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HEY GUNS posted:it was not even the Nazism, they were like this before the war and they are like this now Hee~ Something I can actually comment on instead of just reading cool stuff other people write! The Leopard 1A1, 1A2, and 1A3  This is a Leopard 1A1, a West German tank from 1966, at the time probably the finest tank on this side of the Iron Curtain. It terms of firepower it's bar none: a very good gun, the Royal Ordnance L7, with a then-cutting-edge coincidence rangefinder, ballistic computer, and gun stabilization system. The design is in other respects pretty unremarkable: it has a welded hull with a sloped glacis and lower frontal plate and a cast, bowl-shaped turret. It was designed in the 50s and the early 60s and the dominant philosophy in continental Europe at the time was that HEAT projectiles would make heavy armor obsolete. It has adequate protection against things like autocannons and is about as tenacious as a wet paper bag against anything else - its only real flaw. It was pretty soon thereafter that it was somewhat underprotected (US and Soviet designs from this period have easily twice as much armour) and when the Leopard 1A1 assembly lines started up again in 1972 they redesigned the turret:  The new turret looks essentially identical to the old one[1] but there's a significant upgrade in protection because the entire turret, which used to be regular cast armour steel, is now cast high-hardness steel. Casting something that big is not easy. It's already difficult enough to cast regular armour steel for tanks[2] and casting HHS that big is kiiinda an act of insanity. It's also not the most efficient way to use high-hardness steel: the majority of the benefit you get from HHS can be accomplished by fairly thin plates backed by softer steel. Nobody else tried casting HHS turrets: either they made thicker turrets in regular armour steel, or they opted to weld HHS plates onto cast or welded armour steel turrets. The Leopard 1A2 was part of the fifth series of Leopard 1s, originally planned for 232 vehicles. After 112 Leopard 1A2s they decided to weld the turrets instead:  This is the Leopard 1A3, which has a welded turret, which is:
But still. They tried, the insane bastards. [1] The only visible difference are the rangefinder housings: they're circular on the 1A1 and oval on the 1A2. [2] US armour steel casts from this periods are notably a bit weaker than British and German casts. EDIT: This is a bit speculative: the Leopard 1A2's armour is alternatively described as thicker, stronger, or simply better, with no good sources on exactly how it was done. I dispatched a correspondent to Panzermuzeum Munster and even they don't know. I put more faith in stronger than thicker though, because the turret isn't outwardly bigger and I caught whiff of someone saying hardened steel on an Italian forum. LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Oct 30, 2018 |
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Oct 30, 2018 18:15
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FastestGunAlive posted:Even before the ECH, there were a few stories of guys taking 7.62 to the helmet in Afghanistan and Iraq without injury. I think there may have been at least one that got hit by a higher caliber with a picture going around. The ECH as resistant to AR rounds is one of the points they highlight with it but I'm not inclined to risk it This article mentions an ACH stopping 7.62x39mm Soviet at 400-600 m. The ECH supposedly has over 35% more protection, which is one of those metrics that can mean bloody everything, from "35% more of all threats we expect them to encounter" to "35% higher velocity of impactors" to some bizarre metric wherein a 35% increase is insignificant. With some back-of-the-napkin math, a 35% increase in velocity would mean the danger-range for the AK-47 moves from 400 m to slightly less than 200 meters. Which is pretty nice and all, but still means you're going to die if shot in the head from across a room.
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Oct 30, 2018 20:08
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bewbies posted:It seems like someone would've realized it's grossly overpowered for most infantry tasks Less than 25% of fighting in the Transvaal campaign (1880-1881) occurred at ranges of less than 900 metres. At Colenso, in 1899, Boer infantry engaged two British artillery batteries at a range of 700 m and won decisively. I don't have similar data for the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 at hand, but it seems that fighting at the time was expected to happen at considerable ranges. In order to deliver effective fire at those ranges you need a heavy bullet, and a bullet 7-8 mm in diameter is a good way to achieve that. While WWI and WWII shortened the expected range (the US experience was that about 90% of all fighting occurred at less than 300 m in WWII and Korea) that didn't mean that the long-range benefits of heavier bullets had completely disappeared. During France's fighting in their colonial empire in the inter-war period and again after WWII, they arrived at the conclusion that every squad needed to be able to deliver effective firepower at 600 m range, which 7-8 mm bullets are pretty decent at, and 5-6 mm bullets generally aren't. Strictly speaking, it didn't matter how you delivered firepower at 600 m, you could use machine guns and patrol mortars, but you had to be able to do it at 600 m, and you had to be able to do it at squad-platoon level. Or you can issue a full-power, .30 calibre rifle to every soldier in the squad. It saves money and weight. I don't think this is a universal perspective or experience, but I think it explains why .30 calibre rifles weren't obviously grossly overpowered even after WWII. (French infantry doctrine is heavily shaped by the idea that cohesion will degenerate and you want a squad that is scattered and unable to communicate with itself still be capable of engaging almost any target effectively. This is one of the reasons why the French continue to love the rifle grenade, which allows any soldier to act as a grenade launcher.) LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Oct 31, 2018 |
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Oct 31, 2018 00:21
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FrangibleCover posted:3) The 8mm Lebel being replaced by 7.5mm French rather than a true intermediate round The French had been interested in 6 mm bullets ever since the 1890s - one was considered for adoption in 1900 - but they ran into a variety of problems. They managed to develop a 6 mm, 6.4 gram very low drag bullet, the balle No 29.5, with a muzzle velocity of 900 m/s. Unfortunately manufacturing the powder required for this kind of performance at a large scale was a capability unavailable to French chemistry at the time. The 1910 rifle project wanted a bullet with a flat trajectory out to 800 m and lethal out to 2400 m and a dispersion contained within a human-sized silhouette of 1.6 meters at 800 m, with a practical rate of fire of 20 rounds per minute. The E.N.T. No 110 (6.5mm, 11.8 g, 877 m/s) and the E.N.T. No 111 (6.5m,m, 6.8 g, even faster) were tried, but found to fail the lethality criteria. The E.N.T No 123 (6.5x61 mm, 7.5 g) was developed in response, which had a muzzle velocity of 979 m/s and satisfied the ballistic requirements, but the powder in the cartridge was considered unstable and unsafe. They also tried some 7 mm bullets, starting with the EPC bullet (7x33.5, 8.52 g, 869 m/s). This bullet was basically better than the 8mm Lebel in every way, but it didn't meet the accuracy requirements of the 1910 rifle project, having a dispersion of 2.43 m instead of the target 1.6. The usual solution to this is to increase the velocity, but the French were using copper bullets which made this difficult. In 1912 the Meunier rifle was tested with an 8.0 gram 7 mm round, which failed the requirements, and was replaced with the 7x56.95 mm, 9.05 gram, 856 m/s steel-core, copper bullet. This 7x56 mm round was adopted for use with the Menuier A6 rifle in 1913. On this development process, Emeric Daniau writes: quote:So, after intensive work by the E.N.T. on various “Ultra Low Drag”, 6 mm and 6.5 mm bullets, resulting in the firing of several thousand projectiles (barrel endurance test needed 3000 to 4000 shots per barrel), most weapons evaluations were finally performed with conventional spitzer bullets designed along the lines of the German “S” bullet, an intriguing situation that still lacks explanation.  