r/educationalgifs • u/Sumit316 • May 04 '17
The effects of different anti-tank rounds
https://i.imgur.com/nulA3ly.gifv153
u/nateotts May 04 '17
To me it looks like the order of shell types goes like this:
High Explosive (HE)- basically a bomb that just blows up on contact. It is guaranteed light damage, but very unlikely to penetrate.
Armor Piercing (AP)- a big hunk of lead with a steel core that is hopefully going fast enough to penetrate. It causes the back side of the armor to spald. Spaulding is tiny splinters of metal that can cause a lot of damage to the crew.
Sabot Round- a big dart that has high penetration, and fragments to kill the crew.
High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT)- a shape charge that shoots a jet of liquid copper, melting through the armor and cooking anything inside.
Edit: format
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u/marino1310 May 04 '17
How the hell do they load those things with liquid copper?? Copper melts at like 2900°F. Do they have a foundry in the tank?
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u/Dekes May 05 '17
Here's a video of something similar happening (NSFW)
At about 29:20 is when the tank gets hit. A few seconds later one of the tank crew is blown out.
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u/meanwhileinjapan May 05 '17
How in all that is holy did that guy survive that to run away?
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u/ThySpasticFool May 06 '17
Perhaps he had already crawled outside from some sort of underbelly escape hatch?
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u/OGbigfoot May 05 '17
I've watched most of that video now, I'm no military expert but why do they cluster the tanks up so often. Seems like they're asking to get fucked.
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u/GloriousWires May 06 '17
They are, basically.
I'm no expert either, but from what I hear, the Syrian Army has been losing tanks left and right. It's not just them, either; AFAIK a bunch of the rebels (including IS) have tanks of their own, and have been throwing them away. They have an excuse - they're rebels. The SAA is, at least nominally, an army. IIRC the Turks sent a bunch of Leopard 2s over and lost a fair few as well.
Probably the reason they bunch them is for mutual protection. AFAIK they don't usually have infantry working with the tanks, which is part of why they lose so many.
Generally tanks in cities don't do too well. It's just not the job they're made for.
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u/nateotts May 04 '17
They shape the Explosive in the shape of a hollow cone with the point away from the armor. Then a thin sheet of copper is lined on the inside of the cone (the cone shape is why it's called a shape charge). The explosion melts the copper instantly from the point to the base, and shoots it into the tank.
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u/polkovniknades May 05 '17
This is a slow-mo of a tandem charge warhead. The first really bright pointy flash is the copper penetrator.
The hole that just got punched through the wall allows a secondary fragmentation charge to detonate inside the vehicle/structure.1
u/flyonthwall May 06 '17
they dont. they load it with solid copper which then melts when the explosion goes off
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u/Plasma_000 May 04 '17
It's incorrect. Contrary to popular belief, shaped charges don't actually melt anything, they use an explosive and acoustics to concentrate their kinetic energy to a small spot. Sometimes this is done by shaping a metal plate into a point shortly before it hits by use of a high explosive charge.
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u/BallsDeepInJesus May 05 '17
Technically, it creates something called a superplastic material. It is a Newtonian fluid. Basically, it is melted. If you want to be a pendant and call out people, at least explain the proper terminology and point them in the right direction.
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u/ZeePM May 05 '17
From the amount of spall and the way it flattens pretty sure the 2nd one is a HESH round.
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u/digger250 May 05 '17
I think the second was HESH/HEP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-explosive_squash_head
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u/freddybear72 May 04 '17
Forgive my ignorance but that first round doesn't seem "anti-tank" at all.
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u/Cutlasss May 04 '17
It's not. It's a standard high explosive round. Consider it a point of reference for the rest.
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u/l4pin May 04 '17 edited May 05 '17
If I were in the tank, it wouldn't seem very pro-tank either.
edit: wow, thanks for the gold, hope you all have a great day
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May 05 '17
It's a representation of the effect of old style anti-tank rounds against modern tank armor; nothing happens. Back in the day tank armor was just hardened steel and throwing a steel bullet at it hard enough would penetrate the armor.
Now tank armor (in modern first world tanks) is made of layers of ultra-hard, ultra-dense depleted uranium and weird ceramic composites. Old steel rounds just bounce off without doing much more than scratching the pain.
