"A tank is a tank is a tank, pretty much, plus or minus a few bells and whistles."
Geeze, such amazing ignorance. If you're vaguely interested in this sort of thing, and want to learn all the process and engineering reasons the Abrams M-1 became the King of the Killing Zone, get a copy of the book by that name: http://www.amazon.com/King-Killing-Zone-Orr-Kelly/dp/0393026...
Written by someone who initially expected to castigate it due to early (mis)reported teething problems (e.g. the whole "it throws tracks (more than other tanks)" was due to a proving ground's faulty tension meter), he got completely sold on the tank which has since totally proven its worth.
Lots of fun stuff, from their modeling everything with strong constraints like weight (i.e. what bridges can it cross), e.g. they didn't want to provide a heavy M2 .50 BMG but the tankers demanded it. To the successful development team's leader, a grizzled Chrysler car exec who drove them crazy with "that doesn't look good" sorts of complaints.
Which often turned out to be a boon (ignoring that weapons should look good so their users feel good about them, which the M-1 delivers on). Said it was too high in an ugly way, so they figured out how to shave a foot off, which is very important for the European theater (not so good for deserts). Didn't like how the armor skirts didn't extend all the way to the back. So they gave in (I'm sure the modeling said it was only a minor net loss) ... and found that made a critial difference in keeping cruft thrown up by the tracks out of its turbine engine.
Very much an iterative process, in a domain where you truly "bend metal" to get things done.
So take the author's words with a big grain of salt, she's woefully ignorant of a huge domain in which we've been building for a very long time the world's most sophisticated artifacts, and learning how to, and how not to do it ... with stakes no less than national survival. Digital computers used for IT are a very recent development as these things go.
Geeze, such amazing ignorance. If you're vaguely interested in this sort of thing, and want to learn all the process and engineering reasons the Abrams M-1 became the King of the Killing Zone, get a copy of the book by that name: http://www.amazon.com/King-Killing-Zone-Orr-Kelly/dp/0393026...
Written by someone who initially expected to castigate it due to early (mis)reported teething problems (e.g. the whole "it throws tracks (more than other tanks)" was due to a proving ground's faulty tension meter), he got completely sold on the tank which has since totally proven its worth.
Lots of fun stuff, from their modeling everything with strong constraints like weight (i.e. what bridges can it cross), e.g. they didn't want to provide a heavy M2 .50 BMG but the tankers demanded it. To the successful development team's leader, a grizzled Chrysler car exec who drove them crazy with "that doesn't look good" sorts of complaints.
Which often turned out to be a boon (ignoring that weapons should look good so their users feel good about them, which the M-1 delivers on). Said it was too high in an ugly way, so they figured out how to shave a foot off, which is very important for the European theater (not so good for deserts). Didn't like how the armor skirts didn't extend all the way to the back. So they gave in (I'm sure the modeling said it was only a minor net loss) ... and found that made a critial difference in keeping cruft thrown up by the tracks out of its turbine engine.
Very much an iterative process, in a domain where you truly "bend metal" to get things done.
So take the author's words with a big grain of salt, she's woefully ignorant of a huge domain in which we've been building for a very long time the world's most sophisticated artifacts, and learning how to, and how not to do it ... with stakes no less than national survival. Digital computers used for IT are a very recent development as these things go.