinmetall) with a 45 mm barrel designed in March 1932. and adopted by the Red Army on March 23, 1932. The 45 mm caliber was selected because the large reserves of the French 47 mm shells could be converted to 45 mm by milling out the driving bands. The resulting light quarter-automatic anti-tank gun was discovered to be unsatisfactory due to low mobility and reliability problems, and after a series of modifications (including the arrest of th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mikulin M-17
The Mikulin M-17 was a Soviet-licensed copy of the German BMW VI V-12 liquid-cooled aircraft piston engine, further developed by Alexander Mikulin and used by Soviet aircraft and tanks during World War II. Production began in 1930 and continued until 1942. More than 27,000 were produced, of which 19,000 were aircraft engines while the rest were used in Soviet tanks of the period. Acquisition and production The Soviets had bought examples of BMW's III and IV engines earlier in the 1920s and bought two examples of the VI engine in 1926 for evaluation. Following successful bench trials of the engine the Soviets decided to purchase a license for it. A deal was concluded in October 1927 after prolonged negotiations. The Soviets paid $50,000 and were to pay 7.5% of the price of each engine produced after the first fifty. In exchange, the German company was to inform the Soviets of all changes to the engine for a period of five years. Soviet engineers and technicians were to be trai ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Acronym
An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial Letter (alphabet), letter of each word in all caps with no punctuation. For some, an initialism or alphabetism connotes this general meaning, and an ''acronym'' is a subset with a narrower definition; an acronym is pronounced as a word rather than as a sequence of letters. In this sense, ''NASA'' () is an acronym, but ''United States, USA'' () is not. The broader sense of ''acronym'', ignoring pronunciation, is its original meaning and in common use. . Dictionary and style-guide editors dispute whether the term ''acronym'' can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are not pronounced as words, and they do not agree on acronym space (punctuation), spacing, letter case, casing, and punctuation. The phrase that the acronym stands for is called its . The of an acron ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Armoured Vehicle-launched Bridge
An armoured vehicle-launched bridge (AVLB) is a combat support vehicle, sometimes regarded as a subtype of military engineering vehicle, designed to assist militaries in rapidly deploying tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles across gap-type obstacles, such as rivers. The AVLB is usually a tracked vehicle converted from a tank chassis to carry a folding metal bridge instead of weapons. The AVLB's job is to allow armoured or infantry units to cross craters, anti-tank ditches, blown bridges, railroad cuts, canals, rivers and ravines, when a river too deep for vehicles to wade through is reached, and no bridge is conveniently located, or sufficiently sturdy, a substantial concern when moving 60-ton tanks. The bridge layer unfolds and launches its cargo, providing a ready-made bridge across the obstacle in only minutes. Once the span has been put in place, the AVLB vehicle detaches from the bridge, and moves aside to allow traffic to pass. Once all of the vehicles have crossed ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Flamethrower
A flamethrower is a ranged incendiary device designed to project a controllable jet of fire. First deployed by the Byzantine Empire in the 7th century AD, flamethrowers saw use in modern times during World War I, and more widely in World War II as a tactical weapon against fortifications. Most military flamethrowers use liquid fuel, typically either heated oil or diesel, but commercial flamethrowers are generally blowtorches using gaseous fuels such as propane. Gases are safer in peacetime applications because their flames have less mass flow rate and dissipate faster and often are easier to extinguish. Apart from the military applications, flamethrowers have peacetime applications where there is a need for controlled burning, such as in sugarcane harvesting and other land-management tasks. Various forms are designed for an operator to carry, while others are mounted on vehicles. Military use Modern flamethrowers were first used during the trench warfare condition ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |