Stealth Tank Unveiled by Poland | Hacker News Reader

Stealth Tank Unveiled by Poland

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99 pointstomashertus74 comments

"which incorporates technology that makes it invisible to enemy thermal imaging"

I call bullshit on this one. The US M1 Abrams has a 1500HP gas turbine engine. To develop 1500HP means producing at least another 1500HP in waste heat, if not more like 3000-5000HP. Let's conservatively say it's 1500HP * 732W/HP ~= 1MW

How in the world do they think they're going to hide a 1-5MW power plant? From the second video: Peltier plates on the exterior.

That's great, but it doesn't do jack to the huge plume of exhaust jetting out the back. And since they've got some kind of fancy exhaust cooling system they've got to be sucking up and discharging MASSIVE amounts of air to dissipate several megawatts without increasing the air temperature too much.

Even then, it's not too hard to turn up the sensitivity on the thermal systems a bit so you can spot these things.

It might be "invisible" only while standing still. This would still be strategically useful, at least from a defensive standpoint.

It might but the second video showed it in motion (30 sec mark) while "stealthed." Although it was moving relatively slowly.

Hybrid engines? if you can make the thing move cool for the last couple of miles that's a massive range of stealth.

I call bullshit on this one. The US M1 Abrams has a 1500HP gas turbine engine. To develop 1500HP means producing at least another 1500HP in waste heat, if not more like 3000-5000HP.

An electric drive system would alleviate a lot of that. For range, make it a series hybrid. It can recharge batteries en route, then operate in a "cool/stealth" mode, so that it can cool down and lie in wait under camouflage and in an enfilade position peeking over a ridge. For maximum stealth, we might want an electromagnetic accelerator instead of a cannon. Such a system would probably want to sacrifice physical protection from anything deadlier than high explosive artillery shells and machine guns for greater stealth.

While we are at it, why do we have to have massive armor and cannons? What if such vehicles could operate as "drone carriers" and launch swarms of drones which are designed as combined surveillance platforms and guided munitions? If you take something like an Abrams M1 tank and land a shaped charge on its main cannon and its tracks, then it just becomes a badly camouflaged machine gun nest. Once immobilized and de-fanged, its machine guns would then be easy to take out. Such drone-missiles can easily out-range the most sophisticated main battle tank gun.

EDIT: The lethality of weapons vs. armor has caused dramatic swings in the tactics of hand to hand weapons on the battlefield. It only makes sense that the increasing lethality of computerized weaponry would cause this to happen for armored vehicles. Knights in armor plate used to rule the field. Firearms made personal steel plate armor obsolete. It used to be that high velocity cannon and massive armor ruled the battlefield. Now it's detection and situational awareness.

So something like lightly armored rocket artillery with a screen of antipersonnel/reconnaissance drones that could paint targets for guided rockets. This might work well until you need to take enemy air force into account.

So something like lightly armored rocket artillery with a screen of antipersonnel/reconnaissance drones that could paint targets for guided rockets.

Not only that. The drones themselves could act as munitions. They could clamp themselves onto something like a main battle tank cannon and set off a shaped charge.

This might work well until you need to take enemy air force into account.

Make the drones small enough, and make them fly low enough, and it won't be as much of an issue. Also, this is why you have your own air force and surface to air missiles.

I was thinking about air force blowing up lightly armored rocket artillery. Also drones make natural target for automatic radar or lidar aimed weapons. I suspect there will be a race to make drones nearly invisible to that form of targeting in a few years as armies around the world equip them.

What if it had some sort of, uhm, "thermal ballast" that would be refrigerated during normal operation?

Then when danger is expected, run the peltier modules in reverse, transferring heat from the outer layer back into the center for a short period of time.

Peltiers are notoriously inefficient. Hideously. Reasonable numbers are in the 10% range. So in order to remove say 5kW of heat from the skin (1.5 tons of refrigeration) which is pretty conservative would require say 50kW of power. Most of which would end up as heat in the metal of the structure of the tank.

If you figure the chassis and armor are say, 50 tons, and steel, you can do a little math to figure out how quickly it would heat up. 50 tons is 50,000 kg and the specific heat of steel is about 0.5kJ/kgK. We're putting heat into the chassis at the rate of 50kJ/sec and things cancel out pretty nicely. You'd heat it up at about half a degree C per second, or about one degree F per second.

In the best possible scenario you're talking about no more than two minutes worth of stealth (perhaps only 30 seconds in reality) and that's with the tank not moving and only idling its engine, just enough to produce the necessary 50kW. It's a neat trick, but I'm not sure it's worth writing home about.

