Alex Terrell wrote:

The Russians once made excellent, cheap tanks. One of their secrets was
to size them for something like the 5th or 10th percentile only.



The don't think the words "excellent" and "Russian" should never be used
together in regards to a tank. They made easily mass producable tanks
that didn't cost a fortune, had admirably low silhouettes and were
fairly serviceable; but even the vaunted T-34 had poor uncoated optics
on its sighting system, and a lot of later designs proved very
vulnerable in combat- as well as having problems like the T-62's
tendency to throw treads, and the T-72's autoloader's ability to remove
parts of the turret crew's bodies.
Of course they were better than a Sheridan, but hell, even a Sherman may
have been better than a Sheridan.
I still wish they had continued down this road of tank design:
http://milparade.udm.ru/25/100.htm
The extrapolation of that concept to the 1990's would have been
fascinating to behold.
Completely worthless from a military point of view, but fun to see in
May Day parades. :-)

Pat