Object 292
Contents
Description
The Object 292 was the among one of the most ambitious attempts during the final days of the Soviet Union to create a next-generation tank cannon testbed. The Kirov Plant and Mobile Vehicle Engineering Institute planned to introduce a high-calibre smoothbore cannon to enable Soviet MBTs to be able to disable equivalent NATO MBTs at the longest possible distance. This meant choosing a calibre of 152 mm instead of the conventional 125 mm or slightly larger 130 mm, which were still common calibres in Warsaw-Pact countries, and mounting it onto a hybrid between the T-80BV and T-80U's turret. Due to a severe lack of funding as the Soviet Union was struggling with financial debt, although the cannon proved effective during field tests, the prototype was eventually shelved. However, experiences learned during the program would be further iterated on for future MBT prototypes.
The Object 292 was introduced during Update "Air Superiority" as a reward for the 2024 Call of the Dragon event. While it may look like a T-80U without the ERA packages, the lack of an anti-aircraft machine gun and the significantly larger cannon gives it away quite easily. It's not the best protected tank at its tier, but the sheer penetration and damage from the monstrous 152 mm cannon more than makes up for any potential shortcomings by sending the source of the damage back to the hangar in a single shot; however, make sure to make every shot count, as a missed/ineffective shot will most likely be the death sentence of the Object 292.
General info
Survivability and armour
If players do not recall the chassis and design of Object 292, the engine sound will certain gives it away; in this case, the chassis is T-80BV without its Kontakt-1 ERA blocks while the turret is from T-80U without the Kontakt-5 ERA blocks. It can be said that Object 292's hull is somewhat like a T-80U with T-80BV's composite armor layout (T-80U has a revised composite armor based on T-80BV's design), but the lack of Kontakt-5 also means its ufp only has the base armor at around 550 mm KE. The armour efficiency of UFP is quite inconsistent, reducing the closer the hit came to the driver viewport or the LFP. The LFP isn't going to stop anything, much like with the majority of SU medium tanks.
The turret is another story though, since it used a revised T-80U turret, it will have better protection than T-80B series thanks to the new composite armor layout with high protection; this also leads to redesign of mantle thus it has much smaller area than conventional designs, the area around the gun can go up to 500 mm KE protection, making it much harder for lower-tier tanks to penetrate the turret. Commander should be careful for lucky shots on the mantle around the barrel as it can also lead to disablement of the turret system or sometimes quick knock-out to the turret crews. The shields on the sides of the turret can block HEAT-FS completely.
Turret has multiple of weaknesses ranging from understandable to weird. Anything above turret shields is vulnerable to direct APFSDS hits (causing the dart to hit at least one crew member and possibly the turret ammo rack) and HESH, with random parts of the roof causing the entire tank to implode when hit by any amount of overpressure damage. Bottom of gun mantlet sides right under the gun have 0 to 1 RHA protection, causing the tank to implode when hit by exposives. Whether it's a bug or a feature is not known, but it makes the tank very easy to parry.
The overall internal layout is very similar to most Warsaw-Pact/Chinese MBTs with a carousel autoloader located at the center mass of the vehicle, but instead of having the projectile laying below the propellent like the 6eTS series autoloader on T-64/80 series, the autoloader only consists of the projectile itself and the propellent is located either behind the turret instead (separately from the crew), or behind the carousel if it cannot fit into the autoloader, this in turn slows the reload rate to 10 seconds per round, but allows the tank to survive some ammo rack hits.
The fuel tanks unfortunately negate all the effort to move critical modules into less vulnerable positions, as fuel tanks explode hard enough to destroy the tank, all the same with any SU MBT, so letting enemies hit the hull, particularly LFP, is still a bad idea. The three-men crew is also retained on Object 292 with identical layout to T-80 series - thus any penetrated shots up front that didn't detonate the fuel will very likely disable the driver at the first place, then cause fatal damage to the turret crews by both the projectile and shrapnel; to make matters worse, if players decided to bring full-load at 30 rounds, there will be 14 spare propellent located exactly behind the autoloader carousel on the chassis. It is never a good idea to turn Object 292 into a gas-turbine-driven mobile firework launcher, so either the tank needs to dig some cover for its LFP with the dozer blade or try to find at least some kind of solid cover for its hull.
