Rheinmetall Ammunition and Textron Systems have jointly developed an unmanned anti-aircraft tank called "Coarse Sawtooth" and presented it at the 2023 annual meeting of the US Army Association. The main purpose of this unmanned tank is air defense operations, especially anti-drone operations.
The "Coarsely Serrate" unmanned anti-aircraft tank consisted of two parts: the Ripsaw M5 unmanned combat vehicle chassis and the Sky Ranger 30-mm anti-aircraft turret. The Ripsaw M5 unmanned combat vehicle is a new type of unmanned combat vehicle, which is divided into three models: heavy, medium and light. The US Army has already tested the medium car. The "coarsely sawtooth" unmanned anti-aircraft tank is based on the chassis of a medium car.
The chassis features torsion bar balanced suspension, 6 small-diameter load wheels on each side, 4 carrier pulleys, and silent, high-life rubber-to-metal hybrid tracks. Its powertrain consists of a 1000-horsepower diesel engine and an Allison 9-speed automatic transmission, which can adapt to a variety of terrains, including desert, snow, hills, or rough terrain. The "coarsely sawtooth" unmanned anti-aircraft tank has a high-speed, flexible, and powerful ability to pass through the terrain, and it has low noise, good concealment, and is not easy to be detected by the enemy.
As a military equipment, the "coarse sawtooth" unmanned anti-aircraft tank also has a perfect tank shape and armor protection. Its hull armor thickness is 35-40 mm, the thickness of the turret armor is 25-30 mm, which can withstand rifles or 12Attacks from machine guns of caliber up to 7 mm. If you add some reactive armor or active defense systems, it can also fight against common anti-armor** such as RPGs.
* In terms of systems, the "Coarse Sawtooth" unmanned anti-aircraft tank is equipped with a Sky Ranger 30 anti-aircraft turret. It is an anti-aircraft gun improved from the 1970s with a 30 mm Erlikon KCA airborne gun (Saab 37 cannon), using 30 173 mm ammunition, 252 rounds in reserve, and an actual rate of fire of up to 1000-1200 rounds. It can also fire forward programmable munitions, which are effective against small targets such as drones and cruise missiles. It has an elevation angle of -10 to + 85 degrees, a strike range of 3000 meters, a rate of fire of 16 rounds per second. Its turret is also equipped with the ROSPY multispectral smoke grenade launch system, with two 9-pack smoke grenade launchers that provide cover for themselves if necessary.
There is also space on the left side of the turret where an anti-aircraft missile launcher can be installed, which can fire two to four short-range anti-aircraft missiles of different types, including the American Stinger, the Mistral missile from MBDA, and the Skyknight C-RAM missile system from the UAE Edge Group. The turret can also be fitted with a coaxial 762 mm machine gun for close self-defense. In this way, it can hit ground targets with a 30-mm gun and a machine gun.
The Sky Ranger 30 air defense turret is an unmanned ** system, with built-in advanced sensors, the core is an S-band radar array, and there are 5 independent phased array antennas around the turret, which can achieve 360-degree full coverage, and the detection range of small targets such as drones can reach 20 kilometers, and it can also be optionally equipped with Erlikon X-TAR 3D X-band detection radar.
The turret also has a built-in Sky Master fire control system, which makes use of artificial intelligence to identify targets and **target behavior. It can also be equipped with a passive positioning antenna, which can detect the drone's radio control signals and jam them with jammers, thus preventing the drone from completing its mission. It can also be equipped with a laser air defense system, which increases the accuracy of strikes.
It can be said that the "coarsely sawtooth" unmanned anti-aircraft tank is equipped with the Sky Ranger 30 anti-aircraft turret, which gives it an unrivaled advantage in air defense combat capabilities, especially against UAVs.
The "coarsely sawtooth" unmanned anti-aircraft tank is not only an air defense tank, but also an intelligent and information-based unmanned combat vehicle. It is surrounded by panoramic cameras that provide an all-round view. It also has a TAC FLIR 280-HD optoelectronic system, weighs 25 kg, has a 982mm focal length lens, can provide high-definition images, has multiple field of view observation modes, can separate the screen, display picture-in-picture, has a mid-wave infrared thermal imager and a short-wave infrared imager, can penetrate mist, smoke, haze, etc., and has laser measurement and irradiation capabilities. It uses artificial intelligence for target detection, can distinguish between animals and people, and can hit enemy targets.
According to FLIR Systems, its artificial intelligence is mainly based on ATR algorithms, emphasizing the development of target recognition capabilities for multi-source information fusion. It is a nonlinear dynamic system that simulates the human thinking system, by imitating the behavior of the biological neuron network system, constructing a large number of artificial neural unit nodes, and fusing two or more sensor information with different principles and different environments to make the image data more reliable, readable and understandable.
In addition, the "coarse-sawtooth" unmanned anti-aircraft tank also has strong autonomous mission execution and decision-making capabilities.
The "coarse-sawtooth" unmanned anti-aircraft tank is very versatile, it can perform a wide range of tasks. Its main mission is air defense operations and can deal with a range of air threats, including drones, cruise missiles,** and low-altitude fixed-wing aircraft. The unmanned tank can rely on waypoint navigation to perform "guided follow movement" and "off-road movement", and perform tasks such as convoy protection, perimeter defense, surveillance, rescue, and border patrol in desert, snow, hills or rough terrain.
It is worth mentioning that cannon-based air defense systems have certain advantages over missile-based air defense systems when dealing with large-capacity saturation attacks, since the former can consistently hit several incoming targets as long as there is ammunition available. A press release from Rheinmetall asserts: "Skyranger 30 can hold its ground against swarming drone attacks." ”
When carrying air defense operations, the "coarse-sawtooth" unmanned air defense tank can also carry similar unmanned vehicles and unmanned aircraft, expanding the diversity of tasks to cope with a more complex combat environment.