Then the French realized they were looking at a war very soon and didn't want the logistical issue of having both the Menuier A6 and the Lebel Mle 1886 in use, so only 1013 rifles were produced. But France did actually enter WWI with a semi-automatic rifle, and it did see combat use. After WWI the idea again turned to getting rid of 8mm Lebel Mle 1898D round. The requirement this time was that the Army wanted an infantry weapon capable of delivering effective fire out to 600 m, and a heavy machine gun capable of delivering effective fire out to 800 m, and it'd be awkward if they didn't use the same round. Now, most people arriving at this problem might try to solve it by making an infantry round capable out to 800 m. The French, meanwhile, decided that they should make one calibre, 7.5x54mm French, and issue two cartridges: the 9.0 gram, 1924C for infantry weapons and and the 12.35 gram Mle 1933 D for heavy machine guns. The Mle 1924 C had a muzzle velocity in excess of 800 m/s, while some genius decided the Mle 1933 D should match the ballistics of the 8mm Lebel Mle 1898D, so it had a muzzle velocity of slightly more than 694 m/s. This was right after they'd replaced the Mle 1898D with the Mle 1932, which had different ballistics. This was a stupid idea and was abandoned immediately after WWII.
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Oct 31, 2018 02:13
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Valtonen posted:On the ”why .30” one of the reasons was also that people in charge were horrified of the idea of having a ”weaker” bullet- it runs against everything you aspire as a general to drive for a round that cant (theoretically) Kill a man from 2 miles If the opponents huge-rear end railway rifle round can (theoretically) still have kinetic energy to do that at 2.5 miles. The fact that this engagement will likely never happen due to lack of 2-mile open field as an engagement area and any sort of sights to allow you to reach that distance doesnt matter- you dont want to voluntarily shorten your assumed reach. So once the massive drop in size from blackpowder chunks had happened the idea of making your bullets even smaller was a scary concept for someone who started their career with a black powder gun of .45+ bore- which would be the inspector generals everywhere. I think that view is a bit too simplistic. It doesn't seem to match the French experience much, for example: they wanted 6 mm high-velocity bullets, and when they couldn't get 6 mm settled for 7 mm high-velocity bullets, and only got as far as 7.5 mm because the calibre was supposed to double as a heavy machine gun bullet. The range requirement for the 7.5x54mm was driven not by wanting to hit targets at two miles like in the late 19th Century, but by wanting to have accurate and effective fire at 600 and 800 m, the ranges the French were fighting at at the time. Valtonen posted:And last- after the classic rounds like 7.62x54R , 8.92x57 and .303 british came out and stockpiles mounted inertia took hold. Thats why PKM still fires a caliber designed at the end of 18th century. Sorta? Machine gun bullets are in a very good place, because the operational requirement of flat trajectories and enough energy to kill a man out to 800 m is one that hasn't changed much. There's very little incentive to replace what already works well. The PKM uses an old round largely because if you designed a new round you would just get the old round in a new hat.
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Oct 31, 2018 05:01
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Alchenar posted:By 'Transvaal Campaign 1880-1881' he means a 3 month 'conflict' with ~1000 total involved on each side and in which most activity consisted of Boers sniping at British forts on the next hill. She >:c bewbies posted:That all makes sense too...I guess what I find baffling is why no one did the math on the advantages of intermediate rounds once all of the other gear (machine guns and IDF and so on) came around to much more effectively engage stuff at longer ranges. I can kind of see wanting to finish out WWI with the old stuff just because of logistics and production concerns, but why on earth did they not make the switch in the intervening years? Pure organizational inertia? The critical part of machine guns and other support weapons is not that they exist, it's that you have enough of them to use them effectively. A machine gun can usually fire accurately out to 800 m, but that does not mean that simply having one machine gun in the squad is enough to deliver effective fire at 600 m. The French experience (which I'm citing a lot because I have a paper on it at hand) was that to deliver a sufficient volume of fire at 600 m, you needed the majority of the squad to have rifles effective at 600 m. A machine gun wasn't enough. (And again, French infantry doctrine assumed a very chaotic battlefield where the squad ends up scattered, so ideally every man in the squad can deliver effective fire at 600, not just the squad as a whole.) Also, machine guns and the trucks to carry tired machine gunners are expensive! (Also, "doing the math" is exactly what the US did in the 50s and 60s that led to the adoption of the 5.56 NATO round.)
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Oct 31, 2018 17:12
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FrangibleCover posted:Look at what's happening today with 6.5mm class ammunition: Absolutely sod all because 5.5mm class ammunition is fine too. Maybe not 100% optimal but fine. 6.5 Grendel, because Alexander Arms needs a military contract damnit!
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Oct 31, 2018 17:22
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Nenonen posted:But mind you, against helicopters which is actually a feasible target, or at least it can't just hover there idly. C.M. Kruger posted:IIRC the first two settings on the G3's diopter sights are both zeroed at 200 meters but the first one is a V notch intended for shooting at helicopters or in low-light conditions, and you're supposed to use the other 200 meter one for regular shooting. In the early Cold War era, if a helicopter can shoot at you, a G3 is probably sufficient to shoot back. The helicopter probably has a PKT on a wobbly mount, you have a G3 on a stable mount, and the helicopter is big and probably coming in for landing anyway.
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Oct 31, 2018 21:41
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FrangibleCover posted:Tankers are Dragoons because there are currently half a dozen or so armoured units called "Dragoons" in some form or another, not even counting the various armoured recce units. Special mention goes out to 13e Régiment de Dragons Parachutistes, showing that even airborne special forces LRRP units can be dragoons. At least they're not the CRAP hussars.
