T-14 Armata, Canfora

T-14 Armata Main Battle Tank.

Russian armour guru James Kinnear looks at Russia’s revolutionary new T-14 main battle tank. Packed with 150 full-colour photos over 80 landscape pages, this is a must-have reference for modern armour modellers and covers the T-14’s design, development and features full walk-around photographic coverage. The perfect companion if you are building Takom or Zvezda kits!

The T-14 ARMATA Main Battle Tank (MBT) made its public debut in May 2015, at a time of renewed tensions between Russia and the United States and its NATO allies. The appearance of the T-14 ‘Armata’ was for Western observers as much a revelation as the IS-3 heavy tank that made a shock appearance in the Victory Parade in Berlin in September 1945. After years of making do with updating Soviet-era tanks, the T-14 ‘Armata’ is the first genuinely new post-Soviet Russian design.

The T-14 is technically sophisticated and the first with a fully automated turret entirely devoid of a crew as one of many new design features. However, the tank is however expensive to build and maintain compared to the T-90 and T-72B3 MBT types and requires significant crew training compared with other tank types.

The ARMATA is a showpiece of military engineering, but the upgrade of earlier T-72, T-80 and T-90 tanks is now being pursued in parallel as a more cost-effective solution for everyday needs. Whether the development T-14 ‘Armata’ will become a series, albeit limited production tank, or remain a technical showpiece has yet to be seen, but there is no doubt that it has made the impression it was intended to.