Well, to address the last two posts, two things to remember:
The Abrams is designed to go head to head and break your heart and your army. But, there has to be a trade off somewhere. In order to get the obscene level of protection of the frontal arc, something had to give, and since they had to leave a nice large exhaust for the turbine, that is where it gave. But, to be fair: *all* tanks, including the vaunted Merkava, is weak to the rear. Hit it with something largish (like the 57mm), it will punch. What happens next depends on the design.
I don't know what is up with the Autoloaders: But the Abrams and the Merkava both have actual crew-members loading the gun, so as long as you got food, you got a loader. The Merk has a something of a semi-auto revolver system going that gets followup shots off at a rate that has to be seen to believed, but, it still has a loader, so if it breaks beyond repair they can work around it or better yet yank it out and still be good to go.
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Member of the Bofors fan club! The M1911 of automatic cannon.
Proud fan(atic) of the CV90 Series.
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