Of modern tanks and their ammo + others...

[urefinger]

Just recently i picked up a copy of jane's guide to AFV's or something similair and it struck me just how many modern MBT's still carry HEAT rounds...now i had assumed that the only use for heat rounds was in tanks with very low muzzle velocities (e.g. infantry support halftracks (german) or MBT's like the churchill) as the muzzle velocity makes very little difference to a HEAT shell - if any at all - but it would appear that comparitivly modern MBT's like the german leopard still carry it. the ammo storage is something like 12 HE 18 APFSDS-T (armour-piercing-fin-stabilised-discarding-sabot-tracer) and 6 HEAT

now, the ONLY possible reason I can think of for these MBT's to be carrying around HEAT rounds when they've got APFSDS to fire out of there nice 6 metre long 120mm guns is that APFSDS sabot rounds lose their momentum quite quickly over long distances (im sure we all know the equasion M=WxV) and so when firing at the maximum range of the gun, the gunner might choose to load heat knkowing that the amount of energy lost from the tungsten projectile would be so great it would fail to penentrate the armour. What do you think? any other theories (my friend suggested that seeing as HEAT rounds effectivly melt armour (they burn through it) if you hit an enemy tank that was inpenentrable to normal kinetic energy rounds twice in the same place with HEAT you might get through seeing as the metal is already very weakend)

also - I've noticed a lot of tanks including right-up-to-the-minute ones e.g. the brittish challenger tank (and possibly the american abrahams - but information on that little bugger is still clasified) carry HESH rounds (high-explosive-squash-head) that - and im not entirely sure here can someone check this out? - supposedly STICK to the armour, or splatter against it if you prefer. And then detonate blowing chunks off the internal armour which then bounces around the crew cabin...but why carry this round? is it effective against the armour that the tanks rounds could'nt penentrate with the idea being "if you cant get through it's armour then you can at least try and kill its crew" i imagine it'd take a bloody big shell to pentrate 200mm of armour but i can imagine about 5 pounds of shaped charge blowing bits of metal off the inside wall (especially if the armour was thick but brittle)

any thoughts on anything i just raised - try to put it in laymans terms plz

also - has ANYBODY made or is working on a mod to allow us to use modern untis (especially MBT's) in cmbb battles or is this not possible due to a lot of countries still having the armour of their tanks classified an so on? i can imagine nothing better than cmbb EXCEPT cmbb with t72's, challengers, leopards, abrahams etc etc etc

thanks in advance for taking the time to read and to reply.

[ng cavscout]

I can think of 2 factors causing modern tanks to carry HEAT rounds.

1, cost, I think the heat round is significantly cheaper than a DU SABOT round, and why use sabot when heat will work?

2, some targets would be better affected by Heat than by sabot, such as some lightly armored APC's, the sabot might cut right through, without enough energy being dumped in the target to kill it. This sounds silly, but I heard guys coming back from gulf war 1, saying that when faced with a BMP, if you only used AP, (kind of like sabot for the 25mm on the bradley), the bmp would keep fighting, because the rounds went right through one side, the troop in the way, and back out the other side, so you might kill some troops, but the vehicle would still be alive. What they recommended was lacing the back part of the IFV with AP, to rupture and spill the fuel cells, then give it a burst of HE to light the fuel and kill the BMP.

Just my 22 cents worth.

[Redwolf]

For one thing, the HEAT rounds serve as dual-purpose anti-personnel rounds in tanks that carry no HE, e.g. all current US tanks AFAIK.

Also, HEAT causes considerably more damage inside a vehicle than the ADPS dart. Especially for vehicles with lots of space inside, as opposed to be totally stuffed with hydraulic-driven mechanisms, ammo and fuel, a HEAT hit is prefferable, e.g. on APCs and scout cars.

