The Supacat entry for the Light Protected Patrol Vehicle competition has been unveiled and has it’s very own Youtube video.
Looks a bit top heavy from the video, but no doubt the trials will come out with the best answer between the Supacat and the FPE Ocelot
of course they will!!!!! every article i’ve read quotes “the uk built supacat and the US ocelot”
I’m not sure if the top heavy look of it isn’t caused by it having a spaced armour shell with the thicker, heavier crew capsule being much narrower than the external dimensions might suggest. If you look at the sequence where the guys climb into it (about 35 seconds in) you can see that a lot of the bulk appears to be open space.
Well at least it doesn’t look as useless as feared it might have been. Indeed looking at the recent press release and further details about it it appears to be a perfectly good MRAP. If it’s top heavy then that’s because it’s an MRAP and putting lots of armour high up on a vehicle your trying to keep small results in being at least a little top heavy.
Also note that as Pete Arundel points out, the boxy appearance appears to be spaced armour. Front and rear axles are part of detachable modules to help absorb blasts, they can also apparently be rapidly replaced to get the vehicle back into service asap, it even looks like it has side doors.
So get used to the look of it, as much as I like the ocelot, this is going to win the LPPV.
Tend to agree with you Ashley but you never know
I think one of the reasons it looks high is because it seems to put the V shaped cab on top of a traditional chassis rather than using a monocoque body that acts as the chassis and allows a lower centre of gravity. The South Africans discovered this design feature decades ago and most of the more effective MRAP designs also take this approach.
It also looks much bigger than the Ocelot which given the mantra of small is beautiful seems a little contradictory
I’m not so sure about the chassis, looking at the cutaway diagrams provided on their website it appears to either have a monocoque hull or at the least the chassis is inside the V hull, not underneath it.
Also the SPV400 is 16cm taller than the ocelot (or 3cm shorter if you use the min value given by SupaCat, don’t know what that means though) its also 1cm longer and 4cm thinner, assuming the specs for the ocelot aren’t rounded to the nearest 0.1m like they appear to be.
Oh, and go rematch the ocelot video again, the ocelot isn’t show going round corners until 3/4 of the way through and only does so once more. The second time it turns round a corner it does so slowly and on flat ground. The first time looks like it’s a little faster, but the way it bounces up and more importantly down, looks a little bit quick. There’s also a guy turning his head halfway through very quickly so I think they make have speeded up some video of it turning a corner very slowly. My point? If ocelot doesn’t look like it’s top heavy, it’s because the people that made that video made sure it didn’t do anything that would make it look top heavy.
I noticed there wasn’t much off road stuff with the ocelot compared with the spv400. One would imagine the supacat has much better off road mobility given its pedigree but maybe the ocelot has greater blast protection given its pedigree.
Is this one of those protection v mobility trades offs?
Who know though, only the trials team I guess.
Hmm Ground clearance on the Ocelot is supposed to be 338mm and on the SPV400 its 355mm, so not a lot of difference.
Assuming a blast is a spherically symmetric wave travelling radially outwards (probably not a bad estimation when only considering a small solid angle) the flux per unit area of the blast wave, and thus the force exerted per area of armour, would dissipate as 1/distance^2. (this is where I give away the fact I’m a physicist) So double the distance between blast and hull, 1/4 the force exerted per area of armour. Better blast protection, higher centre of gravity.
3mm however is not likely to matter too much, the SPV400 probably just looks lower because it’s got storage boxes mounted under the V.
I suspect the ocelot video doesn’t show the full off-road potential of the vehicle just because it came out so much earlier, if you concentrate on the back-ground, most of its shot on the airfield adjacent to the RICARDO facility on the south coast rather than at Millbrook which is where I think this one is shot.
Also the “US made Ocelot” is bull…. yes force protection EUROPE designed the armour solution but its RICARDO who build the Land rover vixens who are actually designing the chassis, running gear etc. and are building them at the mo
This is not to say i don’t think SPV400 is good, the internal space looks smaller than ocelot but given supacat’s pedigree its off-road performance in all likely hood might be better. This will be a close one to call, the ocelot will be more adaptable than the SPV400 (and its ambulance variants) but given that they’ve both made it this far I’m guessing there is nothing wrong with either of them protection-wise. I look forward to hearing the result but the decision should not be prejudiced by anything stupid like “US/UK made”
Ummm not bad…. Still think its looks like Postman Pat’s van! anyone notice the slight wonky wipers???
As regard to US/UK wasn’t Supacat or at least the design of the HMT )which is the basis for Jackal/Coyote sold to Lockheed-Martin. Supacat then bought back the rights to manufacture in the UK. If this has HMT DNa(which I guess it might do) then this could equally be thought of as US. One final think this is rumoured to have a big brother (the SPV600), just like the HMT range (400/600 and 800). This would make sense and together with the Ranger would largely negate the need for most of the existing TSV vehicles and would fill the gaps left by the shelving/cancelling of the OUVS programme. Although reference the SPV600 has been removed from the Supacat website.
If they order the Ranger I think that would give the Army a very useful range of vehicles for the COIN/PEACE-KEEPING and low intensity war scenarios.
SPV400/600 replacing Snatch/Vixen/Vector and most of the WMIK/M-WIMIK(Jackals)and the Bushmaster to a lesser extent, plus the god awful Panther.