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Nov 1, 2018 01:44
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I'd love to talk about Cold War tanks someone ask me questions about Cold War tanks! 
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Nov 3, 2018 19:57
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Nenonen posted:What was the best cod war tank The Cod Wars were fought on sea only, nobody used tanks.
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Nov 3, 2018 20:31
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Telsa Cola posted:Whats your favorite cold war tank destroyer. It's hard to choose... The one I like the best is probably the Swedish Infanterikanonvagn 91:  It's an assault gun/tank destroyer from 1975 designed to serve as infantry fire support in the marshy terrain of Norrland in northern Sweden. It's very light and can float without preparation, which makes it ideal for moving around in Swedish marshes. The idea was that this mobility would give Swedish troops an edge in fire support in the marshes, while Soviet tanks would be channeled along the existing road network - either into ambushes or away from Ikv 91 raids into the Soviet rear area. (In tests with MT-LBs and T-72s bought at the East German going-out-of-business-sale it turned out that Soviet armour was actually pretty decent in Norrland and the Ikv 91 would not have the expected edge, but oh well...) The design is is based on the Pbv 302 and shares many parts with it:  The Pbv 302 and Ikv 91 are decently armoured for the era. From the front they're proof against standard 20 mm autocannons and from the side against 12.7 mm machine guns. In 1975 that's enough to weather almost anything a Soviet Motor/Rifle platoon can throw at it that isn't a shaped charge. An MT-LB is hopelessly outmatched, a BTR-60 can't penetrate it from the front, and the BMP-2 with it's 30 mm autocannon isn't being fielded until 1980. The really cool part of the Ikv 91 in my mind is the turret and gun systems. Weight limitations meant it couldn't carry a powerful gun a la the L7 the Swedish Centurions were using, so it has a 90 mm KV90S73 low-pressure gun. It's basically the Pvpj 1110 recoilless rifle (see below) made into a regular recoiling rifle:  Though the KV90S73 and Pvpj 1110 are different weapons and you can't fire Pvpj 1110 shells in an Ikv 91 or vice versa, they share warheads. (The Soviet 73 mm SPG-9 recoilless rifle and the BMP-1's 2A28 Grom cannon similarly use the same warheads.) Initially the Ikv 91 had two kinds of warheads: high-explosive Slsgr m/72 and HEAT Slpsgr m/72. Official figures for the Slpsgr m/72 appear to give it a penetration depth of 500 mm against RHA, which would be decent in 1975: it's more than enough to penetrate an early T-72's turret or glacis from almost any angle, let alone a T-62 or T-55. The Ikv also has a top of the line fire-control system. You point your laser rangefinder on the target, lase, and the onboard computer will automatically adjust for range and target movement and move the crosshair so that you just need to line them up and point to hit. This is better than any fire-control system in Soviet service at the time of its introduction. It'll remain better than any system fitted to a T-72 until 1990, which means that from 1975 to 1990 the Ikv 91 has a technological edge over anything but the most advanced Soviet tanks, which isn't anything to scoff at. Bofors Aerotronics would, as far as I can tell, continue to develop this fire-control system (FCS) and it ends up traveling quite far. It's integrated with a crosswind sensor and fitted to Swedish centurions in the early 80s. At the same time both Finland and Yugoslavia are looking to upgrade their T-55s and buy the system. Yugoslavia would reverse-engineer the system, fit it to their M-84 tanks, and sell it on to India for use on the Viyajanta Mk.1B Bison and Iran for their M60A1s. (They also tried to sell it to a bunch of other countries, including China, but a software bug during testing tanked that sale...) The Ikv 91 never received any upgrades of note, but it did get access to improved ammunition. Bofors developed a new HEAT round for the KV90S73 and Pvpj 1110, the Slpsgr m/84, in 1984. By really pushing the envelope Bofors managed to squeeze somewhere between 730 and 800 mm out penetration out of a 90 mm warhead, which is basically unheard of. It was also fitted with a hard metal nose to defeat explosive reactive armour (ERA). ERA works by wedging an explosive between two metal plates, and when the explosive is hit by the jet from a HEAT shell, it detonates, disrupting the jet. When you fit ERA outside regular armour, the protection agaisnt HEAT shells is greatly increased. The Swedish idea was that if you could just punch through the metal plates first with the hard nose, the HEAT warhead can penetrate through the regular armour undisrupted. Sweden tested this against some Blazer ERA plates they'd bought from Israel for their Centurions and found that it worked. Unfortunately Blazer is a terrible design, and in tests against Soviet ERA[1] after the Cold War it was discovered that against Soviet ERA the hard nose couldn't penetrate deep enough except at shallow angles of 22 degrees or less - basically worthless. God I just love this thing. It's high-tech, it's sleek, it's mobile, it's Scandinavian... (My apologies for not filming myself getting into one and bumping my head into stuff.) Runner-Ups JaPz KA1 "Kürassier", an Austrian tank destroyer. It's almost identical to the Ikv 91 in concept and probably a little better in many ways. It based on the Saurer 4K APC hull and fitted with an AMX-13 oscilating turret. In 1971 it was the first tank in the world to use a laser rangefinder. The A1 upgrade improved NBC protection, the transmission, fitted passive night vision sights and some kind of ballistic computer, and allowed it to fire APFSDS shells. The protection, gun, stabilization, presence of an autoloader, and optics are probably better than the Ikv 91, I suspect the fire-control system is a little worse. JPK 90, a German Kanonenjagdpanzer 90 fitted with the advanced SABCA fire-control system by Belgium. Basically an Ikv 91 without the turret. Rooikat, a South African 8x8 wheeled tank destroyer fitted with an APFSDS-firing 76mm naval gun. The Rooikat entered service with the South African Defence Force in 1989, right after South African had withdrawn from Angola. It's barely a Cold War tank destroyer, but the combination of a good gun, an excellent fire-control system, and high mobility made it a very good tank destroyer. Besides, the Bush Wars have always fascinated me. quote:the FCS on the Kat had two mainframe computers that where situated on the rear of the turrent, to the right of the gunner was the input system where you could pick what round was going to be fired so if it was an HE you would push the HE button and there was a button for every round as we all should know every type of round travels differently. It also had a small display that would give you relevent info as needed. Once you lazered on to a target the system took over and well it was a matter of pull the trigger. there was a display on in the sight that would show you the distance to the target. There was a function that could switch from main gun to machine gun (so instead of using the foot peddle to fire the machine gun you could [1] Funny story. So, around 1992 the Swedish army are looking for a new tank to replace the Centurions. This necessitates both looking at what's available, developing a list of criteria, and shooting a bunch at the tank you're thinking of buying to prove it's as good as the brochure says. The Swedish army are eyeing the M1 Abrams, Leopard 2, Challenger, and Leclerc. They also want to make sure the tank they buy can stand up to the best Russian tank the Swedish army are expecting to fight, the T-80U. However, the Russians aren't going to just give you a brand new T-80U so you can shoot it a bunch and figure out the best way to defeat it. Unless... "Hey, Yeltsin, we're looking at buying a new tank and we're considering the T-80U. Can we have a sample?" The Russians bought it hook, line, and sinker. LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Nov 4, 2018 |
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Nov 3, 2018 23:18
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Milo and POTUS posted:Loved this post Thanks! I like talking about Cold War AFVs and military technology. 
