Sept 28 — Day 948b — continued
Jeff Stokes
Q: How rugged is it? How much abuse can it take without braking down? Not so much being it by the bad guys, more can you drive through a nasty river/swamp/gorge and expect it to carry on?
And agreeing, how quickly can it be built.
A: On the production numbers, see above.
On the rugged build and cross-country mobility, I’m just thrilled you asked because I am one of those weirdos who thinks that’s a really cool subject.
The quick way to answer your question is this little anecdote. We got driven to the testing site, we get out of our normal cars, and there are several of these Novatar armored cars parked on a forest road for us to look at. There are technicians and some army guys so that me and the other KP reporter can have some one to talk to. I walk up to one of the cars, I introduce myself to the dude standing next to it, who is pretty young but turns out to be one of the company founders and the lead guy for designing the vehicle and getting it into production. After some hellos we walk up to the front of one of the vehicles. I’m not saying anything because, like I said, I think off-road automotive tech is cool, I spent years driving off-road in a conflict zone and thinking about what worked and didn’t. The guy asks me “So, what do you think?” and my honest first-impression answer was, no kidding “That’s a Hell of a suspension you have on that thing. In English we would call it ‘beefy”.
So with that background, hands down, the thing that jumped out to me was how big and heavy the suspension and build for cross-country was. Super-deep wells, ridiculous ground clearance, leaf springs in the back that looked like they were made for a semi, front struts with steel a half inch thick, and so on. I’m not a mechanic, but I am a guy who looks at that sort of thing. Then the designer points out the axles. The Canadian suspension kit contained thicker axles than the stock Ford. The Ukrainians replaced the Canadian replacement axles, with axles of their own — I’m not exaggerating here — about an inch and a half in diameter.
The general concept, I was told, was that in modern war it’s not good enough to be able to go off road, you have to be able to go off road, fast, and just suck up the terrain at times, because of the drones. On the flat the ride is fine but off-road it’s really clear the Ukrainians spent a lot of time and effort making a suspension that can take pretty much anything war operations would throw at it. They told me it would go 80–100 kph through a forest, that’s completely off-road, and the worst that would happen is that if you did that for days and days you eventually might get stress at connection points. I wouldn’t want to ride in it much at those kinds of speeds, but everything I saw convinced me that the Ukrainians had thought about what’s needed in an armored car used in a war against Russia, and they decided the top priority was off-road mobility. For those from OSCE who know the vehicles we drove, based on what I saw, I would want a Novator because it is an order of magnitude more capable than our Land Rovers, and head and shoulders over those Ukrainian Kuguars we had but never used.
In terms of build quality, welding seams were proper, sharp edges were burnished, latches were super-heavy duty, and there was armor in places where the designers had listened to the troops in the field.
An example is the front grill, there’s a radiator there, and the Ukrainians decided to accept possible overheating in some situation to put a splinter/bullet-proof (but not .50) panel across the entire front grill, and to extend it to run semi-horizontally under the forward part of the engine. The logic here is that in modern warfare drone operators, and also just regular soldiers, try to stop vehicles before bringing in a drone to destroy them. The easiest way to stop a vehicle for good is an engine hit, and it doesn’t have to be direct impact, you can fly a drone or ricochet bullets underneath the front bumper and knock out the engine that way. This metal plate up front is installed, as a specific defense against that specific threat.
Another example was how they deal with flat/loss of tire pressure. Some of you from OSCE will remember that out Land Cruisers had wheels with a kind of kevlar donut on the disc, inside the tire. The idea was that if the tire got deflated you could run on the kevlar donut for 3–5 kilometers before it gave out. The disc would be destroyed but you would get out, was the theory.
In this armored car, the Ukrainians have a pressure system that you can turn on from inside the cabin, if your tire goes flat. This is NOT the same as in an Ural truck where you can regulate the pressure up or down depending on the terrain, the downside being it doesn’t change the pressure quickly and you have to stop. In the Novator, you think maybe you have a flat, or one is coming, you turn on the pressure system, and the tire gets extra pressure. I asked “So why not kevlar donuts?” and the answer was “We thought about that but that only really works on hard roads, and the war isn’t being fought on hard roads.” They understand that if the whole tire is shredded, that’s it, mobility casuality. But the idea is that if the task is staying mobile if possible, then “mobility” means “off-road”.
There were several interesting design decisions like that.
Jerome Korshak
Q: Natural sibling jealousy here — I’ve flown several different civilian aircraft, but nothing with a cannon! Well done!
A: Thanks, but for the record this particular vehicle doesn’t get equipped with a cannon per se. Standard would be a heavy machine gun or a grenade launcher.
Daryl Eves
Q: 4 down, 46 to go as first batch of London, Ont.-built armoured vehicles will soon be sent to Ukraine
The first four of 50 military vehicles being built at a London, Ont., factory have rolled off the assembly line and will soon be en route to the Ukrainian army…This from CBC news in Canada. Facebook will not let any Canadian post a link in Canada to a news site. They are worse here in Canada in their spat with the government than in Europe.
A: The question I would ask our good friends the Canadians would be pretty much the same as I asked the Ukrainians — “OK, nice armored car, but what about production at scale, how possible is that and what would you need, and what’s the price wholesale?”