>>64232116
>Long story short: It was always vaporware. It was something that the Russians wanted to show off to the rest of the world to prove that they were not a paper tiger.
Nope. It was supposed to be the cornerstone of russia's reformed army, both by getting a shiny new tank and, what was even more important, getting back into serial tank production. As in real from scratch production in a factory, not just restoring shit from storage (which is mostly tool assisted manual work in its nature). A big part of this was the size or orders (2000+ tanks were planned to be produced in a relatively quick manner).
The real issue was multi-domain, but the three biggest issues were:
- the whole project, among other things, was planned during the long oil rally on the market, russia was making more and more money each year without doing anything, they've expected $250 per barrel prices by 2018 or something like that, so that insane money never materialized.
- financial and efficiency issues in the russian MIC, decades of mismanagement, corruption and other shit (like the russian state preventing some companies to downsize the staff, but not wanting to pay for retention) caused a ton of money allocated to the project to get spent inefficiently, e.g. to keep the place from falling over instead of making a new tank, so that when the gravy train stopped there wasn't enough to continue working on it;
- lofty design goals, retarded design issues, development hubris and import dependence, they wanted to make something too good after decades of slapping ERA blocks on 1970 shit from storage, they wanted to use a problematic BS engine because they already had it, they were wrong to assume "how hard can it be for us" (forgetting that UVZ was the retarded stepson of soviet tank factories when compared to Kharkiv, Leningrad and Omsk) and so on;
