T-14 Armata

[Husar]

Well, afaik a skilled human loader is usually faster, at least British tank crews were seen to out perform auto-loaders historically, but I'm like 10 years out of date so things may be better now. In the West tankers do the maintenance on their own machines, and the four man crew makes that faster and gives you more men to operate the tank if someone gets knocked out - so if a tank crew lose their loader or gunner then he can be replaced and the tank keep fighting (albeit less efficiently). The big problem with an autoloader is that it's something else that will break, and in a combat situation everything will break at some point.

Well, I don't know how likely it is that just one crew member gets knocked out in a modern tank, but the Russians have been relying on autoloaders for many of their existing tank designs already. The Leclerc can fire 12 rounds per minute apparently, I am not aware that human loaders are this fast. The older soviet autoloaders seem to be slower, but the russians improved them as well AFAIK. One advantage of requiring less crew is that you can field more tanks in the first place I guess.

As to the effectiveness of the new Russian tank, it may look good on the outside but I'm dubious as to how hi-tech it is, and if it is hi-tech I'm dubious about Russia being able to producing consistent quality. Hell, two of their air-display team crashed into a mountain, you think those Radars didn't fail?

That sounds a lot like prejudices, but I see no reason to assume that Russia is incapable of having hi-tech, they got really good programmers after all.