Storing the heat chemically, in an easily reversible endothermic reaction including but not limited to phase-change, could be much more efficient than using Peltiers to cook the crewmwmbers

Could you also carry liquid air, or compress it on the spot, and use it as a coolant?

It's Polish. For much of the year there is a reasonable supply of snow for cooling too.

"Ready for export in 2022", it says. That's a lot of countries you can't sell to if you have to rely on snow all year round.

3 months of snow most years, sometimes less.

Jet engine on planes have a pretty serious thermal signature as well. That doesn't mean stealth technologies are useless.

I suspect invisible in the general case involved some poetic license. But improving the thermal characteristics even in limited circumstances is pretty valuable.

Another posted noted that the prototype is based on a CV-90. That's not really a tank at all (Wikipedia calls is an "infantry fighting vehicle"). For those in the US it is roughly comparable to the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

It has a 550hp Diesel engine, which is much easier to cool than a 1500hp turbine.

Maybe it's not so much about being completely invisible as being hard to localize by thermal imaging?

For instance, if they can dump most of the heat into the air, so that what the thermal imager sees is a big blob, then if you had several tanks advancing as a loose group, so their thermal blobs overlapped, someone trying to use thermal imaging to aim an anti-tank weapon might not be able to tell where to aim to hit the tanks instead of the spaces between the tanks.

A long insulated hose could exhaust the heat some distance away from the tank. Then it would look like a giant stealth rat.

What if it uses an electric motor? Imagine the usefulness of a hybrid tank, electric power for when you want to crawl in stealth mode and a huge diesel motor for when you want to floor it.

As with all stealth tech, the point is not to make it impossible to know that there is a tank somewhere there -- it's to make it impossible to automatically track by guided weaponry, and hard to acquire as a target when using an IR sight. For that purpose, dissipating all heat into air and thus cloaking the tank and everything around it in a cloud of hot air is an advantage, not a disadvantage.

> US M1 Abrams

You're comparing an old, outdated lump of shit of a tank with a brand new 2014 design.

Source: My buddy works for the Defence Materiel Organisation in Australia, and had to buy a bunch of them.

Yeah, sure. It makes a lot more waste heat than a new one. That means that it might make 5MW of waste heat while the new 500HP diesel might only make 1.5MW of waste heat. Or a 300HP diesel might only make 1MW of waste heat.

It's 80% less! A megawatt is still a lot, though.

Poland is using the strategy of "Showing Teeth" - which means that it is doing everything to actually make any country think twice before attacking.

Having huge stockpile of artillery and armoured vehicles it is very difficult enemy to have.

Recognizing this as perfect way to deter enemies (mainly Russia) Poland have been investing resources on growing woods (for hiding) and developing newest artillery and "hit and run" vehicles and equipment.

You would be surprised what they have in development at the moment. After all - Poland just started huge shopping spree - they started enormous arm up project, so we will see more of those ultra high tech stuff showing up soon.

The problem is that most other countries do know that we are only "showing teeth" and that Poland actually doesn't have a big supply of these things, and the one we have are outdated as hell. This concept probably hopes to change that image a little bit.

Poland is going to be a very interesting country to watch over the next 10-20 years. It has one of the fastest growing economies in Europe, a sizable population, and geopolitically speaking, a very long memory. Tensions with Russia are going to mount in the coming decades as Poland's economy grows, and Russia's slows down. I doubt they'd come to blows, least of all in the near future. But Poland is going to gear up, just in case.

A lot of this will come from Poland's desire to reduce its dependence on the US. Poland and the US have cooperated, militarily and politically, more reliably than most European countries have. But in light of recent events in Eastern Europe, the US is starting to look like a less-than-reliable backstop.

Why would Russian economy be slowing down exactly again, seems to be doing quite the opposite last I checked.

Keep up with current events!

http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/crude-oil.aspx

The vast majority of Russia's economic growth is coming from oil and gas reserves, especially the latter. That's a notoriously shaky ground on which to build an economic expansion as rapid as Russia's has been in the last few years. Extremely volatile over the long run. It doesn't help that most of that wealth is being captured by a handful of government-sanctioned plutocrats, and by government officials themselves (Putin most especially; he is rumored to have a personal net worth in excess of $70 billion). A very small proportion is actually being reinvested into productive and petrochemical-diverse industry. To make matters worse, the country suffers from some major demography issues. Its birthrate is problematic, and its population is old. It is one of the few major industrialized nations whose population is expected to contract significantly over the next century.

There is very little stability underpinning Russia's economy. It's wobbly, as is, right now. It'll be wobblier still over the next 10-20 years.

