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BR350A and B HE fuse and Pzgn39 HE fuse


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ArgusEye,

Here's a sampler on the Great Optics discussion.

Optics in CMBB-How are they better?

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=58927

Wrong Optics In Tiger I late, King Tiger...

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=54570

Optics Grogs, check this out!

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=48706&highlight=optics

This one's for fun--actual WW II German optics! Much more interesting than data tables!

http://www.snyderstreasures.com/pages/opticsgerman.htm

Am going to post this now, lest some incident occur.

Regards,

John Kettler

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Thanks for the links John.

And thanks for the further info ArgusEye. The descriptions you give of the Brit, US and Italian optics, however, do make them sound so useless that I can't help but wonder if the problems could be due to major damage, lens abrasion, or interior dirt?

Here's a 1941 photo taken by a British tanker through his periscope, and it looks clear:

http://www.nam.ac.uk/online-collection/detail.php?acc=1975-03-63-2-587

I dig some digging to aid my memory - most WW2 British tanks used the Vickers Mk.IV tank periscope - actually a Polish invention arising out of pre-war collaboration between British and Polish military developers. This scope was copied by the Soviets and eventually by the US and Germany by the end of the war. Of course there were other scopes too, but the point is that British scope-technology couldn't have been that bad if other nations later adopted/copied at some of the Anglo-Polish technology:

http://www.enotes.com/topic/Vickers_Tank_Periscope_MK.IV

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Streety,

You're welcome! I fear that much of the epic optics discussion was lost in the Great Server Meltdown. While I agree the periscope image looks clear, seeing a man up close is a far cry from spotting a hull down tank that's many hundreds of meters away. That other find is simply remarkable, and it's something I never knew about, neither the device, nor its ubiquity.

Regards,

John Kettler

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And glad you liked the vickers link John - yes I knew that the Soviets and US had copied our WW2 periscope (albeit Polish invention) technology, but until I went back and re-researched it I hadn't realised the Germans did too.

Regards the photo - yes of course a "look at me, mum" shot is different, but you also have to take account of the quality of the private/amateur of the moment shot (as opposed to a professional, arranged photo). Here's some more nice through-the-periscope shots for you to illustrate my point:

WW2, through a US Sherman (I think), in action: http://www.ww2gyrene.org/assets/tank_periscope_1.jpg

WW2, through another US Sherman (I think), in action: http://www.ww2gyrene.org/assets/Iwo_tank_infantry_moving.jpg

Modern, through a state-of-art Periscope, at a Military Equipment Convention: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pDRfSanQq48/T0OTmQnHM6I/AAAAAAAAAEo/2vrdsJZygFM/s1600/DSCN1930.JPG

As you see, taking a private photo (whether today or 60yrs ago) through a periscope doesn't give the sort of results a human eye at maximum magnification would get - I merely wanted to show that you can look through these things ok, and by comparison, the previous one I linked was just to give an indication that these things are pretty clear:

http://www.nam.ac.uk/online-collection/detail.php?acc=1975-03-63-2-587

Whilst my department considered Ziess to be excellent, I was used to looking through our old WW2-era naval sights and scopes and they looked and worked fine, so I was just reacting to ArgusEye's suggestion (based on one or two old examples) that our old British stuff was next to useless and widely rated as almost the poorest of WW2, when I knew that generally the British tech was very good, in some aspects considered the best the allies had in the war, and had been copied by many other countries during that period.

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Thanks for the links John.

And thanks for the further info ArgusEye. The descriptions you give of the Brit, US and Italian optics, however, do make them sound so useless that I can't help but wonder if the problems could be due to major damage, lens abrasion, or interior dirt?

Hardly useless! That there are better devices around doesn't make them bad per se. When I make these comparisons, I try to point out the differences. I show what one can do, which the other can't. There is no use in listing the abundance of things they can both do. The Brit ones worked just fine, but the Russian, German and to some extent American ones were just outperforming them.

As to the state of the devices: if they weren't at least decent, I wouldn't have made a comparison. True, old devices get degraded sometimes, but if you've been inspecting them you know what's right or wrong about them. A bunch of German sights and especially rangefinders are completely useless after years of decay eating away at their Canada balsam, and a lot of instruments made plenty use of glues and putties which disintegrate. But a trained eye can spot whether a failure is due to damage or due to design. You'll have to trust me :D or go and buy some collectors beers!