As a last note, the tank doesn't have smoke grenades, only ESS. ESS allows to break automatic trackers of helicopters, but it will not prevent thermal gunner scopes from seeing the tank, and every tank and most aircraft at its rank have one, so it won't really help. It can make things worse, even, as Object 292 doesn't even have thermal scope itself. The tank itself isn't shining extremely bright in thermal sights, at least from the front, but if it will be blinded by its own smoke it will be an easy target for anything.
Armour type:
| Armour | Front (Slope angle) | Sides | Rear | Roof |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hull | 260 mm (69°) | 55 - 70 - 80 mm Top 20 (32°) [+ 20 mm] Bottom |
10-20-50 mm | 30 - 20 mm |
| Turret | ~250 - ~550 - ~1000 mm (Variable thickness) + 495mm (Composite) Turret front ~130 - ~250 - ~1000mm (Variable thickness) mm Gun mantlet |
~650 - ~400 - ~160 mm (Variable thickness) + 495mm - 265 mm (Composite) Turret
45 mm (0°) Ammo Rack |
45 (0°) - 45 (78°) mm | 45 mm - ~500 (Variable thickness + composite) mm Turret
30 - 45 mm Ammo Rack |
| Cupola | 45 mm (35 - 43°) | 45 mm (35°) | 45 mm (30°) | 45 mm |
Notes:
Mobility
To boost the tank with its larger gun, the engine is upgraded from the original Klimov GTD-1000 to the GTD-1250 used on T-80U series; thus it will have enhanced mobility than a conventional T-80BV while players still have to be careful not to over-extend since the relative-slow reverse speed for Soviet tanks still haunts Object 292. The speed is not terrible, but some NATO medium tanks will be faster to positions due to the same or better acceleration.
| Game Mode | Max Speed (km/h) | Weight (tons) | Engine power (horsepower) | Power-to-weight ratio (hp/ton) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forward | Reverse | Stock | Upgraded | Stock | Upgraded | ||
| Arcade | 78 | 13 | 46 | 1,705 | 2,099 | 37.07 | 45.63 |
| Realistic | 70 | 11 | 973 | 1,100 | 21.15 | 23.91 | |
Modifications and economy
| Mobility | Protection | Firepower | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Armaments
Main armament
Although the installation of such a huge cannon into T-80U's turret is not a major problem and it could retain identical, relatively slow turret traverse speed for Soviet-era MBTs, the tank also replaced the 6eTS series autoloader into an unique design specifically for this very cannon, thus the reload rate was drastically decreased to 10 seconds per shot (consecutive shots without changing type of ammunition) - the firepower itself is fearsome indeed, eclipsing even Ariete AMV, with only very few MBT being able to survive a shot onto their UFP, but missed shots are also likely to be the end of Object 292 as many enemies could fire up to 2 shots during the 10 seconds reload.
As already mentioned, the tank doesn't have thermal sights, so it is required to look for enemies very carefully. While the shells can turn most tanks into scrap with anything suggesting a direct hit, the commander has to own it by being vigilant and avoiding panic shots. Due to the shell velocity, aiming shots by hand is easy even at extreme distances, but the tank has laser rangefinder anyway, just in case.
| 152 mm LP-83 | Turret rotation speed (°/s) | Reloading rate (seconds) | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mode | Capacity | Vertical | Horizontal | Stabilizer | Stock | Upgraded | Full | Expert | Aced | Autoloader |
| Arcade | 30 | -5°/+15° | ±180° | Two-plane | 22.8 | 31.6 | 38.4 | 42.5 | 45.2 | 10.00 |
| Realistic | 14.3 | 16.8 | 20.4 | 22.6 | 24.0 | |||||
Ammunition
| Penetration statistics | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ammunition | Type of warhead |
Penetration @ 0° Angle of Attack (mm) | |||||
| 10 m | 100 m | 500 m | 1,000 m | 1,500 m | 2,000 m | ||
| 152 mm APFSDS | APFSDS | 695 | 693 | 687 | 680 | 673 | 665 |
| 152 mm HE | HE | 61 | 61 | 61 | 61 | 61 | 61 |
| Shell details | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ammunition | Type of warhead |
Velocity (m/s) |
Projectile mass (kg) |
Fuse delay (m) |
Fuse sensitivity (mm) |
Explosive mass (TNT equivalent) (kg) |
Ricochet | |||||
| 0% | 50% | 100% | ||||||||||
| 152 mm APFSDS | APFSDS | 1,980 | 7 | - | - | - | 78° | 80° | 81° | |||
| 152 mm HE | HE | 920 | 45.9 | 0.3 | 0.1 | 8.62 | 79° | 80° | 81° | |||
The shells of the tank are extremely lethal and give the best in the world of kinetic and chemical shells, respectively.
