A combined arms approach. No one vehicle despite the designers of the BMP-T claiming to do so can do everything. You have your APC's and IFV's providing suppressive fire and fire support for the infantry, you have your MBT's being used for direct fire against very hardened and difficult areas, you sweep every centimeter of the AO with infantry and you have air support overhead to watch how they move and take out targets of opportunity/availability.
Even if you designed a "Tank Support Vehicle" that can do damn near everything you'll have to use it intelligently. Get too close to the enemy with it and they'll chew you up with little if any way of fighting back. Stay out of sight or too far from the infantry and you gotta ask why is it there?
For the Stryker they had to rework parts of the Expeditionary Tanks turret IIRC it was mostly the guts there was some issue with the auto-loader mechanism I think it was having jamming on shell ejection, feeding a new round, or something similar.
As for weight even tracks have a weight limit. Not just for the vehicle but also things like stable road surfaces, bridges, and the larger the vehicle is the harder it gets to move it cross country. Fuel consumption or power demands also rapidly rise with vehicle weight as well. Many high weight vehicles require additional maintenance to keep them running. Many MBT's require a fair bit of maintenance to keep them in running order. To add to the problems they often wear down running gear, suspension systems, and even the tracks themselves. It is simply impractical in many ways to give a vehicle the kind of hard protection frontal arcs have over most of the vehicle in the first place as it adds too much weight.
To get the widest protection you either need an armor that is very tough but light and/or an APS system that can intercept or dud things like RPG rounds. Or a better solution is to not get into the tight spaces vehicles have trouble with as a large heavy vehicle is still at a disadvantage because of limits on maneuverability. Hang back and provide fire support where you can and let the infantry slog it out.
It shouldn't be too hard to gen up an autoloader system for a Short Barreled Howitzer. May need to modify the gun and breech a bit but if you can build auto-loaders it should be doable. Fixed 105mm Shells are not overly large and easily handled manually for example. So making an autoloader that can say juggle a several at a time in say a revolver style auto-loader shouldn't be too hard to do.
Tom isn't making assumptions about Urban Combat at all. In fact in Urban Combat the vehicles are very reliant on the infantry to protect them from enemy AT teams, spot ambushes, and otherwise protect the armor. In turn the armor provides fire support as the infantry screen forward. More or less as tom described armor hangs back while the infantry sweeps forward with the big vehicle guns hammering enemy points of hard resistance.
Urban Combat areas are meat grinders for pretty much everything that goes into them. The bigger the urban area the worse it tends to get.
There is an alternative though. The Russians made the BMP-T See here
Before I forget it again there is another weapon system to consider. It is a sort of hybrid between mortar and a gun. They call it a Gun Mortar. It is not only capable of indirect fire it can fire directly on targets as well. The Russians like to use them on some of their IFV's like the BDRM type vehicles. They fire shells and gun launched missiles.
edited 13th Jan '15 7:20:40 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?@tom
Mostly, weight. True AP rounds are solid shot designed to pierce armor at all costs. Sabot rounds, for example, don't pack an explosive charge. Usually, this isn't an issue for killing power as the shrapnel of the impact is usually enough.
Because APHE rounds are filled with explosives rather than dense lead or tough steel they tend not to penetrate as well as dedicated AP rounds. Still, if they do penetrate they tend to explode inside the target. Naturally, an explosion in a confined space is extremely deadly. However, even if the APHE round fails to penetrate, it's still a mass of high explosives in contact with the hull. A sturdy hull, like an MBT, would shrug off such a blow with only damage to scopes.
The only problem with trying to turn HESH/HEP is it is not meant to penetrate anything but to smash and deform against the target. It has thin shell walls to help accommodate the effect. It is already operating off of a short impact delay fuse to allow the material to smash against the target and spread out. If you are shooting something like bar/cage/slat armor which is meant to help stop RPG rockets there is a very good chance it would deform the shell as well at stand off range.
Who watches the watchmen?![]()
HESH rounds are actually more effective against fortifications than vehicles. squashing against the surface of a target offers more contact. This means more shockwaves being transmitted into the target. For a tank, this isn't really an issue. The warhead isn't likely to breach the armor and modern vehicles have spalling liners. The metal body can disperse the shock evenly.
Fortifications, which usually don't have the same features that vehicles do, tend to disintegrate when you stick a half ton of explosives onto them.
What you're looking for is a kind of high performance armor piercing cap for a APHE round. Firing them separately makes it hard to hit the same spot with both rounds. Stacking them means the rearmost round takes the recoil from the first.
