Picture of the Day – 16.2.2017

Here’s another interesting picture I collected. This time from Syria, 2016.

100mm KS-19 on Kvadrat chassis

This is something pretty strange. What you have here is 100mm KS-19 AA gun on Kvadrat chassis. Never heard of either? I am not surprised – it’s a really strange combination. KS-19 is an ancient Soviet 100mm anti aircraft gun. Built between 1947 and 1957, around ten thousand of these things were built and later exported all over the world, specifically to Soviet-friendly third world countries such as Syria. It can fire HE and AP-T rounds with with performance roughly equal to D-10T. The ammunition is, however, not compatible and I have no idea where the Syrians got theirs.

Kvadrat chassis is even more interesting. 2K12E “Kvadrat” is the export variant of the 2K12 “Kub” anti-aircraft missile system. Syria operated around 200 “Kvadrats” before the civil war. In this case, the Syrians removed the guided missile weapon system and somehow installed the AA gun on top of it. The Kvadrat chassis (designation GM-568/578) is light (weighs some 15 tons), lightly armored against small armos only and can (in intended configuration) drive as fast as 50 km/h. However, the center of gravity shift and the weight of the gun (around 10 tons) assure that the performance of the vehicle will be abysmal and reliability very low. It’s a typical example of war-time rigging.

85mm KS-1 gun on ZRU Kvadrat chassis

Another interesting vehicle – the same Kvadrat chassis but with even weirder gun, the 85mm KS-1 AA gun. As the caliber suggests, this is actually a WW2 gun (in Soviet nomenclature it’s called “85mm anti-aircraft gun model 1944 KS-1″) and I have no idea how it got to Syria or where do they take the ammunition for it. This strange vehicle doesn’t belong to Syrian units or rebels, but to the Hezbollah Lebanese militia supporting the government.

Ironically, both vehicles (built in 2016) would be completely fine in World of Tanks – they are very low tech.

3 thoughts on “Picture of the Day – 16.2.2017

  1. Nice to see your posting stuff a bit more often now I do like the idea of a picture of the day thing with a small history/whatever in this world that is in the picture describing the picture. Also I want to ask how much more players are playing Armored Warfare on the EU servers then the NA servers because there literally are 0 players in the PVP que on the NA server.