Ranger in (4×4,6×6 and 8×8) could perfrom the TSV role, plus supercede or at least compliment the Mastiff/Ridgback and add a new wheeled APC capability, not disimilar to FRES Utility.
I would want to see the open top vehicles restricted to the special force type roles and not used for general patrolling as seems to be the case at the moment.
Husky, Coyote(if not superceded by SPV600)and
Ashley, unfortunately I’m not a physicist, which is why I tend to ask a lot more questions than give answers.:)
Your statement, ‘Assuming a blast is a spherically symmetric wave travelling radially outwards’, does this assume that the IED is on the surface? I thought with most IED’s being sub-surface this would alter the blast characteristics, with the effects of the blast going upwards as well as outwards? Or is it a case of being near the surface it doesn’t make an iota of a difference?
Also, with regard to MRAP vehicles generally, would they benefit from a sacrificial blast ‘cushion’ mounted on the outside of the vehicle? To try and visualise the blast cushion I had in mind, think of empty soft drink cans fixed between to metal sheets that compress when struck. This would in effect decelerate the shockwave prior to it hitting the hull. Would this be of any benefit?
Is there any intention to fit a rooftop weapon on the LPPV? I thought I had read somewhere (can’t remember where) that there was such a plan. If the Supacat is somewhat top heavy (and my suspicions were slightly aroused by the video),and a weapon were to be mounted on its roof, then would that not exacerbate the problem (even if the weapon were an “unmanned” RWS.) Problems were encountered with the machine gun mounting on the Saxon, which helped create a top-heaviness in the vehicle.
To Richard, According to what i know about IEDs, they are shallow buried so the shockwave can be thought of as “spherical” but when it comes to soil ejecta this is certainly more directional. I also don’t think a blast cushion would do any good as the levels of strain rate involved are massive making most of the energy absorbtion techniques used by the car industry irrelevant, they just don’t work fast enough to be useful.
Also concerning the height of the SPV400, whilst this could indicate it has a high c of g, if the running gear is kept low and the body is made of composite, then it might not be as bad as it looks, although certainly the ocelot’s looks to be lower.
Finally, I’ve heard lots about the Ranger PPV saying its the best thing since sliced bread, is there any information to back this up as the fact that no one has bought it yet is kind of telling to me that there must be something wrong with it?
The Saxon turret was a problem in two ways. It was heavy yes, and hard to operate with any accuracy, but its primary downfall was the fact that it killed crew. Should you be the commander of such a Peak turret Saxon you needed to see the vehicle corners. So you would be head and shoulders out. The fact was the Peak Turret was too small for a crewman to drop into fast if he had body armour on. And there were bodies to prove it. The Saxon coulod also roll like a dog on wet grass. And she did on SPTA with a young officer head and shoulders out. He was a lot thinner after she lay on him!
And sadly you could not command without that level of exposure. So the Turret was removed for eLF AND sAFETy Not top hamper. The beast should never have gone off road really
Phil, thanks for the reply. I had not realized, (from reading newspaper reports) that the problems of the Saxon, highlighted in Bosnia, were compounded by the limitations of the Peak turret. I thought that it was the increased weight, created by the normal(?) DISA machine gun mountings over the commander’s hatch, which made the Saxon even more likely to roll. Is the Saxon Patrol, a later vehicle which is, I believe, still in service, any more stable?
Sorry, have been busy for a few days with past paper revision (which when I made my physics argument is why I stated all of my assumptions).
Although mines are buried, even if this caused them to focus their shock wave upwards, it would still form a cone shape rather than a solid column. Thus as far as the armour is concerned (because if any paths the shock wave could take that won’t encounter the vehicle do not affect the outcome and can be ignored) the bit that hits it looks like the outside edge of a sphere, even if’s actually a cone.
My assumption though is an assumption, because the explosion does not come from a single point even though it is cone shaped, the “tip of the cone” could actually be some distance below the surface, and thus twice the distance from the ground would not equal twice the distance from the bomb.
But even still, more distance does mean better protection, there’s a reason MRAP’s are really tall.
As for weapon mounts AFAIK LPPV is a replacement for the Snatch, so weapons up top consist of a dude (or two) with rifles sticking their head out of the top hatch. Probably not too bad an issue as the LPPV isn’t supposed to be an AFV or an APC, that and it will keep overall weight down.
And on Ranger, I though everyone who was going to buy MRAPs had bought their MRAPs already and doesn’t feel like replacing them.
And additions because I forgot to put them in.
AFAIK SupaCat was sold to Lockheed Martin (pre Jackal 1 order I think) but the company itself and everything it develops (including all IP) is soundly within the UK.
And while the crew compartment on the SPV400 looks cramped, the crew compartment on the Ocelot only goes as far back as the rear wheel arch and is thus just as cramped, it just doesn’t look like it from the outside.
Past paper revision how old are you if you don’t mind me asking?
About the last point you made the chances are MRAP’s will be here to stay for some time if they fit within the force structure which the really should if there are IED’s around. Especially here in the UK I don’t think we could afford to just dispose of hundreds of new vehicles because we could replace it with something marginally better.
Speaking of Lockheed Martin and the Supacat, there was an LMUK design for an MRAP-type vehicle called AVA.
http://www.lockheedmartin.co.uk/news/330.html
A bit to big for LPPV, but I believe that it was offered for OUVS.
Snazzy Ferrari-style vents.