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Old 08-18-2020, 06:46 PM
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ChalkLine ChalkLine is offline
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Default BMP-1M, probably the Twilight War standard.

During the 80s we thought the BMP-1 would stay as it is and would be thrown into depots before being issued to third-echelon troops. It seems the Russians, knowing they didn't have the rubles to make the BMP-3 in sufficient numbers, decided to have a hard look at the old war horse.

The big complaint among the many of the BMP-1 was that it was built with another role to the one it now occupies (although that role didn't exist when it was designed). It was only designed to stop shell fragments and rifle calibre rounds, not even having enough armour to defeat the 12.7mm on the sides. This is the vehicle in the rules.

Obviously, this had to change. I could go on about soviet battle concepts, they're quite different to what they led us to believe, but the main thing is that the soviets moved from a "well, we're going to lose men, let's make sure the objective is achieved so it doesn't turn into a slugging match where we'll lose lots of men" theory to a theory where they needed to stop attritional warfare grinding down their troops. This occurred during their Afghan commitment and went fairly unnoticed by the west.

Thus we get the first modernisation; the BMP-1 Afghanka package. This is a survivability package to minimise crew losses. It is a 6mm applique armour package that brings the sides of the vehicle up to a level where it's resistant to 12.7mm armour piercing rounds. They also developed a system where the troops could remove the ATGM from the roof (already upgraded to those used by the latest vehicles) and replace it with a carried Plamya 30mm AGL in a remote mount. If you really want the old 73mm-armed BMP in your game you should be using this one.

However after Chechnya, Afghanistan and watching the west in Iraq the Russians decided that the standard BMP-1 was going to be a rolling coffin in modern combat and embarked on a widespread upgrade to give these vehicles some effective firepower to hold western IFVs at bay.

Here we get the BMP-1M, a very different beast and probably quite a surprise to many people. They turfed out the old turret because they'd come to believe that IFVs were unavoidably going to be involved in urban combat. In its place was put a remote mount, here's the blurb:

"It is fitted with a TKB-799 "Kliver" one-man weapons station armed with a missile pod, a 30 mm 2A72 multipurpose autocannon (it can be used against both ground and air targets) and a 7.62 mm PKTM coaxial machine gun. The missile pod is mounted on the right side of the weapons station and normally holds four 9M133 Kornet (AT-14 Spriggan) or 9M133F "Kornet" ATGMs with a laser jam-resistant fire control system, but these can be removed and replaced by a pod of 9K38 Igla (SA-18 Grouse) surface-to-air missiles. It carries 300 rounds for the main gun, 2000 rounds for the machine gun and 4 ATGMs. It also has a modern computerized fire control system with a two-plane stabilizer and a 1K13-2 telescopic sight with distance measurement/thermal/laser channels and ballistic calculator with external sensors.
Computer simulations proved that the BMP-1M can outperform the American M2/M3 Bradley at firepower efficiency (the tested aspects included ATGM power, the effective range of the ATGM and the autocannon during day and night conditions and launching the ATGM while on the move). In these simulations the BMP-1M won a combat engagement with the M2 Bradley 1.3 times more often."
This beastie was available in 1998 but you can bet your bottom ruble it'd be turning up a lot earlier during the Twilight War.
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