[Robert Isenberg]

HEAT rounds only use something like under 20% of it's energy to form the jet that pushes the armor out of the way and causes the armor to flow like a liquid out of the jets way into the vehicle

the rest of the energy still acts as an HE round less the energy for the jet

also velocity does effect the penatration of a Heat round the faster it travels the more it disrupts the jet so HEAT rounds are shot at lower velocities and arc more their flight characteristics are very different from a long rod penatrators to the point of there being different setting for the gunner to use

luckly it is just the flip of a switch

and the loader says what round he loaded is up

HESH was primarily designed to punch holes in fortified structures causing the spalling to injure or kill the defenders it also works well against vehicles that do not have spaced armor like earlier soviet tanks

Originally posted by urefinger:

Just recently i picked up a copy of jane's guide to AFV's or something similair and it struck me just how many modern MBT's still carry HEAT rounds...now i had assumed that the only use for heat rounds was in tanks with very low muzzle velocities (e.g. infantry support halftracks (german) or MBT's like the churchill) as the muzzle velocity makes very little difference to a HEAT shell - if any at all - but it would appear that comparitivly modern MBT's like the german leopard still carry it. the ammo storage is something like 12 HE 18 APFSDS-T (armour-piercing-fin-stabilised-discarding-sabot-tracer) and 6 HEAT

now, the ONLY possible reason I can think of for these MBT's to be carrying around HEAT rounds when they've got APFSDS to fire out of there nice 6 metre long 120mm guns is that APFSDS sabot rounds lose their momentum quite quickly over long distances (im sure we all know the equasion M=WxV) and so when firing at the maximum range of the gun, the gunner might choose to load heat knkowing that the amount of energy lost from the tungsten projectile would be so great it would fail to penentrate the armour. What do you think? any other theories (my friend suggested that seeing as HEAT rounds effectivly melt armour (they burn through it) if you hit an enemy tank that was inpenentrable to normal kinetic energy rounds twice in the same place with HEAT you might get through seeing as the metal is already very weakend)

also - I've noticed a lot of tanks including right-up-to-the-minute ones e.g. the brittish challenger tank (and possibly the american abrahams - but information on that little bugger is still clasified) carry HESH rounds (high-explosive-squash-head) that - and im not entirely sure here can someone check this out? - supposedly STICK to the armour, or splatter against it if you prefer. And then detonate blowing chunks off the internal armour which then bounces around the crew cabin...but why carry this round? is it effective against the armour that the tanks rounds could'nt penentrate with the idea being "if you cant get through it's armour then you can at least try and kill its crew" i imagine it'd take a bloody big shell to pentrate 200mm of armour but i can imagine about 5 pounds of shaped charge blowing bits of metal off the inside wall (especially if the armour was thick but brittle)

any thoughts on anything i just raised - try to put it in laymans terms plz

also - has ANYBODY made or is working on a mod to allow us to use modern untis (especially MBT's) in cmbb battles or is this not possible due to a lot of countries still having the armour of their tanks classified an so on? i can imagine nothing better than cmbb EXCEPT cmbb with t72's, challengers, leopards, abrahams etc etc etc

thanks in advance for taking the time to read and to reply.

[fridericus]

hi

the leopard 2 doesnt carry he, only some heat. reasons for heat are explained allready.

and hesh wa re-introduced for kosovo. the serbians drove around with old t34 and t55 and in firing a ke on this its whole waste of it, hesh is enough. its also taken for fortified posisiton like houses or atg-foxholes.

[MikeyD]

The Russian T72 and its many later iterations also carry dual-purpose fin-stabilized HEAT rounds. It does make sense. Just add a copper funnel and stand-off fuze to the front of your HE round and Voila -- you've got HEAT! I believe some dual purpose HEAT also have pre-fragmented cases so you've got a versatile HE/HEAT/frag combo. That means as long as you've got ammo left in your tank you've still got some anti-tank capability. Gone are the days when a Panther rounds a corner just after you've fired your last AP round.

The closest to 'modern war' you could probably get with CMBB is playing Lend-Lease 76mm gun Shermans versus captured German T34-85s and making believe you're in Korea in '51.

[ July 11, 2003, 02:35 PM: Message edited by: MikeyD ]

[Lumbergh]

Originally posted by redwolf:

Also, HEAT causes considerably more damage inside a vehicle than the ADPS dart. Especially for vehicles with lots of space inside, as opposed to be totally stuffed with hydraulic-driven mechanisms, ammo and fuel, a HEAT hit is prefferable, e.g. on APCs and scout cars.