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Nov 4, 2018 20:39
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Chillbro Baggins posted:The S-tank was a turretless MBT, it had proper armor and just sacrificed the turret for a low profile because their whole schtick was to dig in and slow down the Red Army for a day or two until NATO got their poo poo mobilized. Not really. Sweden certainly would like to have NATO mobilize and help them out, but the Strv 103 was not as such designed for digging in on a fighting retreat. Swedish tank doctrine put the Strv 103 in the role of armoured assaults and counterattacks. A platoon of Strv 103s has dozer blades for digging themselves fighting positions, but that's just a useful thing to have, not the sine qua non of the Strv 103 in combat.
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Nov 4, 2018 21:52
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Fangz posted:There's an interesting article on evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the S-tank here: This article is full of some pretty silly errors. The one that stands out the most is the photograph of a Chieftain on a tank transporter labeled as a Strv 103 on a tank transporter, but I also want to dig into this passage: quote:the Strv 103 to the world in the late 1950s describing it as a main battle tank many observers were puzzled. <snip> The uniqueness of this vehicle extended beyond the exterior. The vehicle had a crew of just three when most turret tanks of the period had a crew of five. Two of the crew sat up front in the forward hull while a third sat at the rear of the vehicle and had an extra driving console for fleeing rearward. Armament for the tank was a bit more conventional however in that it was equipped with the outstanding British L7 105mm gun which at that time had become NATO’s standard tank gun equipping a large proportion of British, American and German tanks. There was nothing to unveil in the late 50s: the first two prototypes were delivered in 1961, and the unveiling happened in March 1963. By the Strv 103's development began every single tank-designing nation in the world had dropped the concept of the five-man tank and removed the bow gunner. Four man tanks was the rule when the Strv 103 was conceived, not the exception. Between M46s, M24s, and T-34s there's probably a bunch of them around, but the Soviet Union standardized on the 4-man T-54, the 4-man Centurion Mk.3 has been in service since 1948, and the 4-man M47 entered service in 1952. It might be the case that between M46s and T-34s still in service five-man tanks are still the majority, I don't know, but there is nothing special about a tank having less than five crew members in the late fifties or early sixties. Further, in 1963 the L7 was not in use in the Bundeswehr except on prototype Leopards. The Leopard 1 enters serial production in 1965. In 1963, the vast majority of Bundeswehr tanks are M47s and M48s armed with 90 mm guns. A large proportion of West German L7-equipped tanks does simply not exist yet.
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Nov 5, 2018 02:45
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Cessna posted:Sorry, no turret, not an MBT. It was designed as a tank, made to be a tank, marketed as a tank, served as a tank, labeled a tank, named a tank, fulfilled all the roles of a tank, armed like a tank, and protected like a tank.
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Nov 5, 2018 03:13
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Cessna posted:The British WWI tanks had sponson mounted gunss, which allowed them to traverse their guns more than any S-Tank. The Saint Chamond didn't have a traversable gun at all. Sponsons aren't really turrets either, and if you accept that it's a traverse, even if limited, that makes something a tank the Jagdpanzer IV presents a pretty strong argument for being a tank... LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 05:04 on Nov 5, 2018 |
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Nov 5, 2018 04:40
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TheFluff posted:hello, yes, this is nerd Have you written effortposts on the Hawée modifications of the J 35F1/F2/J Drakens or will I have rewrite my draft lost draft through a torrent of tears? (I was 75% done and lost my draft. It was saved but the save was overwritten.  )
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Nov 5, 2018 23:56
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TheFluff posted:I don't know much about that Welp.. F 35 Draken And the AIM-4 Falcon  In 1949 the Swedish Air Force (Flygvapnet) are looking to the future and issue a set of requirements for a single-seat, high-altitude, supersonic, all-weather, day-and-night jet fighter capable of engaging bomber groups and enemy fighter planes from all directions, using Swedish roads as runways, By 1955 the first prototypes take to the skies, and in 1960 the first model of Flygplan 35, the J 35A Draken, enters service, armed with unguided A2A rockets, twin 30mm autocannons, and the AIM-9B Sidwinder. It's technically capable of engaging bombers and enemy fighters from any angle, but Flygvapnet want the brand new American AIM-4 Falcon missile (Rb-27 in Swedish service), and on the 22nd of December the same year the Falcon-equipped J 35B3 prototype takes to the skies. Development of this aircraft continues, and in 1965 the J 35F1 enters service with the AIM-4 Falcon, just in time for the US to commit to Vietnam and discover that the AIM-4 is actually garbage. This'll be slightly awkward for a good 15 years, when Flygvapnet finally take JA 37 Jaktviggen into service, a wonderful and amazing plane capable of carrying the Skyflash air-to-air missile, which I'll let Frangible sing praises to. Right before Jaktviggen enters service, the Draken wing at airbase F16 is conducting an exercise, simulating defence against Soviet aviation. The aggressor aircraft standing in for Soviet MiGs are J 32E Störlansens, electronic warfare planes equipped with advanced jamming equipment. In the F16 barracks after the exercise, some of the pilots are bitching amongst themselves about how difficult it is to get a radar lock on Störlansens. They ask Draken radar-engineer Göran Hawée what's making Störlansens so hard to hit, and Hawée begins explaining how radar jammers work. So this is a good time to explain how a radar jammer works! How A Radar Jammer Works (Abbreviated)  Radars work a lot like bat echolocation. A bat makes a screech and listens for the echo. The time it takes for the screech to echo back to the bat tells it how far away things like yummy insects are. Similarly, a radar sends out a radiowave and listens for the radar echo: the time it takes for the radio signal to return tells you how far away things like dangerous Soviet MiGs are. The main difference between bat echolocation and radar in method is that bats screech in all directions and triangulate on the echo with their ears, while radars tend to transmit in a very narrow cone and make multiple scans at different angles to determine the angle to the echo:  Imagine