Red Army = most effective force !

[Marek_Tucan]

Marcello said:
King Tiger clause applies: IF you can get it there. To be honest I have heard fairly nasty horror stories about early T-64 reliability but AFAIK it was reasonably debugged by the T-64A/B. The Chieftain had good armor and firepower, mobility was more problematic.The T-64 was more balanced hence why I gave it the "Best" rating.

I won't use T-64B in here as it's more of a counterpart (both on timescale and in capabilities) to Leopard 2.
Remember also that the mobility issue may not be as severe concerning Chieftain, esp. in terrain - in its design there applied also many experiences with Centurion in Israel and Centurion, though not with good power-to-weight ratio or speed, was found better for harder terrains than other tanks in Israeli service.

The Leo1 Marder comparison has merits but I would say that the Marder isn't the first thing that comes to mind if I try to come up with the opposite of expendable.

True, I might have rather used something like US turreted tank destroyers

Against steel armor it had good penetration which retained even at the maximum range, it could be used against soft targets and was cheaper to produce. AFAIK at least for the 125mm gun HEAT rounds accuracy wasn't that terrible. Of course that meant that when NATO introduced very effective against HEAT composite armor the soviets had one unpleasant problem to deal with.

From what firing trials (even in our very own army) seem to indicate, the accuracy of HEAT was about three times worse at 2000m than accuracy of crappy old BM-15 APFSDS and often effective HEAT range is stated to be 1500m compared to 2000m for APFSDS.
True T-64 was pretty safe (in theory) against HESH ammo used by most of NATO but then in Chechnya a Chechen T-72 got destroyed by baseline HE from another T-72 (took seven rounds, though before the engine compartment was hit for a coup de grace, but the tank was pretty incapacitated even before that).