Compartmentalization and system ranking as fundamental design requirements for armored vehicles: Ukraine, Switzerland
Abstract
The proliferation of low-cost FPV drones has fundamentally altered the threat landscape for main battle tanks, elevating crew survivability to the primary design criterion and necessitating a reassessment of historical protection concepts. This study, through a comparative analysis of archival materials from the Swiss Federal Archives, declassified Soviet-era thematic publications, and the personal diaries of development participants, traces the independent emergence of the compartmentalization principle (Ukrainian term – division of the vehicle into compartments isolated from one another) within the Swiss and Ukrainian schools of tank design during the 1970s–1980s. The results demonstrate that both engineering schools, responding to the catastrophic tank losses during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, independently arrived at nearly identical solutions despite complete informational isolation. In the Swiss NKPZ project, «Kompartimentierung» was formally established as a mandatory evaluation criterion, with only two concepts ensuring complete physical separation of the crew, ammunition, and power pack. Concurrently, Kharkiv designers developed a compartmentalized layout based on the quantitative ranking of systems by their contribution to survivability, assigning the highest protection coefficient to the crew, who were placed in the most protected compartment. Both schools independently converged on three fundamental principles: locating the crew in an isolated rear capsule, utilizing the engine compartment as an additional protective barrier, and equipping ammunition compartments with blow-off panels to vent explosive energy outward. This developmental parallelism demonstrates that compartmentalization and system ranking represent an objective regularity in the evolution of specialized vehicles, rather than localized inventions. The timeliness of this research is underscored by the fact that the principles of compartmentalization and layered crew protection, developed in the 1970s as a response to the challenges of their era, are gaining renewed relevance today in light of the widespread use of FPV drones, which once again bring the issues of armored vehicle survivability and the prevention of catastrophic losses to the forefront.
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