you're a bat, hunting for yummy insects. Imagine that, instead of hearing your own echo, there was an rear end in a top hat bat screeching false echoes at you? You'd hear both the true echo and the false echoes from the other bat. The false echoes tell you there's insects where they're not, and while you're hunting false insects, the rear end in a top hat bat flies in and eats all the yummy insects. This is one of the ways radar jamming works: by sending out false radar echoes, you confuse enemy radars as to your true location. All you need to do is transmit lots of false echoes at the same frequency as the enemy radar. (You can transmit false echoes on every frequency but then you have to spread your jamming power out over many frequencies.) Since a radar is a giant glowing Eye of Sauron to any receiver nearby, it's pretty easy to figure out which frequency it transmits on. In the analogy of bats, if a bat is screeching, you can hear exactly which frequency it's screeching at and copy that frequency. Another method of radar jamming is side lobe jamming. While a radar listens for returns in a very narrow cone, it's not deaf in other directions:  The big lobe is where the radar is pointed, but it can detect radar echoes, faintly, in every lobe - and it can't tell if a signal is in the main lobe or a side lobe. Imagine that your radar is pointed 45 degrees to the right and an rear end in a top hat MiG 45 degrees to your left suddenly 'screams', as loud as it can, in your radar frequency. It'll get picked up by one of the sidelobes and your radar will think that there's a MiG 45 degrees to your right, even though the MiG is 45 degrees to your left! If the MiG does this just once, you'll just see a blip at 45 degrees right while the MiG's real return is at constantly there at 45 degrees left: it's easy to tell which is the real and which is the false MiG. However, if the MiG times its screams to always happen when your radar is pointed 45 degrees to the right, you'll have two MiGs on your radar, one real and one false (and you only get one question). The MiG can easily do this if it knows how fast you sweeps are. One sweep every second? Scream once every second, on the second. A 90 degree difference between the real and false echo is an extreme case. If an enemy radar has a lock on you, you can make a false echo at just a few arcseconds off your real position, then slooooowly increase the distance between yourself and the false echo. As long as your false echo is 'louder' than your true echo, the radar will stay locked on your false echo. Once the radar lock is far enough away, you can stop transmitting false echoes. To the enemy radar, it'll look like it gets a lock, then suddenly there'll be no lock. It'll reacquire you, get a lock, and then it'll lose you suddenly again. Back in 1979... Göran Hawée is trying to explain this, probably better than I, to Draken pilots. Shortly afterwards he visits a J 32E unit and asks one of their engineers how the jammer actually works, then sits down with a circuit diagram for the Draken's PS-01 radar. The jammer detects which frequency the PS-01 is transmitting on and sends false echoes on that frequency. So if you vary the PS-01's send and read frequency just a little bit every time, it won't hear the false echoes. And the jammer detects how often the PS-01 sweeps across it and uses that to time the false echoes to break radar lock. So if you vary the PS-01's scan speed just a little bit each time, the jammer can't break radar lock. OK, so how to wire up the PS-01 so the frequency and sweep rate varies over time? Well, it turns out that the PS-01 is an overwrought mess of a radar, full of unused cables and electronic components with unused outputs. Including a signal generator. Soon thereafter FMV (think Swedish DARPA) receives a proposal: wire the PS-01's frequency selector and sweep-rate selector through the unused signal generator parts, using leftover cables in the system. This will greatly improve the Draken's ability to fire on targets in a jamming-heavy environment. In 1982 the Swedish and Finnish J 35F Draken fleets are upgraded with the PS-011A Hawée 1 radar, a process I like to imagine involves giving Göran Hawée a soldering iron and pointing him at a Draken. J 35J Draken At the same time Flygvapnet comes to the realization that the JAS 39 Gripen is not going to arrive on schedule and they're going to have to keep their Drakens in service much longer than expected, well into the 90s. This is a very long service life for the Draken, and the J 35F2 just isn't going to cut it anymore. It's time for an upgrade. One of the people working on this upgrade is Göran Hawée, who is trying to solve a problem with the PS-011 radar. Like all radars from the early 60s, if you point it below the horizon while flying, the radar will be completely overwhelmed by the echo of the ground. This makes it almost impossible to see and lock onto targets flying near the ground, which is a significant weakness - especially after the Soviet Union fitted radars capable of filtering away the ground echo on the MiG-23P in 1978... The usual way of making a radar that can filter away the ground echo is to make a completely new radar with new electronics using pulse-Doppler methods to filter away everything moving about as fast as the ground is moving relative to the plane, leaving only very fast things like enemy planes. Göran Hawée looks at a circuit diagram for the PS-011, realizes that he can just wire the return signal through the echo suppression and logarithmic arithmetic circuits already present in the radar, and gives the Draken a radar capable of spotting and engaging targets despite ground clutter. This becomes the PS-011A Hawée 2, applied to all PS-011-equipped Drakens in Swedish service. Again, this process seems simple enough that all you need is a circuit diagram and a soldering iron. Hawée 2 is not the only upgrade the Swedish Drakens received. Sixty-six J 35F2 Drakens receive a number of avionics upgrades to the AIM-4 systems, becoming the J 35J Draken. Between the new avionics, Hawée 2, and new proximity fuses, the Rb-27 in Swedish service is rated "Mycket God" (very good) in 1985. Which is not bad for a missile that was garbage twenty years earlier! Further Reading on Hawée 1 and 2, in Swedish: https://www.aef.se/Avionik/Notiser/Hawee_1_Notis_1.htm https://www.aef.se/Avionik/Notiser/Hawee_2__Notis_2.htm
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Nov 6, 2018 10:29
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P-Mack posted:If the turretless tank was a regular tank and tanked just fine, is there a particular reason there were no more turretless tanks after this one? There were attempts. The West German VT-1 and early designs of the British MBT-80 project were attempts to make turretless designs in the 70s for the 80s. They didn't succeed. In the West German case because it's a pretty decent tank but: a) The Leopard 2 is also a pretty decent tank that does everything the VT-1 does, and there's no reason to build both; b) The West Germans rate the VT-1 as less suited for their armoured reconnaissance needs.
