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Working on the older tanks means making stats for the older guns.
It's interesting to see that the best AP round for the 90mm M41 isn't a lot better than the same style round for the 105mm M68.
The 90mm HVAP-T M332A1 (an armor piercing composite rigid round) penetrates 321mm RHA at near the muzzle.
Early 105mm APDS M392A2 penetrates a mere 350mm.
Both would rely on high-explosive anti-tank rounds to penetrate Soviet armor.
Also interesting is the construction of the APCR round. There's a tungsten core inside a lighter "windscreen". It looks a lot like a sabot round that keeps the sabot the entire trip to the target.
APCR is the preferred way to fire a heavy penetrator through a rifled barrel. May be talking out of my arse here, but I seem to recall APDS works poorly in very high velocity rifled barrels, while it works perfectly in smoothbores of pretty much any variety, though the higher velocities do increase penetration.
ReplyDeleteSpinning KE penetrators of any kind is OK. Going smoothbore was for velocity not to eliminate problems with spin with KE...
DeleteExcept: HEAT rounds don't like being spun. They've long had a driving band that would spin without adding any rotation to the round, which is fin stabilized.
There's a bit of debate about which kind of round spurred the development of smoothbores.
Additionally, there was a lot of trouble developing a sabot that would properly depart the round without spin.
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