The Russian lightweight ultra-compact armored car “Lasok 4-P” looks like a “mobile plague doctor”, writes The Drive.
The reason for the creation of “Lasok 4-P” the American publication calls the need for the Russian Defense Ministry to have an armored vehicle capable of being placed inside a Mi-8 AMTSh helicopter. “This stringent requirement may explain to some extent the apparently strange aesthetics of the resulting product,” the newspaper writes.
The Drive notes that the use of a V-shaped body in the car is probably due to the need to protect against improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or mines. Other elements of the car, in particular the spare wheel attached to the door, as the newspaper writes, “owe more to the structures from the interwar period between the First and Second World Wars than to what you can see on the modern battlefield.”
According to the Lasok 4-P developer, the Innovative Chassis Center, a light armored vehicle with an armored capsule and a cargo compartment module “is specially designed with a low silhouette and light weight parameters (compact carrying armored hull) to provide transport capabilities inside multi-purpose helicopters.” The machine was created by the organization on its own initiative.
In December 2020, in the publication The Drive, the North Pole platform of project 00903, launched in the same month by the Admiralty Shipyard in St. Petersburg, was named “the ugliest ship” in the world. At the same time, the director of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) Alexander Makarov explained the unusual design of this platform by the need to find it “most of the time in the ice.”