If you look up the guy who did some echo sounding on a chieftain he didn’t find even nearly 120mm armour on the front.

Hell, you can look at the drivers hatch open on the video and know for a fact that it’s not 12cm thick.

I’m thinking if the armour is modelled as is should be we’re going to see thinner frontal armour than the fv4202s fake frontal hull.

If we look at these two:
Tiger 1 – speed 45.4
Weight: 54 tons
HP: 690
Armour: 120mm max
Turret 360: yes
Capable gun against all relative threats – yup

Now let’s look at Chieftain
Speed: 48 kph (if it worked)
Weight: 55 tons
HP: 750
Armour 120mm (very sloped)
Turret 360: yes
Capable gun against all relative threats – yup

So as you can see, while we call it a MBT, it can also be classed as a Heavy if you wished. I would say that the chieftains primary faults prevent it being classed as a true MBT in my mind, as it falls out of the perfect triangle ( Mobility, Firepower, Armour)

What do you recon SS, are modern MBTs more akin to what we could call Heavies? Is the weight gain in current tanks part of the re-occurring tank evolution? Food for thought.

The point of MBT was to replace all tanks, not to turn all tanks into mediums. The meta that was around when the first gen MBTs came out happened to have them act more like mediums than anything else but that constantly changed depending how the armour vs armament race was going (and indeed these early MBTs had to be supported by heavier tanks (Is-3, conqueror, M103) because they were too light). The battlefield role of MBTs changed constantly and cheiftains role was somewhere between heavy tank and tank destroyer, it also replaced conqueror as well as centurion remember.