Talk:List of main battle tanks by generation

Al zarrar MBT is 3rd generation

Its not 2nd gen it's a 3rd generation main battle tank. It's written in it's articles. 203.175.72.22 (talk) 21:27, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

T-14 Armata

In 4th generation: shouldn't the Armata go from "planned" to "prototype"? Or is planned better than prototype? Planned sounds more like "we plan to build something, but we do not have anything yet", but, - as far as I know - 14 Armata's have already been build.

• If* planned is the better category, I would like to suggest that that is made clear...

(The one German tank "planned for 2035" suggest's not, bc they do not even have a prototype, as far as I know.) 90.186.21.101 (talk) 15:40, 23 September 2022 (UTC)

K2 & Type 10 Fourth Generation

Why would the K2 and Type 10 be in the fourth generation? There is nothing that meaningfully sets them apart in technology or capability from any upgraded third generation tank and they look completely out of place compared to all the other fourth generation tanks that are still in their prototype phase. I know the definition is pretty vague but that's just silly. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:908:425:120:BD66:D543:9AB:5B53 (talk) 02:54, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

Incorrect tanks in 4th generation

While the K2, Leclerc XLR, Altay, Challenger 3 and Type 10 are advanced tanks they do not have the same characteristics as other 4th generations tanks like the T-14 or KF-51. They all Lack APS systems except for the C3 and K2, still have fire control systems and thermals on par with the Leo2A7+ and are essentially just advanced Gen3 tanks. The challenger 3 has the same engine as the Challenger 2 even. Coobadge1 (talk) 20:28, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

First 1st Gen tank?

If you consider the criteria of the first 1st gen tanks to be the product of the WW2 era. Then the T-44 should clearly be first. As it was a series production tank. That was envisioned and designed on it's own with experience of the WW2 era. And on top of that it didn't see any action of the WW2. So if we go by that criteria, then it clearly should be the first 1st gen tank and not the Centurion tank. IMO. 2404:440C:170E:9400:1DA1:A969:3EF2:BB1 (talk) 16:06, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

We rely on what WP:RELIABLE sources say. (Hohum ^@) 16:24, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

You are asking me for a source that will state that it's the first MBT in the world? Then I don't think you will find it. But not because it wasn't the first MBT, but because people couldn't be bothered stating the obvious, and also those terms of tank Gen's were quite loose in the first place, but by what I understood. It is precisely the true 1st tank of the first gen. 2404:440C:170E:9400:1DA1:A969:3EF2:BB1 (talk) 16:32, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

That attempted source: www.varzilov.com appears to be scale model making site, not a reliable military history source specialising in tanks. Please abide by WP:BRD and do not edit war on disputed content.

Wikipedia uses reliable sourcing, not editor opinion. (Hohum ^@) 16:33, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

@Hohum "reliable sourcing" 🤣 77.97.203.220 (talk) 05:27, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

The T44 is typically listed as a Medium tank, MBT refers to a tank's role (and diversity of it). 2A02:C7C:C4CD:A500:6144:BB0B:7B61:5FF8 (talk) 18:57, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

Merkava 4 Barak He belongs to the new generation

Why is the new Israeli Barak Markeva 4 tank not listed in the new generation while older tanks such as the Japanese which according to some researchers were considered weak compared to the Israeli in the previous generation or the new British which many of its capabilities are based on capabilities that were already in the old Israeli tank. I think it should be on the new list. It also has technology that is not found in the competitors and it meets the requirements of most of the competitors' new generation rifles. 2A02:6680:1103:92BD:5E55:C946:1FB7:218E (talk) 12:54, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

"Year in Service"

I've changed this to "Year Entered Service" as for most entries this seems to be what is being listed but for ones which only existed as prototypes both of these labels are inaccurate, but giving an indication of year would be preferable I imagine, so some tweaking of the column name or addition of an extra column might be good? 2A02:C7C:C4CD:A500:6144:BB0B:7B61:5FF8 (talk) 18:54, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

Removal of A1/A2/A3/... variants?

I think including variants is useful, especially now we have semi-merged entries, in particular for variants specific to different countries, however one thing I noticed is a tendency to include, for instance, the M60, M60A2, and M60A3. Likewise the M1, M1A1, M1A2.

I'd contend that's both not useful, not applied comparable to most other entries, and is somewhat misleading.

