Yes, that was my point. When i hear "amphibious tank" i think of something like the AAVP and not a normal MBT with a snorkel like almost all MBTs use it since a long time.
Is the suspension system really that useful? After all the old STRV-103 had that already (
http://baike.baidu.com/pic/52/1159520749627313.jpg) and noone ever considered it worth copying in any tank design that came afterwards... till now or till the Type-90 if that one has this feature too.
Maybe to some extend tank designers that are operating within a tradition going back to WW2 shy away from "going too advanced" because everybody still has it in the back of the head how the rather simple but tough russian tanks in the end proved to be better than the more advanced but problem haunted german tanks. Best example are the overlaping wheels of the Tiger 1. They were a good idea on the drawing board because they provided a very stable platform for the gun, but they froze together in winter and because a lot of mudd virtually glued them together, the engine had to work much harder than it would have had to with normal wheels, which was a big problem for the already underpowered machine and increased the probability of overheating besides increasing the fuel consumption unnessesarily.
Especially the development of the Leopard 1, which in some way was the first one of that new generation of MBTs (you know, the first one that was definitely rather designed to be a agile predator than a rolling fortification) was especially influenced by WW2 experiences and memories. The premise was to achieve a maximum performance and reliability combined with a minimum of maintenance and a optimized "in-field-repairability" (fast exchangeable engine aso.). I think the big success of the Leopard 2 comes mainly from sticking with this principles (for example by using the reliable, traditional multi-fuel diesel engine instead of a more complicated gas turbine).
They didn't just develop a high tech tank out of the blue like the French did for example, but deliberately avoided the mistakes the german engineers in WW2 made and only then thought about how new technologies could be combined with that experiences.
I think that "better go simple and reliable"-attitude is one of the reasons why the Leo, the Abrams and the Challenger still got no automatic loader.
What i want to say with all this is that i could imagine "western" tank designers might shy away from using such fancy suspension systems because it feels a bit like one of those ideas that look good on paper but tend to cause problems in practise.
Of course it doesn't have to be unreliable, but usually you can assume that the more complicated a system is, the more liable it is to malfunctions, the more maintance it needs and the harder it is to repair. A advanced and complicated hydraulic system would certainly suffer more mobility kills from mines, if confronted with such, than the oldfashioned suspension systems that are used in most MBTs today, i wager.
@ rrrtx:
Are the restrictions that hard that they can't sell anything? Germany has pretty harsh restrictions too and still sells tanks and ships to certain customers.
