HerrTom

Believe it or not, it can fit 3 crew plus the weapon in an automated turret. It's a pretty big boy. I don't know why I spent so much time on this haha. At least the tank chassis I already had from a CAD exercise!

I took a look and only found other people referencing that same article. I did also find this from many years ago: Not sure if there's much new in it, but here it is anyway.

Ran a few tests with 152s and 203s. 152 straight onto the gun mount. Damage? Commander sight and some track damage from the two that missed and went under it. (Forgot to select it, sorry!) 3 direct hits on the roof of an Abrams, knocked out a lot of equipment but this tank should not be operational at all according to the discussion in this thread. I wondered what it would take to knock out. Took 14 (!) more direct roof hits to knock it out besides the four misses, which caused no module damage. I fired some 203s at the T-64. Two direct hits to the roof knocked it out, but none of the misses did any damage to modules. In particular, the one to the right likely would have penetrated the tank. I guess none of us have been clear, CptMiller, but the argument is that even misses should be causing damage, and the Abrams shouldn't be eating 152mm shells for breakfast.

I for one think a GAU-8 based ground system is an entirely reasonable idea. Excuse the terrible quality, It's only a quick mockup.

@John Kettler it took a couple of tries, and I still haven't managed to find a good failure model for RHA, but here's what I got for the worst-case scenario: If the shell comes in parallel to the gun and lands under it, chances are fragmentation is going to damage the gun, maybe to the point of not being able to shoot. Since the RHA failure model needs some work, the ultimate tensile strength of RHA is around 900 MPa, meaning any elements that are yellow or higher likely fractured, as well as any elements that strained beyond some 20% or so (RHA is not very ductile) It's worth noting that had the shell landed perpendicular to the plate, the damage would be significantly less, as seen by the other simulations I've posted, and also that the detonation position here was a little unrealistic (since the fuse really hasn't hit anything technically), but it was much easier to set up. @||CptMiller||, it's not the shells that penetrate, it's the fragmentation from the exploding shell, which are largely directed outwards that pose a very high risk to armour. With that said, the explosive force can certainly cause damage, especially on thinner armour (like the top of any tank). To summarize everything I think I've found and read in a nice list (applying to large calibre artillery like 152, 155 and 203) Radial fragmentation from shells should stand a risk of penetrating into the fighting compartment of even tanks. Not specifically catastrophically, but with the capacity to injure crew members, damage optics and ammunition stores as well as the engine. With that said, armour skirts help significantly against this threat, but don't really protect the tracks or rear aspect particularly well, leaving the engine particularly vulnerable. Direct hits to the frontal aspect of a tank may be damaging to optics, but that may be about it. Roof hits to any tank should be far more catastrophic to any armoured vehicle in the game. We have evidence from my explicit dynamics analysis (but that's not enough), TFO's article (http://sill-www.army.mil/firesbulletin/archives/2002/NOV_DEC_2002/NOV_DEC_2002_FULL_EDITION.pdf), as well as the video John posted (http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4a2_1407852495) showing the danger posed.

Beautiful pictures! Thanks for bringing them here.

Well, I haven't got much else better to do today, so why not? Thanks for that Aberdeen report, too. Very informative. My suspicion is that since the gun is round and relatively thick, it may not be as vulnerable to fragmentation damage as people are suspecting. Maybe in the Black Sea timeline, these Abrams got the Lada armour upgrade? Yup. Being buried will make a huge difference in the explosive power and fragmentation pattern.

I think there are two things going on here - #1 is the telephoto effect, which compresses the distance between objects. The shell was probably a lot further away than it looked. The second is that the shell seems to have exploded in a ditch, which probably shielded our unobtanium Lada. Impressive nonetheless. I think I forgot to mention this, but I looked up the Mk 82 vs a 152mm shell, and the difference is something like 150 kg of TNT vs 6 kg. So there's a fair margin of explosive power between the two! After investigating the HE-FRAG shells, I pale at the thought of what a Mk 82 would do to a tank. While you're definitely right on a lot (especially on shells up to 120mm or so), I think the opinion is less that near hits and airbursts will kill tanks and more along the lines that hits within a couple of meters of tanks should stand a higher chance than currently (is there one?) of damaging subsystems and even injuring crew (and in my opinion, direct hits outside of the front aspect should knock it out). It may be a shotgun, but it's more akin to that 120mm shotgun shell than a 12ga. TFO's article gives some pretty solid evidence for artillery shells knocking out M48s through the side armour, which as far as I know is similar to the armour on the roof and rear of the Abrams.

Does anything else in the US Army arsenal use 30mm shells? I kinda wonder why they didn't fit a bushmaster on it instead to thin out the logistics footprint.

I think it's because the Ladas were made to military specifications coming down from the top of the Politburo! These platforms are a well kept secret that shows the superiority of Russian armor. On a more serious note - Hilarious! Clearly didn't set off the fuse at that shallow angle. Equally amusing how it spins out of control after the ricochet.

