Different types of artillery? (somewhat Ukraine related)

Hi there,

the pictures/vid’s of stranded (out of gas?) or broken down russian tanks in the Ukraine had me thinking if in a worst case scenario the turret of a broken down tank could be converted into a (stationary) artillery piece?

or are there any truely differently types of artillery (speaking from a balistic POV) … eg FLAK (anti-aero) vs. Tank vs. artillery howitzer, etc…

I am aware that they will be tailored to the use case (eg. flac shooting lots and lots of rel. small caliber shells in short period of time) … but at the end of the day they are just obscenely expensive tubes that send out nasties on one end, or?

pls educate me

I suppose you could fire High Explosives out of them, but they really don’t make good stationary artillery pieces, especially if they are broken down. The gun doesn’t elevate high enough, so you need to get them on an inclined hill to make them effective. Then there is the fact that the main gun and ammo just isn’t designed for this job. It wouldn’t be as powerful or as accurate as actual artillery.

Plus, Russia has a LOT of artillery that is designed to do the job. The best thing (and what the Russians will be doing) is to get units out to recover disabled equipment, get it back to centralized areas and basically fix them, or strip them for parts if nothing else.

Trying to do what you suggest would definitely not be an optimal use for the system, as it’s not what tanks are designed to do and they wouldn’t’ be very good in this role.

Not very useful. Tanks lacks the integrated network dedicated to artillery support + the gun cannot be elevated high enough to achieve ballistic trajectory (except if you put it on a slope) + main ammunition will be AP rounds of various types, but not adapted to indirect fire + if engine is broken, you may be unable to turn the turret or even charge a round for lack of power. As XT said, better to repair or bury it and use it as a bunker. Some panzer did that en '45.

With luck, maybe they can be converted into Ukrainian playground equipment in the near future.

Let us hope so.

your post seems to address some of my Qs in my second paragraph:

what are AP shells, what is indirect fire … how is a - say - 85mm cannon of a tank different than a 85mm cannon of a stationary piece of artillery? or is it just the “accessories”?

thx for sharing your thoughts

The first thing to consider is that the gun barrel that you see pivots and is balanced with a long section that is mainly the gun breech and loading mechanism inside the turret. When the barrel goes up, the breech moves down. Given the tank is designed to be as low as possible there is a limit to how high the barrel can go before the breech hits the floor.

Some of the footage you’ll see is of self-propelled artillery, which is essentially field guns on tank chassis. They are very different to tanks - they sacrifice low height to get that essential elevation, less crew protection and, because they are firing well beyond sight, are linked together into coordinated firing networks rather than roaming over the landscape.

Tank guns are optimised to fight tanks, with AP [armour piercing] shells, firing directly in a flat trajectory aiming for a killer hit first time. Indirect fire is when you shoot up hoping it lands where you want it to.

AP means “Armor piercing.” Tank ammunition generally fires ammunition specifically designed to punch through armor. There are several types; tanks can fire solid slugs called sabot, which are hardened and basically just huge bullets (anything inside will be incinerated; the sheer kinetic energy will set things on fire) or they can fire ammunition specifically designed to project explosive force through a very small area of the target; this is usually called HEAT.

These ammunitions are unsuitable for use as general purpose artillery, which is usually just high explosive.

Tank guns also are not designed to be aimed this way. They are line of sight, pointed directly at the intended target; that is “direct fire.” Artillery is networked into a system to allow it to be fired at things beyond visual range, a location on the map; that is “indirect fire.”

Typically tanks use “guns”, which are high velocity, relatively flat shooting cannons. They fire APFSDS (armor piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot), HEAT (high explosive anti tank), beehive/canister (think giant shotgun shell filled with either balls or darts) and HE (high explosive). The 120mm gun in the M1 Abrams can have a muzzle velocity in the ballpark of 5000 ft/s or 1524 m/s.

Artillery these days typically are howitzers, which are cannons designed to fire at high angles for plunging fire. They’re usually larger in bore diameter than tank guns - 155mm is a common size for NATO, and 122/152 are common Russian ones.

Anti aircraft artillery is typically either missiles or automatic cannons of 57mm or less. They might have armor piercing rounds for occasional ground use, but they’re not very penetrative.

One reason that tanks wouldn’t make good artillery is because the ammo is not at all optimized for that task. For example, a 155mm HE round is 46.7 kg, 10.8kg of which is explosive. By comparison, a 120mm HE shell fired from a tank gun is 11 kg with 3 kg of explosive.

Back during WWII, it wasn’t uncommon for guns to be adapted for various tasks- the famous German 88mm gun was originally an anti-aircraft gun, but it turned out that it had a high enough velocity to function as a fantastic anti-tank gun. Similarly, a lot of the early-war “heavy” anti-tank guns for several countries were adapted WWI/post-war antiaircraft guns, like the US 3" gun M7, which was used on the M10 tank destroyer. Interestingly enough, the M7 was an adaptation of a quick-firing coastal defense gun from 1903.

Actually that’s more along the lines of the old AP/APBC ammo from early WWII. It was basically the same design concept as naval armor piercing ammunition- a big bullet, sometimes with a “ballistic cap” of softer metal to help the round not bounce off so easily.

“Sabot” is lingo for “armor piercing discarding sabot”- basically the gun fires a smaller, lighter projectile surrounded in a larger diameter less dense “sabot” that flies off, leaving the smaller, denser projectile to continue to the target and retain more velocity. The combination of a full-sized propellant charge and a lighter projectile mean that the rounds go faster and retain that velocity better than a full-bore round. Today’s sabot rounds are APFSDS- armor piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot. Basically a 120mm round that has a roughly 1" diameter projectile with a sabot that takes up the other 95mm. It’s essentially a 1" diameter, 2’ long dart with fins that goes 5000 feet per second, and is made of depleted uranium, or in some countries, tungsten carbide or maraging steel (less effective). They’re fiendishly effective relative to older types of rounds.

