SMOKE SCREEN FOR TANKS?

One of the coolest gagdets James Bond ever had was the smoke screen that gushed out of the back of his Aston Martin, leav­ing Goldfinger’s min­ions behind, chok­ing and con­fused.
Now, a South African defense firm is team­ing up with Saab to pro­vide the same kind of pro­tec­tion to tanks and armored vehi­cles. A set of sen­sors, the com­pa­nies claim, will pick up the sig­na­ture of a rocket-​​propelled grenade (RPG) launcher. In less than a sec­ond, the Land Electronic Defence System 100 “will dis­patch four smoke can­is­ters cov­er­ing the tank or vehi­cle and mak­ing it impos­si­ble for the attacker’s mis­sile to trace the vehi­cle,” SABC news notes.
“The screen will obscure the attack­ers line of sight and give the vehi­cle and occu­pants a chance to get behind cover,” says a Grintek Defence press release. Because the smoke obscures more than just the vis­i­bile spec­trum, it “can­not be pen­e­trated by ther­mal imag­ing equip­ment used to aim weapons or guide mis­siles.“
But you can expect to see George Lazenby return as 007 before this gizmo is deployed on American armor. Picking up the sig­na­ture of an RPG is beyond tough. And even if the smoke can be shot out in a sec­ond — a big if — these big vehi­cles don’t exactly accel­er­ate like an Aston Martin. The Abrams bat­tle tank, for exam­ple, takes seven sec­onds to go from zero to twenty miles per hour.
THERE’S MORE: The smoke screen might “have some util­ity in defeat­ing an ATGM [anti-​​tank guided mis­sile], but against an RPG it would only pre­vent the crew from see­ing what was about to hit it,” says Defense Tech reader JA. An RPG is a “fire and for­get” weapon, he notes. “Once launched they travel to point of aim, or some­what near it, with­out any fur­ther input from an oper­a­tor. An ATGM, on the other hand, does, in gen­eral, require course guid­ance input from an oper­a­tor and smoke sys­tems are of some util­ity against them.
“This assumes that the crew rec­og­nizes that some­thing is inbound and moves the vehi­cle,” how­ever. “If they sit still, then they blow up in com­plete privacy.”

September 27th, 2004 | Armor, Ground Vehicles | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.