The BMP-1 is a fully amphibious tracked vehicle, with a front-engined chassis developed especially for it, a welded steel hull with a sharp, sloping front with a conspicuously ridged surface, a centrally located, flat, truncated cone turret and a troop compartment at the rear.
Driver's station The driver sits in the front on the left side of the hull. He has three TNPO-170 periscope vision-blocks to provide vision when his hatch is closed. The driver's center vision block can be replaced with a TVNO-2 active night binocular vision device for use in night and poor visibility conditions or with a TNPO-350B extended periscope when swimming with the trim vane erected. The BMP was the first Soviet armored vehicle to use a simple yoke steering system.
Commander's station The commander's station is located behind the driver's station and is provided with a removable OU-3GA2 or OU-3GK
infrared searchlight with an effective range of about . A dual mode (day/night) TKN-3B 5x/4.2x magnification binocular vision device is coupled to the infrared searchlight. Two periscope vision blocks are fitted with a heating and cleaning system. The commander's station is equipped with an
R-123M radio set.
Turret , Finland. Note the ammunition stowage. The BMP-1 has a conical turret equipped with a fume extraction system and an electric traverse drive with a manual backup system. OG-15V high explosive ammunition was made available from 1974. The BMP-1 was a threat to NATO APCs, light AFVs, and even MBTs of its time, by use of its main gun or ATGM. Nevertheless, the strong anti-tank focus of its armament didn't provide sufficient firepower against enemy unarmored vehicles, infantry and light fortified positions, especially during mountain battles (mostly due to the low elevation angle of the main gun). The appearance of the more successful BMP-2 armed with the 30mm 2A42 dual-purpose autocannon solved this serious problem.
Troop compartment The troop compartment located at the rear of the vehicle can carry up to eight soldiers. There are four firing ports on each side of the vehicle and a single firing port in the left rear door. A combination fume extractor hose and cartridge deflector is provided to clip on to weapons at each station. Soldiers sit on two padded benches along the center line of the vehicle and face the sides. Vehicle batteries, electric equipment and the main fuel tank are located between the benches, with tool stowage beneath. There are four large D-shaped hatches in the roof of the hull, which can be opened from the troop compartment. The airtight rear doors of the troop compartment contain fuel tanks. Space inside the troop compartment is limited. There is little room for personal equipment, which leads to it being stowed outside while on operation, sometimes limiting rearward traverse of the turret. The seating is cramped, especially for troops in full battle dress. In the BMP-1 and BMP-2, ammunition is stored near or even inside the compartment, which can lead to a catastrophic failure in case of a hull breach.
Maneuverability The UTD-20 six-cylinder
four-stroke diesel engine is located in the centre of the front hull, behind the transmission, with the cooling system to the right and radiator above. The engine drives a manual gearbox with five forward and one reverse gear. The BMP-1 has a maximum road speed of , which is automatically reduced to around off-road. During the
First Persian Gulf War, the armor protection of the BMP-1 proved vulnerable to the armor-piercing rounds of the US
M2/M3 Bradley's
M242 Bushmaster autocannon. During the intense fighting in Chechnya, no penetration of the BMP-1/BMD-1 turret front armor was noticed because the turret made for a small target and had relatively thick frontal armor compared to other parts of the vehicle.
