The HEAT round is full caliber, not a sabot round reference your link. The HEAT-MP round is a saboted sub-caliber round. - M1 Abrams rounds.
The older rifled 105mm tank gun fired M393A1/A2 HEP rounds. Still stocked for Foreign Military Sales.
This has been updated to the M393A3 for the mobile gun system Stryker vehicle.
Recoilless rifles (definition varies - some call them rockets) like the Carl Gustav (84mm) and various other manufacturers (83mm and other calibers) have HEP/HESH warheads. Plasticized or squash warheads. There are also some breaching munitions and missile warheads with similiar characteristics.
Spinning a HEAT warhead and resulting plasma jet with solid head (for a shaped charge with a liner) disrupts the jet and wastes energy available (angular momentum and all that physics stuff). You don’t need a liner to create a shape charge effect.
Note that HEAT rounds do not “burn” through armor/concrete. It focuses extreme pressure against the target. The target material flows plastically away from the pressure point. Of course, this generates lots of heat leaving what looks like a “burn” but is an effect of the pressure/plastic flow.
If you’re saying that a rifled barrel wears out faster than a smoothbore barrel in general then okay, all things (such as muzzle velocity) being equal. I understood your statement to mean that chemical energy munitions, i.e. explosive-filled shells, HEAT or HESH rounds, would wear out a rifled barrel faster than pure KE munitions, which didn’t make sense to me.
I used to know all this 20 years ago (learn a lot playing with pencil & paper RPGs*) so,
HESH
High explosive anti-tank - non-penetrating, effect - chunks of spall shred things in the tank.
HEAT
High explosive anti-tank - sorta penetrating, effect - hot jet of molten metal (partly from the warhead, partly from the armor of the vehicle?) sprays things in the tank.
APCR/APDS/APFSDS/FRAP/FAPDS/LRP/others?
Kinetic energy penetrators - effect - high velocity metal rod punches through armor and bounces around hitting things in the tank, FRAP/FAPDS breaking into small pieces first.
Am I remembering all this correctly?
What’s the current ammo of choice for tanks with reactive armor, composite armor, and reactive over composite (assuming anyone’s combining the two)?
CMC fnord!
*pencil & paper Role Playing Games - usefull
pencil & paper Rocket Propelled Grenades - useless
I think it’s simply that KE munitions have a very tiny moment of inertia (i.e. all the mass is concentrated in a dense “dart” right along the gun axis) so the rifling doesn’t impart much force to spin the munition. HEAT or HESH rounds are big and “fat”, and though I don’t know if they’re more massive, I’m certain they’ve got a larger moment of inertia since there’s more mass further from the barrel’s axis. The barrel rifling encounters much more force from those “fat” munitions, which makes it wear out faster.
I love this place. Not sure there’s anywhere else I could have got the same depth of response in the same time to a question that just popped into my head.
KEP. I don’t care how reactive your armor is, when it get hit with a depleted uranium dart at those speeds, the dart is out the other side before the armor knows it’s been hit. But IIRC we’ve never fought an enemy who used reactive armor, Or modern composite, for that matter. Most of the tanks we killed in Iraq weren’t front-line Western tanks. They were older, domestically-produced Russian models (T-72), among others (Chinese Type 69).
Canister in the Tank World is called ‘Beehive.’ Unlike the old canister round, the modern type has a fuse that opens the shell at some preset distance from the muzzle. (The closest setting is called ‘muzzle action.’) It them releases a swarm of little needles called ‘fleshettes.’ They are quite nasty.
Other rounds available for most guns are HC smoke, WP smoke and sometimes even illumination, although there is no need for that nowadays.
As stated, a KE round can be fired out of a smooth cannon. This is the sabot round. There are also CE rounds that can handle a rifled gun, these are HEAPDS rounds once used by the Soviets. The are of course complex in their construction.
Approximately 1,150 10mm tungsten balls traveling at 1,400 m/s (3,132 MPH), ~Mach 4!
That will ruin your [del]underwear[/del] day in ways a Ma Deuce just can’t.
In other words, you find your tank surrounded by a large group of RPG-wielding foot soldiers. Machine guns throw a lot of lead, but if the targets are scattered, it’s harder to hit them all. Machine guns work better on enfilading fire (i.e. down the line of targets) than across a line of targets.
True of the main gun on the old M60 but not of the Abrams. Take a look again at the cutaway posted above or the video crowsmanyclouds posted. Those are just balls of tungsten flying at you at very high speeds.
Interestingly, I read that in the initial testing the US and UK conducted while trying to decide between these two, the exact opposite effect from what one would expect occurred. The 105mm rifled gun, supposedly more accurate but not as hard-hitting, showed greater penetration and less accuracy. The 120mm smoothbore gun, supposedly less accurate but harder-hitting, scored better accuracy with lower penetration. I read that several times, assuming I’d misread it, and that seems to be what they concluded.
I do recall that the Challenger II’s current gun holds the record for the longest-range confirmed tank kill, during the first Gulf War. Presumably that wasn’t against reactive armor, though.