From my understanding against open topped vehicles RPGs don’t do THAT much damage since they rely on burning a hole through the armor and then inflicting casualties from shrapnel that comes from the penetration. A hit on the door of a normal pickup truck would kill/injure the driver but the truck itself would still work unless it hit the engine directly.
There’s video of a Ukrainian RPG hitting a Russian open top truck carrying soldiers in the back, the rocket seems to impact the passenger side door. The drivers cabin is full of smoke and the truck slowly comes to a stop but the truck still seems fully capable of being driven and all the soldiers in the back seem fine and dismount after the truck stops.
To kill equipment, rather than people, they used to use “anti-matériel rifles”, as the name says. The Wiki lists a number of modern variants. Typical cartridges are 12.7, 14.5, and 20mm and can accommodate explosives, armor-piercing cores, incendiaries, or combinations of these.
As suggested, though, it should be sufficient to take out the unarmoured men.
An RPG is a one-shot, unguided weapon with a range of around 300 meters that typically requires the operator to expose themselves so as to have an unobstructed line of sight to their target and not injure themselves or anyone around them with the back-blast from the weapon.
The technical isn’t an APC or tank. If they are smart they will be shooting at you from a thousand meters away with an .50 M2 Browning machinegun or Oerlikon 20mm antiaircraft gun or whatever heavy weapon they bolted to the bed.
Unless I’m already in close, I think I’d prefer to go with a long rifle. Ideally a .50 A50 or Barrett anti-materiel rifle.
If they have 1000 meters of visibility, of course. Most battlefields aren’t chessboards. If the terrain or cover (buildings, trees and so on) allow it, an attacker with the RPG will hope to get as close as possible to the technical before exposing himself, or even revealing himself. A range of 300 meters is nice, but why not use it at 100?
In general, the assault element of an infantry unit will try to reduce the distance between themselves and the enemy as much as they can before engaging. If you can get right on top of the enemy before they have a clear shot at you, terrific. Infantry has no business fighting at greater than 500 meters for the suppression element, 200 meters for the assault elements.
My brother has an AR-15 in 5.56. Once when shooting with a friend we shot it at the friends silhouette targets that he uses for his .22.
1/4" steel. The 5.56 went right through it. While it probably wouldn’t do much damage to an engine block after having to penetrate the fenders, I suspect it would otherwise make quick work of a civilian vehicle.
Punching a hole into a vehicle just gives you a vehicle with a hole in it. Unless the vehicle in question is a blimp, I don’t see how that causes much of a problem.
Aren’t most light truck engine blocks cast aluminum these days with steel cylinder inserts? Not easily penetrated by any means, but certainly not as challenging as cast iron.
A vehicle with a hole in the radiator will overheat and ruin instelf in just a few minutes unless you shut it off. A vehicle with hole in door or window may also have a driver with a hole in it.
Well, that depends on the type of engine you’re shooting at and whether you hit anything a 5.56 can damage after passing through sheet metal, suspension parts, etc. A 5.56 may be more than a .22LR in mass and powder charge, but you’re going to have to get lucky and hit a pretty fragile part of a gas engine (distributor or coil on an older one, ecm or somehow take out all the coil packs on a modern one, fuel system or all the ancillaries on either), or hit the pump of a diesel. It’s not damaging the block or the valve train appreciably on either, even if it’s exposed for some reason.
7.62/.30 cal has a much better chance of penetrating the block and locking the engine. A 12.5/.50 cal crew-served machine gun is almost certain to, even after passing through the body and most suspension parts.
To clarify, I’m not really arguing that you can’t stop a vehicle with 5.56, but it would be less work and be more sure to succeed with a larger round. 5.56 is controversial for large game, so I wouldn’t really want it for hunting vehicles.
The average car has 30 to 50 different computers, and high-end cars have as many as 100, and they’re accompanied by 60 to 100 different electronic sensors.
These modules and sensors are far more fragile than an engine block so the shrapnel from a round shattering on the block is a second chance to take something critical out.
A bricked fuel injector control unit will mission kill a vehicle just as effectively as a cracked crank shaft.
Yes, but as I said before, those components are small. You’re going to have to be very lucky to hit one through the body of the truck. Also, only one or two of the modules (e.g. ECM) is going to actually stop the vehicle’s engine. Everything else is pretty much going to just generate a warning light, not stop the vehicle.
Your “average car” with 30 to 50 computers is astonishingly unlikely to be used as a technical by Russian forces in Ukraine. Surely we’re looking at something more like whatever the eastern bloc equivalent of the Toyota Hilux is. While I’m not at all familiar with Russian pickups, it seems unlikely to me that they’re chock-a-block with sophisticated electronics.
True, but the engine’s death from penetration of the radiator is generally a slow affair. It’s entirely possible that the vehicle will escape to a place it can repair itself if the radiator is your target. Heck, if that’s the measure, you don’t even need a .22LR. You can take a vehicle out with a .177 pellet gun.
This is one time when the accuracy of an AK in the hands of a maybe not that good a marksman is a Good Thing. Spray a Toyota pickup with 20 rounds from an AK and unless you are extremely unlucky, you will break it. Or the persons therein. Or both.
I somewhat disagree. Not all AKs are the same. Many are chambered for 7.62, but increasingly they’re a 5.56 rifle. As I’ve said before, a 7.62 is much better at damaging machinery than a 5.56. Both are pretty much equally good at killing the occupants, but the larger round is more likely to stop the vehicle and kill the operators. 12.5/.50 is really what you’d want to use, and you’d want to be throwing as much of it as you can.