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Nov 6, 2018 22:21
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TheFluff posted:It's worth keeping in mind though that almost all of the above also applies to other tanks of the strv 103's generation. The Leopard 1, AMX 30, M60 and Chieftain all lacked protection against 120mm APFSDS. Some of them had ballistic computers retrofitted though, but in most cases the fire control never became nearly as good as on the newer generation tanks. With the exception of the early Chieftains, those tanks all had ballistic computers. Ballistic computers based on 1950s technology, but ballistic computers nonetheless. The difference between upgraded versions of them and newer generation tanks is also often pretty faint. The M60A3's M21 ballistic computer and the M1 Abrams' M21 ballistic computer were designed to give the same performance, and the West German Leopard 1A5 was basically fitted with the Leopard 2's fire control system. Fire control systems is usually one of the easier and faster ways to upgrade an old tank in the 70s and 80s, so you see a lot of hulls from the 50s and 60s fitted with brand new fire control systems. The lack of a stereoscopic rangefinder and analog ballistic computer is one of the major lacks I'd point to with the Strv 103. Maybe there was a good reason for its absence, but the tank seems eminently suited for it: the accuracy of a stereoscopic rangefinder is limited by magnification and base length, and the Strv 103's hull seems pretty well suited for a wide-based rangefinder. Though this is of course a bit counterfactual: if I'm going all-out in fantasy tank development I might as well get the Europanzer Chieftain with French HEAT rounds, an American engine, and German optics. :P
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Nov 6, 2018 22:43
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Davin Valkri posted:If that's, to use the joke structure, a "tank made in heaven", what would a "tank made in hell" look like? I imagine it'd use Soviet crew ergonomics and German (Leo 1's) armor, but what else would it have? It's hard to get much worse than early production Panzer 68s, which famously activated the turret drive randomly when the radio was used on full power and fired the gun when the cabin heater was turned on. It's basically an AMX-30 but worse in all respects. Though you could probably get a bit further by making it use a British engine and giving it the 152 mm gun from the M551 Sheridan. That way you have a tank that can't drive anywhere, can't survive being shot at, is actively dangerous to the crew and everyone around you, and has a worthless gun. If you want to get into comical ineptitude, switch the loader and gunner so the loader is to the right of the gun and trying to shove 22 kg shells into the breach with their left arm. I also recommend getting rid of the commander's machine gun, because you obviously don't need an AA MG in this day and age!
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Nov 6, 2018 23:31
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TheFluff posted:Stereoscopic and coincidence rangefinders were not really useful below 2000m with 1960's and newer ammunition (and combat distances greater than that were rare in Scandinavia and Western Europe in general). The ballistics were good enough to be rather forgiving of ranging errors. The strv 103 was more accurate at or below 2000m without a rangefinder than the M60A1 AOS with a coincidence rangefinder in comparative trials in the US. That makes sense. The x18 optic is pretty nice. TheFluff posted:The first Leopard 1A5 was delivered in 1987. That's almost 20 years after it (and the strv 103) were first taken into service. The upgrade was made because without it the tank was effectively obsolete, just like the strv 103 (which was replaced by the Leopard 2 a few years later). The Swedish army was very keen on a new tank around 1985 too, but there was no budget at that time. Oh, sure, but I thought that "Some of them had ballistic computers retrofitted though, but in most cases the fire control never became nearly as good as on the newer generation tanks." was not the case.
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Nov 6, 2018 23:38
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FrangibleCover posted:The Ikv 91 with its cool Bofors FCS entered service in 1975 and the system was subsequently put on Centurions. It's unclear to me whether those actually are related. I suspect that Bofors was going to make an FCS for the Centurions, it seems likely they'd have developed the Ikv 91's FCS, but I've never gotten confirmation. For all I know they could have bought a Nahal Oz from Elbit.
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Nov 7, 2018 00:13
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Valtonen posted:The 152mm gun/launcher was an amazing weapon. Alone it killed not only the mbt70 but also m60a2 and 551 sheridan. By all accounts it made more damage to US armor AND airborne than any Soviet weapon system ever. There M19 fire control system fitted to the M60A2 is very nice for 1969. Unfortunately, it was on the Starship and not the M60A1-but-better. US tanks development in this period makes for a period from 1960 to 1978 where they just seem to make the most awkward tanks despite having all the tools necessary to make some pretty decent ones.
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Nov 7, 2018 04:35
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C.M. Kruger posted:To cheat, add "it's the Soviet export model" to the end of anything that's been proposed. Most Soviet export tanks were actually quite decent. They had a tiered system for exports, and as long as you're not on the bottom of the list like Iraq was, a Soviet export tank is a perfectly fine tank. The export version of the T-72A obr. 1983 was available for export as the T-72M1 at least as early as 1985, and the only major downgrade was the absence of the anti-radiation lining, IIRC.
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Nov 7, 2018 05:37
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C.M. Kruger posted:Uh yeah the T-72M and T-72M1 was what Iraq had in 1990. According to Zagola the T-72M had the original T-72 armor profile and were upgraded with applique to bring it to T-72A standard. The T-72M1 incorporated the armor improvements on the base model. Both had the upgraded laser FCS from the T-72A, and these Czech/Polish tanks were the main type of T-72 used by non-Red Army forces such as East Germany, Poland, etc. Zaloga is wrong in this instance. The T-72M did receive applique, which gave it the hull (but not turret) protection of the T-72A obr. 1983, in 1985-1986 at Polish and Czechoslovakian assembly lines. The T-72M1 is simply a T-72A obr. 1983 that didn't receive the nadboi anti-neutron cladding. The TPD-K1 sighting complex with laser rangefinder was standard on all T-72 Ural-1s made in or after 1978, a year before the T-72A becomes a thing. (Poland and Czechoslovakia actually buy a license for some kind of T-72 in 1978 and end up producing a tank rather similar to the T-72 obr. 1978 when they get their factories going in 1981-82) This website has a few clear photos showing the differences between different export tanks. You can see the Soviet and Czechoslovakian/Polish T-72s, T-72M, T-72M with applique, and T-72M1.
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Nov 7, 2018 10:19
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Valtonen posted:Depends on the Army. Depends on the tank, even. (Tanks are designed to army spec, granted.) This is very noticeable if you compare the West German Leopard 1 with the US-built M48A2C in West German service. In the M48A2C, the commander selects a target from his cupola, directs the turret onto the target, climbs into the turret to use the rangefinder, estimates range, and tells the gunner to engage, then climbs back up into their cupola to observe, direct, and find new targets. The gunner, after being told to engage, lays the gun on target and fires. In the Leopard 1, the commander selects a target from their cupola, directs the turret onto target, and tells the gunner to engage. Then they continue to direct the battle from their cupola/hatch and find new targets. The gunner, meanwhile, operates the rangefinder, estimates range, and engages. Same army, same number of crewmembers, in operation at the same time, essentially the same technology, but the tanks are designed for very different workflows.
