The Armored Vehicle Thread

Why do I always get into these things when I'm at work and can't look up the articles where I read on it.

Early era penetrators would hit the insert and shatter, because the hard rubber wouldn't behave in the same way as armor plate and the energy reflected back into the projectile would break it.

This is only something that I've ever heard as happening to the real early days APFSDS. The later ones behave as you two describe

Garcon: The rubber isn't dumping energy back into the projectile. What it does is cause a bulge which shifts both the top armor layer and the penetrator around causing the penetrator to take on a less favorable strike angle causing it to hit another layer of armor under the rubber in a way that may cause it to be destroyed, deflected, or deformed. That might cause it to shatter or deform. Rubber, when you hit it hard enough, becomes more like a liquid and less like a solid which is what causes the bulging as it tends to forcefully flow away from the point of impact. There is sort of hybrid that is basically a really hard passive armor layer that uses the elastic interior layer to help keep it from shattering by helping to basically buffer the force of the impact and spread out the force better. If it passes through it basically turns into NERA. The Leopard supposedly has a variant that uses that.

The only things that I have heard of shattering even early long rods on impact are hard passive armors. ERA can sometimes cause the effect especially if the rod has a poor strike angle relative to outer plates when it goes off.

Speaking of losing tanks for decades, remember that time that we lost the only surviving T28 super heavy tank and some farmer found it just sitting in a field 27 years later? Like, it wasn't even hidden behind anything in particular. It just got left there or maybe fell off a transport vehicle and was too much trouble to recover, and everyone just kind of forgot about it.

There are rumors that one of the 10 French Char 2C's still exists somewhere in Russia.

During the invasion of Afghanistan, Coalition forces found an FT-17 from the Polish-Soviet War that had been captured by the Soviets and donated to Amanullah Khan in 1923. The tank was later donated/returned to the Polish government.

^ I heard of that, it was 4 of them to be precise.

The FT is a neat little tank. It is fun to drop into WWII themed RP games when the players have no real AT capability and they get to realize even a dinky tank can kick their ass.

The FT is Difficult, but Awesome in Battlefield 1. It has paper armor and a weaker gun than other tanks but it's the only full 360 degree turret tank in the game. (The artillery truck has a 360 turret too but can't move when using that particular part.)

It's my most played tank in that game.

Edited by MajorTom on Oct 11th 2018 at 10:18:02 AM

Ah, BF 1. Where more tanks showed up in the single mission than in the entirety of the Western Front in Real Life.

Same with man portable automatic weapons.

That is not entirely true. There were several large-scale battles involving over 100 tanks or more. The first battle with tanks involved tens of tanks. The Germans though really didn't deploy very many tanks.

Man-portable automatics were in use before the first world war with the Russo-Japanese war being one of the first to see them in use. At least two LMG's were in service prior to the start of the war. They weren't individual weapons though and operated off of the typical 2 man team set up. One carrying ammo and spares the other operating the gun.

They weren't deployed as densely as you would find on a game server but thousands saw combat from the start of the war from both sides.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Oct 11th 2018 at 1:57:32 PM

still, do you know how strange it is to modern sensibilities to hear "tens of tanks" as a large scale tank battle?

Hell even the 476 in the largest WWI tank battle falls flat to the thousands used in large tank battles in WWII.... 8056 at Kursk.

Edited by Imca on Oct 11th 2018 at 11:54:44 AM

Immy: It actually isn't strange. Tens of tanks is pretty average. Several battles had hundreds of tanks. The British overwhelmingly used tanks pretty heavily. The second battle of Cambria saw the most of that war IIRC.

Also see above for automatic weapons in use. That is they were already part of military inventories before the war started in at least three militaries with varying degrees of success and efficacy.

I said to modern sensibilities, not to the war itself.

I mean, can you imagine hearing a modern tank battle described as including tens of tanks? That would be more a small skirmish, not a tank battle.

