The Miracle Tank Of Legend

strategypage.com ^ | December 3, 2008 | NA

[JDoutrider]

Something interesting

[RightOnline]

Ping.

[Matthew James]

bttt

[centurion316]

Tandem warheads. Its already been done, including by the Russians.

[lentulusgracchus]

Until somebody comes up with a two stage EFP...

Yes. New RPG-7's with two-stage shaped-charge warheads to defeat reactive armor appeared in Iraq three or four years ago in the hands of jihadis.

[B4Ranch]

ping

[big'ol_freeper]

ping

[B4Ranch]

Imagine being inside a tank and it getting hit by a warhead. If that didn’t literally ring your bell, nothing could. You wouldn’t have eardrums left, I don’t think.

[mountn man]

Why not just throw democrats at them?

There ain't nothing in the universe that dense.

[Smokin' Joe]

Why not just throw democrats at them? There ain't nothing in the universe that dense.

Ayup, the density's there all right. It's getting them up to speed that's the hard part.

[meatloaf]

Not at all. Ever hear of mirrors?

[redgolum]

Depleted Uranium is very dense, and unlike lead or other elements, it self sharpens as it bores in.

Nasty stuff.

[JDoutrider]

Imagine being inside a tank and it getting hit by a warhead. If that didn’t literally ring your bell, nothing could. You wouldn’t have eardrums left, I don’t think.

LOL! Indeed your whole system would be left numb and ringing! Lost enough hearing from close encounters with things that go BOOM to get a C&P rating... Still can't hear worth a damn from that. Can't imagine being entombed in a tin can being slammed with Boom!

[archy]

Imagine being inside a tank and it getting hit by a warhead. If that didn’t literally ring your bell, nothing could. You wouldn’t have eardrums left, I don’t think.

I have been inside an open-topped armored fighting vehicle when a shaped charge warhead struck us, the explosive jet blowing right in one side and right out the other. We hardly noticed it at the time [taking full-auto RPK fire, among other things] though it would have been pretty rough on anyone standing directly between entry and exit.

I'd also have been less happy to have undergone the experience in a fully-enclosed vehicle such as a tank. A couple of my Israeli pals who have survived impacts from wire-guided AT missles such as the Soviet Sagger/Malyutka tell me I worry too much, that the commander's cupola comes right off [with the vehicle commander in it] and relieves the pressure.

[archy]

Here’s a “stupid-civilian” question: what’s the deal with “depleted uranium”? What does it do that plain ordinary lead doesn’t do? Does it glow in the dark, or explode-on-impact, or what?

It's not a dumb question unless you don't ask it. DU is both sufficiently dense [like lead] and hard to penetrate either rolled steel or *honeycomb* composite armor very effectly. Indeed, part of the armor layers of an Abrams tank is itself DU, because of that density.

But in addition to being dense and reasonably tough, it's pyrosphoric, which means that as chips or flakes are scraped away, as when it penetrates a resisting armor surface, those chips become extremely hot from the friction and ignite, both setting fire to anything combustable they come into contact with, like ammunition, hydraulic lines, fuel or the vehicle's crew members, but also burn up a great quantity of the oxygen insside doing so.

Watching a typical older US or British tank *brew up* with fuel and ammo aboard is spectacular: after a half minute or so the poweder in the main gun rounds begins to burn off and a jet of flame 20-30 feet high roars out of the turret hatches like a rocket engine or giant blowtorch. Soviet tanks like the T55 or T72 are less spectacular, but generally pop their turret off, which may land nearby or sometimes quite far away, depending on what hit it and how much and what kind of ammo was in the gun's automatic loader.

[B4Ranch]

Wouldn’t the concussion bust everyone’s eardrums?

[B4Ranch]

I have had the opportunity to inspect a couple of tanks that had burnt. The bent and twisted metal inside told me that some nasty moments had occurred inside it. I could only pray that the crew died very quickly. One of them had a lot of soil inside it as if it had rolled and slid down a hill.

[archy]

troops in Iraq noticed that although EFPs (Explosively Formed Projectiles) go through metal armor, often glass laminate armor (aka glass ballistic laminate armor) will stop them. Troops reported that the EFPs would not go through the bullet proof windows, which are made of glass laminate.

The same reason the Russians in Chechnya learned to hang metal tubes filled with water along the sides of their BMP and BMD tracked personnel carriers. When these began to cut down on casualties from RPGs and roadside EFP mines, the Dukhai switched to using underbelly mines instead, sometimes stacking three or four 10-kilo TM46 or TM57 antitank mines to go off beneath a single vehicle. The .75-inch belly armor of a BMP did not offer much protection from that sort of attack, and the Russian answer was to withdraw the lighter [amphibious] tracked vehicles and use personnel carriers built from obsolete tanks instead.

Indeed, even HEAT rounds have little effect on Diesel fuel carried in vehicle tanks. Both the Soviets and Swedes capitalized on this and mounted multiple fuel and water cans alongside the tracks of their vehicles. It was a stopgap measure, but probably better than nothing.

[RetiredArmy]

NOTE TO ARMY AND DEFENSE DEPARTMENT: Funds for all new weapons programs are hereby canceled. I need the money to fund my socialist agenda. Signed, Commissar Osama Obama.

[archy]

Wouldn’t the concussion bust everyone’s eardrums?

The round that hit us was noisy, but occurred outside the vehicle. Obviously, a 2-stage warhead would have been a very different matter, but the concussion was probably actually more than would have been felt inside a fully-enclosed vehicle- at the time, I thought they were trying to take out the running gear and glanced a round into the ground. My surprise later when we found the quarter-sized hole burned in on one side and out on the other was matched only by my gratitude for not having been standing closer to where those holes had been burned through.

I had a CVC/ Tanker's commo helmet on at the time, which undoubtedly helped some in reducing the effect of the concussion/blast. But I was real interested in other things going on at the time, and it's quite likely that I would not have noticed a smallish nuke going iff had it been detonated in front of us.