The Armored Vehicle Thread

Skip the 120mm nonsense and go straight to a 5"/54 caliber Mark 45 gun.

AFP: So you are up for the 130mm gun then? It is over 5".

A while back both the US and NATO were looking at 140mm guns to counter a Soviet Paper Tank project that never went anywhere. The look into the bigger guns however did reveal a notable issue. The notably larger guns imposed an almost system wide increase in weight and a reduction in shot counts. Not only was the ammo notably heavier but guns, mountings, and mantlets added a lot of weight. The other problem was the total package took up more interior space in the tank. This was one of the things that made the US begin to revisit auto-loaders to help handle the much heavier ammo and make room for the system.

This led to two things of note. The first is the XM291 solid propellant gun which for the interested involved the Electro-Thermal Chemical Gun technology. It also led to a prototype Abrams called the CATTB which had the140 mm smoothbore gun, new armor scheme, new turret, auto-loader, a new engine, and some other tech bits that no one has managed to find the details of. Seriously finding details on this thing is annoying as hell.

Basically what ended up happening is the Soviet super tank never appeared and instead of massive guns the US went with improving ammo and the Germans eventually went with a longer gun to squeeze more performance out of their own munitions.

edited 22nd Jun '16 8:36:50 PM by TuefelHundenIV

There are parallels with, say, the big German 128mm in WWII, and the few tank destroyers that mounted it. It was certainly an impressive gun, and with the right ammunition it probably was viable right up through the Cold War.

It was also a very poor choice to arm fighting vehicles with, considering that the long 75 and 88 were plenty sufficient for the war, and the bigger gun carries some very hefty penalties that far offset the additional power offered by the caliber—price, difficulty of production, unwieldiness, increase in armored vehicle size, et cetera.

It might now be an appropriate time to move onto bigger guns beyond the 120mm, but at the same time, the automatic thought that "bigger gun must surely mean better!" can be dangerously wrong-headed. The right tank for the right strategic situation; otherwise you end up with engine-fire King Tigers.

Next German tank's going to have a 130mm main gun. In my view, and stand by to point and laugh at me in a decade or so if I'm wrong about it, Rheinmetall isn't splurging all that money on that new hull, new turret and new bigger gun to go inside it if they weren't sure that the German Defense Ministry wasn't going to buy it at some point. Though I wouldn't be surprised if the new gun ended up in the Leopard as a "product improved program" kind of thing. Armata HAS got NATO spooked.

What could be interesting is the possibility of the Abrams getting the 130mm gun as well in the medium to long term, skipping the L/55 version of the 120mm entirely. It may well even end up in the Challenger 2.

Probably 20 or so, which they'll never use, and never have spare parts for...

Fund it by selling all the really early models of the Leopard 2 they still have? Anything is possible.

I think those were sold about 20 years ago.

edited 23rd Jun '16 4:02:39 AM by Greenmantle

Is it a tank? Is it a plane? IT IS THE AEROGAVIN!

Brought to you by Mike Sparks Productions.

The whole entire "AeroGavin" thing might have been funny once. But only once. After the first time, it ceases to be funny, and is simply asinine now.

edited 25th Jun '16 9:42:56 PM by pwiegle

Stop letting Mike Sparks rape good model kits...they were happy pieces of plastic until Sparky turned them into his Gavin-bortions....

Why is he obsessed with the thing any way?

Something is wrong with his head, but I suspect he suffers from some form of autism or a mental disorder of sorts. All I can recall is that he was kicked out of the USMC reservists and tried to enlist but was refused entry.

Who else despite of being told how wrong he is several times, spends time and money pushing for his "designs" and insists he is some sort of military genius is beyond me, he is like the military minded version of Chris Chan.

I wonder if Sparks and Sprey know each other.

edited 25th Jun '16 11:41:29 PM by AngelusNox

The main reason I ask, is because while it is a decent battle taxi, I could have sworn the M113 was netoriously thin skined, and very fragile.

Combined with a high profile and low armemnt, it sees like it would be bad at any kind of front line role.

It has a thin aluminum hull and it is just what you described, a battle taxi.

Egypt and a few Asian countries with a lot of M113s have conversion kits to slap some add-on armour and turn the M113 into an IFV.

But a plain M113 offers overall protection against 7.62 NATO ball but that is it, 7.62 AP or even improved 5.56 rounds like the M 855 A 1 can be a threat.

Elbit Systems have installed add-ons on several M113s for us. They have more armor, better tracks, and a RCWS. Then there's a few more which feature the turret of the FV 101 Scorpion instead of the RCWS.

