The T-62 was a Soviet Union’s main battle tank introduced during the early 1960’s. This tank was revolutionary for its time using a 115 mm smoothbore cannon, the first of its kind. The T-62 was made to replace Soviet T-54 and T-55’s that were in service and ended up making one of the most crucial advancements in the history of tanks. The smoothbore cannon has been standard issue for most main battle tanks since the 60’s excluding the British Challenger 2’s, and all previous British MBT’s, which are actively being upgraded to smoothbore. The creation of the smoothbore cannon caused fin stabilized ammunition to become the new normal, such as armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot (APFSDS), and high-explosive anti tank fin-stabilized (HEAT-FS). This new age of cannons and ammunition pushed out older ammunition like solid shot and high-explosive squash head (HESH), HESH is the reason British MBT’s kept the rifled design. Along with the T-62’s revolutionary barrel it also had relatively thick sloped armor making it hard to penetrate with weaker ammunition, especially in the turret. The T-62 was armored well and had a large cannon that made it heavy it still had an operating speed of 31 MPH which is impressive, especially for its time. It also had an automatic brass casing ejection system which would serve as a precursor for the Russian autoloader. The T-62 was truly a game changer for future tank designs. Another fun vehicle that was based off of the T-62 is the Chinese Object-122 TM. The TM was based on a captured T-62 and featured a larger barrel and 4 anti-tank missile launchers. Ultimately the project was scrapped due to the complexity being, well, too complex for the Chinese engineers at the time. No pictures of this vehicle are available for creative commons use but you can find pictures of it incredibly easily by looking up Object-122 TM.

This image shows off the smoothbore cannon