Russian GPD growth is oil price proxy :)

>But in light of recent events in Eastern Europe, the US is starting to look like a less-than-reliable backstop.

I think that Poland is somewhat satisfied with the response the US had at least in Poland and other NATO allies, which was stationing more troops there. The US is tied in how far it will be willing to go to countries outside of its NATO commitments. Ukraine wasn't simply worth going to war over Russia with. I don't think that anyone doubts the US' resolve to follow through with its NATO commitments.

Apparently it's going to start production in 2018 and be ready in 2022. They sure are taking their time.

A lot can change in that much time. For instance, Russian foreign policy.

> Having huge stockpile of artillery and armoured vehicles it is very difficult enemy to have.

The media went on and on about Iraq having "the 4th largest army in the world" during the first Gulf War. In the end, this amounted to a lot of people in uniform dying when the bombs collapsed their shelters or blowing up in their Soviet-era tanks. Having land-based vehicles doesn't amount for much nowadays if you don't have air superiority as well.

Even setting aside Poland's own small but well-equipped air force, anyone trying to establish air superiority over Poland is going spend a lot of money getting nowhere. German and American fighters on alert are an hour away, and the British and French won't be far behind.

Ground forces take a lot more time. The day spent waiting for the first elements of allied rapid deployment forces is an eternity when your capital is 100 miles from Belarus.

Also thats why I stressed the woods thing - its very easy to hide equipment in woods. Poland have one of the best wood management systems in Europe.

In Iraq army was exposed, air attacks were easy. In Poland or lets say Finland, Norway - woods give superior cover of army movements.

Also Poland have developed one of the best manpads around - check their performance during Georgian war:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grom_(missile)

and are advance in production of "chameleon" screens for tanks and armoured vehicles that make them invisible to infantry and optic devices from distance.

Checking back on hiding this tank in forest vs in snow, they say they have a temperature-controlled cover. I can see how it works in desert by heating up to the temp of the sand, but anyone knows whether they can make their temperature appear lower too?

With proper cooling mechanism is very doable but tank would need to constantly move as it would probably eject heat underneath it, so if it would stay in same place for a minute ground around it would reveal tanks location.

Just to the point - this tank is hit-and-runner. It is intended to sit in bushes and when enemy is passing by it will jump out, fire few shells and using its technological advantage and mobility it would disappear back to wood/bushes. Its not constantly using engines etc to run the mask as this would be pointless especially in winter.

Here is a discussion of up-gunning main battle tanks to 140mm guns to keep up with advances in armor.

http://z4.invisionfree.com/NSDraftroom/ar/t1514.htm

A few interesting points:

Larger cannon are going to be harder to protect. Computerized weapons that can directly target cannon from sufficient ranges could severely degrade a force with conventional main battle tanks.

The cost of logistics can be related to as the eighth power of the tank’s weight (for a tank of the weight we’re discussing). Therefore, the logistics slice of a 80 ton tank would be roughly 5 times greater than an existing 63 ton tank!

O(N^8) is nasty! A technology that can get one out of an arms race involving such unfavorable scaling would be game changing.

If remotely guided/autonomous surveillance and munitions vehicles could be made that out-range main battle tank weapons, then stealthy carriers of such weapons would rule the battlefield. This, of course, comes with the caveat that another arms race of countermeasures could ensue. It's hard for me to envision countermeasures that aren't themselves vulnerable to purpose built missiles, however.

Do note that the vehicle in the pictures is just a Swedish CV-90 with some plastic bits on it, a (probably) mock barrel and various systems. To my knowledge no prototype hull has been completed to date so I find various claims that speak of a target of 2018 for mass production hard to believe. Furthermore, it's not known whether the actual design will pan out.

Here is a movie from 2011 of this vehicle. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6OjpB...

They show how they activate and deactivate the heat camouflage and you can clearly see the difference. It's not fully invisible but if you don't know what you are looking for you will miss it. The camo can also be activated in only certain spots so in one scene they make it look like a normal car in IR by only partially cooling down the exterior.

Looks like something you would see in the Battlefield game series, more specifically Battlefield 4. Quite clearly Poland feels threatened with the events taking place in Russia and Syria and wants to show that it is not some small place that can be pushed around. To be honest, I honestly do not blame them, the world is a dangerous place and it only continues to grow even more dangerous. Russia is growing increasingly unpredictable and who knows will be stupid enough to follow them or any other reasonable threat country into war if it ever comes to that?

