That would be a big killer for the A2 then. Not just the missile system and its (potentially loss-of-vehicle destructive) problems, but if the gun stabilizer never worked that'd be another big axe in the project. Height was probably another consideration, even if it was only 4 inches taller than the A1/A3 tanks; I like the hunter-killer system in the A2 and I see the Brits did something similar with Conqueror.
It's a shame they never got the stabilizer working properly, even if they were able to do it for the A3 as an add-on pack. That could be a gun issue, though; maybe the 152mm was just too physically large and weirdly balanced as short as it was? The 105 worked fine, so...alternatively it could have been the shape of the turret; the wider A3 turret having enough room for whatever worked that didn't in the A2. It can't be gun stabilizer technology in general, we had that with the M4!
I suppose an A2 with the 105mm gun makes some sense, though had MBT-70 not been a thing I wonder if that might have been a potential future.
Now why the hell didn't the French put a gun stabilizer in the AMX-30...
according to
one source, the Turret in the A2 was pretty much everything you didn't want in a tank turret. The crewmen were isolated from one another (though they all had their own hatch), the main gun wasn't the only problematic weapon, as it was also saddled with a rather unpopular .50 caliber installation (the M-85) that had to be replaced by the ww2 era Ma Deuce, and a coaxial gun (m-73) that had to be replaced as well. It was notoriously complicated (in the turret) and as mentioned before, the crew were ISOLATED from one another, this makes intra-crewman communication kinda tricky if, say, the electrics were to have (Predictable) problems in the field. (Dirt, mud, and moisture are teh bane of electronics, right up there with dust. especially 1970s era electronics, and the A-2 was chock full of them, while dirt, mud and moisture are more "Default conditions" for military vehicles operating outside of a nice, clean motorpool.)
In a way, it was reaching to the edge of what was available technologically-and with that reaching, the flaws would be inevitable when examined logically, particularly for the time it was in service (the 1970s), where the Army was at a low point in morale and cutbacks resulted in legends of units having to steal their parts from one another or scrounge from 'other sources' to remain operational. (particularly bad in the post-1976 to 1981 period.) The M-60A2's major problem, then, was that it was not soldier proof and didn't work very well to begin with, and that it needed more upkeep and maintenance than it was likely to get due to budget, manpower, and personnel issues-it was too delicate for the world, and so it was phased out.
On the bright side, lessons learned included that a good cannon works better than a combination gun/missile system, and no small amount of the technologies it demonstratd were refined along with lessons from the MBT-70 program, to give us the Abrams. but if it had dropped in the pot in 1975, the A2's wouldn't have been much of an obstacle in the Fulda Gap had the Soviet hordes actually been serious about bringing about world communism directly and evangelizing the western europeans with the same zeal they had people in central europe during the sixties. (YOu know, conversion by the sword and all that.)
Not that ANYONE on either side would have lived particularly long had that happened (or had the NATO allies decided to achieve one-germany solutions via bullets and bombs on their side!)
You can measure the 'success' of M-60A2 by the simple expedient of how many were purchased by export partners in places like Iran (under the Shah) or Israel, or Jordan. (The sum total is zero, by the way. The U.S. could not find buyers even in Taiwan for this turkey, even Turkey wouldn't buy it...before someone brings up that most customers were blocked by export regs, I remind you that we were happily selling F-14s to Iran-brand new ones, with all the goodies, in the same time period.)
