The Armored Vehicle Thread

Same can happen in Halo, Covenant nano-laminate armor is described as being extremely resilient to anything but hypervelocity slugs and plasma fire.

Yet you can still defeat armored vehicles like the Wraith with but the Warthog's machine gun. It just takes a fair bit of ammo to drill through.

Worse, some vehicles have bloody shields! And you can kill those shields with the dinkiest of pistols eventually! (Well maybe not the case for ODST's Automag on Legendary on account of hax shield regeneration mechanics for enemies.)

I guess the best way to find out would be to build both sides' weapons and thrust them into battle with each other!

edited 25th Oct '16 6:49:36 PM by MajorTom

Hmm a gun that takes many rounds vs a gun that takes fewer, has a near perfectly flat trajectory, and has near instant impact at all ranges can do CRAM and AA duty or .50 cal Gatling gun. I think I will go with the one that can burn holes through heavily armored vehicles in a few short seconds.

Or we could go fuck it and get the Bolo tanks which can fly to the moon and have guns that measure out put in megatons per second. Bolo because fuck you, everyone around you, and everyone in your orbit.

Fun trivia, the M90 shotgun in Halo:CE can kill a Wraith with one or two shots, I tried and it worked.

But out of all things from Halo, the Scorpion has to be the most poorly designed tank I've seen, even for sci-fi standards. What kinds of tank would have the driver/gunner hatch be exposed enough to allow the driver to be sniped or be killed by explosives being set off too close to it?

Angelus: Who knows. At least the crazy Mako APC from Mass Effect looks like a functional armored vehicle.

If youse guys are gonna mention the Mary Sue...er, Halo franchise and other fictional works, take it to the sci-fi thread....

Taira:....Nope. Mostly to rustle your jimmies. :D

Speaking of sci-fi aside from the aformentioned Mako anyone actually seen any decent looking design wise armored vehicles from sci-fi? Better yet vehicles actually based on real world armor design concepts?

edited 25th Oct '16 10:35:26 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Some neat stuff but nothing I would call like, reasonable to be honest.

There's always the C&C3 Scorpion tank. That had better be some good polycarbonate.

I'm doing some reading on the T-90MS and... what's with the bustle? On one hand, I'm hearing that the autoloader and ammo for it is now located in the turret bustle, but on the other hand I'm hearing that the bustle in question is merely a glorified box with no means of accessing it from inside the turret.

Ukrainian newspaper concept for a T-64 with an unmanned turret. Come to think of it, is the T-14's ammo storage any better at protecting the crew in the event of a brew up than this will?

edited 25th Oct '16 10:22:56 PM by Krieger22

Everything I've heard says the bustle is accessible to the autoloader and the turret and that the T-90MS turret is actually quite a bit different than previous T-90 models.

Also thanks to an article posted by Sabre IIRC part of the T-72 and older tanks brew up problem was rounds stored outside of protected magazines inside the compartment. It looked like near maybe a dozen or so rounds stored in racks around the interior space. Something that tends to get the tanks cooked off pretty badly.

If you're going to bring up armored fighting vehicles from games, I'mma gonna bring up those from Warzone 2100 again. I mean, why not? Fully modular chassis that can be everything from a hover tank to a massive set of tracks, and have rotary 105mm howitzers sprouting from the top.

I think we can get those if we develop caseless ammunition and sort out autoloaders.

Most of them. A lot of tanks have viewports more than big enough to put a sniper round through and those hatches above the driver have to be light enough for the driver to push out so he can get the fuck out in the event the tank is disabled or on fire or some other reason he needs to GTFO quick.

Even in modern cases like the Abrams where the viewports are glassed/windowed over instead of open per-NBC-warfare requirements, that glass isn't strong enough to completely protect you the driver from a direct explosive hit (like say from a 125mm tandem-HEAT round) or anti-materiel rifle round (which is what the Halo sniper rifle fires).

The main reason drivers have a higher survival rate than this describes is the chance of being hit in those exact conditions is extremely low.

Yeah, but most tanks either have tiny view ports which are incredibly hard to hit or periscopes, the Scorpion has a hatch that leaves the driver's head exposed to sniper shots and splash damage from grenades.

For Sci-fi armor:

Planetside 2 tanks have a decent enough design, with the NC being the traditional MBT, the VS with an assault gun and the TR with what is essentially a SPG. Same thing for BF 2142 with the EU with the Tiger MBT and the PAC with the Nekomata Assault gun. The lack of coaxial machineguns on those tanks are a pain in the ass though.