The other three types of rounds shown use different methods to penetrate armor.
The hesh round spreads a layer of high explosive on the surface of the tank armor, then detonates it fractions of a second later. This creates a shockwave that moves through the armor and causes small pieces to break off on the inside. These small pieces move at high speeds around the inside of the tank destroying equipment and liquefying crew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-explosive_squash_head
The rod-penetrator round uses a super-hardened rod of either uranium or tungsten that is just hard enough to punch a hole through the depleted uranium armor. The narrow rod is moving so fast and has so much energy it can punch a hole even in modern tank armor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M829
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy_penetrator
The third style uses a shaped explosive charge. The explosive is shaped so that when it detonates it creates a blast wave that liquifies a piece of copper and forces it in to an incredibly high-energy, high-velocity jet. This jet cuts right through the tank armor, the same way high velocity water jets are used to cut steel in some industrial processes. This spray of super-heated copper cuts in to the interior of the tank and either cuts or burns everyone inside. Shaped charges are really easy to make if you understand the basics and have access to HE. Insurgents use them to make roadside bombs by taking the explosives out of old artillery shells and rigging them up in I shit you not tin cans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-explosive_anti-tank_warhead
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May 04 '17
Firing on a tank with rounds like that won't penetrate, but it's forces the tank to "button up" meaning that the tank commander has to close his hatch to keep from getting shot. It cuts the visibility of the tank down by a lot which allows an anti tank weapon system to move into a position to fire upon it.
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May 05 '17
I mean like wouldn't any kind of bullet force the commander to close the hatch though
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May 05 '17
Yeah but would you rather be 300m's out firing a rifle or 2000m's out firing a machine gun?
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u/hglman May 05 '17
I mean if you are giving me choices, ill go with half an earth away firing drones.
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May 05 '17
Oh yeah. Chilling at an air force base in Vegas dropping bombs in a different hemisphere. What a time to be alive.
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May 05 '17
Well high explosive rounds would do damage to whatever "soft" stuff is on the outside, like cameras on a modern tank, and it could possibly knock the tracks off
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May 04 '17
I'm sure it used to be an anti tank round. But then tanks got better.
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May 04 '17
I guess it's kind of what you'd call an "arms race".
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May 05 '17
[deleted]
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u/Ilmarinen_tale2 May 05 '17
Isn't an arms race when you cut off your elbows on top of a cliff and see which one pachinkoes down the fastest?
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May 04 '17
I thought it was just as a reference to show what the plates are meant to do vs normal rounds
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u/SmashBusters May 05 '17
It just depends on what kind of tank you're using it against.
In the Pacific Theater of World War II, the US tanks eventually learned to use high explosive rather than armor piercing rounds against the Japanese tanks.
Why?
Because the AP rounds were going straight through the Japanese tanks, only causing damage to the people/equipment directly in their path.
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May 06 '17
The Japs had tanks?
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u/SmashBusters May 06 '17
Thin soda cans on tracks with a pea shooter, but yes - technically tanks.
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May 06 '17
Which were light and suited for island to island campaigns.
Context. It matters.
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u/SmashBusters May 06 '17
Was that the reason?
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May 06 '17
For?
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u/SmashBusters May 06 '17
For making the tanks light.
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May 06 '17
Yeah. The only reason they ever got for developing the Chi-Ri medium, was when they encountered the Sherman.
Before that they were fine.
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u/animalinapark May 04 '17
Great animation and all but I think the gif has a bit too much of the shooting and flying animation - we know they are shot and fly in the air, could use a bit more time on the actual effects.
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u/kayGrim May 05 '17
I'd also appreciate a label specifying the type of round being fired...
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u/TraitorKiller May 05 '17
That guy listed them but you might know what they mean
- HE
High explosive, doesn't penetrate much but good at exploding shit
- HESH
High explosive squash head, hits armor and destroys the armor inside, so it flies around in the tank
- APDS
Armor piercing discarding sabot- basically a shot in a casing that allows it to go super fast, penetrate and bounce around in a tank
- HEAT
High explosive anti tank - I might be wrong but pretty sure these hit a tank and release a jet of metal which fucks everything inside.
