Has tank and armored vehicle development stagnated?

has tank and armored vehicle development stagnated?
US:
>m48
>m60 in 9 years
>m1 in 19 years
>going on 39 years and still using same system
russia:
>t55
>t64 in 8 years
>t72 in 9 years
>t80 in 3 years
>going on 43 years and all we have is vaporware trash
same with apc and ifv. its been 38 years since the bradley was designed and 32 years since bmp3.
and most all european are still using the same upgraded cold war trash. all the hot stuff coming out is all just upgraded stuff too. do we need a big war to motivate innovation? or maybe another high stakes cold war? why are planes and ships getting all this attention compared tanks?

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Because were in one of the periods were military tech doesn't change much.

Look at it with a historical perspective, military tech advances in leaps and halts, things will advance quickly then plateau for a long time with incremental, expensive, improvement then leap ahead again.

Also the planes and ships are mostly memes as well. War in itself doesn't necessarily increase innovation, for centuries the pike formation was *it* and we could be in one of those times... or not.

>why are planes and ships getting all this attention compared tanks?
Planes are heavily dependent on technology, ever since WWII. Physical characteristics like speed, lift, and drag have been slowly refined over the history of aviation, but technology takes huge leaps. This is why fighters are characterized by generations, because the technologies standardized in each not only changed how the planes were designed, but even how aircrews fought and trained.
Those generational gaps represent a near-total advantage over previous aircraft. A 3rd-gen fighter will have very little chance of defeating any 4th-generation fighter. The difference in their capabilities is just too great and it would take an almost unrealistic difference in aircrew ability to compensate.

Ships are, to some extent, the same. Partly because many ships currently in service are overdue for some modernization and partly because developing technologies are becoming increasingly relevant to naval warfare. We've seen surface ships go from fighting forces before WWII to carrier escorts during and afterward, to missile trucks in recent decades. Now we're seeing stealth as one example coming to modern ship designs.

One final reason is that tanks are much smaller than aircraft and especially ships. Many technologies are not matured enough yet to be plausible for tank design. We've seen a gap in tank design because we're reaching the limits of what can be done with gunpowder and metal armor. Other technologies haven't matured to the point of feasability in tanks, and were newer technologies with more room for improvement. Tanks did see ATGMs several decades ago but these haven't yet surpassed the simplicity and reliability of modern guns.

>do we need a big war to motivate innovation? or maybe another high stakes cold war?
Necessity is the mother of invention, and we're in a time of relative peace. No one's feeling enthusiastic about having big hueg land wars, so why invest so much money in making your tanks cooler and shinier?
>why are planes and ships getting all this attention compared tanks?
Blame China, I guess.

As has been pointed out, all of that rapid development was during the Cold War, when everyone was trying to one up each other and be prepared for a major war that was actually a real possibility. It was also a time of much faster technological development, specifically in armor, missile, and computer tech. No one wants to fight a major war today, so no one is really focused on developing cutting edge weapon systems that are only useful in large peer on peer conflicts.

The problem is that current tank platforms do almost everything that they need to do already. Everything we want them to do that they can't already is either so minor that it can be bolted onto the hull instead of getting a whole new tank design, or so major that it wouldn't be a tank anymore (if it's even feasible at all). As other anons have pointed out, the new plane and ship advancements are memes, too. Guns in general haven't had any major developments since the early 80's, either, possibly earlier. The only big advancement that I know of in any field since then is the proliferation of computer-guided munitions, which, if anything, has made tanks less viable period. Lasers and railguns are going to have no effect unless they can be miniaturized to be usable on a tank chassis, and even then, they may not be better than existing chemical propellant projectiles.
So yeah, tanks aren't going anywhere until either someone comes up with a way to do their job better, except they already do it well, or warfare changes.

Consider the following:
where will you use tanks against China?
If it was the USSR Central Europe would have been the new Kursk, but with China navy and aviation are the name of the game

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I think we can all agree that nuclear weapons ruined war.

The M-1 was designed from the start to be upgradable. There's almost nothing in there from the original except the engine and the hull.
>or maybe another high stakes cold war?
Maybe. The armored programs of Pax Americana have all been horrendously mismanaged, with the exception of buying MRAPs and Strykers off the shelf.

