By J.Hawk
The news and photos of a Russian-made T-90 MBT following a direct hit by an anti-tank guided missile have been posted on a number of Russian news outlets and blogs. The tank’s frontal turret armor indicates it’s the newer T-90A with a welded turret and thicker frontal surfaces. The missile’s explosion clearly detonated at least one of the Kontakt-5 reactive armor panels and destroyed and damaged a number of surface fittings including the Shtora ECM system. The tank appears to have remained operational, though the gunner’s primary sight and thermal camera seem to have been damaged by the explosion. There are no additional details concerning where, when, and with what weapon the T-90A was attacked.
Yet it means the active anti-missile defence systems did not work (or maybe were not turned on again?).
@ Dagnir,
I’ve seen takfiri terrorists footage of Aleppo front lines, where the SAA rides around in a tank with men sitting atop of the vehicle. Providing top notch weaponry, doesn’t turn crews into triple A soldiers.
Some of the active anti-missile defence might be a hazard to surrounding infantry, more so than a missile designed to penetrate tank armor. That wouldn’t apply to the Shtora defense system though but perhaps that needs a certain range to confuse the TOW’s guidance system.
TOW is a wire guided, optically tracked SACLOS(Semi-automatic command to line of sight) heavy AT missile -_- optically tracked (cross on target), semi-automatic (auto missile to crosshair), wire guided (trailing wire after missile) devices (most land based ATGM) can not be jammed, but only, after a active radar detection, line of sight obscured by hot smoke and/or actively intercepted. Shtora is a infrared decoy device that automatically launches hot smoke and jams the frequency of the IR beam lighting the targeted tank for the laser dot reflection seeking missile head, thus turning a dot on tank into a humongous spot on terrain. It works only on laser seeking heads (mostly aircraft deployed) and in the intended frontal arc. As there is no lased lighting the target Shtora wont be triggered. I hope that this reply would be useful.