So welcome to the inside of Object 268.
I’m sitting more or less where the Commander would be, the seat has been dismounted.
But he would be in a position, obviously under his hatch, so this is probably a reasonable estimate.
Directly to his front would be the eyepiece with the TKTD range finder.
He also has a number of mounts for visibility outside of that, and of course the cupola will rotate.
To his right is the back end of the ammunition carousel.
We’ll talk about that in a little bit.
Directly underneath me is the projectile rack,
there’s another one of those a bit forward and to the left.
Behind me on the wall is where you would find the radio, and a couple of other odds and ends that would be required.
Unfortunately, the vehicle is somewhat stripped, so anything else is pretty much pure "guesstimation".
Looks like a dome light to his front, internal electronics.
I’m not sure if that’s for him or the gunner, truth be told, and underneath me is,
it looks like stowage for one, two, three, probably six rounds of ammunition.
Projectiles from the shape of the ledges.
The other thing I can see from up here, and it’s actually way down on the floor, is the torsion bars.
Now, these are, ordinarily, you would expect them to go from one side of the vehicle to the other,
but this particular vehicle, and some of the other Soviet Heavies had, well they call them half length.
In actuality they don’t even come to the half way mark in the vehicle.
Apparently the problem with them was they gave a rather uneven effect between the wheels.
But still, for somebody who is used to full width torsion bars,
or maybe as you saw on Panther, double width torsion bars,
the fact that they were able to get a good suspension system to work with bars
that seem to be maybe a meter long, is actually kind of impressive.
The gunner is reasonably comfortable.
Although the seat is a little bit small and a little too close to the gun.
Controls are very simple; he has hand cranks only.
Now traverse is six degrees left and right. It’s done on a toothed arc.
And you can see, the gunner’s seat is attached to the gun and he moves with it.
That keeps sight alignment very simple.
Elevation: negative five to plus fifteen.
The gun is very well balanced, it has to be said.
To aim it, to his front he’s going to have a direct vision optic.
It’s a Tsh-2A. And for the indirect fire role, which is about thirteen kilometers or so,
you would mount into the housing here, the ZIS-3 panoramic sight.
Now that would extend up through the gunner’s hatch and actually brings in mind the question,
was the gunner’s hatch for the optics or was it for the crewman?
Because getting in and out of this, you have this big sight housing and controls in the way underneath it.
There is also, it looks like an attachment point for another of the ubiquitous periscopes,
rotatable and adjustable in elevation.
However, it is blanked off on this vehicle, so I am purely speculating.
The gun itself was capable of firing AP/HE rounds.
The AP round was about 49 kilograms.
The HE round was 43 and a half 45 00:03:31,520 --> 00:03:35,240 and the AP round would go at about 750 meters a second.
It would fire both legacy ammunition from the older ML-20 Howitzer as well as later, more modern stuff,
and can fire either the bagged charges or the metal case propellant charges.
Either, or; it worked both ways. So a fairly neat feature that you can’t complain about the gun at all on this.
There is no co-axial.
There were some studies put in as to whether or not they wanted to put a coaxial,
but it’s room that they really didn’t want to give it,
and frankly, for its role as an assault gun,
basically levelling fortifications and other buildings particularly,
that were in its way, it really wasn’t appropriate anyway.
No loss, no coaxial. If you have to machine gun somebody,
you have the 14.5mm on the roof anyway.
That’s it for in here, over to the loader side.
Loader’s seat seems very well laid out.
I’m sitting on his seat, which I assume is only used for road marches.
You can get off it and for combat operations, and it’ll actually fold down out of the way.
Here, simple as.
And to his front it looks like he has propellant charges,
but the neat feature is the ammunition rack to his rear.
As you can see, it’s kind of on a chain conveyor system, so he just grabs the round,
places it on the rammer here, gets a round forward, comes back, grabs a charge,
places it on the rammer, rams forward, back, carousel spins one more notch,
and after firing, he’s ready to do it again.
He doesn’t have to go around, grabbing this massive fifty kilo, almost, projectile,
and man handling it around inside this crew compartment.
Very nice little feature.
Breech operating handle, of course here for the sideways sliding breech.
I’d move around a little bit more, there’s a control box for the ramming system.
