muller@gn.ecn.purdue.edu (Mark B. Muller) (01/11/90)
From: muller@gn.ecn.purdue.edu (Mark B. Muller) gahooten@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Greg A. Hooten) writes: >What I ment was that the explosive has to be held in some type >of armoured box. If the box is half inch plate steel (for >example) then the penetrator for my HEAT warhead does not need >to be very heavy duty compared to the 12-15 inches of armour >that the heat has to penetrate. It would seem that the >penetrator would just be turned into more molten jet. It is >the box and the slab that the penetrator needs to get through, >and the less this is, the less dense the penetrator needs to >be. > >As to weight, this might not be significant in tank weapons, >but would be for missiles. I was mainly talking about tank >guns because I had never heard of a penetrtor type weapon in a >missile system. For use in tank guns, there is a much more elegant solution to the problem of reactive armor than an improved HEAT round; armor piercing rounds. Something that is commonly misunderstood is that the 120mm German designed gun (America seems to have problems designing guns, as the 105mm gun is a British design) was designed around firing APFSDS ammunnition. This stands for Armor Piercing, Fin Stabilized, Discarding Sabot. It is fin stabilized so as to allow the round to be longer and thinner than spin stabilatization alone will allow. It for this reason that the gun is a smooth-bore (although the improved HEAT capability is appreciated), although it is slightly rifled so that the spin of the round matches the spin that the fins impart do to being canted for this purpose. Upon hitting the reactive armor, the round simply has a little more to go through to penetrate the the tank. The effect of some plastic explosives going off as a penetrator of approx. 40mm (I don't have the exact figure) impacting at a velocity in the neighborhood of 4000 feet/s (muzzle velocity is over 5000 ft/s) is most probably neglible (by the time the explosion goes off, the penetrator is probalbly already through the reactive armor, possibly well into the main armor). In short, HEAT is a good way to make a lightweight weapon that is effective against many targets, but AP has always been how tanks kill tanks except in extreme cases. Disclaimer: I do not mean to offend anyone. If anything I say is please forgive me, and politely correct my error. --------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Muller Undergaraduate student School of Aeronautucs & Astronautics muller@gn.ecn.purdue.edu Purdue University ---------------------------------------------------------------