The well-known russian Sosna-U tank sights, which was created thanks to the purchase of television matrices from the French company Thales that had been shipped through Belarus to bypass sanctions since 2014, seem to be coming to an end.
Russian mass media showed on their video that these sights are no longer on the T-80BVM tanks, which was pointed out by Kontakt642 Twitter account.
Read more: Almost Thousand UAVs in Ukraine's "Army of Drones" And They Are Deadly to the russians (Video)
Thus, in the video, inside the vehicle, instead of the Sosna-U sight, the 1PN-96MT-02 night sight is seen. It is installed in place of a night sight with 1G42 retention.
The 1PN-96MT-02 night sight from the Vologda Optical and Mechanical Plant was claimed as a solution for the modernization of the T-62. Moreover, it was frankly considered a budget solution for the export variants of the T-72, in the case of the customer's desire. For the T-72B3 and T-80BVM tanks of the russian armythe Sosna-U was preferred.
The capabilities of this night sight can be considered significantly worse than the Sosna-U. Even in russian sources for the 1PN-96МТ-02, the detection range of a tank-type target was declared to be up to 3 km. And this parameter is also questionable, as in some sources it is indicated that 3 km is for a tank in profile, and so in general up to 2 km. For comparison, the russian federation claims that for the Sosna-U this parameter is 5 km.
Moreover, the 1PN-96 sight itself was initially developed for light armored vehicles, such as BMP-1/2, BTR-80 or MT-LB. And it was unsuccessfully promoted by the manufacturer, who updated it from time to time. In particular, somewhere in the early 2010s, a tank version appeared for installing the TPN-42 and TPN-1-49 sights in the regular place.
And for the entire time of its existence, the 1PN-96 remained useless to anyone, until russia faced lack of foreign component parts due to sanctions.
Of course, ubder the question is the actual manufacturer and supplier of the matrix for the 1PN-96MT-02. Despite the fact that the russian federation now claims that the sight is assembled entirely from domestic components, back in 2018 it was reported that it is based on a foreign microbalometer.
Read more: Sanctions are Working: russia Cannot Produce Satellites For Space Recon
