I guess the reason for staying with the t-55 is more economic than military, as animal mother said there not much chance of slovakia being in a war and if the t-55 contract means people keep there jobs and jobs are created then they may as well go for it.

Yup, true.

Originally Posted by the_13th_redneck

The thing might just fall apart from getting hit!
Reactive armor. Means you can just about forget about infantry support. When one of those go off they're super lethal to any infantry standing around the tank.
I guess if you had a gazillion of these it could work. It'd be funny to see reactive armor of each tank setting off ones in the other etc etc.

Actually, modern ERA is not dangerous to dismounts, as the effect is contained inside the ERA cell, unlike first generation ERA where the flyer plate exited the cell.

Ahh okay, thanks!
Are they using modern reactive armor though?

@ shadowalker

It's Slovenia, Slovakia is a *Now, Is that nesesary?* country outside EU, NATO and as far as I can remember with a weak democracy. We just got accepted into the richest countries club, hehe what that means is that were supposed to be giving out loans and not receive them so much anymore.

@ all

MoD plans on buying something new quite soon, because this T-55 upgrade is now quite old (5 yrs) and it turned down major upgrades for the M-84 (ex-Yugoslav T-72).

Basically the whole plan of this upgrade was to bring the T-55 to the level of the M-84 and to have 130 fairly equal tanks in a country of 2 mil. and which covers about 20.000 km2, most of it not good for tank advancements.
Hope it makes more sense now, though I would have liked the Leo's much more too. Hope we get the newest version now.

oops sorry! i knew it began with an s i must of just skim read what country it was for. I am wondering if now that countries like slovenia, poland, czech republic hav joined the EU is there going to be a decline in the amount of russian weapons ordered and a shift towards weaponry from germany, france etc. like poland has ordered the Patria AMV from finland to replace its current soviet vehicles, is this going to become the trend?

I think it will, membership fee and all.
We already bought four Cougars from Eurocopter, Roland AA from German navy (bad choice IMO), some humvees from the US...so I think this trend is here to stay, at least for now...

@ admin who replaced a part of my post with his question about the necessity of that part:

No it wasn't.

@13th_redneck

It's modern ERA allright, everything upgraded is modern, wouldn't make much sense upgrading old stuff with old stuff, would it?

I take it you are from slovenia, do you think this is a good thing or do you think it is going to cause more problems trying to integrate new western systems and older russian/soviet systems.

Good thing, definitely.

Everything (weapons systems) from the socialist regime are now really old and in need of replacement so that's just a step we're going to have to make IMO, besides some compatibility existed from "the old days" too, for instance our republican (state not federal) police had Bell helicopters like from the start, Bell 47's(bubble cockpit) I think.