Alright remember me talking about the weight issue? The WWII
SU-85 tank Vietnam received in 1960 weighs in at
29.8 tons vs. the
SU-85/ASU-85 weighing in at
15.4+ tons. There's more of course but the following points can be cleared up.
1) Not the to be confused with the WWII SU-85 SPA (Yes the Russians designated them
BOTH SU-85 if you didn't note that above.) though from the below ref. you can see it looks very much like the
SU-85M produced in 1945 as shown near bottom right. So this rules out modernization again back to weight etc.
http://www.tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww...viet_SU-85.php
2) So I can't find anything to suggest they fought in the Chinese Conflict of 1979, however, there's plenty to suggest they were bought to secure their borders after the conflict. At this point I wouldn't have any problem
allowing for training that
JUNE 1980 to be a reasonable time for these tanks to have been fielded. I've used this site (1st. one.) before and I believe it might be Russian. Last used when I submitted the
BTR-82A.
http://weaponsystems.net/weapon.php?...2%20-%20ASU-85
https://www.onwar.com/weapons/afv/data/rusothasu85.htm
3) The issue will be when were they taken out of service and stored? When did they reenter service?
A) The first would be more difficult but could possibly be aligned when the Russians took them out of service+ so something around
1995 if we "cobble" everything together. Not unprecedented in the game, if you look at the South African OOB I was able to convince Don to do this with the
ROOKIVALK AH for a variety of reasons you'll find in the HELO Thread. The below ref. does support it being out of service with the
first post shown from this Russian site (Yes I know it's a "Blog" some are however better than others and are a last resort for me but, information is "
light" concerning Vietnam with these tanks.) and near the bottom you'll see it discussed in
SEPTEMBER 2015.
http://www.russiadefence.net/t3581-v...-ground-forces
A1) In service date
earliest I suspect would be
JUNE 2014 however,
JANUARY 2015 would be better and would cover that 6 month "
SWAG" we have used many times in the past for equipment items of this nature and challenges.
B) Leave it alone once entered, also not unprecedented in the game where
we know equipment has been warehoused/stored. The
STRIX issue falls into this category. There were other issues in the "
decision tree" but a key one was the "argument" that with your potential enemy is armor heavy, are you going to let one of your best anti-tank weapons sit in a warehouse if they attack? There's enough military types out here that I think would agree that you get them into the field ASAP. Given Vietnam's limited resources (And some of those other posts are correct on the economics involved.) that the
ASU-85 could be considered for "exception" as well.
So that's it for me.
Regards,
Pat