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I certainly agree. Look at all the cool shit that Cold War gave us in preparation for a war that never came. They're either being misused by retarded sand people, or rusting in god-forsaken depots. What a fucking pity.

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Soviet Union fucking died. Without Soviet threat you don't need thousands of state of the art tanks. Spend money on the carriers.

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Basic tank design was more or less nailed down in the same war they debuted. Tanks have always been more of an incremental upgrade sort of thing.

>This is why fighters are characterized by generations, because the technologies standardized in each not only changed how the planes were designed, but even how aircrews fought and trained.
But this is true of tanks as well.

>M-1

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This. The massive military development we have seen over the past 60 years was based off of the lessons learnt in WW2. Now we have hit the wall, all the new things we discovered have been driven to their logical conclusion.

Honestly the only real innovations we have seen post war is the rise of the IFV and also the Russian terminator thing (tank to protect tanks against infantry). Everything else is just WW2 extrapolated.

>the only real innovations we have seen post war is the rise of the IFV and also the Russian terminator thing
Even in WWII it was well understood that tanks needed infantry support when operating in urban environments. The Russians knew that as well as anyone, then somehow forgot about it around the end of 1994, then very quickly remembered around the start of 1995.

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There’s been stuff happening. It’s just not nearly so obvious and displayed.

i want you to watch these videos.

youtube.com/watch?v=CY9gojFu-_U

youtube.com/watch?v=CGAk5gRD-t0

youtube.com/watch?v=e1NrFZddihQ

youtube.com/watch?v=XH6NIazR5pA

youtube.com/watch?v=2VB3VpSxMXs

youtube.com/watch?v=O2QqOvFMG_A

youtube.com/watch?v=wewaCdSW4yc

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>where will you use tanks against China?
Just inland of the beaches of Taiwan...

kek

The one place where there's innovation is happening is the drone zone. But I'm guessing most of the meaty stuff is going unreported, since drones aren't as cool as tanks, fighters and frigates. Shit like this was in the sci-fi realm just a decade or two ago.

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>youtu.be/9MlQ0AMZpz0?t=938
I'm fairly sure it's been covered well enough in this thread, but skip to 10:38 if you want to hear someone with some real-world experience and credibility say it.

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whoops, 15:38

life isnt a video game where you move to another tier after a sufficient amount of xp
upgrading to a different model is only done when there is an immediate threat your current weapons cannot handle or there is an arms race where your weapon will be obsolete very soon

upgrading an army is expensive as crap, and the current M1 abrams is sufficient to handle nearly every threat in the battlefield
the battlefields threats have significantly reduced in intensity but greatly expanded in its spread and occurrence

upgrades will no longer come in heavier armor or weapons
but in cost-effectiveness and transportability
what's the damn point in a M2 MBT with 155mm gun firing hypersonic rounds with ceramic-graphene armor if none of your enemies even have tanks?

>what's the damn point in a M2 MBT with 155mm gun firing hypersonic rounds with ceramic-graphene armor if none of your enemies even have tanks?

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I love his unstated point--new technology should focus on improving tankers' ability to do their existing jobs, not to give them new jobs that really should be handled by someone else. To do otherwise causes their existing jobs to suffer.

You can reduce this to a couple of Heinlein quotes (going by memory here): "In combat, every second is as precious as jewels" and "a suit you just wear". I don't know if "ergonomics" is really the right word here; it's not just how your workspace is designed, it's what jobs and tasks you've been assigned. Chieftain hits on this a lot when talking about how each crewman goes about his business in each design he crawls into.

Agreed. Later in the video he talks about the Merkava, and goes on at length about the built-in combat simulation system they gave the tank as opposed to the one that takes something like 4 hours to hook up to the Abrams.
Just goes to show how valuable actually doing the work in the field can be when it comes to analyzing the equipment made for it.

Tanks are dramatically less important than either. A sufficiently advanced navy can END trade to hostile nation, a sufficiently powerful air force can eliminate any number of tanks with almost no casualties.

>what are landlocked countries?
>what is contested airspace?
>what is holding land?
A reminder that there are exactly 0 nations on earth that can field such a capable navy and/or air force which cannot also field an equally capable armored force.
Also, comparing one piece of hardware to an entire branch of the armed forces is kinda stupid, right? Actually I guess that second point really goes more to than you, but still.