Oh My Gods

Yes, you are very clever having looked up some information on the internet.

But you missed some shit.

Yes, Kontakt-5 was developed in 1985.

Yes, that predates the deployment of the M900 APFSDSDU.

The date you give for the deployment of the M900 is wrong, we had it in the tanks in 1988, not 1990.  I was there, saw it with my own eyes what it takes to turn in and sign for "nuclear materials" when we traded in the M883 rounds.

Yes, Kontakt-5 premiered on the T-80U, which also first appeared in 1985.  But they didn't field them until closer to 1990.  Again, I was there.

While the US intelligence agencies missed a lot of things about how good or bad Soviet stuff was, we had our own eyes to see what was right across the damn border.  Forgot the USMLM exploits, didn't you?

No, the T-72 didn't get Kontakt-5 in 1989 except at trade shows.  The Russians had the same problem with defense spending we had then, the Cold War was ending around them before it ended around us.  T-72B3 didn't get into deployable numbers until 2010!

Plus!  In 1990 we got to see what the East Germans had.  Some of that was sobering, much of it wasn't.

Armor and penetration values are very hard to make apples to apples comparisons with.  It's especially hard to get two sources to use the same methods.  Is that penetration value at the muzzle or is it at 2,000 meters?  Is it LOS thickness, is it the actual thickness at 0°, is it "rolled homogeneous armor equivalent"?  Lots of times it doesn't say and you get to make assumptions.

Take the, speculative, penetration values for M900 for example.  The 520mm value I found against RHAE is almost certainly the 2km @ 0° value.  The 650mm value I found recently is probably the 100m value (which is the cannon equivalent to muzzle velocity.)

There's a lot on the internet that's presented as absolute values without considering that the first appearance of something isn't the date that it's really available.

If that were true, 3-34AR would have had M1A1's instead of M1(IP)'s in 1987.  They still had M60A3(TTS) (and were called 2-37AR) the day I arrived in the midst of a unit designation change AND turning in the M60's.  The M1A1(HA) starts production in 1988 but we didn't get any until 1990.

See how that works?

So stop telling me, from Canada, to ignore my lying eyes.  I am what historians call a primary source!