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  1. #11
    Council Member Fuchs's Avatar
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    I can think of dozens of improvised and quantity-produced weapons and munitions that could destroy/pierce MRAPs.
    DPICM bomblets are still in use (and will remain so in many countries), sensor-fuzed submunitions like Sadarm are in many countries' inventories (USA, France, Germany, Russia have own designs).

    MRAPs are really "blast-protected trucks with self-defence weapon".

    I would agree that it's a good general APC, if

    (for heavy brigades: ) it had an off-road capability closer to that of tanks

    (for light brigades: ) I would trust the official assertion that troops need passive artillery protection even though they shall dismount out of sight of the enemy



    The wheeled armoured vehicle design has really evolved in the past few years. Previously we saw very few armoured vehicles with large bulletproof windows (some wheeled APC like Fuchs and a Patria type had some windows).
    I remember some Land Rover conversions, the Mamba and the South African designs.

    Now we see large bulletproof windows as standard; the panoramic mirror was obviously not satisfactory for daily road movements in multiple multi-month deployments. Crash prevention was obviously not prioritized enough in Cold War APCs.

    Another advance was the finally universal application of V-shaped hulls, resulting in the necessarily big height. Complicated suspensions and engines like in-wheel electric engines and hydro-pneumatic suspension don't fit well into an underbelly blast protection concept. These technologies lost momentum although they were high on wish lists ten years ago.

    One lesson of MRAPs was the importance of size and turning radius in urban environments; maybe that the next designs will attempt to avoid very large designs in order to remain agile in urban environments. All axles steerable as in recce light AFV designs would help, of course.

    The usage of MRAPs in other environments than Iraq/AFG would certainly lead to additional design changes and add-ons.

    I' sure that the counter-blast armour developments of the past five years will enable much better APC designs in the future. I don't think that any real new APCs in the 12-18 ton range will have less than three axles, though. Almost everyone wants to be able to cross irrigation trenches and drainage channels without the time-consuming use of dedicated equipment.
    Last edited by Fuchs; 07-10-2008 at 12:25 PM.

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