Have you played any tank outside the abrams
I don’t know if it’w worse, but in term of overall, they firstly built it on the best for their budget on the market, and after, had to get back on a local thermal imagery. and as for the commander thermal, we don’t really know.
I would love to get an access to trophyLab haha. But you need to prove that you are working either for a governement/military or a private investissor/weapon engineer.
Thales Catherine-FC
-
Scpetrum band: 8–12 µm long-wave infrared (LWIR)
-
Resolution: Typically outputs standard PAL-equivalent line formats, yielding around 754 × 576 or 768 × 576 pixels.
-
Range: Proven long-range detection (reported detection capabilities up to ~10 km for armored targets and ~6 km for infantry).
Irbis-K:
- Spectrum band : Irbis-K’s spectral range is 8-12 µm, revised from an earlier 7-12 micron figure declared in 2012 stated by the Manufacturer, Krasnogorsk Zavod.
- Resolution :The commander’s device is a cooled matrix with 320×256 pixel resolution and identification range up to 2.5 km, with a double-range option, and separately a related plate is described as a new 640×512 pixel matrix domestically produced by Orion, with an integrated laser rangefinder. These two are companion/commander systems, not Irbis-K itself.
Irbis-K’s actual pixel resolution has not been publicly disclosed - Range : Commander optical system: identification range up to 2.5 km, with a double-range option
Gunner’s optics: out to 3,240 meters, day and night, plus an operating temperature range of -50°C to +50°C and tolerance of sand, dust, hoarfrost, sea fog, dew, and high humidity.
Catherine-FC is best described as a mature 2nd-generation scanned MCT sensor (Gen 2+)
Irbis-K is a 2D staring MCT array of unconfirmed generation, likely more advanced than Catherine-FC but probably not the same “true” 3rd-gen GaAs technology Russia reserves for the T-14 Armata. Neither is unambiguously “3rd generation” by the strict staring-array/QWIP definition, Which is the Catherine-XP/MP (other version of the Catherine or export, more modern) and Russia’s Armata-class Orion matrices.
Honestly, I start to not understand anything, so I’ll let Claude finish what I was saying.
Irbis-K family: commander does get roughly half
In the Russian-indigenous pairing (gunner’s Irbis-K + commander’s Agat-MDT/TO1-K04DT), the commander’s channel is a lower-spec unit: the TO1-K04DT’s photodetector has a spectral range of 3–5 micron, a cooled matrix with 320×256 pixel resolution, and an identification range up to 2.5 km (with a double-range option). Irbis-K’s own resolution isn’t published, but even against the plausible 640×512-class matrices mentioned for later Orion sights, 320×256 is roughly a quarter-to-half the pixel count — so your read on the commander getting notably worse resolution than the gunner holds for this pairing.
Sosna-U + Catherine-FC: no such gap
This is the opposite case. In the Kalina fire-control suite (T-90M/T-90MS), the gunner’s Sosna-U and the commander’s PAN “Hawkeye” panoramic sight are not a high-res/low-res pair — both sights are built around the same French 2nd-generation Catherine-FC thermal matrix, operating in the 8–12 micron band. That means commander and gunner are looking through the same sensor spec: the same 754×576 resolution, the same detection ranges (infantry to ~6 km, armor to ~10 km, helicopters to ~14 km). The commander’s Hawkeye adds its own independent two-plane stabilization, day/thermal channels, and an integrated laser rangefinder, letting the commander take over the gunner’s role if needed, but the imaging quality itself isn’t degraded relative to the gunner’s station.
Conclusion:
Sosna-U has a gen 2 thermal with both commander and gunner with 754×576 pixels, and the irbis-K is better, still a second gen, but the resolution wasn’t disclosed (still classified, Mil.today have been refused to this information by the secret services)), but the Commander system ( in the 320×256 pixels class) gives almost the half of the resolution of the gunner’s thermal (around 640×512pixels) because of the TO1-K04DT/Agat-MDT sight.
To say Sosna-U/Catherine-FC produces a better on-screen image than Irbis-K, you’d need to know Irbis-K’s resolution, NETD (thermal sensitivity), and optics. None of that is public. We only know Catherine-FC’s numbers (754×576, NETD <70 mK) because Thales publishes datasheets; Irbis-K’s are classified.
1 Like