And thats kind of what I mean though, between being crew served, and not near the same density, if BF 1 had the weapon deployments right, you would see way more bolt actions and less autoguns.

Edited by Imca on Oct 12th 2018 at 1:39:54 AM

Tens of tanks isn’t too unusual for a post-WW 2 tank battle. The largest tank battles these days have a hundred or so tanks at best, if even that.

It’s possible we’ll never have an enormous tank battle again. Nobody really feels like getting into big formations like that any more, and doctrine now favors more organic armor deployments.

Bringing that many armored vehicles together in one place is just asking for some smartass in an F-16 to come by and start dropping hellfires on people.

Or, if you're trying to be thrifty, cluster bombs will also do an ugly number to bunched up vehicles.

Most modern cluster munitions are specifically designed to do so.

Numerous engagements. For example Al Busayyah in 1991.

Kursk was the outlier, not the rule.

73 Easting was the most recent "great tank battle". That said, it's not impossible for there to be further ones. It just requires a symmetrical war with at least a semi-competent opponent, not Timmy Taliban/ISIS style fuckwits.

73 Easting wasn’t really enormous on the scale of the WW 2 battles we were talking about. And, as I mentioned, modern doctrine breaks up those large armored formations more and more. Even with two peer-state armies with lots of tanks, there may not be a large congregation of tanks in one place.

That will depend on what objective you're trying to take (or defend) and how important it is.

Piecemeal attacks in the modern day with a relative few tanks will suffer the same results they did a hundred years ago in WW 1. That is, complete and easy destruction by ATGM's (vehicle or tripod), enemy tanks, and aircraft.

For example say Russia were to invade Colorado tomorrow (somehow), they wouldn't commit only a few dozen T-90s to attack Fort Carson, they'd be hitting the base with 100+ because there are 100+ vehicles and aircraft defending the base. Maybe even several hundred to a thousand-plus if they wanted to completely overrun the US military presence at Carson, Petersen, Schreiver, the Academy and Cheyenne Mountain. Such a tank battle wouldn't be a 1000 meter wide salient, it'd be 1000+ vehicles operating in a 10+ km wide front.

Haven't we seen enough videos out of Syria and Iraq where piecemeal tanks were easily blasted apart by mines, VBIED's or ATGM's to think dispersing tanks is a good idea?

Well...maybe. If I was taking a base I wouldn’t just match vehicle for vehicle, I’d probably want to try and split the defender’s attention or harass their flanks, or a similar “sideways” approach rather than just main force.

The modern emphasis on strategic mobility means armored formations are broken up by necessity, but that doesn’t mean they operate alone. They form an organic capability for other units. To use your 10km front example, armor would be spread around among the various mounted and dismounted infantry in the area, rather than operating together in a single formation.

You can’t really compare modern combat to WW 1 except in the broadest of strokes. There’s no real comparison.

Edited by archonspeaks on Oct 12th 2018 at 9:10:55 AM

You won't see massive tank concentrations like there were at the largest of tank battles. Weapons like the proliferating smart cluster bombs and an increasing number of ATGM weapons guarantees that. In fact, that was the whole point of programs like Assault Breaker and successor programs. There are already plans being worked on to turn those smart cluster bombs into drone flown weapons that can chase down tanks and weapons like Brimstone II giving even helicopter gunships standoff missile ranges.

This is why you are starting to see real honest attempts at the signature control for tanks like the IR masking blankets, the early stealth tank designs, and other equipment to make it harder to find and kill tanks.

From what I understand, most big tank battles even in WWII were mostly just multiple small tank battles happening in the same area with groups of vehicles fighting over key positions.

And in the Fort Carson example, if General Snuffisnki of the 188th Guards Tank Division is trying to take the Fort with the defenders having anything like parity in armored forces, I question his judgement or the competence of the Russians' Air Component Commander.

Hammer the enemy's forces with artillery, air attack, etc. Then use the cavalry units for what they're for, flanking and exploiting, not trying to crush the pikemen with their dead horses.