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Nov 8, 2018 01:15
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Hogge Wild posted:Which was better? I'm slightly intimidated by all the real scholars in this thread, and I want to be cool like them and have high standards, so the honest and rigorous answer is that I've not found a report that evaluates the merit of either method. Nor can I speak from experience, as I've not had the opportunity to compare the two in person. That said, when I read that the commander operated the rangefinder in the M48A2C, not the gunner, I almost screamed.
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Nov 8, 2018 02:02
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TheFluff also mentioned that at ranges less than 2000 m stadimetric scopes are as good as or better than the stereoscopic/coincidence rangefinder, so if you're only engaging at ranges less than 2000 m you might not have this issue at all. Do you know how this works in the M60A3? From what I can gather from Stefan Kotsch's excellent website the commander operates the laser rangefinder.
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Nov 8, 2018 02:17
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Valtonen posted:M48 is a very old tank, and could be claimed to predate Leo 1 by half a generation of FCS development. Comparing M60 with Leo 1 is more even. I chose the M48A2C and Leopard 1 because they were in service with the same army, so I could talk about crew workflows being affected by the design of the tank, resulting in two different workflows in two otherwise fairly similar tanks operated by the same army. The M60 is more contemporary with the Leopard 1, but changes nothing about the comparison: the M60 and M60A1 used the same fire control system as the M48A2C.
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Nov 8, 2018 02:57
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FrangibleCover posted:with room for 24 guys, the BTR-50: Like the LVPT-5, the BTR-50 was designed for amphibious assaults so one APC per two squads is better than one APC per squad in terms of space. It also needed to be rather large because they wanted it to carry a field gun in addition to the troops. This leads to the Czechoslovakian OT-62D, where the CSLA figured that they didn't want their OT-62 battalions to be understrength compared to their BMP-1 battalions, issue one OT-62 per squad and fill the rest of the space with a squad-organic fire support team. Sometimes an AGS-17 team, sometimes a recoilless rifle team that can fire their gun from the deck. This in addition to the recoilless rifle mounted in one of the turrets. The Polish army was pretty fond of firing mortars out of the hatches on their APCs, incidentally. In addition to doing it with 82mm mortars during the Cold War, post-Cold War APCs have hatches specifically designed to mount 60mm mortars so the passengers can engage. LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Nov 9, 2018 |
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Nov 9, 2018 04:32
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Cessna posted:Yeah, the "Zubr." Every time I see photos of them I laugh a bit. Like I said, hovercraft are made of sheet metal, glass, and rubber. The fact that they put guns and missile launchers is just silly; if they're in a fight, they're losing - it would be better to devote that space to carrying more cargo and less explosives. The guns and missile launchers on the Zubr are air defence weapons and a rocket battery to give covering fire in an assault. The Zubr, like pretty much every Soviet LCAC and every part of the Soviet armed forces, is designed to operate under unfriendly skies. Cessna posted:True, but consider the USSR's big push to be a sea power in the Cold War era. Amphibious capability equals the ability to project power overseas, something they were working towards at that time. It's not like they didn't have this capability. The Baltic Fleet had the 71st and 75th Landing Ship Brigades more than capable of providing lift to the 336th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade and the MRR of your choice for an assault on Gotland and mainland Sweden. You spoke glowingly of US LCACs landing after an initial assault by AAVs taking a beach suppressed by helicopters. I'm not really seeing how the USSR can't do this in the Baltic. They have the landing craft, they have amphibious vehicles that aren't as tall as a house, they have the helicopters, they have a battalion of PT-76s, they have the LCACs... Slamming the USSR as not grasping amphibious warfare because they don't have US' exact capabilities and doctrine in invading Grenada and Al-Fao seems a bit like slamming the US as not grasping land warfare because they lack the SADF's ability and doctrine in conducting high-speed operations in northern Angola. The USSR grasped amphibious warfare very well: they knew exactly what they needed and they had that capability.
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Nov 10, 2018 04:32
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Phanatic posted:APFDS rounds don't care much about sloped armor in the sense that it will cause them to bounce, but sloping the armor still increases the effective thickness of armor due to simple geometry. It's not going to just bounce off the S-tank's 40mm of 12-degree sloped armor, but that 12 degree slope means it's got to penetrate 192mm of armor, not 40. It's not quite that convenient. For instance, if you're trying to protect a box that's 1 unit high with a slope at 60 degrees from the vertical, you'll improve the thickness of the plate by a factor 1/cos(60), but at the same time you'll also need cos(60) times as much armour material to cover the whole slope. If you're trying to protect a box, you can get the same thickness by making a vertical plate that's twice as thick, which takes up less space yet offers, under our naive assumptions, the same level of protection:  APFSDS is weird, though, and penetrates better the more inclined the plate is. A generic tungsten penetrator fired at a plate inclined at 60 degrees penetrates 1.17 times further. This increases to 1.24 times for a plate at 68 degrees. A plate inclined at 60 degrees protects only 1.7 times as much against tungsten APFSDS, not 2.0x. Whereas a plate twice as thick actually protects twice as much. There are certain advantages to sloping, though. For example, if APFSDS penetrates multiple stacked plates at different obliquities, the forces acting on the penetrator can break it into two or more fragments. This significantly reduces its penetration ability, as high-velocity long rod penetration is fundamentally a function of rod length. A rod fragment simply won't penetrate as far as the entire rod.
