| impertinence said: I nominate a happy medium, a T-80. |
Doubt that as well :) as the original video suggests the incident happened near UKBTM (a company that makes various military and civil tech) testing range in Nizhny Tagil. T-80's "home" design bureau located in Omsk, furthermore for the most part they are deployed in Eastern Military District and in two years time will be put out of service completely, so by now they are rather rare as well.
Besides now I see there's a thingy of familiar shape to me behind the NSVT machine gun that looks like wind and weather sensors installed on T-72BA, which makes me to believe it could be anything in range between T-72BA to T-90A.
| impertinence said: Do you happen to know of any good resorces for military equipment identification? I would like to brush up on some old skills. |
Not particulary, there're number of field manuals that have few hints on how to distinguish Soviet military tech on the battlefield, but they're very, very basic. E.g. FM 17-12 Tank Gunnery, hopelessly outdated, probably there exists a newer version, but I'm not sure if it's available for the public. You'd porbably need a literature written by industrial experts rather than military, it exist in wide range from pop (various periodic publications) to academic. E.g. one of the recently published books in my collection is "Venediktov, life dedicated to tanks" (Russian only obviously), biographical data aside it covers entire history of designing and production run of countless mods of T-72 including those that never saw the light of day. It is pop, but dedicated to tank enthusiasts only. The authors couldn't resist to throw a few punches at T-64 and Kharkov bureau. 40 years long holy war, that claimed more victims than any harm Nintendo vs. Sony wars would ever do :D You just need to be aware of those things and think critically.
