Nope.
I just watched it yesterday.
Oddly, when they welded a plug into the barrel it shot the plug out with minimal damage to the barrel.
When they stuffed mud into the barrel the end of the barrel shredded itself. You can see it here around the 8:15 mark.
re: the bit about an A-10 no longer being a threat to tanks. Whether or not the 30mm gun can penetrate a tank’s upper or lower armor (remember: The ground is hard, and bullets bounce. Fire enough of them just in front of or behind a vehicle, and you will bounce them up into the belly. The crews don’t like that much. :D), I’d be willing to bet that a Hellfire missile or a 2,000 lb JDAM will still ruin the tank crew’s day really quick. And they could do so before anybody told the tank crew that there was a fight on (effective range of a modern smart bomb is something like 30 miles. When you release it doing 600 knots from 30,000 feet up, that sucker has a while to glide before it smacks the ground.)
During Desert Storm, quite a few Iraqi T-72s found out that there was American armor nearby when Hellfires launched by M-2 Bradleys connected with them from a few miles out. Worth mentioning, that once the Hellfires are gone (they only carry a few of them on external launchers), the Bradleys become a lot less effective against tanks, although the 25mm Bushmaster will give the tank commander something to think about.
Also, while talking about .50 cal rounds and 20mm shells and 30mm shells, it’s worth noting that there is more to a bullet than how big across it is. A 30mm cannon round from an A-10’s Avenger cannon is rather long. A lot of its hitting force is from all that extra mass behind it compared to what a smaller, shorter round carries.
And while we’re talking about sneaking up on tanks and climbing all over them with potatos and cans of paint, remember that those things can move at a pretty good clip. You can try to jump onto the 70 ton tank while it’s rolling past at 30MPH, but I don’t think I want to watch.
But yeah, to disable a tank? You just need a couple of spikes on the ground, to blow out the tires on the fuel truck. 
Minor nitpicks to a bunch of interesting points you bring up: the Bradley will be firing TOW missiles, not Hellfires. Alternately, the Hellfires will be fired by the AH-64 Apache helicopter, not the Bradley. The wiki does support T-72 kills “at close range” by the Bradley’s 25 mm M242 utilizing M791 APDS-T ammunition with saboted tungsten penetrators.
I saw that movie in first release with a friend who was in the USMC. His disgust knew no bounds. He figured the USMC with 20th century weapons could have exterminated those “f*&@ing teddy bears” most ricky-tick and with few or no casualties of their own. The Imperial forces do seem to have uniformly lousy marksmanship and a penchant for fielding fighting vehicles that are the first word in both fragility and clumsiness.
Not Hellfires, TOW missiles are fired from Bradleys. These are wired guided with a range up to 3750 meters. In actual use during Desert Storm, the Bradley guys would pass off tank targets to the accompanying M1A1 tanks at extreme ranges. TOW missiles are nowhere as fast getting to the target as a sabot round from a 120mm cannon. The Bradley gunner (who would have to keep the crosshairs on target for the entire flight) did not want to see the target swiviling his main gun toward the Bradley while waiting for the TOW to get out to full range. Another factor (probably the biggest) was the visibility. It was howling rain/wind/smoke during a good part of the action (a real crappy winter). At extreme ranges, losing sight of the target in the smoke and rain meant a miss with a TOW. If the M1A1 had a fix in the sight, the target was going to be hit.
Might as well throw in an anecdoted from the war. I was in the G$/J4 ammo section. One function was to monitor different levels of certain ammo items. Iraq had around 5,000 armored vehicles (tanks, APCs, SP artillery, etc…). Based on the Ruskies invading West Germany, some planners had come up with a figure (pulled out of a butt as it turned out) that it would take 7 rounds of tank killing ammo to destroy a single armored vehicle. I guess they anticipated misses, repairable damage, defective ammo - who knows. So we tracked how many Hellfires, TOWs, 120mm sabot and HEAT rounds, Navy/Air Force laser/TV guided missiles, and Copperhead 155mm rounds (and some others munitions). Every Division commander assumed his forces would have to take on the entire Iraqi armored force; the Air Force A-10s, F-15/16s, B-52s would miss everything plus you couldn’t take their word actual damages, the artillery and MLRS rounds with the HEDP munitions wouldn’t do any damage, etc… for other justifications. We got up to a ratio of 43 tank killers/to each Iraqi armored vehicle before saner head turned off the pipeline. There were several fully loaded ammo ships floating around the gulf that just returned to the states with the cargo intact after the war. Actual kill ratio was less than two rounds to kill an armored vehicle. The A-10s were very effective after some fine tuning based on analysis of Iraqi deception practices, MLRS, B-52s, and artillery destroyed tanks/APCs just fine. Many US/Brit tank units hit 90% first round kills, I believe in the after action reports that every unit was above 60%. You just could not believe the amount of ammo leftover that had to be reprocessed and shipped back. I’ve got a bunch of other stories as well.
