The Armored Vehicle Thread

My broadband fiber router is made by Huawei. What's this about spyware?

Huawei has ties to the PLA. That makes some people nervous.

I already knew that bit. The NSA is rightly paranoid about Chinese hackers getting into their systems - it's happened a lot before.

I've got a $25 Baofeng handheld radio, which has quite the poor reputation in the Ham radio community.

That said, I'd wager it has more to do with it being a $25 radio than with it being made in China. It's common for VHF/UHF handhelds set up for ham operation to cost closer to $2-300.

Hmmm, radio communities talking about ham. Let me ask. Glazed or baked?

Heh, would a baked ham be a amateur radio enthusiast who smokes pot?

Meanwhile in Libya.

One day they'll discover the virtues of sloped armor.

The US Army's Tank Destroyers Weren't The Failure History Has Made Them Out To Be.

Thoughts? Counterarguments? "Silly Allies shoulda embraced the StuG life?"

From what I've read of the concept, the idea of the tank destroyer wasn't bad per se. It was just overly complicated in execution and in use of some tech. Curiously, the tank destroyer concept still lives on both sides of the (former?) Iron Curtain these days. Things like TOW-armed Humvees and Bradleys and Kornet/Spandrel equipped counterparts of BMP's and BTR's and things still get used to scout out and knock out enemy MBT's and other AFV's rather routinely. There are even a few somewhat dedicated things like the Sprut-SD. (Many dedicated vehicles are intended for airborne/amphibious ops at least for the ones I know of.)

And nice to see a mention of how the British Army used their M10s:

Basically as mobile anti-tank guns, which was the original intention of the design. I noticed no mention of the British Tank Destroyers including the Archer and original Challenger.

And on the subject, British Forces did continue to use the M3 Gun Motor Carriage to the end of World War II, as fire support vehicles for some Recce (Armoured Car) Regiments in Italy and North Western Europe.

edited 28th Aug '16 8:02:36 AM by Greenmantle

Assuming they had appropriate ammo for soft targets, the Glass Cannon T Ds would also probably serve quite well as cavalry raiders, assuming they could outflank the enemy and tear through their rear echelons like a chainsaw through warm butter. If they ended up getting cut off or enveloped they'd be in a bad way, but at least they'd still have the BF Gs to try and blast their way out with.

But yeah, that's the big thing folks forget about American armor doctrine in WWII, it was an extension of horse cavalry. A guy on a horse is a big target, but he's a big, fast moving target who can cause all sorts of mischief if allowed on your flanks. A Sherman tank is simply a bigger, heavier, faster horse with a much bigger saber. And even the Germans had some pretty thin-skinned armor, such as the Elefant, which was best used from a distant vantage point where it could plink off enemies from outside of their effective range.

Wasn't it more a (misguided?) modernization of horse cavalry? Cuz the idea of battles on horseback was a dying "art" in the US Army in the 1930s. It was all but gone by the Philippines Campaign. (It saw one last hurrah before Corregidor though.)

As opposed to the school of thought Patton thought of following WW 1 where the tank was more the massed attack tip of the spear frontal attack stuff. (To which it has become today.)

Even today, I don't know how often armor rolls in on the pointy end of the tip without at least having artillery and airpower soften the lines for them.

Actually, if anything is a modern extension of cavalry, it would be aircraft.

Wouldn't aircraft be more the modern day version of skirmishers?

A cardboard mock up of a T-90 used by the US military for target practice. I think I might want the templates for that.

cool.

@AFP: The Elefant wasn't actually particularly poorly armored. I may rag on German tanks a lot, but the Jagdpanzer Tiger(P) had a lot of armor, especially up front, even if the layout left something to be desired. It had 200mm of frontal armor (uparmored from the original Porsche Tiger spec of 100mm frontal (similar to the Henschel Tiger that was accepted)) and something like 60 to 80 mm of side armor.

Most medium tanks could penetrate the side armor of an Elefant/Ferdinand, even at substantial range, though the same could be said of the Tiger, Tiger II, and Jagdtiger, though few vehicles of the war could penetrate it from the front (not that that would likely matter much if an ISU-152 slammed one of its huge HE shells into it).

The Elefant was best used from afar because it did not have a turret and it did have a really long gun.

edited 31st Aug '16 12:14:57 PM by Balmung

Went to the Bovington Tank Museum today...

Did you get me a souvenir?

I didn't mean to imply that the Elefant's armor was inadequate. It was in fact more than sufficient when the vehicle was used for it's intended purpose: Making life difficult for Soviets from stand-off distances. If a medium tank is shooting at the side armor of an Elefant, then the battle is already going poorly no matter how much armor they have because they've been outflanked.

As I recall, the Soviets had their own fair share of vehicles built on similar concepts of dropping the hammer on the enemies of the people from truly Russian distances.

I went to an outdoor military vehicle museum once. My friend Max and one of my cousins started talking up a storm as they rattled off their knowledge.

@ Garcon: No. I didn't even get myself one^note  I wouldn't have known what you wanted anyway, nor where to send it....

Although, it might be interesting to note their (ex-Finnish) Stug III is preserved in Finnish condition.

edited 31st Aug '16 1:36:43 PM by Greenmantle

A documentary I once watched said that the Ferdinand / Elefant had no machine gun to ward off infantry, and could be disabled by throwing an incendiary bomb (such as a Molotov cocktail) into its air intake vent...

edited 31st Aug '16 1:44:40 PM by pwiegle

Well if they can get close enough to throw shit at you, you're definitely not at stand-off distances. You've got wheels, move and keep some distance between you and the enemy. Have your own infantry out to screen and play interference in case someone gets sneaky.

Yeah, well, another problem was that the Elefant was slow. It had thick armor to protect it from anti-tank guns, but it didn't have the mobility needed to avoid a bunch of infantry armed with gasoline-filled bottles, unless it was accompanied by a mass of other tanks/armored vehicles.

It was also mechanically unreliable, and so heavy that it took three to five armored recovery vehicles linked in series to tow a single damaged Elefant off the battlefield. Most times, the crew just bailed out and left their damaged Elefant where it was, either sabotaging it, booby-trapping it, or letting a fellow German tank destroy it.

edited 31st Aug '16 2:16:58 PM by pwiegle