AT-L

Artilleriyskiy Tyagach Lyogkiy, or AT-L (, meaning light artillery tractor) was a Soviet Cold War era artillery tractor. The vehicle has the same cab as the ZIS-150 and ZIL-164 trucks, but has a different front end and grille similar to that of the GAZ-51 truck. ==History== The light artillery tractor AT-L was created in 1947 by the design bureau of the Kharkiv Tractor Plant. Due to the insufficient power of the only suitable diesel engine, it was necessary — for the first time in Soviet practice — to resort to a more efficient but expensive and maintenance-demanding planetary transmission without side clutches, similar to that of the Panther tank.

To overcome a one-meter-deep ford, as required by the military, improve cross-country ability in deep snow, and reduce overall weight, a welded load-bearing box-shaped hull was designed for the first time instead of a frame. Unfortunately, operational experience in the military revealed that this design did not pair well with the original running gear featuring six intermediate-diameter road wheels (due to its structural similarity with the Ya-12, the tractor was even mistakenly designated in the West as Ya-14): the mounting of the support rollers could not transfer the high loads from oscillations of the upper tracks at high speeds to the thin-walled hull. As a result, the running gear had to be redesigned with five large-diameter road wheels, which appeared somewhat awkward but were much heavier. This was done in 1954–1955, and from 1957, the HTZ-5A (also known as ATL-5A) modification was produced. It replaced the more conservative development of the Ya-12 — the M-2 tractor — which had been in production from 1948 to 1955 and is depicted in all illustrations in this article.