@John Kettler Very informative. I looked at the case in more detail. I see more destruction in the nose than expected, but it seems a pretty good match for your radiograph!

Thank you! I was unaware of the standard. The Mk. 82 is a 227 kg bomb with 87 kg of filling, compared to the approximately 5 kg of TNT in a 155mm shell. I also realised that I assumed the shell was filled with Octol - which is probably more akin to the much less common OF-29 shell. Composition B has a detonation velocity of 8050 m/s compared to Octol's 9000, so performance will probably be around 5% worse than my simulations. Do you have a save or video of that? A Javelin has a tandem HEAT warhead, so yeah, it should be significantly less destructive than a 152/155mm shell. Though I remember playing a mission where my Javelin team fired at a group of infantry. It missed and made a pretty large crater. AAR told me they managed to kill 4 soldiers with a miss!

I haven't had the time/been able to do enough tests to really determine the penetration of the shrapnel beyond being able to say that having the shell parallel to the armour is more dangerous. I guess I can also say that at 1 meter, it can easily punch through 40mm of RHA. It looks like some might be able to go through almost double that judging by the kinetic energy they have, though they wouldn't have much left afterwards. The shell is an OF-25 HE-FRAG, which should be one of the standard 152mm shells in-game. The program is AUTODYN, which I thankfully have access to. I'm not sure how licensing works since I'm still able to use my Uni's license but as far as I know it's similar to most engineering tools - a few thousand dollars a license. Edit: Also, the shrapnel one took 14 hours to solve, so you have to have time to do it too!

Finally finished the splinter investigation. These shells are impressive. They're really simply designed such that they fail largely in the radial direction, as I'm sure many of you know. I set a 152mm shell to "airburst" 1 meter away from a 40mm thick steel plate. Boom! Some of those splinters are travelling mighty fast. They by and large match the splinter velocity I calculated from the Gurney equations - so this part is pretty accurate for the artillery shell. And then fragmentation peppers the armour plate. Anything red here is failed completely. Elements that are way wonky stretched failed and moved way too far but for some reason weren't eroded by the solver, and are almost certainly a fine metallic powder (so ignore them! Mostly means solution instability past the point these guys formed). Looks pretty good compared to figure 1 in TFO's article, I think. I think I'd rather not be hit by an artillery round in a tank now, and it also seems that misses to the side offer a higher risk of damaging the tank (simply due to most shells landing next to a tank rather than directly on it). Overall, I may have to agree with the OP here that artillery isn't quite deadly enough to vehicles. Nearby hits should have a high chance of causing heavy damage, and on more lightly armoured vehicles like BMPs, BTRs, Strykers and maybe even Bradleys, near hits should penetrate to the rear and rear-sides.

This is exciting. It seems my simulations reflect reality pretty well! So to summarize some stuff I've learned and what I think I've learned from the myriad of sources posted on this thread: 152mm shell hitting 40mm RHA with .1 ms fuse. [2 ms total] 152mm shell hitting 150mm of RHA with instant fuse (I forgot to set it here, sorry!) [1 ms total] Both of the simulations above show a "worst case" for the shell - it landing normal to the armour. This is since the shells are designed to explode sideways so most of their energy is actually sent radially, as can be seen by the fragments flying outwards. A direct artillery hit to the frontal aspect of an MBT will probably not harm the crew, though the fragments have a good chance of causing some serious damage to poorly armoured things next to the shell. I have no doubt that some of those have enough energy to go through a few dozen millimeters of steel. Now this brings me to the first case - 40mm of steel, reflective of the turret roof on an Abrams, or really any tank. A shell hit there is enough to catastrophically fail the armour (though the simulation doesn't run long enough for this to be seen - the steel in that area has a huge damage factor - it's not structurally sound anymore) and also cause spalling on the other side.. Roof hits and engine hits seem like they should almost be guaranteed to cause major damage. My next plan is to look at the radial shrapnel to investigate the damage it could cause to the sides of a tank. TL;DR: First image reflects a direct hit knocking out a tank - like in TFO's article. Second image depicts a direct hit to the thicker armour one would see in a glacis plate or the front of a turret. There's practically no damage to the armour on either side.

I found some time to read through the article in detail and one thing stuck out at me. In the 1980s, they used M48s as a placebo for modern tanks? Compared to an (estimated) M1A2 (which admittedly isn't a contemporary to the tests in that article, but relevant to CMBS) I guess the findings are still pretty valid! Some areas don't appear to have much more protection at all! Though I imagine the skirts and improved spall lining and materials science on the Abrams would help it survive artillery better.

After I posted, I put some more thought into it and started setting up a treat for you guys. I think I take my musings back a notch! That's a lot of force being applied to the armour, especially with a top-aspect shot! Thank you, very enlightening! A preview: You know something fun is happening when the "Estimated Clock Time Remaining" goes from 59 minutes to 3 hours... This may be a bit of a wait.