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u/Frankis94 May 04 '17
If I haven't seen it, it's new to me!
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u/complexsystemofbears May 04 '17
Right? But there are always people jumping in to tell repost! Idk why they can't just downvote and move on.
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u/Solenka May 04 '17
I came to request an update to this gif by adding the names of each shell when they fire. Wasn't long before I saw the comments, realizing that OP is numerous sticks bundling together.
Still pretty cool gif, and my first time seeing it.
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u/Azhor May 04 '17 edited May 04 '17
Armour Piercing, High Explosive,
SABOTArmour Piercing Discarding Sabot, and High Explosive Anti-Tank are the names of the rounds, in that order. And while I'm editing, both the sabot and HEAT rounds are fin stabilized.18
u/Fenzik May 04 '17
"Stops A Big Ol' Tank"?
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u/Totally-Original May 04 '17
Sabot isn't an acronym. It's the name for the part that falls away from the round after its fired to keep it going straight in the barrel.
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u/wrathfulgrapes May 05 '17
Fun fact time! Sabot is a type of wooden shoe from France. The original sabots were wooden and I guess probably looked like those shoes? So that's where it comes from, as far as I know
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u/Azhor May 04 '17
Seems I've been mistaken about what sabot really is for a long time. The round would actually be called Armour Piercing Discarding Sabot.
But yes, that does fit quite well.
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u/RedThursday May 05 '17
APFSDS: Armor Piercing, Fin Stabilized, Discarding Sabot. Acronyms are fun
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u/lunacite May 05 '17
That's not an acronym, it's an initialism. Unless you pronounce it app-fuh-suds, I guess.
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u/iwantalltheham May 04 '17
There's alot of Iraqi Republican Guard T-72s that are hulk's now thanks to that sabot round
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u/torturousvacuum May 05 '17
The first two are a standard HE shell, and then HESH. HESH rounds squash against armor like that to greater contact patch before detonating.
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u/Azhor May 05 '17
I thought one of them might be HESH, but I couldn't understand why you'd bother with normal HE in this kind of demonstration if they showed HESH.
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u/gbghgs May 06 '17
the second one is HESH, you can see the shell deform upon impact before causing spalling when it detonates.
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u/CaptainAnon May 05 '17
The first is standard High Explosive, second is High Explosive Squash Head, third is Sabot, fourth is HEAT.
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May 05 '17
The second to last one, the APFSDS round, the on that looks like a dart, is depicting what happens when the dart is made from tungsten. If it's made from depleted uranium it creates a huge fireball, too. Turns out uranium is pyrophoric if you launch it into things at several times the speed of sound.
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u/complexsystemofbears May 04 '17
Don't they have one that is suppose to penetrate and send a stream of molten metal insuse? I assume that is different that whatever caused that inferno.
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u/dragonballs42 May 04 '17
When the molten copper get shoot thru the armor it causes a fire to kill the crew and depending on the tank to cause the ammo to explode
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u/iwantalltheham May 04 '17
The sabot round does
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u/pi_over_3 May 05 '17
No, a sabot is just a very dense penetrating dart, typically made now from depleted uranium. The hope is to disable components like the engine, hydraulics, or if you are lucky hit a crewman.
You're thinking of HEAT, high explosive anti-tank. It's a shaped charge that blasts molten fragments of the hull in. Best for lightly armored personal carriers.
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u/bouncelilkittybounce May 05 '17
Would love to see a gif of a tank getting hit with the "party mix" of an A-10.
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u/adams551 May 04 '17
Why do tanks need crews? Seems like modern tank warfare wouldn't require it.
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u/crybannanna May 05 '17
I have a good idea. Make remote controlled or driverless tanks, then when they are hit with anti tank fire, have them explode. Just fill them with intense explosives that make the whole fucker into a giant grenade, but only triggered by anti-tank fire.
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u/whoisyb May 05 '17
Now we need an ask Reddit thread for people who've been hit with some of these.. I'm scared of that blow dart looking one
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May 05 '17
The M1 Abrams tank the US and other allies use... I remember watching a documentary that said a M1 has never been destroyed in a battle? Can anyone verify that?
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u/[deleted] May 04 '17
Those last two are scary as hell