Sherman 76 shatter gap, tungsten sucks, etc

[ww2steel]

Okay- main question: why does the Sherman 76's tungsten round suck so bad? Generally the tungsten ammo gets what, a 60% increase in penetration at 100m, 0°? How come it only goes from 123 to 131mm average penetration? Is the APCBC that good, or does the tungsten just suck? I see that the tungsten is on par with the 76L42 round, so maybe the APCBC just is really good. (I see that it is on par with the 85mm.)

Next, the APCBC for the Sherman. I see that it suffers horrible shatter gap problems that seem to be slightly worse in the 43-44 ammo. (Extensive testing shows 10% less Panther casualties at 300m than 100m or 500m, all of these figures raising only about 3% with the '45 ammo.) Why is this so bad? I see that it is going faster than the 76L42 ammo. Is that the only reason, or did the Russians just make horrible ammo for the Sherman 76? (I assume the Soviets made in-house ammo, right?)

I sure could use the help of the ammo/ ballistics/ armor experts on this one.

Thanks in advance for the input,

Mike

[ww2steel]

I finally finished this chart (took about 10 hours!):

Here's a cool graph showing the shatter gap of the early ammo at 300m and what appears to be another slight one at 500m for the later ammo. Interestingly, the M4s also take higher casualties with the later ammo, presumably because they are slightly more likely to continue to fight when becoming paniced instead of popping smoke.

Obviously the best effecitiveness for the Panther will be at longer ranges, and where a shatter gap is present.

This graph complies 1665 tested vehicle pairs, or 3330 tanks.

Mike

[ July 02, 2006, 01:51 PM: Message edited by: ww2steel ]