jhigg

This was a highly debated topic! (Mostly because we were so incredibly bored most the time and would talk about everything until we were blue in the face)

The common consensus was that as long as they had enough speed you would make it through an average house. Although, depending on what the house was made of and what sort of stuff was in the walls, probably not much farther. The tank's tracks are actually quite easily caught up on stuff. Like a little bit of barbed wire would stop a tank dead in its tracks! It gets tangled and twisted over and over until the poor little guy can't tank it anymore. (Like that pun?!)

Well two come to mind.

The tank eats JP8 (a type of fuel) It has a 1500 HP turbine engine that gets about 2 gallons per mile. We had about a range of about 300 miles because of that. The engine itself could fit on your desk, although the transmission was about the size of a small car!

The second being that we could be driving down the road, and hit a moving target at 2500 meters! That's about 1.5 Miles. It blew my mind every time we would do it on the range.

I've heard that before! Crazy, I wish we could at least get an ac outlet!

Yes! The crew has a loader that all he does is load main gun ammo. I don't recall the reason for this, but it does give us one more man for maintance and to shoot machine guns with. (He has a 240 machine gun on top of the tank that he can shoot)

The russian tank do have auto-loaders and our loaders were required to load rounds faster than what the russian auto-loaders could do. (part of testing)

That is a hard question. I honestly believe that the days of the main battle tank are numbered. With all the advances in helicopters and airplanes, I have a hard time believing that they would put tons of money into a new tank. We were always told that "If you are shooting at helicopters, you're wrong". How can a tank even compete with a heli? I'm not a war expert though and I am always amazed at the ways they used tanks in Iraq and Afghanistan (When they finally got them there)

If they are going to make a true 21st century mbt. It has to have a way to combat helicopters. How they would do that I don't know but it would need it. Also, the tank would need something like the TUSK add-on for the current M1A1's and M1A2's. A majority of how they are using tanks currently is not how they were designed to be used. They were never meant to roll into a town and help grunts displace enemies. Also, a huge limiting factor in our current tanks is the sight and computer controlled fire system. Honestly, our daylight sights as so awful, that we use our thermal's during the day. What do you think would be required?