Completely unrelated, but I recently travelled to Poland and it is one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited. The people are super friendly, picturesque surroundings and a mixture of historical and modern buildings. If you ever get there and visit Kraków, head to Moaburger for some of the biggest and best burgers you will ever feast upon. I have seen their nice side, I would hate to see their bad side if provoked, I would not want a stealth tank sneaking up on me, especially in winter.

All those angles remind me of the wire-frame tanks in the 1980's video game called Battle-Zone [1] - who would have guessed a stealth tank would make me reminisce?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_%281980_video_game%...

Considering how expensive stealth coatings are to maintain on airplanes, I wonder if this makes sense. Airplanes generally have more options about when they are exposed to the elements than tanks as well. I also wonder how many ISIS or Taliban soldiers have radar or thermal support.

I suppose it's meant to be a show of readiness against Russia, but there's no reason Russia can't adopt the tactics of ISIS and co (you could argue it already has).

The Polish have a history of quite innovative military equipment. Here's a very ambitious fighter from the late 80s that was very much ahead of it's time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PZL-230_Skorpion

The thermal camo is likely from BAE who corroborated on this project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pftna34TbJU&t=0m46s

I do find the missile protection feature to be interesting; active protection been proven to be useful several times, but doesn't seem to be widely used by any country, except for Israel who do use use them on patrols.

Active protection is quite common on high end Russian tanks.

This seems like the sort of cutting-edge high-tech war machine that sounds fantastic on paper, and in practice is hugely expensive and impossible to maintain in field conditions. In particular, the technology for a completely unmanned, turret with an autoloader replacing the human loader and camera systems replacing "stick your head out and have a look", has been around for decades; there are reasons it's had only limited use.

Gosh, it looks neat, though.

Anyone know what the "Active Protection System Launchers" are actually launching? At first I assumed it was fancy smoke grenades, but then those pigeonholes around the sides of the turret turned out to be smoke launchers. So...Anti-missile chaff/interceptors? Anti-personnel RPGs? Something else?

Oh, one other thing. The second video says it weighs in at 35 tons. Unless they've left off most of the armor for the display model (which is possible), this can't possibly be a main battle tank; there's no way it's got enough armor to take a shot from a full-size tank gun. It seems like they're going more for infantry support and possibly ambush hunting.

> In particular, the technology for a completely unmanned, turret with an autoloader replacing the human loader and camera systems replacing "stick your head out and have a look", has been around for decades; there are reasons it's had only limited use.

It seems to be headed for wide use now -- all new major afv designs are now as small boxes as possible with remote-controlled turrets on top. Look up the Russian Armata and the German ifv Puma.

> Anyone know what the "Active Protection System Launchers" are actually launching?

Anti-missile/bomb defense.

> Unless they've left off most of the armor for the display model (which is possible), this can't possibly be a main battle tank; there's no way it's got enough armor to take a shot from a full-size tank gun.

Armor has greatly improved since the 80's. Especially ceramics have improved by leaps and bounds. This, combined with the much reduced and streamlined internal protected volume, and greater allowed armor volume make a high level of protection possible with much lower weight than current designs. Even still, they only promise STANAG 4569 5+ for the 30t main design, and require 5t of additional applique to be fully resistant to guns from front.

In the eternal technological contest between armor and weaponry, we are currently at a very high point for armor. The combined development of radar-guided active defenses that defeat all slow projectiles and semi-reactive ceramics that shred and destabilize ke projectiles as they travel through them, given a 60t weight budget no reasonable design using current-level armor and weaponry could penetrate itself from any angle. Of course, given enough time this will just result in better guns, but as direct upscalings of modern tank guns have proven to be unworkable and abandoned by everyone, they will have to use some exotic new tech.

In the meantime, if fighting against 80's tank guns, yes you can get full protection on frontal arcs at 35t or less.

Wow - that is substantially cooler than I had expected - I would not have associated Poland with such innovative design, so I must revise my assumptions! Showing my age, it instantly reminded me of Battlezone :-)

Yeah totally, agree. I've read somewhere else that they are planning to take this technology and create uniform with same kind of camouflage. Don't know about Battlezone though:)

Thanks, that brings back memories. Looks like Poland decided to do a prequel :)

http://fc02.deviantart.net/fs27/f/2008/144/9/8/BattleZone___...

It's done with BAE, the british defense giant. And it's based on a Swedish design, so it's a group effort.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL-01

Is it just me and my personal impression or did we pass a local maximum of peace after the end of the cold war and the world is becoming a worse place in recent years?

Almost exactly the opposite is true: http://www.pcr.uu.se/digitalAssets/66/66314_1armed-conflict-...