But probably the best designed tanks I've seen in sci-fi is the 20 Minutes into the Future tanks from Tom Clancy End War: US, EU◊ and Russia.◊

Not surprising; Endwar tanks are basically actual tanks with a few more gribblies stuck on. (Pity that the game itself was so mediocre.)

Actual tanks potentially have a bunch of capabilities not modeled in most games. For instance, it's no secret that tanks armed with the NATO 120mm HEAT shell can shoot down helicopters under some conditions; the shell has an optional proximity fuze and the rangefinder/firing computer are very good. I remember hearing rumors about trials with low-flying CAS aircraft in the late 1980s, where they figured out that the tanks could, to some extent, even defend themselves against A-10/Su-25 type aircraft.

Sabre: I don't know about other HEAT rounds NATO Nations arsenals but that is true for the US M830A1 HEAT-MP-T which purposefully had special fusing added to the package to make it capable of that.

Nowadays, it's both. I've been in the inside of an Abrams (back in the 90s) and they got both view ports and periscopes. View ports for the driver, periscopes and view ports for the commander and gunner's hatches.

They have a sort of plexiglass for the view ports but I don't have any faith in those stopping an anti-materiel round of 12.7mm or better. Especially not some of the fancier stuff like Saboted Light Armor Penetrator/APFSDS ammunition.

Only in the first Halo and only in multiplayer.

This is the Scorpion in single player.◊ Thus probably the canonical version. (Another view in Halo: CE Anniversary Edition.◊) This is the Scorpion in Halo 2 both for single and multiplayer. No grate hatch there.◊ (Halo 2 Anniversary view.◊)

That's the M808B version. The M808C version also has no grate hatch vulnerable to snipers. (At least not without blasting it off first.) This can be seen here,◊ here,◊ and here.◊

The new Halo 5 version the M820, is also not equipped with a grate hatch that allows snipers either.◊

If anything, they look like perfectly viable MBT's albeit maybe a bit tall on account of their remotely operated turrets.

The Honor Harrington series very occasionally depicts tanks used in that setting, in this case a big heavily armored hovercraft armed with a plasma BFG and a variety of other weapons and countermeasures. They're considered entirely obsolete as a concept for a variety of reasons and only turn up on fringe worlds that don't expect to deal with foreign (off-world, that is) enemies.

In one use, a battlefield-requisitioned tank gets into a duel with an armed shuttle. Each roughly knows where the other is, but there's terrain or buildings or something else in between them. The shuttle pops out to take on the tank (because two thousand years in the future, nobody has missiles capable of Roboteching from behind cover) and the two end up taking each other out.

To make it better, the tank's commander and the shuttle pilot happened to each be part of either side's leading diumvirate, so it was basically combat by champion.

In the later appearance by tanks, their commander has an entire battalion of them idling in a parking garage, to provide them some cover from a suspected terrorist/resistance cell. Said cell blows the bottom few floors out of the parking garage with a VBIED and pancakes the entire battalion in one fell swoop. I'd call that a spoiler, but honestly the author took great pleasure in telegraphing the hell out of that scene (said tank battalion commander was demonstrated to be kind of an asshole)

edited 26th Oct '16 4:41:52 PM by AFP

Rumor has it back in June some Syrian ISIS folks or some other kind of rebels took out a TOS-1 Buratino.

Looks like a fuel tanker truck that brews up in a fire.

Holy shit that was a big boom. Must have lit off every rocket still in the tubes. It even looks like it took a hit to the tubes from the missile. Yeah note to self. Don't blow those up inside the urban areas.

Multiple secondaries going off there. It looks like a particularly nasty weapon got blown the shit out of before it could hit anyone else down-range - and more than likely it was a TOS-1.

War is Boring says it's probably a TOS-1, too. Yikes.

That is still a really impressive boom. Some of the secondaries looked like they might be rocket motors cooking off given one chunk looked like it was spiraling out of control at the end. That is damn scary.

So, what the hell a TOS-1 was doing in the middle of a city?

I guess having a maximum effective range of 3.500 meters isn't such great deal after all.

Good question. Who's actually was it? I recall hearing that the Syrians actually had a couple of them and were using them as late as last year.

edited 26th Oct '16 8:40:43 PM by LeGarcon

The TOS-1 has range comparable to a M224 60mm Mortar however it is throwing 220mm Incendiary Rockets which are kind of heavy. The Gen 1 rockets are over 300lbs apiece. The Gen 2 rockets which have a 6km range are 470lbs. They are supposed to be used in both direct and indirect fire.