Would not a penetrating hit of DU SABOT be catastrophic? Doesn't the uranium dust ignite inside the tank or something really nasty (not to mention breathing uranium dust or contaminating the inside of a vehicle with uranium dust)?

I'd give more weight to the "it explodes" and the "it's cheap" explanations...

[ng cavscout]

The Uranium in DU rounds isn't radioactive. And even if it was, it would take too long to harm personnel to be battlefield effective. I wouldn't want to breathe it myself, but as for battlefield usage, it isn't toxic enough, nor would it act fast enough to make it tactically decisive.

[MikeyD]

I believe I read somewhere that of 30 or so people assigned to clean up expended DU ammo after the first Gulf War 3/4 of them were already dead. I can think of lots of substances that aren't radioactive that I wouldn't want strewn across the countryside for the next 5,000 years. DU is one of them.

[ng cavscout]

What I meant was that for battlefield usage, if it is the DU that kills people, it isn't fast enough. I do hope they do more studies and if it is toxic like that, then I hope they find something else to use. I wouldn't count on it though, seems that money is more important than our soldiers.

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by NG cavscout:

The Uranium in DU rounds isn't radioactive. And even if it was, it would take too long to harm personnel to be battlefield effective. I wouldn't want to breathe it myself, but as for battlefield usage, it isn't toxic enough, nor would it act fast enough to make it tactically decisive.

Unfortunately this is a lie.

The depleted uranium used for the rounds for not radiate much compared to undeleted uranium and the rounds are reasonably safe to handle while they are intact.

However, on impact on a tank some the it scatters to dust and the radioactivity around the hole is very noticable, and since it is dust people can absorb the material into their lungs.

German TV did a nice trick on an US army engineer. They used a Geiger counter on a knocked out T-55, the Geiger counter clearly showing substancial radioactivity around the impact point. The next day, a US engineer group would arrive to tow the knocked out tank and they asked them whether they knew that this was actually radioactive and why he wouldn't wear protection.

Having gone through the same training as you (if I may assume), he replied there would be no radioactivity. Sufficient to say, he was very very irritated when they showed him the video made the day before.

Have a web lookup on investigations on DU impacts in youguslavia 1999. And those were the tiny ones from the A-10s.

The radioactivity is only low enough to handle it in a package, and AFAIK the US army does not allow anybody to handle knocked out enemy tanks without ABC protection.

[ng cavscout]

Thank you for the clarification. I knew that we are supposed to use NBC gear when around expended DU munitions, but I didn't know about the test you referred to.

I, once again, was referring to the battlefield use of DU, and it's radioactive properties, as crew killers for AFV's, and I still hold that it acts too slowly to be effective. (In a tactical sense. As a terror weapon, or as a environmental hazard, it could be very dangerous).

[MikeyD]

Ah! You just reminde me of an Army report I stumbled across some time ago on DU. It said the M1 Abram's driver was subject to higher doses of radiation than the rest of the crew due to the common practice of driving with the turret reversed, putting the DU ammo inches above the driver's head!

DU's radiation may not have an immediate impact, but I was under the (perhaps false) impression the heavy metal was in fact a nasty poison like that other heavy metal Arsenic.

[ July 11, 2003, 05:27 PM: Message edited by: MikeyD ]

[ng cavscout]

BTW, I may of been mistaken, or misinformed, but I was not lying.

[Redwolf]

Yes, the radioactivity is by far not enough to affect the enemy crew during a fight.

For the record, AFAIK, it was this engineer's fault, not the US army's, that he fitted the towing cable on the T-55 with his nose 2 feet from the impact point of the DU round.

EDIT: NG, I wasn't implying you were lying, but a lot of high profile bozos do (but as I said, not really those in the field).