In spite of some claims above, the 30mm DU round from an A-10 will score mobility kills on any tank in existence. The rounds don’t bounce at the attack angle an A-10 will use. You just can’t protect the top and engines without a monster weight penality. It will outright kill anything from the Soviet era. The latest Russian tanks might not be completely destroyed but I’d place my bets on the A-10 still.
The T-72B turret roof has an equivelant to about 300mm of steel armor against kinetic energy penetrators, whereas the GAU-7 at 500m does about 70mm of penetration. It’s hard to get armor values for the top of the tank hull, but I doubt it drops below 70mm. You can get mobility kills (thrown tracks) and probably some engine kills if you hit an intake or something, but the A-10 hasn’t been able to penetrate turret roofs or most of the upper body of a tank for a while. This doesn’t account for the fact that most of the attack vectors the A-10 will use will hit the armor off-angle, effectively increasing armor depth.
Of course it has an array of weapons that can kill tanks from any aspect, and the 30mm cannon is still useful against light armor, can potentially cripple or kill tanks with a lucky shot, and is one scary motherfucker, but it won’t routinely penetrate the top armor of tanks like it could with 60s era soviet tanks.
I blame the contractors.
Really? The roof is equivalent to a foot of armor? Yow.
Modern armors have all sorts of fancy layering and high tech metallurgy going on, which gives them different degrees of protection for a certain thickness and also different effectiveness against kinestic energy vs HEAT penetrators. So typically armor values are translated into their equivelant values in rolled homogenous steel armor against those weapon types, which makes it easier to understand and compare. It doesn’t mean that the actual thickness of the armor was a foot - but that it would give the protection equivelant of a foot of armor against a kinetic penetrator.
Modern tanks are crazy tough, but of course modern anti-armor weapons are extremely powerful.
I was researching some of the smaller anti-tank guns fielded at the start of WW2, like the 25mm Hotchkiss or the 37mm Bofors. Although they were respectable weapons at the start of the war, they were considered obsolete against the more powerful tanks at the end of the war. I gather then that automatic cannon, and especially depleted uranium penetrators, has made an enormous difference.
The metallurgy of the rounds is the more important part - as I said earlier in the thread, hitting a tank impervious to the rounds you’re using over and over doesn’t have a strong cummulative effect.
But advances were made in penetrator design and material that allowed them to be harder, heavier, have a lower cross section (hence greater force on a smaller point) and attain higher velocities. So that 30mm on the A-10 can penetrate about as much armor as the 76.2mm gun the T-34 used. But of course armor technology has improved right along with it.
If you can destroy a normal gun by putting your finger in there, you could probably disable a tank’s cannon by lodging your head in there.
20mm AP will probably penetrate the engine compartment (left and right rear) and do damage to the engine/transmission, possibly enough to earn a “mobility kill.”
“Hiding” from an Abrams is not impossible, but the Thermal Imaging System on the main sight, along with the Commander’s Independent Thermal Viewer, can make it difficult for a normal-body-temperature person to hide, unless they have total concealment. So the “hide-until-they-drive-by-and-then-jump-out-and-shoot-them,” while risky, is possible.
The main sight sits in a small-ish box right in front of the tank commander’s cupola, and is subject to a soft-kill (rifle bullet through the sight); this could possibly take out the daylight sight as well as the Thermal Sight. It does have thick metal shutters that can be closed, but I think a .50 cal would go through those.
However…the Gunner’s Auxiliary Sight, while purely optical in nature (and no good at night without some form of illumination), is still very accurate. And well protected inside the main gun mantle.
The back of the turret is rather thinly armored (compared to the rest of the turret and front glacis) and is the 120mm ammunition stowage compartment; the top rear has the blow-out panels. The 120mm ammo is self-consuming (think very heavy duty, chemically treated cardboard) and burns very energetically. A 20mm incendiary could set the 120mm ammo on fire, and the crew might want to bail out if that should happen, but there probably wouldn’t be some sort of catastrophic, crew-killing explosion due to the armored, reinforced bulhead between the ammo compartment and the crew compartment. If the armored door should happen to be open when the ammo goes…scratch one crew.