- For instance, the M60 and M1 Abrams have quite a few other variants, if you set aside the specialised ones there are still various variants unlisted like the AOS and RISE variants for M1, so listing A1/A2/A3 isn't remotely comprehensive.

- The UK's Chieftain as a counter example has variants Mk.1 through to Mk.13, which are relatively comparable to the US "A1/A2/A3" system. Should we list all of those? The Leopard 2 is another counterexample, while we list the variants specific to other nations (ie Leopard 2PL), we don't separately list Leopard 2/2A1/2A2/2A3/2A4/2A5/2A6/2A7/2A8?

- What does listing those actually tell us? Sure the M1A2 SEPv3/SEPv4 is a useful listing as it shows a version which has crossed into the next 'generation' of MBTs, but the M1, M1A1 and M1A2 occupy the same generation and are largely similar, so why not list it as "M1 Abrams" and be done with it?

I'm gonna leave this discussion up here for a bit before I change it, to see if anything else comes to mind and see what other people's thoughts are, but if someone wants to go ahead before me and be bold I welcome it. I think it'd just be a sensible change to make the table a bit more consistent while being easy to read. 2A02:C7C:C4CD:A500:E119:57FB:E7A8:1259 (talk) 23:39, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Can you define "Year first built" means?

There's no explanation what this means. I've seen some examples, and it appears to be the year when the development is completed (ex: Type 10, K2). So here are the examples.

• The year of final prototype that passed acceptance test.
• Beginning year of the mass-production.
• Completion year of the first mass-production variant.

Thanks Kadrun (talk) 17:41, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

The quantity of tanks listed here makes it a bit complicated to give a single "years" category for this page, as the year that tanks entered service isn't applicable to those which never entered service, and some also have long delays between the development period and their service.

Where I've filled them in, I've generally used either

• The year a complete prototype has been made, or when serial production has began (ie, the transition period from development to production). "Year first built" acting as a succinct category title for that idea.
• Or for those which didn't make mass production, the year associated with the completion of their most advanced prototype.

2A02:C7C:C4CD:A500:E86F:EB4F:320C:28FE (talk) 00:56, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Summarising

@TravelerFromEuropeanUnion Hey, I noticed you reverted virtually all of an edit where I worked on summarising down the notes for many of the tanks. I'm hesitant to just go straight back to summarising them again, so hope you might be open to discuss it here. I'd love to ask your reasoning for reverting the edit.

I think we have a problem on this page currently that many tanks an unhelpful degree of detail, mentioning certain things which we can leave to their respective article pages, but also in a few cases leaving out key information too. We also have a number of cases with slightly unnecessary repetition, or just too many words used for the notes.

A result is that these tables grow incredibly large simply with the number of lines needed for the narrow "notes" section.

• The "Unnamed Semi-Autonomous Next Gen Tank" is a pretty severe example, on a widescreen desktop, the entry takes up my entire page, and unnecessarily so. Do we need to know that "Chief Engineer Mao Ming of the Beijing Institute of Technology said in a 2023 interview [...]", it doesn't really pertain to the tank at all, rather the source. If necessary the reference data could be tweaked to have author fields and dating, although it doesn't seem essential. We don't mention the chief engineers of any of the other tanks by name. We mention twice that it will have an "active protection system"/"active defences system", likewise it featuring drones is mentioned twice, we mention a standard 40-ton weight twice. We also have a vague statement "China’s latest main battle tank has been highlighted on state television, suggesting the fourth-generation vehicle could soon be ready for service, according to a military analyst." being sourced from an article in 2022. It doesn't contribute a lot on this page, and it's a vague and speculative statement..

