What if a human gets a direct hit from a SABOT round? Will the round go straight through, leaving a huge hole in his/her body? I assume because it is intended for anti-tank purpose the human body would not be much of an obstable for it so it would straigh through until it runs out of energy or hit something hard and explode. What do you think will happen?
The human will die.
I think the sabot would make you holey.
A Palestinian was on the news a few years ago when he got hit by an Israeli one and lived. I don’t know how long he lived for, but certainly long enough to get to the ICU and be swathed in bandages.
I must be an evil person, but I laughed.
Sabot isn’t an acronym to be capitalized, it’s a term for the sleeve that allows the long and narrow projectile to be fired in a stable manner from a larger barrel. The acronym would be APDS or a variant thereof.
My WAG is that it wouldn’t actually do all that much. Nothing in the human body is even remotely up to the task of impeding the passage of the round. I’d guess that the shot would simply go clean through without transferring much kinetic energy, resulting in a fist- to head-sized cylinder punched out, but no Gallagher watermelon explosion or anything. If you didn’t need anything that was in the cylinder (limb amputation?) and could get the blood loss handled quickly enough, my money’s on it potentially being survivable.
Perhaps, but the OP asks about a “direct hit”, which I take to mean basically center mass—ie, the middle of the target’s chest. That ain’t gonna be survivable even if Hawkeye and Trapper John are there to start triage immediately.
My guess is that a human body struck with a Sabot round would burst - splutch, like an overripe peach - due to the shock. Rather like an enlarged version of this Youtube video in which a man shoots a watermelon with a .50 sniper bullet. Or this compilation. Or this clip of a common rifle bullet going through ballistic gel. The killer is hydrostatic shock - the human body is basically a bag of water, and water doesn’t compress, it has to get out of the way somehow, so if you pump a huge amount of energy into it (however briefly) you’re going to burst that bag.
Yeah, a tank shell goes really quickly - but the tissue and organs etc are still being moved out of the way at enormous speed, with great force.
Well, you would be able to stand in front of my TV without blocking my view.
Yeah, but the mess on the carpet would be a real downer.
Back prior to Desert Storm me and all of the flight crews from my unit were taken to a place where we got to see Soviet built equipment. They wouldn’t say how they got the equipment but a lot of it had Egyptian markings. (After DS every unit had a T-72 on static display on the front lawn so it wasn’t that big a deal. Anyway…) They had a T-55 with a neat little hole on one side of the turret and a slightly bigger ragged hole on the other side. The sabot round went straight through the commander’s station. On the deck of the tank they displayed what was left of the shredded tank commander’s uniform. It was found outside of the tank and had been sucked out of the exit hole.
A sabot round is essentially a giant flechette, however, and they generate a minimal temporary cavity as they’re quite aerodynamic. The bullets in your links are deforming/yawing in the gel, which increases their temporary cavity size and creates the entertaining long-range Gallagher ability. This is a YouTube video of a FMJ bullet in gel, and a flechette’s effects are milder than this.
IIRC, a APFSDS round from a 120mm Abrams tank is 40mm in diameter, not counting the four fins which probably add another 40-60mm on top of that. That’s bound to hit something important.
Also for the OP, sabot rounds don’t explode. They’re a solid chunk of metal and are dependent upon striking something, or having fragments of armor that was punched through strike something, inside the target vehicle in order to make a kill.
You’ll be eyeing Sharon Stone until you notice a spot of sun in the middle of your shadow.
I misread this as getting hit with the actual sabot. Sort of like how it’s possible to die from a blank or starter round if it’s close enough.
Was the weapon Israeli? I know they did a lot for US intelligence by giving goodies from their wars.
Scooped on just about everything I was going to say. I guess my contribution is going to be the word sabot is the French word for shoe, specifically wooden clogs, which is where the military meaning derives from.
It makes sense if they were. Israel captured so many tanks that at one point they even fielded a few T-55 battalions consisting of refurbished former enemy vehicles.
That’s the assumption.
The diameter of the penetrator is smaller (dimensions are wandering into classified territory).
Kill mechanisms inside the target include, in no particular order; spalling metal from the tank’s interior wall impacting crew - ammunition - electronics - fuel, the depleted uranium penetrator shedding shards of its skin which are pyrophoric [burn violently in air] (penetrators are machined - let’s say not in the air) igniting most anything in the interior, there is a tremendous shock wave/overpressure as the penetrator and armor wall enter your living space unannounced. Recovery teams looking to recover penetrators described bodies as “goo”.
A note about DU penetrators. As an ingot, the metal itself doesn’t burst into flames. Only fragments from machining or target penetration have the pyrophoric characteristic.