Otherwise, not a bad idea but not a new one.
edited 14th Jan '15 4:37:02 PM by Belisaurius
HESH/HEP is actually effective on vehicles like IFV's provided they don't have cage/slat/grid or spaced armor mounted. ERA would also likely defeat such a round by deflecting the blast when the warhead goes off. Without those add on armors though the vehicle can be seriously damaged or destroyed. The IFV/APC type vehicles are not really rated to take the kind of direct to the hull force most of the gun fired HESH/HEP rounds deliver. Especially when you start talking 105mm or 120mm HESH/HEP Shells. They are very much like taking a direct hit from a powerful HE shell only most of the blast is right against the hull rather then radiation out from the vehicle.
Spall liners and curtains also have limits. They may stop the smaller splinters and fragments but more powerful blasts can still punch fragments through the liner and through the curtains. On a modern tank no not that big of an issue. The composite armor absorbs a lot of the shock before it even reaches the inner layers of the hull. It could still do some serious damage to tracks, road wheels, external mountings and possibly the engine if you hit the right spot with the bigger HESH/HEP rounds.
Yes HESH/HEP is great for smashing bunkers, building, and other hard points. The Stryker MGS fires 105mm HEP rounds to good effect to breach walls and knock out enemy hard points in buildings.
I shared it in the armor thread there was an experimental vehicle that used a Burst Fire cannon to defeat armor so it is possible that if you use auto-loaders loaded in a certain fashion you could double shot nearly on top of the leading round.
edited 14th Jan '15 6:23:25 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?Which was excellently demonstrated in the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Israeli Sho't tanks used HESH rounds as their AT ammo of choice in their 105mm L7's. Against T-62s and T-55s it would blow em wide open fairly literally.
Unlike a lot of the AP ammo the T-55s were carrying, HESH was range independent. It hit just as hard at 3000 meters as it did 300.
Given the Israeli's munitions were largely supplied by the US at the time they were likely firing HEAT shells. The US never widely favoured HESH/HEP for fighting other tanks and preferred to use HEAT warheads for a long time.
HESH/HEP actually does not have same performance at all ranges. In fact effective dispersal of the explosive for maximum effectiveness of a HESH/HEP head is very dependent on velocity at impact. To top it off the round is already fired at lower muzzle velocities then most other rounds to achieve that. Too fast and the warhead spreads too thin over too wide an area. Too slow and it doesn't get enough explosive against the hull to achieve the blast effect needed. Also bad impact angles means the warhead has poor or partial dispersal against the target resulting in reduced effectiveness.
HEAT shells will have the same power in the shell regardless of velocity at impact. The only thing they are reliant on is a good enough impact angle.
Found it. The Rapid Rife gun was an ARES 75mm gun supposedly firing a CTA type round from an automatic gun. See here
edited 14th Jan '15 11:39:17 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?Hardsuits are my realest of real robots. They at maximum only go up to 2 stories or 20 feet tall with the rare 25 foot tall robot, require advanced motor and muscle systems and even wheels and thrusters to move (thankfully all of which my setting has), are heavily armored with points of weakness often being covered in a somewhat crouching position or with thick interlocking armor plating, require a lot of power (I got something called Nova Batteries and such which I will explain in a later post) which they do get distributed throughout the frame, you will only see maybe 5 of them in armored combat and even then it is purely urban (thanks to the advanced muscle and skeletal systems they can duck and weave around corners) due to the logistics needed and the fact that they would not support themselves anywhere else. And the skeletal frame is made with new lightweight alloy materials being used for manned spaceflight, stations, and even sections of Moonbases A, B, and C.
Hardsuits weren't even developed as weapons of war in my setting in the first place, they were a experiment in humanoid robotic frames with possibilities in freight moving and construction, but were later recognized to have potential in war since it was essentially a large pilot-able android of sorts.
Control systems vary, standard stick for anyone not doing anything too fancy, Mo-Cap with specialized gloves for people who have to do something more delicate (IE, Rescue, Construction), Interface for Cyborgs where they control the machine as a extension of themselves, and finally Hybrid, which combines interface and stick since for many cyborg users it actually lessens mental strain on them by making it so that the mental commands are only for specific actions.
In short, Hardsuits are large one man tanks that hold none of the disadvantages a tank has in a urban environment, but are heavily debated for their usefulness in other environments. Many in the research industry question why Hardsuits are kept in a humanoid form when new specialized scorpion slash spider like models have proved just as effective with lower to the ground designs and smaller weakpoints. Many assume pop cultural inertia.
