Soviet/Russian Vehicle Thermographic Sights
It's well known the Soviets preferred to sink R&D into light intensification rather than thermographic sights before the dissolution of the USSR. The main reason was the resolution of the Gen-1 thermographs; out past a certain range the target appeared as a blob and couldn't be clearly identified and the risk of blue-on-blue was too high for a widely deployed vision system. In this regard Soviet thermographs were slightly inferior in resolution to western variants.
However they did actually mass produce and deploy a system, and this was the Agava-2 Gen-1 thermographic on the command variant of the T-80, the T-80UK, first appearing in 1992 after the dissolution.
What's not widely known is they had a Gen-2 variant, the Agava-M1, ready for widespread fielding in 1995 for general retrofitting. Unlike what you'd expect this had nothing to do with the French systems they were looking at but an in-house model developed from the earlier Agava-2.
However the breakup of the federation and the collapse of the economy meant like so many nascent systems this project was shelved due to being sourced from countries now outside Russia. Once the technology was secured the project was continued on shoestring budget and resurfaced as a retrofit in 2016.
Depending on your backstory this means that Soviet thermographs might now be available for a variety of vehicles, but probably not in any uniform fashion. The first vehicles would be the T-80UKs getting updated and their old Agava-2s bolted onto other vehicles.
Like all thermal sights it's a fairly evident installation being an armoured drum on the top left of the turret possibly allowing players to realise something's up with the vehicle. Small vehicles such as the BMP-1 to -2s, BTRs and BRDM-2s would need them mounted on the hull or a new armoured bulge mounts on the turret top.
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