Thread by @KesariDhwaj

This is a dishonest piece which hides catastrophic failure at OFB. Thread:
- Russian APFSDS mentioned in the report : BM-42 'Mango'
(Indian Army designation: AMK-339)
- Why was it imported?
- Two reason:
(1) Production disaster at OFB: In mid-90s, OFB started producing DRDO+

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developed 125mm Mk-1 APFSDS with soft core (pic)
- IA Designation: AMK 340
- However, army personnel lost lives when ammunition burst inside the tank barrel
- Investigation found that OFB was producing hybrid rounds where it was mating a foreign penetrator with indigenous +

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shell but did not follow procedure leading to defective ammunition
- How many rounds were found to be defective? 140,000!!!
- This was almost 20% of the total holding of this type

(2) Ban on Israelis:
- Parallel to fiasco above and exigency of Op Parakaram led to import of +

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Israeli 125mm round
Designation: Israeli - CL 3254M/ Indian: AMK 340A (Pic)
- Apart from import, it was to be co-produced with OFB
- But here again, while imported ammo did OK, the one produced by OFB had QC issues.
- Because of QC issue, production numbers never stabilized
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- And QC was achieved only by 2009.
- But what is worse is that production of DRDO Mk-1/AMK 340 125mm ammo was stopped in 2005
- And then, tragedy struck as IMI got blacklisted in 2010!
- So, between 2005-2010, there was hardly any production of APFSDS ammo.
- Not to mention+

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that almost 20% of the stock made by OFB was defective
- It is in this gap, that IA had to resort to import of BM-42 'Mango' round
- DRDO in parallel is developing own Mk-2 125mm APFSDS (yellow color)
- Which has quite similarities to the Israeli CL-3254M

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Summary:
- Russian BM-42 was a stop-gap measure to fill alarmingly low number of this type of ammo
- DRDO Mk-1 125mm/AMK 340 production was not stopped because it was defective
- But because OFB did not follow proper production process. It is all detailed in CAG Reports
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- OFB could not even stabilize production of Israeli 125mm ammo
- How did OFB increase performance of BM-42 round?
- Where did they get the penetrator from for increased performance? Imported?
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OFB can do better than sponsor such hit-jobs in media

In case anyone is interested, here's my analysis from 2014 on the scenario of Kinetic Energy / APFSDS rounds in India.
vatsrohit.blogspot.com/2013/11/indian…

And here's another data-point about why IA imported BM-42 'Mango' from Russia and how OFB screwed-up:

- Between 2008-09 and 2012-13, there was 92% short-fall in production of APFSDS by OFB against the indented numbers.