[ July 11, 2003, 05:27 PM: Message edited by: redwolf ]

[emodin-]

On the subject of HEAT/long rod penetrators, my (limited) understanding of why there is a mixed load also has to do with the way armor innovations have developed over the past few decades. Specifically, the "regular" Abrams tank is better at protection from HEAT rounds than from long-rod penetrators (solid shot rounds), while there is a version of the Abrams that sacrifices some of it's protection against HEAT rounds for protection against long-rod penetrators. (All of my info curtosy of Clancy's non-fiction book "Armored Cav")

As a side note on HEAT rounds, there was an article I found on the net (and yes, that makes it instantly suspect) that went on to state that the British were developing a system that would render HEAT rounds inneffective. IIRC, the system basically involved a capacitor hooked to two conducting lines running through the armor of the tank. One of the conducting lines would be towards the exterior of the armor while the other would be closer to the interior (but still meshed INSIDE the overall armor package). The idea was that when a HEAT round (which is basically a jet stream of copper) penetrated through the first conducter and then into the second one, the capacitor would release the stored up charge, sending a huge amount of electricity instantly through the HEAT round, hopefully depleting or destroying most of it instantly.

A really cool idea, if it's true. But, as in all things involving warfare, someone will figure out a way to defeat it if it actually exhists.

[SgtMuhammed]

The new armor package on the M1 doesn't sacrifice HEAT effectivness to combat kenetic rounds. It adds a layer of DU to the mix to make it more effective. It doesn't take from but adds to.

[SirReal]

I'm sure a grog can correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that a DU round is radioactive, and is also pyrophoric. That means that the metal will catch on fire during the penetration, and the interior of the target will be filled with bits and pieces of burning uranium. This is not a good thing.

/SirReal

[Denwad]

*sigh*

Same problem in WWIIOL, take a FlaK 36 and shoot a panhard with AP, and odds are that it'll keep driving if you don't hit a crew member or other vitals. Use HE, and the concussion will mash the crew members and destroy vital components (tires, fuel,etc...)

Thin armor (BMP frontal ~25mm or something like that) will allow high velocity penetrators to pass through with minimal spalling, as there is little armor to spall.

[urefinger]

thanks for all your replies, i really didnt expect such a good response.

what im getting here is that a heat round - when it works - can be far more effective i.e. produce a better penentration than a APFSDS round. i still think that if an abrahams came up against e.g. a t72 it would shoot it with APFSDS to make SURE they got a penentration (faaaaar worse that a heat round simply bounces off and you only alert the enemy to your prescense)but i heat round might say, be used againt tank that was already shocked or knocked out by AP to "brew it up" or used against APC's as a more effective - and cheaper round? (that was a fairly long question ) i really dont see its use as HE my uncle who was actually IN the armoured says it has practicly NO anti-infantry effect (when watching a program about the sas he likened it to "a flashbang"...

but what about HESH - is it actually a anti-fortification round? or what? im pretty dam sure its an anti armour round too and if so, why? (uncle refused to comment because he never fired it or heard of it)

I really dont think the designers of the depleted uranium round had any thought of the radioactivity being the prime reason for its manufacture, during the course of a battle the contaminated crew would'nt be impaired by it at all and provided they didnt say, spend the next three days in the tank, would probably survive.

thanks again and any other genral information on tank ammo is appreciated...

sometimes when i see a t34 brew up on cmbb it makes me quite sad as i remember the tale that my uncle recounted to me about having to listen to his driver and friend mark williams burn to death in his tank... we should take a moment to rember tankers all over the world who died like this.

[YankeeDog]

A couple of additional points, in no particular order:

- Depleted uranium, especially when pulverized into a fine dust, is dangerous even if there is little or no residual radioactivity in the metal (and yes, there is always at least some residual radioactivity in DU). Uranium, much like lead, is a heavy metal posion. If you inhale DU dust or handle DU without gloves for protracted periods of time, you are risking all sorts of bad health effects that have nothing to do with radiation. Overall, DU is nasty stuff, and long-term exposure, and especially inhalation of dust, is very bad.

