APFSDS design vs Heavy ERA

[Hedgehog]

8 hours ago, Homer said:

 

must.  resist.

Doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

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[dejawolf]

On 5/6/2017 at 10:06 AM, EasyE said:

 

Yes sorry typo, 3BM-32 is how it should have read, both the 32 seemed to have had a DOI in the mid 1980s but not reached any real distribution until the very late 1980s. It appears that a few different methods for manufacturing the rod were being run.. Uranium and tungsten are actually were  very quirky things to alloy and manufacture, with it being very difficult and expensive to achieve uniform tensile strength in a high LD  alloy rod because of fracturing during fabrication and heat treating of the materials. The 3BM-42 being a quick solution to the problem and the 3BM-32 being another. There was no inexpensive solution to this problem available to the USSR  to mass produce longer rods until the late 1980s, where they were a decade behind the USA and Germany at this point.

 

 

I suspect that the USA didn't know this, and assumed that the USSR had worked out how to cheaply alloy heavy metal long rods with out very serious manufacturing defects. From what I can gather in available public information, the BRL-1 armor package would have been effective against the most common APFSDS steel with tungsten slug designs of early 125mm ammo like the 3BM-26, with the NERA array breaking apart, yawing and causing misalignment the interior components to then fail against the backing compoenents. The rush to introduce 3 armor packages a little over 8 years suggest to me that this was the case.   

 

On another note, the USA and Germany conducted a great deal of research in the late 1980s on vastly improve the tensile and yield strength of heavy metal alloys. In some cases gaining improvements of 300-400% through some methods that caused  dissolution uniform recrystallization of ultra fine powders of various metals mixed with the main heavy metal. I suspect this may be one of the ways the M829A2 was improved over the M829A1. It could also be a way of improving the heavy metal alloys in armor packages such as HAP-2 and Burlington.

 

from what i know, the main reason for the short L/D of russian rounds, is because of the autoloader not being able to accomodate longer rounds. only with the T-90A were the russians able to use longer rounds because of a redesign of the autoloader. 

[Damian90]

On 8.05.2017 at 1:45 AM, dejawolf said:

 

from what i know, the main reason for the short L/D of russian rounds, is because of the autoloader not being able to accomodate longer rounds. only with the T-90A were the russians able to use longer rounds because of a redesign of the autoloader. 

 

Not longer than 740mm for AZ-185 autoloader in T-90A, T-90AM/SM/M, and also AFAIK T-72B3.

[EasyE]

On 5/7/2017 at 5:45 PM, dejawolf said:

 

from what i know, the main reason for the short L/D of russian rounds, is because of the autoloader not being able to accomodate longer rounds. only with the T-90A were the russians able to use longer rounds because of a redesign of the autoloader. 

 

The lack of any long monoblock round even being introduced in small amounts until 1991 suggest to me this is not main reason for the rounds being much shorter then the theoretical limit.  Almost certainly they could have produced longer rounds at some point in the 1980s. Producing them in mass at a price that wouldn't seem prohibitive, was out of reach.