PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
To make money. Bundeswehr will perhaps get a couple of battalions of it to get the sales ball rolling, but they will be mostly used for photo ops due to lack of spare parts and 130 mm ammo.
Tanks and other Armoured Vehicles Image thread.
- Thread starter Duke Nukem
- Start date
It's not purely for export; MGCS is supposed to be the next generation MBT for both France and Germany, and both Rheinmetall's 130 and Nexter's 140 are competing for that program.
Doomsought
Well-known member
The biggest flaw with the 130 and 140 is that you don't need them. Modern arms are already overkill for modern armor, so you would be better off spending the weight and budget trying to catch up with a more effective protection scheme.
Gun-launched missiles and drones; those few extra millimeters might not mean much for a shell, but for a small drone or gun-launched missile, it could open up new options.
Aldarion
Neoreactionary Monarchist
Are they? There is a reason why tanks were going for 55 cal gun lengths recently, as well as higher pressures. Problem is that both lead to greater wear and tear on the barrel.
Also, while range advantage does not really matter in Central Europe due to terrain - combat there would happen at ranges of around 500 to 1 000 meters tops - it is relevant in Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Russia, Poland etc.) due to wide flat spaces there.
Doomsought
Well-known member
Gun launched missiles and drones are a boondogle that only gets past the smell test by covering the odor up with buzz words. Now if you had a hull mounted mortar, that would work better as a launch system for missiles and drones. Mortars do well with low pressure and wide bore and VLS launches are well understood, so if you want a multipurpose launcher, then use a mortar.
Last time the US had a tank that launched missles, it barley used them.
And the time before that it was a failure.
Barrel launched missles are a stupid idea only Russia likes to do.
Aaron Fox
Well-known member
Note Israel had a surprisingly good reliability rate with their LAHATs. Then again it's based on the 'fit the missile to the gun' methodology instead of the other way around.
To be honest, the 152mm gun-missile launcher was another victim of 'ahead of its time' based on some seriously understandable problems of the period (APFSDS wasn't all that effective yet, as the majority of the rounds are AP or APDS and they had serious problems in retaining energy at long range).
Also note that the US (and much of NATO)'s multi-purpose round is a HEAT round, which is essentially reliant on caliber for its punch. Bigger caliber means increased effectiveness.
Anyone in the tank sphere will tell you that the 130mm is a compromise gun that isn't going to be as good as the 140mm. Unless we make some serious jumps in ETC research alongside the associated capacitors, in the end, they'll be going for the 140mm. That is largely due to gun tech being rather stagnant for the last few decades while metallurgy jumped leaps and bounds since the 20-aughts.
Idk if either will be selected.
The 140 is to big and the 130 doesn't have enough going for it yet.
Also, no APSFDS or an earlier verity was used on the walker bulldog.
HEAT was standard for awhile but SABOT replaced it as the standard anti armor round
Pretty sure Israel has had some successes with gun-launched missiles, and we already have the Excalibur shell, which is almost a gun-launched missile, except it has no rocketmotor.
See, I can agree that a mortar-launcher might be a better option, but gun launched missiles have worked for other places besides Russia.
How often to the Isreali use it though?
The US tried a lot..
Aaron Fox
Well-known member
Largely because the US military learned from the British experience with APS/APDS rounds, which is basically 'muzzle breaks make their use practically impossible'. US tank guns relied heavily on muzzle breaks, so regular AP rounds were used.
The APFSDS sabot round for the Walker Bulldog was privately developed by AAI in 1982, so it is not actually an example of an early APFSDS round. It's a retroactive upgrade that came massively afterwards.
I was just using a early tank the US has that used it.
The Walker also had a muzzle break
Gun launched missiles were originally a crutch for guns insufficiently accurate to fight at long ranges, which is especially true for low pressure or short barrel guns like those of Sheridan or BMP-3. They are a pain in the ass to load, they are expensive, and if you are going to use an ATGM, you can make a better one if not restricted by the needs of being fired out of a gun (most notably the caliber, most ATGMs not limited in this way are 150mm+ in diameter).
The biggest restriction being warhead size, as in shaped charges penetration is directly related to the diameter of the charge.
So long story short, why bother with a gun launched ATGM, when you can make a straight out better ATGM for the same price just to stick it on an IFV.
Because ATGMs aren't the only sort of exotic munition that can be gun-launched; having gun-launched anti-drone/SHORAD missiles or gun-launched drones for tanks are possible.
Again, this inflicts a severe artificial design limitation of having to fit into a 120-140mm cylinder on very expensive devices that are more suited to be launched from more specialist launchers, which may be placed on a tank or better yet a separate support vehicle. You're better off sticking a dozen of these things in a small VLS cell in the turret basket if you really need them on a tank, like some futuristic tank designs predict.
Drones of this size may well be launched by being chucked out of a hatch if for some reason you want to keep a drone taking the limited space inside a tank.
As for AA missiles, firing it out of a barrel pretty much excludes the IR guidance of most state of art missiles of this class because the seeker will see shit in terms of vision cone, if the target is within the limit of barrel elevation at all and the barrel is cold to begin with, and others need a dedicated external guidance device that will get damaged all the time on a tank. So pretty much back to laser guided ATGM, which do have basic AA capability. But then again, fun fact, modern tank guns also have a basic AA capability.
Also normal SHORAD missiles are insanely long and for a good reason, good luck loading that into the breech in a cramped tank turret, another design limitation. A Stinger is 1.52m long and pretty delicate so no bumping it on everything...
For comparison LAHAT is "just" 0.975m long, and Russian ones are something like 20cm shorter.
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SHORAD won't work out of tank cannons.
Not enough elevation usually and also none of the guidance features.
And why launch drones out of the barrel when armor should be supported by infantry who can launch the drone as well?
Adding in more things that can break on a tank or horrible ideas.
I could easily see an MBT conversion where the cannon and ammo are replaced with VL cells and/or mortar for rapid deployment of drones and anti-drone systems.