Here's a 1941 photo taken by a British tanker through his periscope, and it looks clear:

http://www.nam.ac.uk/online-collection/detail.php?acc=1975-03-63-2-587

On a scale like that, on a photo of that quality, on a target that well-lit, any of the effects I could see differences in would be obliterated. The difference is not whether or not you can see and aim at a man standing 50 meters away, the difference is whether you can spot that muzzle brake sticking out from the embankment 1500 meters away.
I dig some digging to aid my memory - most WW2 British tanks used the Vickers Mk.IV tank periscope - actually a Polish invention arising out of pre-war collaboration between British and Polish military developers. This scope was copied by the Soviets and eventually by the US and Germany by the end of the war. Of course there were other scopes too, but the point is that British scope-technology couldn't have been that bad if other nations later adopted/copied at some of the Anglo-Polish technology:

http://www.enotes.com/topic/Vickers_Tank_Periscope_MK.IV

Whether or not something was stolen from wherever (with simple inventions like this, it is always unclear whether they were stolen or just very obvious), this is a design of a system, a whole instrument, of which lenses are a component. The same system can perform very differently depending on the quality of its lenses, and therein lies the rub. Brit systems were no less advanced than its counterparts, although they were more finicky. They didn't have the range variable sights the Germans used, for instance, but that was a luxury the Krauts could afford because of their better glassware. If the Brits had wanted to, they were well able to implement the same. That they didn't probably had to do with the image degradation they would have had to cope with.

John, thanks for the links. I work in the field of optics, so maybe I was expecting something more glass-groggy! I appreciate it.

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ArgusEye,

The comparative optics discussion here is reminiscent of some of what we talked about in the largely lost thread. Notably missing are glass quality, coatings and filters.

http://forum.worldoftanks.com/index.php?/topic/35025-german-tank-optics/

More actual WW II military optics

http://snyderstreasures.com/pages/optics.htm

WW II optics collection (drool!), including a few views through same. This person seems like someone you might wish to contact.

http://news.webshots.com/album/128362688VgwwGZ

Prepare to die of optics grog happiness. Shot after shot through the lens!

http://www.paulstiger1.co.uk/WWII-Optics-Collection.htm

Edmund Scientific used to sell tank periscope prisms like this one.

http://www.anchoroptics.com/catalog/product.cfm?id=127

Russian sniper telescopes

http://kalinkaoptics.com/rifle-scopes/pu-original-wwii.html

Regards,

John Kettler

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ArgusEye, now come on old boy, you can't accuse me of wrongly thinking you'd said that British optics were bad when you'd originally said in this thread:

"With the British scope (from a Comet) I could find the horizon, but every time a car passed, there were a lot of internal reflections from the headlights, and I couldn't tell if it was a car coming from the left or from the right. The whole thing was a bit finicky, and one error could put it out of proper alignment, so maybe I could have gotten a better picture, but I severely doubt anything could have improved the parasitic reflections."

So, if you couldn't tell which direction a car was coming from and that the whole thing was finicky, easily put out of alignment and with parasitic reflections, this makes the Comet's sight sound pretty useless to other readers. I'm glad you've revised your comments to now say the sights were all at least "decent", pity you couldn't have said so before.

And you can't simply choose to completely dismiss the specific history of the Vickers periscope e-notes link without offering your own references to corroborate your point. The scope was both widely used, sold to other nations and copied. Of course, it would only be as good as the lenses on the end of it, but I used it to point out that if we had the best scope but without the lenses to see which way a vehicle was coming from, then we wouldn't even know if our scope worked properly - let alone be widely used, sold to and copied by the US, Soviets and Germans.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

animosity242,

GERMAN EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE

http://www.lexpev.nl/downloads/op1666germanexplosiveordnancevol.1.pdf

DICTIONARY OF EXPLOSIVES, AMMUNITION AND WEAPONS (German Section)

http://www.scribd.com/doc/34026872/Dictionary-of-Explosives-Ammunition-and-Weapons-German-Section-USA-1958

GERMAN EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE (Later Edition)

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA376695

STANDARD ORDNANCE ITEM CATALOGUE, Vol 3

http://www.scribd.com/doc/13810984/Standard-Ordnance-Items-Catalog-1944-Vol-3

These should keep you out of mischief in the short term. Also, this thread has a great deal of material on German and Italian antitank projectiles, their explosive fills, lethality and so forth.

Regards,

John Kettler

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  • 2 years later...

I'm familiar with the usual artillery shell and bomb burst situations, where the item balloons before the case disintegrates into a cloud of variously sized fragments, but am pretty sure I've never seen any high speed imagery of APHE detonation. With the burster charge in the base and the case walls much thicker than for standard HE, I'd imagine the phenomenology would be somewhat different.

Regards,

John Kettler

 

I found this discussion while looking for details of Soviet MD-5 or MD-8 fuses used in their APHE shells. 

 

During further research in a book about Russian artillery ammo I found an illustration of APHE shells fragmentation (Cech 37mm and German 50mm ones) which may help to imagine what kind of fragmentation can be expected from typical HE burster:

 

Fragments_wrnwwex.jpg

 

Regards!

 

Sorry about digging out this thread from the abyss ;).

Edited by Amizaur
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Amizaur,

 

Absolutely no problem. My thanks for showing me some grog goodies I'd not seen before. b certainly shows how thick APHE shell walls have to be to withstand the immense compressive forces which occur on impact and thereafter. Recommend you post the link to this discussion over at CMRT, where I suspect quite a few will find the thread of interest--and that's without the new pics!

 

Regards,

 

John Kettler

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