Under the little latch are the buttons for reverse and forward, and there’s another one that actually puts the rammer into operation.
If you look up at the roof there is quite a sturdy travel lock,
which will swing down and then you just put the collar pin in here.
As you look further around, more stowage for ammunition propellant.
He has an optic; single periscope, fixed off to the right hand side
and to his front would be another of the drop down, rotatable periscopes as well.
He also has a dome light to the front.
All in all, this one definitely gets good grades.
Last place of course is the driver.
It is possible to sneak in through the crew compartment,
but I thought it would be more amusing to see if I could climb in through the outside.
The first problem of course is the pike nose which is a great way of falling off.
But there is a nice gun right here, so I’ll see if I can get up another way.
So far so good.
Of course there is a problem with the gun in the way...
Little bit limited.
Okay, my left foot is in position, my right foot is kind of stuck.
All in all, actually that wasn’t too bad. So I’m in position, I have my controls.
Well if it wasn’t for the fact that this in the back of my neck, it’s not bad.
The seat on this particular vehicle does actually go up and down.
So I’m going to lower it and we’re going to have a look inside.
So as I’ve come down into the driver’s compartment, immediately, this isn’t bad.
Not least again, this is a functioning vehicle, so I’m able to close the hatch.
That’s done, you release the latch, lift all the way up to raise the hatch to clear,
pivot around, locks into place, and straight down and it locks back into place here and you’re now secure.
Vision to the front is by the single large periscope.
It’s not fantastic but it will do.
There are also additionally, two smaller fixed periscopes to the side, to give you a little bit of extra visibility.
Not fantastic, not bad.
The controls; similar to some of the other vehicle’s we’ve seen at this point.
Clutch pedal on the left.
I have to say that this is a very light clutch, so that makes a very nice change compared to some tanks.
Accelerator on the right, with the hand throttle as well.
Driving position: passable.
You can see of course that the parking brake can still be placed by use of the plungers,
steering is powered, so it’s easy to steer.
You have an eight speed gear box with two reverse, and we have a reverse selector here.
Speedometer on the right, it has all of 23 kilometers on the clock.
I’m not sure if it’s accurate or not.
I would have thought it would have done more than that in testing.
Further forward you have the air valves for the reserve air starting system.
As you come further right, one of the fuel tanks.
The one on the front right is 90 liters.
There is more ammunition stowed to my right.
Behind me is a large escape hatch.
Now, that’s one of the advantages to not having the full width torsion bars,
is that you can leave room for people to get in and out the bottom.
Directly above me is the pivot point for the main gun.
So this is basically a large ‘L’ shaped piece of metal.
The end of the ‘L’ is more or less where the traverse control intersects, and it’s basically cut into teeth.
You turn the handle on the traverse, the cogs mesh with the teeth on the end of this ‘L’
and that will move your gun left and right.
To my left is going to be the battery rack, and just forward of that are three fire extinguisher bottles.
The instrument panel to the front; nice and new, again, operating vehicle.
So we have your ammeter gauge, water temperature, rev counter,
oil temperature, oil pressure, oil pump, starter button.
Fairly simple, easily laid out.
As you’re looking forward, a neat little feature that was demonstrated to me was,
for lack of a better term, was a rotating brush to keep the windshield clear of mud,
or snow, or whatever else came onto it.
Ammunition to my right, ammunition to my left; never a wasted space around here.
So all in all, the driving position is fairly comfortable.
This one definitely gets a passing grade.
The fact that Object 268 did not enter service cannot be blamed upon either the designer or the vehicle.
If you wanted an armored vehicle that was going to go around lobbing six inches of high explosive love at people,
you weren’t really going to get much better.
Unsurprisingly, the vehicle did pass it’s service tests.
It was, however, somewhat over-taken by events.
After a little bit of critical thought they decided it was probably better
to have a whole fleet of T-10s as opposed to some Object 268s and some T-10s.
A turreted vehicle was probably going to be far better overall than having all of the resources
put into an assault gun with limited traverse.
As a result, no more vehicles were built, and the one remaining prototype sits here in Kubinka today.
That was it, hope you enjoyed it,
and we’ll see you, as ever, on the next one.