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Nov 10, 2018 06:17
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FrangibleCover posted:As well as taking most of the top end of Norway Cessna posted:But amphibious warfare is sort of like the naval warfare concept of a "fleet in being." That is to say, it isn't about hitting a defended beach. Instead, you get a lot of mileage out of being able to threaten to attack in a lot of different places. By having the capability to attack a lot of beaches you force an enemy to defend those beaches, and thus to divide up their strength. If they don't defend - or only lightly defend - a beach you can take advantage of that and land a lot of troops there quickly, then - since your vehicles are tracked - you can quickly move ashore and make problems for them by dropping hundreds of infantry where they don't want them. This concept of fleet-in-being was one of the really difficult situations faced in the defence of Northern Norway during the Cold War. Kampflystudient av 1975, which is one of the documents describing in detail the strategy for defending Norway, involves planning a defence of Troms against a Soviet invasion:  The expected Soviet forces are one Soviet Motor/Rifle Division that's rolled through light resistance from Finnmark (blue circle), two MRDs and a tank battalion crossing the border from Finland (red circle), and a one Naval Infantry Brigade spearheading a fourth MRD (sans tank battalion) into one of the fjords, supported by two VDV regiments. The Soviet objective is Narvik. The problem described in the part of the paper specifically about rebuking the naval invasion has to deal with the issue of picking exactly which fjord to defend. They pick Malangen because it's closest to Bardufoss airport, and therefore assumed to be a major Soviet objective, but even so, they can't leave other fjords undefended:  One infantry battalion, one tank squadron, and an artillery battery ready fight a naval infantry brigade and its support. The paper also stipulated that 90% of Norwegian combat aircraft would be shot down in a successful air campaign. You can see here that two battalions, three batteries, and a reconnaissance squadron are split between three fjords, leaving two batteries, the reconnaissance squadron, and an infantry battalion in the wrong place when the Soviet force commits to Malangen.
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Nov 10, 2018 08:57
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Cessna posted:The fact that amphibious operations are extremely useful in situations where there is not a war (or not a war yet) is something I spent two posts describing. You've asserted the point repeatedly, but I think it's still unclear why exactly: a) The Soviet Union can't just use their strategic airlift capability to land troops or food aid at a friendly airport (like in their humanitarian missions to Peru and Ethiopia) or unpaved runway; b) The Soviet Union can't just send a ship to a friendly harbour; c) If they absolutely have to land on a beach, why they can't just use a Ropucha, BTR-60s, and the Minsk parked within Yak-38 range. Phanatic posted:Any links to info on that? That seems very weird. I mean, just imagine a huge homogeneous mass of armor large enough that it's effectively infinite compared to the penetrator, fire a long rod at it, see how far it penetrates. Now do the same thing but incline the armor, why would it penetrate any further? I grabbed the exact numbers off the Tankograd article on the T-72, to be honest, and they're something of a simplification. The short answer is that if the armour isn't effectively infinite you have to account for a variety of additional effects, such as the penetrator normalizing towards the plate, plugging, and the free edge effect making parts of the armour less effective than a solid block of steel. This diagram shows several of these effects:  The long answer is that the interaction of high-velocity long rods against inclined plates has no easy solution and mostly involves crying. You can find a lot of scientific articles by searching for "long rod penetration" on Google, but I don't have any specific links on the subjects to provide because it's simply above me: I don't understand it yet so I can't explain it, only relate that's very difficult. Someone I know linked me this from a Russian text on the subject:  This is BM-6, BM-8, and BM-11 being fired at some kind of target at different angles. As you can see, long-rod penetration is a complete mess.
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Nov 10, 2018 23:15
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Cessna posted:This is nowhere near as efficient of a way to move bulk cargo, and requires that port facilities be intact. I think this is reaching. The Soviet Union could: a) Move troops and food aid to an airport, like when they provided aid in Peru, And Ethipoia, as well as domestically in Chernobyl and Armenia, when they provided strategic airlift for 55,000 Cuban troops going to Angola, and when they moved their own troops into Kabul; b) Move troops and food aid to an unpaved runway, the An-12 can land on flat plains on grass; c) Move troops and food aid to a friendly harbour. No specific Soviet example comes to mind, but Cuba used their merchant marine to ship tanks to Angola, so it's not like you need to be a superpower to pull this off; d) Land on basically any beach you care to mention with their landing craft and amphibious transports. Whether that's an uncontested beach you can roll up on your landing craft on, or if it's a slightly more contested beach you need a lot of rocket batteries and an aircraft carrier to grab. Yet, somehow, they lack the ability to project power and humanitarian aid overseas. Their ability to project power ends on the shore, except for all the landing craft, rocket batteries, strike aircraft, and naval helicopters!?
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Nov 11, 2018 01:51
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You keep saying that they'd have been better served by building more amphibious landing capabilities, but merely repeating a weak argument over and over doesn't make it a strong argument. The assertion that you absolutely need a large amount of landing craft to support allied nations and provide humanitarian aid is simply not borne out by the many, many examples of the same capacity being provided by conventional shipping and strategic airlift, and you've really not managed to provide any concrete examples of where Soviet amphibious power would be useful except in the one place they actually did have half their amphibious capability. The way you've described the utility of amphibious forces, they seem almost like a solution looking for a problem: they're absolutely, critically, necessary for all those times you want to launch an operation into a country with a shoreline but no useful harbours or airports, yet at the same an operation small enough that you don't need the habours and airports for continued operation? That's an exceedingly marginal benefit to give up surface combatants in the Atlantic for.
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Nov 11, 2018 03:44
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Cessna posted:Out of curiosity, why the hostility? I've spoken you elsewhere and have always found you to be someone I enjoy interacting with. Now you seem to be determined to prove me WRONG over a matter of opinion. What gives? PM me if you prefer... Thank you! I've found your posts on lots of stuff like Nazi uniforms very interesting. It might just be because I missed like two days of medication in a row, but the initial spark of contention was that I'd spent a bit of time as an amateur historian looking at two theatres of operation in specific: the planned defence of Norway (which I wrote a snipped about in response to your comment about fleets-in-being) and the potential WaPa operations in the Baltics against Sweden and Denmark. This made your comments about the Soviet amphibious naval capabilities seem absurd at best, and after that it was about picking at the facts and getting increasingly agitated that you would not see what I felt was reason and that you presented arguments I felt lacked in substance. And like... I guess it's natural that you'd draw on your experience with being part of the US armed forces when speaking on military matters, and I don't really think you're a rah-rah nationalist, but a lot of your arguments regarding (Cold War) military equipment often seem to have an element of "this is the way the US does it, this example of doing it differently was a really dumb idea." Which is not wrong most of the time, but the combination of "look at the way the US does it" and "people not doing this are doing it wrong" can occasionally read as being motivated by dogma moreso than rational assessment, especially in situations where there's a lot of room to disagree. Especially with regards to Soviet military equipment and doctrine, where your voice is backed by a choir of 80 years of propaganda. I feel kind of bad for painting you with that brush, sorry.
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Nov 11, 2018 05:12
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Cessna posted:Thanks! To be honest I'm just here to talk about tanks and other AFVs. I've learned how to tell the difference between every T-72 model operated by East Germany, I might as well use it for something. 
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Nov 11, 2018 06:52
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