Page 1 of 4

Is China's ZTZ-96 Main Battle Tank Any Good?

Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 3:16 am
by Xiaoshan_Sailor
Interesting article on China's ZTZ-96.
Is China's ZTZ-96 Main Battle Tank Any Good?
Russia and America don't think so.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/ ... good-81081
R30 (1).jpg

Re: Is China's ZTZ-96 Main Battle Tank Any Good?

Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 10:00 am
by 43rdRecceReg
I guess the first question to ask would be whether it's a fake, or the genuine item :lolno: :D
I believe a Chinese firm managed to produce a counterfeit Porsche (with a Ford engine? ),
and so a fake tank is not beyond the bounds of possibility. :D

Re: Is China's ZTZ-96 Main Battle Tank Any Good?

Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 10:13 am
by General Jumbo01
No main battle tanks are any good any more! They are like the battle ship. Great in WW1 but out-moded by the carrier in WW2. The new battlefield fire and forget missile launchers are small, highly mobile and score every time with no line of sight required.

We don't have them in 1/16 yet so don't panic!

Re: Is China's ZTZ-96 Main Battle Tank Any Good?

Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 10:36 am
by jarndice
I wouldn't go loading the "Fake" Military propaganda solely upon the Chinese,
American Nuclear Submarines rarely if ever carry the proper Fleet Numbers on its Conning Tower indeed they are irregularly repainted with a different number just as the Lockheed SR71 Blackbird whose Tailfins similarly carried an assortment of different numbers throughout its service.
And closer to home if you go to the Army Air Corp Museum at Middle Wallop you will see a De-Havilland Canada 2 Beaver Numbered XP821 and it is painted in United Nations Markings and the White and Blue of that organisation,
If you ask the staff why it is painted in that scheme you will get a cock and bull tale about "Aid to the people of Kampuchea/Cambodia and Laos" :lolno: :lolno:
The US Army was flying the U6 in Vietnam in a number of roles and was well known by the troops on the ground and by US Navy/Marine and Airforce aircrews,
The U6 was the US army's designation for the Beaver,
Coincidently the British Army's Beaver XP821 was flying aid for the UN in South East Asia when the UN could have had access to any number of single engined liason aircraft but it was considered safer to fly a type that the belligerents recognised as friendly so it was able to operate a lot closer to the action than has ever been admitted.
There is a lot more to this story but I like my freedom. :haha:

Re: Is China's ZTZ-96 Main Battle Tank Any Good?

Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 10:59 am
by 43rdRecceReg
:D
:think: What happens to the driver's head, when the Gun suddenly drops down into the maximum hull-down position? 8O :D

Re: Is China's ZTZ-96 Main Battle Tank Any Good?

Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 11:49 am
by General Jumbo01
He gets a bump! When the gun is fully lowered and then traverses he gets decapitated. However, like Russia in WW2, what's the loss of a man when there are so many replacements available?

Weren't the UKs first claimed nuclear bombs nothing of the sort? Little white lies! ;)

Re: Is China's ZTZ-96 Main Battle Tank Any Good?

Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 11:50 am
by Raminator
General Jumbo01 wrote:No main battle tanks are any good any more! They are like the battle ship. Great in WW1 but out-moded by the carrier in WW2. The new battlefield fire and forget missile launchers are small, highly mobile and score every time with no line of sight required.
I don't know that I'd go that far. The tank may no longer have the pre-eminence it enjoyed during the Second World War, but it's still an important part of combined-arms warfare in terms of heavy support and exploitation. Tanks might suffer in asymmetrical and/or urban warfare, but that's nothing new; it's just a limitation of the concept. Anti-tank guns and handheld shaped-charge weapons didn't make tanks obsolete, so it's unlikely that ATGMs and standoff ground-attack aircraft will do the same. There's always been that constant arms race, there are always new countermeasures.

To be honest, I'm pretty happy that there haven't been any large-scale conflicts between powerful industrial nations to put the theory into practice. Being an armchair general is a lot more fun when no lives are at stake.
43rdRecceReg wrote:
:think: What happens to the driver's head, when the Gun suddenly drops down into the maximum hull-down position? 8O :D
I'd like to think that in a situation where the gun might be aiming at something rapidly, the driver would have the good sense to be well within cover!

Re: Is China's ZTZ-96 Main Battle Tank Any Good?

Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 12:10 pm
by jarndice
The UKs first Nuclear Bomb Test produced what is known as a "Squib" To be polite it underperformed :{
In the very descriptive terms of Wiley Coyote it went bnag instead of BANG,
Practice makes perfect and now we can kill millions of innocents just as well as anybody else who has the bomb.

Re: Is China's ZTZ-96 Main Battle Tank Any Good?

Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 1:38 pm
by Son of a gun-ner
jarndice wrote:The UKs first Nuclear Bomb Test produced what is known as a "Squib" To be polite it underperformed :{
In the very descriptive terms of Wiley Coyote it went bnag instead of BANG,
Practice makes perfect and now we can kill millions of innocents just as well as anybody else who has the bomb.
One could say that all nuclear bombs detonated in the 40's and 50's went bnag instead of bang, including the ones dropped on Japan. They were immensely inefficient.
To think that the one dropped on Hiroshima only detonated around 2%, that's 7grams, (the size of a peppercorn) of its uranium, the rest, 98% of the fissile material just being blown apart in the air and not contributing to the destruction.
It certainly brings home just how scary these weapons are.
When I did my apprenticeship, I worked with guys that had worked on our British nuclear test program in the Easter Island area (edit; Or was it the Christmas islands? probably the Xmas ones), they had machine workshops in the back of lorries, probably why they struggled to get it right ;)

Re: Is China's ZTZ-96 Main Battle Tank Any Good?

Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 1:46 pm
by Son of a gun-ner
As for the Chinese tanks. . . .
This isn't the first time this has happened to them in other tank exercises.

Watch "ZTZ-96B lose a wheel during Tank Biathlon 2016" on YouTube
phpBB [video]


Watch "Chinese Type-96B Tank Breaks Down in Tank Biathlon 2018" on YouTube
phpBB [video]


To be fair to them, they did win a race in an event.

Watch "Chinese Team Wins Competition in Tank Biathlon" on YouTube
phpBB [video]