- HESH has been used at various times as an Anti-armor round. For a given shell size, especially modern HEAT rounds are generally more effective, so HESH is now out of favor. HESH is also especially ineffective against reactive armor, as it relies on a slight delay between impact and detonation for its effect - reactive armor can use this time delay to literally blow the HESH round apart.

- As the Gulf War showed, the pyrophoric effects of long-rod DU penetrators can be quite dramatic and immediate, so I wouldn't necessarily say that APFSDS has trouble causing enough damage inside an AFV to knock it out. As correctly noted, though, light armor may not provide enough resistance to a DU penetrator to create said pyrophric effects - IOW, you may get a "through and through". From what I have seen from the Gulf War, though, APFSDS was generally a one-hit kill against Iraqi tanks, so much so that Abrahams crews referred to it as the 'silver bullet'.

As such I suspect there are three major reasons why M1s still carry HEAT in addition to APFSDS: (1) cost - HEAT is alot cheaper than DU, (2) utility - DU is virtually useless against infantry, and as noted, HEAT works pretty well against same, and (3) against light armor, HEAT might be somewhat more effective at attaining a first-round kill due to the extreme overpenetration of the APFSDS on such targets.

Cheers,

YD

[Mr. Tittles]

what would happen if a abrams tank fired a DU round up into a cave opening in one of those afganhi caves? would the round penetrate deeply into solid rock and then just flash over into flaming radioactive heavy metal particles?...

what about shooting up a nuclear reactor? DU think thats wise?

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by SirReal:

I'm sure a grog can correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that a DU round is radioactive, and is also pyrophoric. That means that the metal will catch on fire during the penetration, and the interior of the target will be filled with bits and pieces of burning uranium. This is not a good thing.

It just occured to me that enriched U-238 would make a damn effective round

[John Kettler]

DU is pyrophoric. AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY

magazine some years ago had a cover photo of a GAU-8 (A-10 30mm gun) being static fired on the Eglin AFB gunnery range against an M-41 tank tipped onto its side. The rounds smashed through the roof and exited the floor, trailing a spectacular shower of sparks. Imagine trying to breathe with the fireworks inside the tank, setting everything combustible on fire.

Any finely divided metal is poisonous, let alone a radioactive one. DU particles in direct contact with lung tissue are enormously carcinogenic, and the radiation migrates once there. Sad to say, the U.S. Army knew years before Gulf I that powdered DU in/around AFV wrecks constituted a severe hazard to the troops, but the Army didn't warn its soldiers. A Google search on depleted uranium will turn up all sorts of stuff (try www.gulfwarvets.com), and physicist Michio Kaku wrote a book, titled METAL OF DISHONOR, on the sordid DU saga.

As for HESH against armor, it worked great on monobloc (as opposed to composite) armor. Think of a big chunk of plastic explosive detonating directly in contact with the armor. The resulting shock wave propagates through the armor to the inner wall, where it rips part of said wall off and sends it flying about the interior. I've seen post combat interior photos of a T-55 hit in the turret by HESH. The shot tore loose a pie sized plate which carved effortlessly right through several feet of radio and no doubt the turret's occupants.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

John Kettler

[ July 13, 2003, 08:20 AM: Message edited by: John Kettler ]

[flamingknives]

* HESH is still used by the British army in the Challenger 2, as it's effect is not adversely affected by spin, as in rifling. Hence it has better long range accuracy than a smoothbore fired round.

The shaped charge effect is degraded by spin, as is APFSDS, although the use of rotating collars on the sabot can negate this.

* AFAIK, ONLY the Challengers fire HESH these days, as pretty much everything else uses smoothbore guns, and hence have HEAT for their DP/HE rounds.

* HESH shouldn't set off ERA until the round detonates. ERA would work, however, as it would not tranmsmit the shockwave. Simple composite armour is as effective, if not more so.

* The more recent Soviet tanks mounting the 125mm gun can fire APFSDS, gun launched missiles (AT11, I think) and HE-Frag, which is a pure anti-personnel weapon, not a shaped charge

* The electric armour is being worked on by the British Defence Science and Technology Laboratories (DSTL, the successor to DERA). Don't know if it actually works.