HEAT is high explosive anti-tank. (see @RickJay’s post and Wikipedia article).

HESH (high explosive squash head) is an older style- it consisted of a mass of plastic explosive that would spread on impact, and then when detonated, would send a massive shock wave through the armor and cause what’s called “spalling”, where pieces of armor are propelled off the backside of the armor at very high speed. It doesn’t technically penetrate, but does destroy the crew.

HVAP is also an older style- kind of a stepping stone between AP and APFSDC- it was a smaller diameter penetrator in a larger lightweight shell- so it had higher velocity than a regular AP shell, and had higher sectional density for the smaller penetrator. But it was still a full-diameter round, so they lost velocity faster than an AP round of the same diameter, even if they started with quite a bit more. HVAP was the US Army’s most effective kinetic anti-tank round of WWII.

I don’t believe anyone deploys this anymore.

I see the Russian tanks have flat squares draped over them which I assume are active armour, which explodes on impact to deflect kinetic or active armour piercing rounds?

I had a similar though to the OP, but it occurs to me you’d need the engine running at least, to drive the turret and the elevation of the barrel? Otherwise, I assume you’re stuck with where it was last pointed? I can’t imagine just the battery for the tank driving the aim for very long, assuming it could? Or are there manual controls for a multi-ton turret? (Yikes!)

Can you even load and fire one of those things manually? I was under the impression the whole load-aim-fire-eject would be automated nowadays, for rapid fire if not for any other reason. (I remember WWII footage of howitzer-type artillery(?) and the loading and moving the ejected shell casing - extremely hot, I assume - does not look like something you’d want to do in a cramped tank.)

Indians do.

there are quite a few vids on https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarReports/new/ that show how surprisingly basic those russian tanks/armored veh. are …

I do not expect a “Cadillac” interior in them, but most of what I have seen does not look too different of what I’d expect from a WWII tank interior …

I do not know how it all plays out today but in WWII the Soviet T-34 was famous for kinda being super basic.

The German counterparts were “better” tanks in fit-and finish and technical details where the T-34 was crude by comparison.

BUT…the T-34 worked. It had the features that mattered in protection and gun and its (relatively) crude design meant is was super repairable in the field. Its overall simple construction and design made it durable and reliable and fixable.

Also, it meant it was comparatively cheap to construct.

Put another way…basic does not mean “bad.” (necessarily)

From some of the reports, it sounds like the Russians are hesitant to get out of their tanks and APCs and do the necessary boot-work. Maybe the designers should have made the interiors even less comfortable.

Nobody uses HVAP either; I just covered all the bases of anti-tank shells, so that there was a little bit of context, and in case anyone sees any WWII or Cold War stuff, they have some frame of reference.

But for what it’s worth, the British still use HESH in the Challenger series tanks, and so does the Indian Arjun tank, because it uses the same main gun. There are HESH rounds still being produced for the venerable 105mm gun- Strykers can fire it, as can a lot of other vehicles.

And it’s still the primary round for demolition purposes (i.e. destroying pillboxes and fortifications), so armored engineer vehicles like the US M728 still carry them for the special 165mm short-barreled guns that they carry.

You can find pictures of WW2 Sherman tanks being used as indirect fire artillery, but they are: A) 75mm gun versions with a main gun originally designed as an artillery piece, B) all lined up in a specific location with artillery style aiming stakes placed in front of them, C) getting fire orders from a proper fire control team, and D) firing at the same time for maximum effect with multiple shells impacting the target at once. (Modern artillery can often fire several rounds in quick succession on slightly different trajectories so that they all hit the target at the same time for even better concentration of fire.) Trying to use a randomly broken down tank would be useless.

Actually, IIRC, US tanks were used in the Korean War in a similar fashion. That’s the last time I can recall tanks being used for indirect fire. They really aren’t suited to this role, and modern MBT are even less suited to it.

Also, there was a Sherman variant with a 105mm howitzer as its main gun, but it was generally used in the direct-fire role against field fortifications and the like.

And to answer the OP’s question somewhat, IIRC the Soviets for a while took obsolete tanks with worn-out engines and buried them hull-down as quickie field fortifications. They’d be sitting ducks against an opponent with modern weaponry and air superiority, but the Red Army generally felt that they would at least slow down or blunt an attack, or force attackers into better defensive terrain. Again, the gun in the turret would be used for direct rather than indirect fire.

I was a tanker for awhile so I’m not an expert but I have some knowledge.

The squares look like reactive armor. That’s different that an active system like Trophy. Reactive armor explodes when hit. It is supposed to make shaped charges blow early so they don’t blow a hole in the armor. It’s not effective against kinetic rounds.

I’ve never been in a Russian tank but the M1 has manual controls. You can spin the turret and move the gun manually without much problem. Of course all the technology that assists in aiming isn’t there for you.

Russians/Soviets have always been big on autoloaders. There tanks are tiny compared to a M1. Having one less crewman was important to them. I have no idea what that means to loading it in an emergency. Nothing good I’m sure.

The 105mm gun on the M1 had the big hot shell casings eject into the compartment and bounce around it wasn’t that big a deal but it could get crowded. They cool down very quickly. The 120mm gun has cellulose cased rounds that mostly burn up leaving just the aft cap.

As was told to me many years ago by a wise sergeant, hope is not a method. Artillery lands where it wants to because of math.