Transferred over from the Random Quirks thread. Thoughts?
I find it hard to believe a 20 foot tall robot the size of most two story buildings has none of the disadvantages of tanks or other vehicles in urban combat. The sheer size alone imposes limitations on mobility unless you want to just stomp everything flat and even then that has limitations. That and they are pretty huge targets. I might buy that if they were half that size with mobility gear.
Who watches the watchmen?Two stories tall is a big target especially accounting for width of the body to go with that height. Even the big ole Abrams MBT is only 8 feet tall treads to turret top. The tank front of hull to back is about 26 feet. Imagine if you stood an Abrams up on it's end how big of a target that would be even moving.
Mobility gear your wheels, thrusters, and possibly climbing equipment. The majority of buildings interiors are not going to be very accommodating of things so large so climbing up the side of a sturdy building to get to the roof would be handy.
edited 15th Jan '15 2:23:34 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?Flight is not achievable for them due to power restrictions. But what you have told me helps fit their Awesome, but Impractical image. But maybe mounted grappling hooks. Heavy models are typically using larger weapons and are typically the 25 feet tall ones.
Each and everyone of the Hardsuit humanoids has groundmovers and thrusters to achieve the needed speed. This technology is also relatively new so shrinking it down will take a bit.
But I do like the ideas put forward.
The Mechs from Gasaraki I think it was used a sort of drilling harpoon and cable winch to get up buildings as well as some other system to help them abseil and climb as well as maneuver. You would have be careful choosing what you choose to climb and make sure you pick a site that can bear the weight. It would be a bad day to pull a few hundred pounds of rubble or building on top of your unit.
There was a type of Power Suit in Ghost in the shell that fits the bill as well. They were deliverable to roof tops via helicopter and could fit into some spaces.
edited 15th Jan '15 4:08:33 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?That is one of the possible proposed purposes of future power armor outside of military use. Though a drone would fit the bill more easily.
Here it is. They have rocket harpoons that haul them up buildings. The scene is a demonstration of the units developed by one company against tanks.
Interesting. Power armor in setting though isn't commonly used as cybernetic augmentation exists and is widespread.
Which makes me think, could a intimidation factor of a large mechanical giant about to crush you be a good factor for their continued use?
And I might need to work on a mounted grappling system for them. Unlike the Motungs for Deadzone Silence which already have duel grappling hooks.
What can the Mechs do that cyborgs can't in setting? Carry more armor, carry heavier weapons and ammo it should be something unique enough to make the armor worth it. As for intimidation while a factor it is rarely the sole the reason for adopting something like a whole system.
Who watches the watchmen?Well definitely heavier weapons and armor. That and there is a general in universe justified worry about cyborgs with built in weaponry so humanoid weapons getting around that would be a thing.
The cyborgs also have limits. They are still human so they can still experience fatigue and other limiting human factors while a tank or a robot don't. A human cyborg can still fall to a few 5.56 bullets if shot while a Hardsuit can withstand that and generally needs anti Tank weapons and explosives.
I also made mention of cyborg pilots.
edited 15th Jan '15 6:30:36 PM by EchoingSilence
Not really. The military as a whole, combined with a cult of personality, the extensive internal politicking, viciously dictated social structure, and tight media control is the tool not just one object. Even then the bulk of their kit is picked to fulfill a specific role rather then weapons of terror and intimidation.
NBC weapons for example are far more effective in generating fear. Regular field equipment can destroyed its hard to stop NBC weapons and once unleashed they make life broadly hellish.
Even Germany's terror weapons and terror bombing lost a lot of their sting once they could be intercepted, protected against, or misdirected.
Add in enough exposure and people become less afraid of them as a whole. Once they learn they are vulnerable and/or fallible a lot of the fear factor can be dialed back.
Who watches the watchmen?

It means you're yielding to their tactics. The Urban Heavy Tank jazz amounts to charging the enemy with a battering ram of the medieval era when your opponent has Gatling guns. No amount of protection will save you from the 360 degree battle that is Urban Warfare. That's why you have to out-smart the enemy. If he's holed up in a pocket in a city, you surround the pocket and slowly close the noose from all sides. Given the nature of Urban Warfare, no tank is qualified to lead that battle, it's gonna be largely an infantry scrum with vehicles playing second fiddle hanging back and supporting the infantry.