I also searched and found this report [1] showing an increase since 2010. So it is probably more nuanced and depends on you definition of conflict.

[1] http://ploughshares.ca/programs/armed-conflict/armed-conflic...

It's your personal impression. The Second Congo War was the deadliest war since WWII, and it started in the late 90s. The 90s had a ton of small wars, there was just little in the way of big ticket 'hollywood' wars like the US in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Have a poke around these pages and see the ones you don't recall: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_wars_by_date

It seems to have muzzle brake on main gun. I wonder why they chose to use it, it seems none of the current tanks have them for a reason.

Did a double-take at the pictures, thought it was a promotional event for a sequel to Arcticfox…

I thought the tank era had passed us. Once that tank fires a single shot, its location is revealed and an artillery or air strike can be ordered against its approximate location.

We are well in the era of air superiority and moving ever closer to the era of drones. Tanks are relevant for the previous wars only.

Only one problem. The enemy can't surrender to an Aircraft. So even with all the air superiority, you still need the Cavalry. Source - http://bluenred.com/2010/11/11/they-can-not-surrender-to-air...

So long as you need troops on the ground to hold territory, you will need mobile protection against machine guns and artillery. Once you have those, then you also will need something that takes the role of a tank. However, maybe technology will take us past the era of 70 ton behemoths armed with a huge cannon.

its location is revealed

... and? Tanks don't have to rely on stealth to be effective. Air strikes are only reliable if you have some degree of air superiority. And tanks can move - depending on what kind of artillery you're facing, they might not be able to chase a moving target.

There were tank-on-tank battles in the US's invasion of Iraq, so they're not that out-of-date. Plus, while there aren't going to many tank-on-tank battles, tanks are an important component of combined arms tactics - you need infantry to take urban areas, and infantry is more effective with armoured support.

Infantry support in urban areas don't benefit from a stealth tank.

I'm not arguing that tanks have 0 value. I'm saying their value has diminished. In WWII they were the dominant technology, and if total war broke out during the Cold War it would have been as well.

But, today their role is diminishing to newer technologies.

I think we'll see the same happen to aircraft carriers, they'll be usurped by smaller drones that could launch from cruisers or destroyers.

It's not unlike computer tech. We are seeing SSDs replace hard disks. The platter disk still has a role, but we all see the writing on the wall.

Keep in mind that Poland's immediate threats are militias, irregulars, mafia, gangs, and assorted bashi-bazouks. A ground weapon with an aesthetically intimidating presence has value in this context.

Poland's immediate threats - the thing that makes sense to invest % of GDP into military instead of medicine or education or whatever - include Russia.

I was specifically implying Russia in my comment. Russia uses patient, shady, and asymmetric tactics. Look at recent history. They annex small regions without waging outright war. Random undisciplined artillery commanders shoot down airliners without orders. Oops, we shot down your plane. Oops, we annexed the eastern half of your country. Oops, a bunch of Non-Russians guys with Russian equipment just invaded your country. They are getting clever. The structured processes of the UN and NATO are left paralyzed. Small, cheap, fast moving tanks might be useful against this gang warfare methodology.

Ok, seriously... lens flares?

I'm glad I wasn't the only one bugged by the really obvious PS lens flare effects

You weren't. And it is the most lazy version possible, Render->Lens Flare

I've wondered for a while why they haven't developed an elite cavalry unit given their geography, position in Europe, and the historical importance of their cavalry.

I might also have a bit too much fondness for paintings of winged hussars...

I suggest, sir, that you go to a store, buy a hammer, and use it on your head.

To what end?

I freely admit that my fascination with winged hussars is immature. That doesn't change the fact that Poland is a state in search of security like all others, borders countries it regards as untrustworthy (Russia and Belarus), and has a largely flat topography that allows armored assault by those countries.

Of course you can argue that being a part of NATO means that they are under the US nuclear umbrella and therefore it is non-rational for them to invest money in military hardware. However a nuclear umbrella depends entirely upon the protector nation being able to credibly communicate that it is willing to use weapons in the defense of the client nation. This gives the client nation incentive to demonstrate that it has a spine of its own and is willing to pay a reasonably high cost to defend itself. Otherwise, who would believe that the larger nation would defend the smaller when push comes to shove? Why else would Poland have gone to war in Iraq?

The winged hussars are still silly, but a well-known elite cavalry unit doe support the narrative that Poland is a bulwark of the alliance against an assault from NATO's traditional enemy. Also, they could better support and possibly train their ally Ukraine.

Tanks are so noisy, you can hear one from miles!

Okay, I give up. It's time to bring back the Polish jokes.

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