The Light Tank No One Talks About

Historically, the United States has had very bad luck with

light

tank

s. There are some good examples of course, such as the M24 Chaffee, but during the Cold War they had many failed ventures, most of them never entered service and those that did were not very well received. We've talked about a lot of them on this channel, mainly the first one, so I've decided to change things up a bit. We will talk about an American

light

tank

that was quite successful even if it was not in service with the us and even if most people don't care, I am talking about the stingray commando light tank, a company developed privately by cadillac gage, was developed mainly for export, it aimed to be as economical as possible, main battle tanks are quite expensive and This was also true in the 1980s, which meant that smaller nations chose to buy cheaper vehicles, such as modern light tanks or modernized medium tanks.

You might think this means the stingray wasn't very good, but for its time it was actually quite advanced. It was first operational in 1984, but was not delivered to the Royal Thai Army until 1990. It is usually quite difficult to find information on tanks from this era, but as it was an export item, there is actually a lot of information about the Stingray that people search. After all, be informed about your purchases, especially when they cost millions of dollars, keeping costs to a minimum. Cadillac attempted to use pre-existing upgrade components whenever possible. It was also supposed to have MBT style weaponry.

Air transportability. High autonomy and high mobility. Let us begin. With the hull itself, as it is one of the few unique components, they will have a fairly conventional layout with a driver in the front tower in the middle and a power pack in the rear. It was built with special Catboy armor, basically just high hardness steel, meaning that along its front arc it could stop 14.5 millimeter attacks but at the back it could only stop rifle caliber bullets the armor. it was kept relatively flat and uncomplicated this was done to make the application of the applied armor a little easier the turret was also made a cadloy despite being relatively small the turret was apparently quite comfortable and easy to work on the stingray had a crew configuration conventional with a driver commander gunner and loader an automatic loader would probably have saved space and weight but would also be quite expensive so it was not used the gunner and commander sitting on the right side of a turret with a magazine placed along the left for the armament used the real low recoil artillery 105 the same gun used by the light tank vfm5 36 bullets were carried in total eight of which were kept in the turret ready frame, the gun had a large number of optional equipment that a customer could choose from, including a laser rangefinder, thermal imaging camera, digital fire control system, and dual-axis stabilizer.

Along with the 105, the Stingray also had a 7.62 coaxial machine gun in front of the commander's cupola. 50 cal could now be mounted by moving to the undercarriage the torsion bar suspension system was borrowed from the M109 although it was slightly modified the drive sprocket was placed at the rear the tracks were supported by three return rollers which were taken From the m41 walker bulldog a detroit diesel 8v 92 ta engine was installed that produced 535 horsepower and gave the manta ray a cruising range of almost 500 kilometers. This engine was already in use by the hemet. One of the Army's heaviest truck platforms in the Stingray.

It was mounted transversely to maximize space savings. the Allison transmission the an improved version introduced for the second round, this version offered improved armor, better fire control systems, a slightly better engine and more as it would have been too heavy, otherwise they decided to try mounting the lev 105 turret on the manta ray, Not only was it lower profile but it also had a bustling autoloader, there were some problems, although the Manta Ray's airdrop capability was questionable, it did not have enough rounds ready and it did not have a comprehensive NBC protection system, all of these are quite important problems and in the end he was obviously not selected.

As mentioned above, the stingray had some success, Thailand purchased over a hundred of them and their military still uses them to this day. I don't think the stingray was ever used in combat, but it came pretty close in service with the rta. The stingray has generally been highly regarded, although there was apparently a scandal involving cracked hulls after an investigation revealed the cause of the cracks. It wasn't a design flaw, it was because the crews raised their tanks to see how high they could reach me. The Stingray is interesting because of how relatively simple it is, other American flight tanks failed because they were too ambitious, but because the Stingray was conservative it was able to have some success anyway, that's pretty much all I have to say, I hope that they liked. the video and see you in the next one