The APFSDS has shell velocity of 1980 m/s and penetration of 401 mm at 60 degrees. Since the shell weights 7 kg, even a glancing penetration is going to take a life or utterly obliterate some module, whether its by dart itself or the shrapnel it creates. Any hit aimed vaguely in the direction of enemy ammo rack will destroy the target with practically no chance of survival. It's even worse than being hit by heaviest tandem ATGM, as other tanks (including already dead ones) and modules can't stop the penetrator, leaving literally no chance of survival and sometimes resulting in collateral hits.
The HE isn't as overwhelmingly powerful and doesn't have special features like the proximity fuse, but it nonetheless flies at 920 m/s and does same overpressure damage as heaviest artillery tanks. It could even penetrate and destroy Challenger 2 series through the driver port, something other tanks can't even dream of doing, so HE can be fired at the turret neck of virtually any tank and in 90% of the cases have the target destroyed, and in the other 10% cases have enemy gun barrel completely ruined.
Ammo racks
| Full ammo |
1st rack empty |
2nd rack empty |
3rd rack empty |
4th rack empty |
5th rack empty |
6th rack empty |
Visual discrepancy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30 | __ (+__) | __ (+__) | __ (+__) | __ (+__) | __ (+__) | __ (+__) | __ |
Usage in battles
The Six-inch Railgun
When players saw the Object 292 from afar, some might take it as a very odd modification of T-64A due to the turret design, while some might take it as a T-80U with all Kontakt-5 ERA packages destroyed; once their vehicle was hit by APFSDS flying at unpreceded 1980 m/s or bombarded by a huge "howitzer" shell, they will soon know what really hits them.
The most iconic feature of the Object 292 is the 152 mm LP-83 smoothbore cannon onboard; as one of the largest caliber smoothbore cannon ever completed which has already hold the record for more than 3 decades, the spade on its hand is fearsome penetration for both its APFSDS and HE-FS shells. As mentioned in previous paragraph, its 1980 m/s velocity translates to it can hit targets from 2 km away at only around a second and having the highest penetration of all smoothbore cannon (also the second highest in ground battle for kinetic shell just below LOSAT) at 695 mm @10m, 90% of MBTs in-game will not have the chance to stop its shell aside from post-2010 Russian MBTs, ZTZ99 series and Strv 122 series by their UFPs; even if the shell didn't detonate enemy targets, the sheer penetration can make sure critical damage to powerplant and crews, sometimes even completely disable the turret system of enemy targets. While using HE-FS is common for Warsaw-Pact/PLAGF MBTs, the Object 292 brings it to a new level - not only it has devastating explosive content for its shell, it also has very high penetration for HE-FS at a whopping 61 mm, which also turns it into a makeshift APHE since most NATO and PLAGF tanks doesn't have good side armor to stop side shots, making it more reliable than APFSDS at close distance and still devastating as a makeshift howitzer to engage covered targets. The 152 mm gun is more than enough to deter enemy from engaging Object 292 without careful consideration, which also makes it a good role to defend key breakthrough points as stationary support vehicle.
