Shipbucket

Love the trucks, LEUt-East....any plans for your AU for truck-mounted artillery and/or rocket launchers?

Remember watching footage from the Middle East and thinking, "Hey wait a minute, that's not an Abrams, what is that?" No? Just me huh...
Anyway the Engesa Osório is what happens when an up-and-coming nation like Brazil says "You know, the Americanos made a really bad-ass tank with that M1 Abrams, I wonder if we can do that?" Engesa had already had a hit in the Cascavel armored car, with the Urutu APC being a good follow up, so how hard can designing a tank be anyway?... And so they did.

In CAD no less!
It was a remarkably advanced design for being a first try by a country that had never built an MBT before, incorporating such advanced features as composite armor rated to stop 105mm rounds, a passive night vision integrated Marconi FCS, and a fully stabilized main gun. What impressed me the most was the compartmentalized ammo storage, something the Challenger 1 doesn't even have! By throwing together a whole bunch of off-the-shelf elements into the tank (Vickers turret design, Dunlop suspension, ZF Transmission, MWM power-plant, etc.), the project, which had started in '83, moved along quite rapidly. Two variants of the tank eventually emerged; the EE-T1 Osório, a 'light' version intended mainly for domestic use, armed with a 105mm L7 gun and simpler Belgian optics, and the EE-T2 Al Fhad, the export variant intended primarily for the Mid-East, armed with the GIAT 120mm gun and more advanced French optics, not to mention an air-conditioning system.
The stage was thus set for the Osório's meteoric rise... and fall.

*

By 1987 the tank was ready and the marketing lads were off to the intended market of the T2; the Middle-East, which had conveniently erupted in flames (literally and figuratively) just a few moths prior with the expansion of WWIII to the Persian Gulf. Engesa was promptly swamped with panicked orders from Saudi Arabia, who had their order for Abrams turned down by the US for reasons of "the Soviets are steamrolling half of Europe and we kind of need them, sorry." Iraq and Kuwait quickly followed.

The first tank delivered to the Saudis, July 1987
The first deliveries of the Al-Fhads arrived just in time for the dreaded Iranian 'Hovercraft end-run' to kick off, much to the initial joy, and surprise dismay, of the over-payed defense annalists (who were betting on the Iranian Army being half-way competent) 1. By all accounts, and despite some bonehead moves by some more inexperienced crews 2, the tanks accounted for themselves quite well, holding their own alongside Abrams and Chally 1s, helping stall the invasion only five miles inland. One account even tells of a lone Kuwaiti tank ambushing and popping an entire platoon of Iranian Chieftains in about a minute(!), with FLIR video from a Kiowa to prove it.

Persian Gulf states (AU), Engesa EE-T2 Al Fhad
Saudi Arabia:

Iraq:

Kuwait:


It's a shame that after the shooting-war had largely ended Engesa never really managed to capitalize on their early windfall deal with the Arab states, in a way a victim of their own success 3. The Osório's high price tag meant that most South American armies interested in new tanks chose Thyssen-Henschel's smaller TH-301/TAM instead. Sales to Algeria and Libya were protested by the US State Dpt and Brazil, not wanting to bully a dragon, nixed them. A deal to sell to the Egyptians fell through after some... choice comments from the Israelis, who were already worried about the Saudis and Iraqis getting 120mil armed MBTs 4. The best they ended up managing was selling a relatively small batch of Iraqi-spec Al-Fahds to Pakistan, giving their armored corps a much needed answer to India's 125mm armed T-72s.

Pakistan:


Zaire tried to buy a large batch of the T1s, supposedly as a response to an influx of Cuban T-62s to Angola. Then right as production had started up Mobutu's check bounced 5, and the ensuing scandal meant that the completed tanks built were either bought by the Exercito Brasileiro (who only bought them to bail out Engesa), or given to Peru to help them deal with their little Maoist problem 6.


One of only a handful of tanks that ended up serving the nation that built them...

