Tank Chats #109 | Scorpion & TV15000 | The Tank Museum

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's YouTube channel. Now, this is TV 15,000. It is actually a unique vehicle. In fact, it was the prototype for the entire Scorpion range and gives us a chance to see where it came from. from and it was built at fvrd, which is the combat vehicle research and development establishment that was in Chertsey, it was built in their workshops and it was launched on Christmas Eve 1965 just to give them something to drink champagne with. I guess it was built with the idea of ​​creating a cvr type thing in the end it is actually powered by a rolls royce r series engine now that is a six cylinder engine it was the type of engine if you remember it used in the rolls-royce phantom plus princess which was actually nothing more than an austin westminster dunn-up to look a little fancy but that's what it was the engine driving a rolls-royce gearbox into a sort of combined transmission and steering unit in the front end really was quite an unusual vehicle, it's strange that they didn't use the B60 engine which you would have thought was more suitable, but they didn't go with the original Austin car.

It's dead, it's made of aluminum, it's well ventilated, as you can see now, the other strange thing is that it actually has hydrogas suspension if you look at it you can see that in addition to the road wheels with their hydrogas suspension units it has return rollers now you won't find any return roller on the

scorpion

scorpion

the wheel fills all the space between the bottom and top stretch of the track, this one is slightly different but it was an amazing vehicle it had fantastic performance but it was built purely as an experiment, a prototype for this new vehicle that became Scorpion later, so it's quite unusual. but even more unusual, it survived after all these years since it was built, to find it here now and you know they've been able to fix it up pretty well.

It's quite notable that the turret, which is just a dummy, was placed on the hull later to make it look a little more like a cvr, but that was only part of the type of decoration, really the hull was what mattered with this engine, the engine was changed later, then they installed a jaguar engine, they probably installed other engines as well. but they were all very limited in width and the jaguar engine was the one that was decided on for the scorpion, so it was tested here and really that's what it is, otherwise it's basically a scorpion with this new type of suspension that the hull Pretty much the same, a little more crudely welded, but it was done in a bit of a hurry, but it's a pretty interesting vehicle and gives us a chance to see where the scorpion came from.

Now this vehicle is the Scorpion. It's more of a light vehicle, in fact. I would look at it and think of it as a light tank, not that anyone would use the term light tank these days. Britain made such a mess of its light tanks during World War II that the term has completely disappeared from the record now, but it's still essentially a light tank, it's actually listed as a fighting vehicle, reconnaissance in parentheses, if you want to be specific about it, but that's what they call it, anything but a light tank, it's a term they hate, even though it has all the characteristics of a light tank.

Tank now, the first thing I should say is that this is one of the prototypes that you can immediately distinguish by the license plate if you are a license plate collector, otherwise the spoked wheels, at least the holes in the wheels are usually a good guide. For a vehicle that was built as a prototype, they built a lot of prototypes to try to determine which one was, you know, whether it would work very well or not. It's actually an interesting vehicle. It belongs to a family that we will see in Of course, but Scorpion was the name of the family vehicle, fv101 was its number and it is still a pretty impressive vehicle, although it is no longer used and I will get to that in a minute too, for starters, the vehicle is built. aluminum at least it's an aluminum alloy, they didn't build this one out of steel, so in that sense it's more like the m113 in the United States built out of aluminum, the only difference is that this was the first complete vehicle built out of aluminum since its body to its turret, everything else is aluminum and that means the weight is reduced quite a bit, it doesn't actually save that much weight, generally speaking with aluminum armor, you need it to be about three times thicker than steel armor so the actual weight difference hardly exists, but there is a difference and that is that the internal dividers are not necessary, the hull becomes stronger because it is thicker and therefore the internal divisions that are taken into account are not needed. some steel built vehicles of the same size type, so in that sense, it saves a little weight.

It is powered by a six-cylinder Jaguar engine. It's quite unusual. They tried a few other engines but decided the Jaguar was the best. It was powerful. They made a D rated version. It's the same engine. like you would find in a 4.2 liter jaguar, but reduced to a more reasonable speed for use as a tank, but it was tight, that was the secret, they needed an engine that would fit next to the driver, the drivers under that hatch, there, the engines stop on the right and you had to have the engine as narrow as possible to fit it.

It is driven through a tn-15. It is a combined gearbox and steering unit at the front. Here it drives the front sprockets, something quite unusual for a front-driven British vehicle again, but that's the general mechanical layout of the thing, it has a helmet designed to carry a man, the driver, and the other two , the commander and the gunner, are in the turret. Now the turret is equipped with a 76 millimeter cannon, which is itself a development of the The old Saladin gun, same type again, is a fairly short 76 millimeter weapon with reasonable anti-armor capability, but it is not wonderful, You wouldn't want to take on the tank and you'd be wiped out, but that's the idea, but that's it. the 76 millimeter cannon, which is a development of the gun installed in celadin next to it and the image intensifier would go, that's that box-like thing on the side of the gun, there and then the smoke is discharged on each side and that It's the whole design of The vehicle is very compact, you could say narrow in a sense.

The early ones, the ones produced as prototypes, generally don't have the storage boxes that you see on the later ones and you'll see that as we go along, but that's why. they were all made to make them as light as possible, the same goes for the crew, you would think in some ways, if the military had their heart set on making light, they would have a team of naked men to drive and operate the tank, but They don't, the man insists on dressing up to get into the tank and they want to wear NBC suits half the time, which are even bulkier, so getting the driver in was a difficult problem anyway, it doesn't matter if it was slim.

To begin with, a guy or a fat guy and they have to get someone to fit into the driver's position and that is difficult enough, they are very fast vehicles, very agile, with torsion bar suspension and quite light, quite a bit of power and a nasty habit of giving off a tremendous heat signature from that Jaguar engine, which is the big problem with them. This one is actually equipped with a flotation screen that is placed around the top of the hull. You pick it up and it's like a camera. bellows a kind of zigzag cloth with a transparent vane on the front that the driver can look at to give an idea of ​​where he is going, the only problem is that under normal circumstances the scorpion follows his tracks and does the same. in the water it uses the tracks as oars and, frankly, they are almost useless.

He will go wherever the current or tide takes him. They won't just slide around in the water like you would expect them to. system with proper propellers on both sides, but you can't transport them in a vehicle, there's nowhere to put them and the rare chance of crossing a river is pretty slim anyway, so in the end they killed the whole business. of the screen and everything else, now we'll get to the big problem when they fired this gun, which was their main target, of course, you got a lot of smoke feedback, especially out of the gap when you were reloading it and the Royal Air Force, who also used the scorpion, began to wonder if the fumes were a little toxic, so they complained.

The test was carried out at the armored test development unit on the road, they carried it out on the scorpion and fired several 76 millimeters and found that the smoke built up in the turret was quite bad and meant that the men were breathing worse than smoking, I mean anywhere, so they eliminated the scorpion completely and couldn't cure it. At least it didn't have, they didn't have, for example, travel power in the turret because it was expensive, it took up space, that was a mistake and they adopted it later, but the scorpion disappeared, they were here in a minute. and the next, there are some out there but they were mostly reworked, some of them I think were reworked into a unit called a saber that had a 30k turret like a scimitar on top, but that's the idea except as scorpion combat vehicles. that couldn't be considered at all now and it was all gone and that's why smoke built up which made the tower unpleasant at least to the two men who were there, that's why it was obviously removed in these difficult times. your support is really valued so please continue to follow us on social media, subscribe to our channel and if you get a chance maybe order something from our store, join one of our programs like patreon or our friends organization and we will .

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