Tank origin

Tasked with the goal of creating armored vehicles that could counter NATO’s technological advancements, engineers at the Kharkiv Morozov Design Bureau worked throughout the 1980s to produce innovative main battle tank designs. One such project was known as Object 490. As conceived by Evgeny Morozov, Object 490 would be crewed only by a driver and a gunner-commander, who would operate inside an isolated compartment with equipment that would allow for the duplication of crew functions. A three-crew variant was also developed before the project ended with the fall of the Soviet Union.