• The Israeli variants of the Centurion are another example of spacing issues, the entry is quite tall right now because of how the page is handling the spacing, placing each version name on a new line. I was the one who actually went through this article and placed all the non-breaking spaces for readability purposes originally, and in my first pass through of the article I followed a pretty formulaic method, but the Israeli Centurion entry always bugged me because it was the one entry which still didn't break great. In that one case adding in the non-breaking spaces between the year and and version name would help alleviate the issue for that entry, and compress it down a lot, without causing any problems with formatting on the rest of the table. Also, on the topic of the Centurion, the Swiss designations are Panzer 55 and Panzer 57, the former being Mk3s and Mk5s, while the latter is Mk7s and Mk12s, so Pz55 and Pz57 would be more accurate descriptors (Pz being a shortening of Panzer)
• In the case of the Ch'onma-ho, "later versions include upgrades." seems pretty redundant to add. If they didn't include upgrades, they'd just be the same version. It's a more obvious example of where we just have unnecessary waffle in the "Notes" section. We also in a lot of cases redundantly repeat the nation the tank is from. Sometimes it's fitting, especially with multinational developments, or versions derived from foreign tanks, but often it takes up a little bit of unnecessary space each time without contributing much benefit to the page.
• The Chieftain is an entry which is a prime example of us perhaps writing out the wrong information, and I don't mean factually incorrect by that. My edit mentions it is the first MBT to have the driver seated in the supine (laid back) position, a feature which is now common among almost all modern MBTs, a major development and shift in design. It also was the first tank to be tested with Chobham armour (although, was not fitted with it in service), which is one major family/type of composite armour now found on both Challengers (UK), the Abrams (USA) and the K1 (South Korea), so the first tank it was tested on is of note. By contrast, now all we mention is that it has the 120mm L11A5 gun, which sure it is of some note in being the first 120mm MBT which is now typical, but also there's a number of previous times calibre has stepped up to a new 'normal'. I'm not against mentioning that fact, but it doesn't seem the absolute number 1 fact to mention about the Chieftain.
• Still on the Chieftain, but the variant for Jordan, is it really key to mention "Rolls-Royce CV12 diesel engine, TN37 transmission", when we could just say "a new engine and transmission". We don't mention every single sight, transmission, engine, machine gun, and so on fitted to every version of each tank listed here because it'd unwieldy, and it's just unnecessary info. We can mention it on the article for that specific tank, but is it that essential to mention that it was a "ROLLS ROYCE CV12!", is this engine so vitally important? It's literally just a turbocharged V12 engine. If it's specs are that key shall we mention it's anti-clockwise 4-stroke rotation cycle? No of course not, because it's fluff. - Of course in cases such as the first turbine engine in a tank, totally worth a mention, but elsewhere, we can condense it.
• AI Igman - Of course the "Yugoslav upgrade of the T-55A" is "intended for modernization of YPA's aging fleet of T-55s", because it's an upgrade of those. We can omit the second sentence, it is just repetition.
• Bernardini MB-3 Tamoyo - Of course it "it never reached production status" if it "it never passed beyond the prototype stage". Again, unnecessary repetition.
• Challenger 1 - "It is extremely accurate, however it was fitted with slow fire control system." This is an opinion, which on this page is unsourced. Likewise the AMX-40 mentions it's "powerful 120mm cannon", I'm sure every tank will advertise it's "powerful __mm cannon", it's not really an objective statement, let's just state which cannon it has, if that is key to state.
• With the Merkava, do we need to mention that "Now they equip the 460th training brigade and the 4th reserve brigade.", no other entry on the page goes on to list which brigades field any of the other tanks.
• Leclerc has unnecessary repetition of "development", "developed", a good example where a little rephrasing can have the identical information but more succinctly. Likewise the PT-91 entry repeats "The PT-91" a lot of times on the entry for the PT-91 where we could say "The PT-91" less times than we currently say "The PT-91".
• On the Zulfiqar, it sounds a lot like original research, or at best speculation, the line "This may indicate removal of the autoloader, or possibly, a new autoloader."
• With the Challenger 2 - "The new main battle tank is significantly more capable than its predecessor." - Gosh, I sure hope so, for basically every entry in this table. It'd be pretty bad if these militaries spent all this money developing new tanks which were only as good as their previous ones!

Hopefully this distils some of my reasoning behind my edit, I'd love to get some insight into why it was a downgrade from the previous version of the article? 2A02:C7C:C4CD:A500:9044:E0FE:E631:6DB1 (talk) 23:59, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

@2A02:C7C:C4CD:A500:9044:E0FE:E631:6DB1:, Sorry, I was reverting another edit made by another user, your edits were made later and got erased. I've restored your edits. TravelerFromEuropeanUnion (talk) 00:12, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

Ah cheers, no worries then! Have a nice day :) 2A02:C7C:C4CD:A500:9044:E0FE:E631:6DB1 (talk) 00:17, 17 November 2024 (UTC)