Protection issues The BMP-1 had significant shortcomings in its protection scheme, which only became obvious during the Soviet–Afghan War. It seats its driver and commander in a tandem layout, on the left side of the hull front, alongside the diesel engine. When an antitank
mine hits the BMP-1s left track, the explosion usually destroyed one to three left side roadwheels, penetrated the bottom, and killed or seriously wounded both the driver and the commander, which caused painful losses of specialist personnel in the Soviet Army. Drivers laid sandbags on the bottom of their compartment in an effort to protect themselves against possible mine attack. The same kind of explosion under the right track was much less dramatic for the driver and the commander, who remained relatively safe. If the vehicle hit a
tilt-rod antitank mine, its steeply sloped lower front glacis plate allowed the mine's arming rod to tilt with little resistance until the mine was well under the chassis. When it eventually detonated, the blast was usually sufficient to kill or badly wound the driver and the commander. From 1982, the Soviet 40th Army in Afghanistan began to receive improved BMP-1Ds (the so-called "Afghan" variant), which, among other improvements, included an additional armored plate under the driver's and commander's stations. This situation was addressed in the later BMP-2 design, where the commander shares the two-man turret with the gunner. The driver's and engine compartments could be equipped with additional bottom armor for improved protection against landmines filled with up to of explosives. , 1 February 1991 There is a protection issue concerning the reloading of the 9M14 "Malyutka" and 9M14M "Malyutka-M" ATGMs in NBC conditions, because doing it through the small hatch from inside the vehicle would negate whatever protection the fighting compartment's NBC protection suite gave. The compactness and low silhouette of the vehicle are generally advantages on a battlefield. Critical areas, such as the engine compartment, the ammunition storage area, fuel cells and the troop compartment, are located in a manner that became the standard for many IFVs and APCs. Penetration anywhere in these areas will often result in mobility and/or firepower damage and/or disabling of the personnel. The armor of BMP-1 IFVs is insufficient to deal with AP cannon rounds – sufficiently thick armor would increase the weight of the BMP-1 considerably and jeopardize its amphibious ability. Some military analysts support the idea of returning to the concept of open-topped APCs, as the armor of light AFVs cannot protect the crew from anti-tank weapons. Modern APCs are mostly used in local conflicts instead of hypothetical large-scale wars with NBC weapons. A problem most often cited by western analysts is the design of the main fuel tank. Due to the low profile of the vehicle, the designers have had to place the fuel tank between the two rows of outward-facing seats, meaning that the infantrymen sit very close to the bulk of the vehicle's fuel storage. Extra fuel is carried in the hollow armored rear doors. Therefore, a hit by an armor-piercing incendiary round would set the fuel contained there on fire, especially if the fuel is kerosene instead of diesel. The burning fuel would move into the crew compartment, resulting in the death or injury of the infantrymen (if they are unable to leave the vehicle via the roof hatches), and a possible explosion. However, the rear door tanks are almost always empty when the BMP goes into combat, as they are only meant to increase the road travel range of the vehicle. In intense war areas where the BMP sees action often, and it is relatively near its base of operations, instructions highly recommend detaching the rear door tanks from the fuel system, filling them with sand as additional protection for the troop compartment, and adding fuel to the internal main fuel tank from other sources when the need arises. This was not practiced by some BMP-1s crews during a number of local conflicts, e.g., in Chechnya, which resulted in frequent attempts by the enemy to hit the rear doors of the BMP-1s. The inner fuel tank is more vulnerable than that of many modern IFVs – the thin side armor means that penetration is likely to occur to the inner fuel tank as well. The BMP-1 has no air conditioning or air cooling system. Its crew members and passengers suffer heavily in hot climates as its air filtration system and exhaust-ventilation fans cannot provide any comfort at high temperatures. It is pneumatically driven and takes four seconds to switch from the traveling position to the digging position. The mine-clearing plows are very narrow, with just two digging tines, each wide, (the same as each track), which limits them to clearing surface-laid mines, in particular scatterable anti-tank mines. A chain mounted between the plows can detonate tilt-rod mines. The maximum mine-clearing speed is . When the NBC protection system is configured and operating, the crew and passengers are protected from
chemical weapons,
biological agents and
nuclear fallout by an air filtration and
overpressure system, which consists of the NBC filter element and the blower/dust separator. BMP-1s were equipped with one
RPG-7/RPG-7V shoulder-launched anti-tank RPG and five PG-7 rounds or one
9K32 Strela-2/9K38 Igla
man-portable anti-aircraft missile launcher and two replacement missiles. It carries 1600 rounds for two
PK general-purpose machine guns. == Service history ==