A ultramarine terminator is traveling to a place on his battle barge when a strange demon with the body of the god emperor and the wings and head of a mutated bat appears and pushes the marine off the barge. The marine falls down in Afghanistan somewhere. A M1A2 appears on the horizon with a second one in pursuit, when suddenly the second tank stops, and the crew get out and start smoking weed with massive Cuban pipes and play cowboy music with bagpipes and violins by ASB.
The ultramarine is 1 kilometre away and is equipped with a heavy bolter, two grenades and a chainsaw.
Space marine obviously. Any other answer is heresy.
Slightly more seriously, almost certainly the space marine. The heavy bolter can shred the tank with near certainty. The tank can probably shoot through the armor (hard to say just how tough plasteel is), but the Terminator has much better mobility.
The bolter shells are not really that impressive. I don’t actually read 40k, but I think they are used against infantry and lightly armored vehicles. They might be able to take away some optics and radios, but should not penetrate even side armour or treads.
Meanwhile a single HE round hitting within 10 m the termie with probably annihilate all the joints and bones of it and perhaps give it internal damage. A direct hit will probably blow it into fist sized chunks of yummy meat and broken steel. The termie will need a better strategy than charging and shooting.
The .50 will probably rip off any sensors and blind it if it hits the good parts, and at least be painful from all the noise, shock and vibration.
I reckon that a disabled LAV 25 could slaughter dozens of termies with its main gun if they used such bad tactics. Good thing 40k guys use good tactics, the tetmie will think of something.
Yeah, but that’s “lightly armoured” by 40K standards, where they have magic materials like adamantium (which, incidentally, is what the Kraken armour penetrator rounds are tipped with). Emperor only know how that compares to reality.
Direct hit will destroy the termie just from impact alone. HE can’t be worse than a 3S area affect weapon and probably more like S5 since I’d think it would have a possibility of minor damage to a Rhino in addition to almost certainly killing unarmored humans, so a HE will still have a chance for a concussion or shrapnel injury. Whereas the bolter cannot do substantial damage to the Abrams, because the Abrams has to be at least armor 11, since otherwise a non-powerfisty Space Marine could one-shot kill an Abrams just by punching it which seems silly.
So I think the Abrams wins by keeping out of the termie’s range and spraying it until a bullet or shell finds a weak spot.
:smack: FFS!
As a former Abrams tanker, I guess I should feel…something…that we have to get Balrogs and killer super-human futuristic space marines to take on/take out an Abrams.
I guess I’m feeling mildly pleased that U.S. Army Procurement Division (or whatever they’re called) and General Dynamics took the time to get the design right.
Not that impressive? They are .998 caliber self-propelled rockets with an explosive charge. It would have at least 4 times the penetrating power of a modern .50 caliber round, and probably much more when you take into account velocity and materials. They’re capable of penetrating plasteel. I’m not saying each and every shot from the heavy bolter will definitely penetrate the tank armor, but more than enough will that the crew is going to get kill in short order.