Under what mechanism would it really be transferred to the crew? Most of the explosive "force" is going to go outwards away from the tank since the gas likes to take the path of least resistance. If you're going to kill a tank with an artillery shell, you really have a few options, as far as I can tell, all depending on the quality and sensitivity of the fuse. Total penetration of the shell, where it acts like APHE and would undoubtedly be catastrophic Partial penetration of the shell into the armour, where the explosion will crack the armour and enter the compartment No penetration, but the shell acts like a poor but large HESH and can injure the crew inside with spalling No penetration but mobility kill on the relatively unarmoured components like tracks, engine, etc. 3 and 4 are the most likely to happen, especially with modern artillery shells which are designed to explode as quickly as possible to maximise the energy put into the target versus the dirt. Finally, the blast, while large, isn't really that large compared to the inertia of the tank. N.B. This is mostly conjecture from my understanding of materials ballistics and explosives. As such, it is not gospel! @panzersaurkrautwerfer may be able to provide more concrete enlightenment. Edit: Here's a picture I found of a Panther turret supposedly hit by a 152mm HE round: Quite destructive! But we have to remember two salient points about this: a ) the rear armour on a Panther is a lot thinner than on any modern tank and b ) German steel was much much harder than steel normally used on tanks, making it particularly brittle and prone to shattering when it failed.

Unfortunately those were pretty old screenshots, and I no longer have that setup available. I think it's pretty close to the one I posted earlier in the thread with a second ambient occlusion shader running on top with a larger distance.

That'd be one long (and big!) video, but I could set it up again maybe. Give me a day or two and I'll see what I can cook up.

Wasn't the speculation earlier this year about VDV/Airborne pack being the most imminent one? I can't substantiate this though.

Yeah, perhaps I was too definite. I've seen his theories applied even to corporations! He's everywhere. Yes, the weakness is definitely not planned rather than a result of the plurality of the Soviet army, but they did have a solution, flawed as it may be. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of US and other western doctrine is based a large part on lessons learned by the Wehrmacht in addition to its own? My line of thinking goes to some of the epic set-piece battles of the Eastern front where the Soviet doctrine triumphed significantly over the more decentralized Wehrmacht forces, particularly in Uranus and Bagration. I guess a big part of the success was surprise and OPSEC, which perhaps isn't particularly relevant in Black Sea's scenario. And I know for sure that those two parameters were of critical importance for Warsaw Pact pre-emptive "defensive" plans. I guess the point you're making is that the Russian army just isn't capable of getting the operational superiority (for a myriad of reasons) needed for the doctrine to work effectively anymore? I can agree with that.

Yup. Just for fun, I ran a quick test in CMBS on a barrage against a dug-in Bradley company with 4 Abrams attached. I dropped somewhere in the realm of 1,200 artillery shells on them over the course of 45 minutes and it was pretty hairy for the Americans there. Entrenched, they suffered 75% casualties, and 3 M2s completely knocked out, 6 no longer mission capable, and all but 3 were tracked. The Abrams survived better, with 2 tracked and lacking thermals and LWR, 1 with all weapons knocked out, and 1 undamaged. This was all just from a series of linear and area barrages. All in all, a Very Bad Day.

True, I guess I fall into the common trap of thinking of the Russian army in the same vein as the Soviet army. While Col. Boyd definitely has a very good point on the OODA loop, it still stems from his experiences in aerial combat which is a somewhat different beast to operational combat operations. My contention is that the other side of the coin is to disrupt your enemies' OODA loop instead of operating faster than them, and that's objective of the orchestrated plan: You know your OODA is slower than the enemies, but if you can apply decisive force on multiple angles through an orchestrated plan, you will operate faster than your opponent can react. The problem you run into, as you mention, is unexpected consequences. The big thing missing is actual combat experience which makes it difficult to analyze without wargaming conjecture. Though that wargaming conjecture has pointed to it being very effective against conventional forces. But, again, the Russian army may have a heritage, but it still is a different beast... Panzersaurkrautwerfer, I imagine you don't subscribe to most of this?

This is a very interesting point. If sensors and the radio environment get significantly degraded, even on both sides, this is an area where the Russians get an advantage. Their doctrine very much emphasizes the plan, the schedule and coordination on the higher levels much more so than US doctrine. Perhaps I'm not too aware of recent developments, but I don't think the US is as prepared to operate in a heavy EW environment as it should be. On the INS - most accelerometers and especially gyros are only passably accurate and that's under normal loading. I'm not aware of any that would happily handle being shot out of a howitzer and still know where it is with any level of accuracy. Tube artillery in this environment may lose its precision fire, though rocket artillery is a different matter. Additionally, laser-guided munitions wouldn't really be affected by this, right? Edit: Oh, and the ones that could handle being shot out of a gun won't be sensitive enough to measure its flight. This accuracy problem is why many ICBMs use star navigation to correct their courses!