You’d need 20mm+ to damage the track; it’s pretty heavy stuff. Sticky-bombs, ala Saving Private Ryan, or other forms of IEDs, might work, if you can get close enough without getting smoked, or get them to drive directly over the IED. Again, this would only be a mobility kill. A sufficiently strong IED might also have some secondary concussive effects on the crew.
The Molotovs are dangerous, to both the tank and the thrower. The thrower has to get close enough to hit, which can be problematic, and if it does hit, the fire sucks up oxygen, which asphyxiates the crew.
However, the Abrams series A1 and later have an NBC Overpressure system that takes bleed-air from the engine, chills it, and runs it into the turret under pressure (I forget how much, but it is enough to create a pressure differential bewteen inside and outside air, and keep contaminants out). Since the Abrams has an air-gobbling turbine engine, a Molotov attack would have to be severe enough to snuff the engine in order to suffocate the crew.
The Abrams have two different smoke concealment systems: smoke grenade launchers and the smoke screen generator. The grenade launchers (one on each side of the turret) hold 12 smoke grenades, and fire up and forward in volleys of six, to create a smoke screen. The smoke screen generator sprays a fine mist of fuel on the engine exhaust grill, and makes lots of smoke very fast (remember: air-guzzling turbine engine, and what goes in must come out).
That’s all I have for now. More later, maybe.
Not surprising given that in these movies, fighters use a technology approximatively equivalent to their WWII counterparts, except in space.
The tank’s sensor systems are very good for seeing people, but don’t do much of anything for recognizing them. It’s no problem if you’re on a battlefield in the middle of nowhere where anyone not wearing a US uniform can be assumed to be a target, but if you’re in a populated place, there’s no easy way to tell the difference between the people you’re trying to protect and the people you’re protecting them from.
True enough, but you’d be surprised at the resolution on an Abram’s Thermal Imaging System. Things like helmets, and rifles, stand out quite readily at 500 meters. Further, if the weather conditions are right. Precipitation, airborne dust, and heat (say, 90+ F) tend to degrade resolution.
You can easily make out vehicle details, and tell the difference between a Hummer and a Ford Expedition and a GMC Suburban at 500-1,000 meters (assuming the viewer can distinguish them by shape to start with, of course).
And the target’s behavior would also suggest motive; a furtive type, trying to hide, might imply nefarious intent. Achmed the goat-herd, standing out in the open, is less likely a threat.
Of course, a clever enemy can take advantage of that.
Another thing I didn’t mention earlier (since I was trying to catalog way to take out an Abrams) is that, acoustically, the M-1 is fairly stealthy for a tank, especially in open terrain that minimizes echo. There were reports in Gulf War I of Abrams rolling right up on (less than 500 meters) dug in Iraqis, and they never heard more than an faint, indistinct rumble from the treads. Of course, this was open terrain (desert), soft sand, and low humidity.
Thermally, it stands out like a magnesium flare on a moonless, overcast night.
I believe Arnaud-Amaury, the Abbot of Citeaux, covered this, back in the 13th Century…
In all seriousness, not much man portable is harming an Abrams short of ATGMs, RPGs, satchel charges, or the like. It’ll be rough on anyone carrying anything that resembles any of those things—like a camera—but as ExTank points out, within their field-of-view, the assorted optics are good enough to distinguish those things within their engagement envelope. Usually.
I’d always thought a buttoned-up tank was essentially blind; hence why infantry hated getting anywhere in front of the things, for fear of being run over. Using them for cover is something else entirely. Nowadays, add getting hit with debris from detonating reactive armor to the joys of close work with tanks. To try and answer Lumpy’s question, I recall reading that during the thunder run into Baghdad during OIF, an Abrams was lost due to repeated RPG hits to the rear, causing a fire which required the crew to egress. I don’t know what kind of RPGs they were—7s, 14s or 29s. The account is detailed in the book, Thunder Run.
Further, the following document on Armor composition for Russian and NATO MBTs may be of interest. I have no idea if it’s true or close to it, but it was an interesting read. Armor Basics (Scribd document, may require account to copy.)
If you could catch a tank when it was sitting still is would what a quart of crazy glue in the treads would do? Actually I don’t think it wouldn’t take a quart, but you would have to get it in the right place and I doubt they would give me a chance to do proper surface prep.
I thought Abrams used Chobham armor which is not reactive (at least in the usual sense so won’t hurt anyone nearby).