Angelus; Only if you mean the AK 7.62mm firing normal ball ammo. Otherwise even 5.56mm AP ammo zips right through it. Medium caliber MG's would tear it up badly AP ammo is worse.

The M113 was not a bad idea for its day but its day came and went pretty quickly. In Vietnam in order to reduce how quickly they were slagged by gun fire adhoc armor kits of large armor plates were added to multi-turret versions. The vehicles were horrifyingly vulnerable to even light mines and older generation AT weapons. The Soviet RPG-2 had a tendency to turn them into infernos. RPG-7s were horrible and slagged them readily. Other vehicles like the Ontos had similar issues. Except the Ontos units saw a lot of duty as ad-hoc heavy weapons emplacements most of the time.

It's light weight helped to a point in terms of portability but in order to improve its protection you have to make it notably heavier and add reinforcement to install some of the heavier turrets. They were designed to keep up with pre-Abrams MBT tank designs.

edited 26th Jun '16 2:38:12 PM by TuefelHundenIV

To be fair to the M113, weren't the Soviet BM Ps and BT Rs of its day also notoriously thin-skinned? The strategists of the day all were focused on the scenario of a mobile war in Europe rather than third-world insurgencies.

The BMP and BTR aren't too lightly armored. BTR can shrug off even 14.5mm. But when they do go up there's no way you're getting out in time.

^ It's only the latest marks of BTR and BMP that show anything resembling resilience. BTR-60 absolutely CANNOT survive anything stronger than pistol caliber. Both .308 and 5.56mm go right through, EPR's or not. BTR-80's earlier marks cannot survive .50 cal. BMP-1 and 2 are easily penetrated by API .50 BMG. BMP-3 can only survive it for a short time before it's drilled through. (And doesn't really hold up against Raufoss 211 ammo.)

Oh I misread that. oops.

Yeah everything then was built for a different time, Vietnam and Afghanistan really changed how everyone did the whole war thing.

The mention of J. Walter Christie in the video reminded me of a neat bit of armored vehicle trivia: The famous Soviet T-34 tank is a bit of a bastard descendant of pre-war American tank designs, as it uses a modified form of the Christie suspension system designed for a series of light tanks that Christie designed for the Brits and Soviets.

Yeah, one problem folks have when regarding things from previous eras is that they lack context for those things. Like why send waves of big slow heavy bombers to try and bomb a factory when a lean, fast, twin engine medium bomber can zip in at high speed and sling a pair of bombs right into it from close range? Well, because that was still a very new idea in WWII and nobody wanted to risk investing a lot of money and manpower and resources into a new idea that might not work (not to mention that WWII strategic bombing favored a war of attrition that the Allies were simply in a much better position to win than the Germans were, and forced the Germans to disperse their manpower across the European continent while fighting a land war against the most powerful state in Asia).

See also: the relatively slow adoption of new ideas like the Aircraft Carrier (very limited use in WWI) and the extended use of outdated ideas such as battlecruisers and battleships (both still in production as late as the end of WWII). Hell, B Cs are looked at as an obviously silly idea today, but in their heyday, they seemed like just as good an idea as the CV must have seemed an absurd one.

edited 26th Jun '16 11:13:42 AM by AFP

So, just because I feel like it's my duty to plug for Charles Stross and the excellent The Laundry Series Laundry Files occult/intelligence series (premise: Lovecraftian magic exists, it works scarily well with computers, and the Brits have a creaky under-resourced overly-bureaucratic intelligence agency to keep it under wraps), the latest book—out today—features a Kettenkrad heavily.

Tankograd blog has a detailed, in-depth look at the BMP-2. A rather rough-hewn vehicle with some pretty advanced features for its time; it even had a rudimentary hunter-killer system (hampered, though, by the lack of any rangefinding system aside from stadiametric lines).

Huh, off topic, but I'm disappointed to learn that Charles Stross cancelled his plans to do a third installment in his Halting State series. Those were great books. Alas.

Did the BMP-2 have the fuel tanks in the aft hatches, or am I thinking of a different vehicle? I recall that they were very dangerous to the passengers and crew if filled with fuel, but that this was only done for long trips. On most tactical operations, the fuel lines would be disconnected and the hatches filled with water.

edited 30th Jun '16 5:22:03 AM by AFP

^ BMP-2 had fuel containers in the rear hatches yes. It was part of the NBC shielding system the BMP-1 and BMP-2 had. It's also why tanks made prior to the later marks of the T-72 had those ginormous fuel tanks on the outside.

Diesel fuel it turns out, is a pretty good radiation moderator.