But as a prototype tank based on Soviet-era technology, the T-80BV hull and T-80U-equivalent turret also brings some flaws to the 292. First of all, the iconic Kontakt-5 or Kontakt-1 ERA packages are not present on the vehicle albeit bolt mounts for them were shown on the UFP, the T-80BV series served as the basis of the future T-80U series with revised composite armor formula for better protection, but this only stops APFSDS up to 500 mm penetration; tanks at its tier might not have the chance to reliably disable Object 292, not the case for higher tiers as MBTs at those tiers has at least 532 mm penetration, so rushing into the battlefield is not the best idea in higher tiers. The turret traverse speed didn't hinder by the weight of the gun itself but it still retains identical speed as its Soviet-era cousins which is at least 30% slower than NATO/PLAGF counterparts; it is always a good idea to turn the turret beforehand for as much reaction time as possible. Coming next is the autoloader system - while the tank can ensure consistent 10 second reload, separated propellent from carousel and now has turret blowout panel for the propellents, the long reload time also means any missed or non-critical damage to enemy tank without disabling the gun system gives the death sentence to Object 292, since most tanks at this tier can reload faster than the autoloader even with injured/disabled crew (in case the enemy has ready shell in breech), let alone tanks with autoloader; do remember there's 14 spare propellents for the other 14 shells inside the autoloader in case players decide to bring full-load, once they are hit by enemy shots, players can expect for a huge firework from the detonation of propellents and thus, 16 shells are more than enough to bring down enemy team.
Overall, while Object 292 brings unique experience to players with its devastating firepower and identical handling of Soviet MBTs to get used to easily, players also need situational awareness and not over-extent to deliver the fatal blow every time it fires - a surviving, gas-turbine-driven 152 mm cannon has both the physical and psychological power to deter enemy targets.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- 152mm main gun enables this tank to engage targets from long distances and the damage is nearly impossible to survive in case of a critical hit
- Autoloader configuration and blow out panel help with survivability (beware that the blow out panel is only for the first-stage charge storage)
- Upgraded mobility from T-80BV series with GTD-1250 gas-turbine engine
- High explosive content HE-FS for long-range engagement against covered targets
Cons:
- Weakspots such as LFP and unreliable fuel tank still haunts the protection of hull
- Lacks any ERA for extra protection and having driver's visor exposed to incoming attacks
- No smoke grenades, so losing attention of aircraft is difficult
- No thermal sight while everyone at the rank has one, ESS is not very useful at this point as a consequence as well
- Only three crew members
- Longest reload time for autoloader MBTs at 10 seconds per consecutive shot
- Lacks both coaxial and HMG for gunning down light targets/aircrafts
History
Describe the history of the creation and combat usage of the vehicle in more detail than in the introduction. If the historical reference turns out to be too long, take it to a separate article, taking a link to the article about the vehicle and adding a block "/History" (example: https://wiki.warthunder.com/(Vehicle-name)/History) and add a link to it here using the main template. Be sure to reference text and sources by using <ref></ref>, as well as adding them at the end of the article with <references />. This section may also include the vehicle's dev blog entry (if applicable) and the in-game encyclopedia description (under === In-game description ===, also if applicable).
Media
Excellent additions to the article would be video guides, screenshots from the game, and photos.
See also
Links to the articles on the War Thunder Wiki that you think will be useful for the reader, for example:
- reference to the series of the vehicles;
- links to approximate analogues of other nations and research trees.
External links
| USSR medium tanks | |
|---|---|
| T-28 | T-28 (1938) · T-28 · T-28E |
| T-34-76 | T-34 (Prototype) · T-34 (1940) · T-34 (1941) · T-34 (1st Gv.T.Br.) · T-34 (1942) · T-34E STZ · T-34E |
| T-34-57 | T-34-57 · T-34-57 (1943) |
| T-34-85 | T-34-85 (D-5T) · T-34-85 · T-34-85E |
| T-34-100 | T-34-100 |
| T-44 | T-44 · T-44-100 · T-44-122 |
| T-54 | T-54 (1947) · T-54 (1949) · T-54 (1951) |
| T-55 | TO-55 · T-55A · T-55AM-1 · T-55AMD-1 |
| T-62 | T-62 · T-62M-1 |
| T-64 | Object 435 · T-64A (1971) · T-64B |
| T-72 | T-72A · T-72AV (TURMS-T) · T-72B · T-72B (1989) · T-72B3 · T-72M2 Moderna |
| T-80 | T-80B · T-80U · T-80UD · T-80UK · T-80UM2 · Т-80U-Е1 · T-80BVM · Object 292 |
| T-90 | Т-90А · T-90M |
| Trophies/Lend-Lease | |
| Germany | ▂T-III · ▂T-V |
| Great Britain | ▂МК-IX "Valentine" |
| USA | ▂M3 Medium · ▂M4A2 |
