Russian T-14 tanks drive during rehearsal for the Victory Day parade in Moscow. (Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin)
It's hard to wage war when nature calls, so Russia is installing toilets in its troubled third-generation T-14 main battle tanks, Russian state media revealed Thursday.
The days of relieving themselves in fuel and ammo cans or hopping out to dig single-use latrines are apparently over for Russia's tank crews, at least those manning the T-14 Armata tanks, Ilya Baranov, a senior official at the Ural Design Bureau of Transport Machine-Building in Yekaterinburg, told TASS News Agency.
Russia put on an intimidating show of force in 2015 by unveiling the T-14 Armata main battle tank, which represented a bold new design billed as an unstoppable NATO tank killer.
The technology sounds like a lethal Rube Goldberg machine: an electrical circuit generates high voltage pulses, that ignites a plasma cartridge that then triggers explosives to propel projectiles at extreme velocity. But this technology, referred to as an Electro-Thermal Chemical (ETC) gun, might become a silver bullet for NATO when it comes to penetrating the next generation of advanced Russian tanks.
Russia's new T-14 Armata is one of the most advanced tanks in the world. So advanced, in fact, that Western nations worry that older tanks like America's M1 Abrams may be rendered obsolete.
Moscow will build 100 T-14 Armata main battle tanks by 2020 according to a senior Russian defense official, putting to rest the fanciful notion that the Kremlin would build a fleet of 2,300 of fearsome new machines by that time.
Russia’s next-generation battle tank can reportedly out-stick the American armor in a heartbeat — and it’s coming to battlefields sooner than expected.
