Generally, no. The commander, gunner and driver have every form of optical sight you can imagine, but naturally terrain and other obstructions make these null and void. On whether you can sneak up on a tank or not depends on the terrain: a good tank commander trying to merely survive from ground based assault will probably choose lowland terrain, open enough to make him difficult to sneak up on but with enough elevated features that he can hide his tank hull down.
The vanilla Abrams has three machine guns: the commander has an M2 in front of his hatch, the loader has an M240 in front of his and the gunner can control another M240 on a coaxial mount from inside the turret. Naturally, the former two put their users in harm’s way. The M2 can either be replaced by the TUSK remote controlled platform, or by a M134 minigun. I don’t think any of these can be aimed skin close to the tank, on the other hand I expect that the driver would dispatch any infantry at that range.
I’m not sure I added much to the thread, but my €0.0.2 =)
May I respectfully submit that, in honor of its namesake, the proposed Chamberlain be designed with a gigantic ring bayonet attachment for the main gun?
I was thinking of some kind of foam canister that would expand and cover the tank in a pile of sticky messy foam. Pretty much make the tank operationally useless I’d think.
Based on replies and posted links, I’m going to propose that a 25mm gun (especially a rotary weapon like the GAU-12) is going to be in the category of “can’t be blithely ignored” by the tank crew.
If you’re an infantryman, the main gun isn’t your main concern - the coax machine gun is the weapon of choice for soft targets. To quote an old instructor of mine, if an enemy tank commander fires his main gun at you, he’s paying you a huge compliment, because things are not going his way.
Anyway, apart from the million-to-one chances, you’re going for a mobility kill. Man-portable shaped-charge weapons - AT84, one of the updated Carl Gustav rounds, something of that nature - can disable a modern tank if fired at rear or top armor. Fire a volley of 2 or 3, if you have them - only you won’t. If a tank commander is dumb enough to get in situation where you can sneak up on him with a charge of 10 pounds or more of HE (and get away), that’s a viable plan as well. (Not a good plan. Any plan assuming the enemy is stupid is a bad plan.) My old field manuals consider anything less than that basically pointless as regards stopping a tank. (Keeping the crew disoriented and unable to see the situation may still be a worthwhile use of the old Molotov.)
As an old infantryman, I still maintain the very best way to fight enemy tanks is to have them run over anti-tank mines that I put down 2 days ago and 10 miles away.
There is one incident of an Abrams rupturing the main gun due to an obstruction. The tank ingested a large branch while maneuvering through the woods. The barrel ruptured when fired at the target station.
I don’t believe Mythbusters did the first TV testing of the “finger-in-barrel” method of gun stoppage. My candidate is the dynamic duo of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny in “Rabbit Rampage” (1955). I humbly bow to earlier cites of course.
I was reading an autobiography of a Canadian forward observer for the artillery in WWII. He commented that they would frequently call in salvos on german tanks, not so much to destroy the tank but to force the infantry supporting the tanks to run off. The tank would follow soon after, as the tank commanders did not like being close to Canadian infantry when they had no infantry support of their own.
Unless he’s shooting a XM1028 120mm Canister Tank Cartridge at you. Effectively that ammo turns the main gun into a giant shotgun. It is specifically meant as an anti-infantry ammunition.
One of these is supposed to have damaged an M1 and taken out the frontal arc of a Challenger, so probably qualifies as the smallest man portable ranged weapon that can be expected to have a chance to take one out if enough shots can be fired at it, particularly from the side or rear.
That reminds me of a conversation on a sci-fi board about that scene, which led to someone linking to a tank forum. The tank guys were talking about how weak that made those scout walkers compared to a modern tank, and mentioned an incident in Europe where a tank was hit by a train. The train was derailed, the tank lost its treads, but the tank was otherwise undamaged. Logs won’t cut it. If you think about it, trying to destroy a tank with logs is a lot like trying to crush a walnut with marshmallows - wood’s a lot softer than tank armor.
That strikes me as one of those cool ideas that’s impossible to pull off. That many magnets would be extremely bulky, heavy (you’d want magnetized steel or something similar, since lighter & softer magnets would just get crunched to dust) and they’d cling to each other too. Basically, you’d have to pile them in a huge heap and hope the tank decided to drive over them.
A friend who served on M48s in Vietnam did this too. They called it ‘back scratching’.
There are dead zones (no pun intended) near a tank where the tank’s armament cannot depress enough to engage infantry. Some WW2 tanks used to have gun ports so the crew could engage close infantry, and the Germans had a close-in defensive weapon system on some tanks (Nahverteidigungswaffe) which could be used against infantry. I don’t know that such systems are in use in modern vehicles.
If a tank lacks outside support (such as infantry), and infantry can get close, they can kill a tank. The Russians, who should have known better, learned this the hard way in Grozny in '94 when they sent armor unsupported by infantry into the city. The launched multiple anti-tank weapons into the sides, rear, and tops of the T-72s and BMPs from upper stories and rooftops, and the Russians couldn’t elevate their guns high enough to retaliate.
Any band going after a tank with light weapons in the op’s scenario is likely to score a mobility kill first. After that, it’s only a matter of time before the ‘bunker’ is taken out. The crew only has so much ammo, and so much gas, to power their systems.
Second the movie The Beast. Loved that one. It’s about a lost T-55 in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation that is being pursed by a band of mujahadeen. The crew is struggling with decreasing fuel and ammo supplies as they try to escape. George Dzundas, from Law and Order, is the Soviet tank commander.
Wouldn’t a Molotov cocktail impair their vision? I mean fire suppression system aside that can’t last forever and its not like they are hard to make or use. I think a barrage of them would eventually suffocate the crew or blind the tank to the point it wont move
Oh, it’s a short-lived compliment, all right. Canister rounds weren’t around back when I wore green. Most tanks will still prefer to engage at longer distances. Interestingly, tank crews in counterinsurgency have started to use a sabot round that breaks up on impact to take out snipers and point targets - because it is safer for whatever noncombatants may be around.
