Immediately after the end of World War II, the Soviet Union found itself embroiled in a new large-scale conflict - the cold war. The arms race has become one of the essential attributes of aggressive competition with the capitalist world. In the USSR, as in the West, tens and hundreds of new types of weapons were created. One of them was a tank hiding behind the index "Object 225". What was the revolutionary machine like?
The first Soviet tank to pass the "main" classification was the T-64A. The machine was developed and created in the early 1960s at the facilities of the Kharkov Design Bureau. Serial production of the T-64 was carried out since 1969. Subsequently, the main and medium tanks T-62 and T-55 were produced along with it for some time. At the same time, the Kharkov Design Bureau, the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant and the Leningrad Kirovsky Plant Soviet the management decided to throw on the development of promising, innovative projects in the field tank building. In Leningrad, the program was headed by the designer N.S. Popov.
After a short time, Leningraders presented two experimental projects at once, which were assigned the indexes "Object 225" and "Object 226". The vehicles received a gas turbine and diesel engine, as well as guns of calibers 125 and 130 mm. Based on the results of the work, the Leningraders planned to compare both projects and choose the best of the tanks. Apart from the elements listed above, the "Objects" were almost indistinguishable from each other.
The 225th tank turned out to be the most successful. The machine weighed 41 tons and had to be equipped with a VTDT-1000T gas turbine with heat exchanger, which at the time of the design of the tank was still not ready and was also in development stage. The tank received a solid armor for those times of 550-600 mm in the front, 70 mm on the sides. The turret armor at its thickest point was 550 mm. It was assumed that all this multi-ton splendor would be driven by an engine with a return of more than 1,000 horsepower.
The tower of the "Object 225" was supposed to be the commander's place, as well as the gunner's place. The design of the combat vehicle provided for the installation of a wide variety of auxiliary weapons from light to heavy machine guns, flamethrowers, grenade launchers and surveillance equipment. As the main weapon, the tank was equipped with a 130 mm D-89T smoothbore cannon, created at Uralmashzavod. The cannon was loaded using the latest machine with a carousel mechanism for 36 cells.
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Despite all the efforts of the engineers, after several years of hard work, it was decided to end the project. The initiative was finally closed in 1972, after the next stage of development and new calculations. The engineers found out that producing a new tank for the USSR would simply not be profitable. Although the innovative "Objects" did not have any significant advantages over the tanks already in use in the troops, their production would have been much more expensive. In addition, the Leningrad promising machines significantly lost to what the Kharkov engineers created as part of the work on the "Object 740" project. As a result, the project documentation was put on the shelves of archives under the stamp of secret.
However, the work of Soviet engineers was not in vain. Many developments were later used to strengthen the "Object 219" project, on which LZK had been working since 1968. As a result, a tank appeared, which everyone knows today as the T-80.
Continuing the topic, read about more 10 expensive tanks, the cost of which bites quite noticeably.
Source: https://novate.ru/blogs/291220/57281/
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