It would weigh ~29 tonnes. About 10 tonnes less than the Boxer Waffenträger if the suggestion for it is correct despite the VBCI Mk2 being a far more potent weapon system lol.
It’s not though? It’s only rated as STANAG 4 on the sides.
You’re seriously not citing War Thunder Wiki as a source, are you? 32 tonnes is the maximum permissible weight of the VBCI Mk2 - do tell how it could possibly be more…
I’m not citing wt wiki. The VCI alone already weighs 25 tons and your trying to tell me that all the addon armor to get it to lvl 6 front and lvl 5 sides from 14.5mm protection+ a turret with a 40mm only weighs 4 tonns sure
Nah but that breach give that tank a big forehead look. And I’m honestly not sure it’s a great direction to go to weak turrets. This make the fire control systems very weak to heavy machine guns and auto canons. Granted, there’s a video of a T90M being basically disabled by a Bradley,; but that required heavy, and dangerous fire density around its optics and turret drive, which are still fairly small targets (especially considering there’s the gunner and commander optic acting as hunter killer). Meanwhile, on something like the t14 armada, you see very lightly armoured turret that could potentially be disabled much easier due to their fairly big profile (compared to optics or turret drives)
Reason why almost every nation trying to develop light-armored unmanned turret is simple. Current MBTs were being too heavy to operate in open field, and heavy-armed manned turrets are failed to protect crews from new threats like HE shells with accurate FCS and drones. So nations have to gain both weight-reduce and crew protection. So they decide to make turret smaller with lightly armored unmanned turret, and rather focus on enhancing hull frontal and roof armor.
Besides, even with manned turrets, sights are prone to heavy machine guns and auto cannons.
Pretty sure KMW has provided an explanation for why they decided to go that route in one of the articles about the ARC.
Altho, imo yes, it does expose the weakpoints more than it should (specifically the turret ring), especially to auto-cannons and I don’t think ARC 4.0 (the likely name of the next variant) will keep it that way, that is, assuming KMW is actually serious about the ARC becoming an alternative to the Leopard 2Ax/9.
ARC is privately funded afaik, whereas 2Ax/9 is government funded. They might merge however if ARC matures more and KMW gets rid of some of the more obvious weakpoints of the design though, since tbh their idea is good, it just need to be executed better, and for that they need Army testing. Optionally, some of ARC design ideas might be transferred over to the 2Ax if they prove to be better than the original design idea, but that remains to be seen.