Engesa EE-T1 Osório
Brazil:

Zaire (Conjectural):

Peru:


And so ends that tale of what could be said to be the best tank of WWIII that almost nobody has heard of...
as well as some ideas that have been kicking around my head for far too long!

Credit for the initial Osório drawings go to Albert1099,
Credit for the photos and development background goes to the legendary Nick Moran's Chieftain's Hatch article:
Al Fahd, The Best Tank You Never Heard Of
Comments or criticisms welcome, as always! Also if I missed any credits let me know. Cheers!

*) Everything up to this point happened IRL, POD being the start of WWIII in late 1985.
1) See Paul Erdman's The Oil War of 1976: How the Shah Won the World for a vision of the future that didn't age well, to say the least.
2) Sure lads, drive right on up to that trench line full of Iranians and RPGs and then turn around for no reason, that can't possibly end poorly. 'Elite' Republican Guard my bum!
3) Also Western lobbying supposedly. General Dynamics, Royal Ordnance, and Krauss-Maffei were not best pleased about their upstart new competitor.
4) They got downgraded Abrams instead, with the US holding a tight leash on the supply of spare parts and support.
5) It turns out buying Brazilian tanks with offers of oil, lumber, and coffee wasn't such a great idea.
6) Official parry line from Jiang and her cronies is that they have no idea how all those Type 62 and 69 tanks ended up in the hands of Shining Path, though they do greatly admire all those valiant Chinese 'volunteers' manning them!

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Доброе утро, последний герой!

*As to the response to Aloysius' post above..*

Mama mia.....
Brilliant job, sir! Well done

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Gotta take the good with the bad,
Smile with the sad,
Love what you got,
And remember what you had.

You ever get an idea lodged in your head, and then it won't go away until you put it down on paper? I may have hemorrhaged a few of them at once... 1
Glad you like it, thanks again for the base drawing!

1) ...and caught a nasty case of footnote-itis.

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Доброе утро, последний герой!

Please don`t quote the entire post, if everybody was doing that, then we would just have side up and down, of long repost of something, just so one person can say mama mia! All you have to do, is either write the name of the artist you are praising and what drawing, or delet everything inside the quote, before posting. This forum isn't reddit!

That is my "tip of today"

I finally had the time to upload a few of my recent projects. As working nights frees up a lot of time to work on things.

First up is a project I made in honour of ANZAC Day, the Airco RS.1 Scout, based on the Bristol Scout with parts from other period kites added.


Next is the younger brother, the Airco RS.5 Scout, using parts from the Nieuport 28, SPAD, and Martinsyde F.4.


Onto WW2 aircraft, just one, a Lockheed L-10 Junior Electra, militarized (which they did do one for the Netherlands), as the PO-1 Trident patrol ASW bomber.


And now to the modern era, I had a eastern European AU country that I was working on, and it developed into the country of Siverya, a northwestern neighbor and staunch ally of Ukraine. They have a homegrown aerospace industry, that survived Soviet purges, and survived by subcontracting for Sukhoi. The home grown design, the Ryvansky RyS-35 is comparable to the Russian Su-35 thanks to western tech from SAAB and the Eurofighter project.


Now, onto armour. Here are a few projects I had, both WW2 and Modern:

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"It is better to type nothing and be assumed an ass, than to type something and remove all doubt." - Me

Nice work nighthunter, some really nice looking designs and ideas there.

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Hood's Worklist
English Electric Canberra FD
Interwar RN Capital Ships
Super-Darings
Never-Were British Aircraft

Thanks Hood!

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"It is better to type nothing and be assumed an ass, than to type something and remove all doubt." - Me

Great to see You back in action, Nighthunter!

But if those SPAD's You used for Airco RS.5 Scout are S7/S13, then You ought to credit Rhade too, as he made them.

You're right, by George. I'll fix it, thanks for catching that!

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"It is better to type nothing and be assumed an ass, than to type something and remove all doubt." - Me