How did tank guns get so deadly? | Evolution of Firepower

fatah armor Mobility this is what we call the triangle the essential components of the

tank

. Remember to subscribe or click the little notification bell if you don't want to miss these videos and I would just like to say thank you. To all our sponsors for making this possible, please join them if you can. In this episode we will look at the

evolution

of

firepower

from World War I to the present day and, specifically, the main gun, the main armament of the

tank

. a story that reflects the changing role and requirements of the tank on the battlefield, from supporting infantry to fighting other tanks.

Now this is a hugely complicated topic and all we can give you here is an overview, so if there's anything you think we've missed. or anything you want to know more about, leave a comment below the beginning about the Som in 1916. A stagnant comrade of trench warfare demanded an innovative solution. Machine

guns

and barbed wire caused huge infantry casualties in no man's land. This is why See the invention of the tank first used by the British Army in September 1916. They had to provide close and fast support to the infantry, breaking through defenses and barbed wire so that the troops could follow behind and exploit the spaces they The tanks have left as British heavy tanks. in the First World War and this is the last surviving example of the Mark One, which is the first type of tank to ever see action.

It comes in two types, there are males and females, and they are designed to solve two different problems in the On the battlefield, now women are armed with machine

guns

, first of all with Vickers pistols, then Lewis and then Hotchkiss. um, they are different weapons. The Vickers pistol is belt fed. The other two are powered by a charger. What they have about them is that they all have about the same rate of fire, about 450 to 500 rounds per minute, now I have a bus like that that hits you at close range, it will more or less cut you in half.

The women were effectively mobile machine gun nests designed to fire at the defending enemy. In their trenches, the males are armed with six-pounders like this one, a Hotchkiss qf6, and the job of these males is to knock down the German concrete fortifications originally used on warships. These fired a semi-armor-piercing bullet that weighed six pounds or about two and a half kilograms, now we call it in the British Army, we call it a six-pounder, that's the actual weight of the projectile it fires, but the other description would be a 57 millimeter gun and that is the diameter of the barrel bore, so you can have a six pound gun or a 57 mil, they are exactly the same inside the tank, the gunners, one on each side, use the weight of the body to pierce, aim and shoot, the maximum range of the weapon was supposed to be 5000 yards, i.e. about four and a half kilometers, but you wouldn't have a chance of hitting something at that distance, the actual range was more than 200 yards, i.e. less than 200 meters, and if the tank was moving, it would be much smaller than the six-pounder as well.

It had to be shortened by just under a meter, as the longer barrel would dig into the ground as the tank moved, but this did not greatly affect accuracy at short ranges, while the tank's history in the First World War is not like that. Of universal success there are many cases in which they perform magnificently at a tactical level supporting infantry since their first use in 1916, when a male tank neutralized a machine gun position that prevented the infantry from securing the village of Fleur in Combri in 1917. The tanks tore a hole in the Hindenburg Line six miles wide and three miles deep and during the spectacular British and Commonwealth advances during the last 100 days of the war, they opened the door to ultimate victory, but before Once the war ended there would be a battlefield. encounter that would show the way wars would be fought in the future in April 1918, a British Mark IV man encountered a German A7v Storm Panzer in the first tank-on-tank engagement, after some maneuvering, firing the Mark IV he was able score three hits on the A7V. which killed several crew members and caused the rest to abandon the vehicle.

It is worth noting that the Mark IV had to stop in order to fire accurately and this was probably because the gunners were not adept at shooting on the move, certainly not trained to do so. shoot at a moving target and definitely not at another tank. Lessons would be learned at the time of World War II. The role of the tank has changed. It's not just about supporting infantry and knocking down fixed fortifications. Now tanks have to be able to fight other tanks. Anti-tank guns were designed specifically to destroy enemy armor. They were designed to fire an armor-piercing round, usually on stage, with a solid shot at high velocity to pierce the armor of an enemy tank.

In response tank armor became thicker and in response the guns had to become more powerful to penetrate them and this continued throughout the war which explains why there are so many different types of tank designs arising and falling. disused between the mid 1930s and mid 1940s and you can see this in our World War II Hall, in the early part of the war quite a few British tanks like this Matilda II like the Valentine were armed with the cannon two pound tank and this is the bullet that fired. Actually, it's not as bad as it seems.

This is a high velocity armor piercing bullet and will penetrate up to two inches of armor out to about 500 yards and that actually compares quite favorably to some of the other weapons of the era, such as the pac-36, the German anti-tank. and the French 25 millimeter Matilda was really loved for thick cruiser armor, good protection and could deal with enemy tanks from the early period of the war, things like Panzer one, two, three, that Italian 1340 over there, the problem starts when it is bigger and harder. Enemy armor starts to appear and we're talking about things like the Panzer four blowing up, it's the point where the poor little two pounder has had its day with so many British tanks armed with this gun that there was an attempt to make the of two pounds.

More effective, this is a piece of kit called a Littlejohn adapter, it is an extension of the barrel, it uses a technique called Squeeze bore, this increases the pressure behind the bullet when it is fired at almost double the speed at which it leaves the bullet. muzzle, increasing its ability to penetrate armor was a bit cumbersome to use and required its own ammunition, so it didn't really take off and the two-pounder gun needed to be replaced, the Matilda was too small and too slow to be upgraded, so which after a moment of glory in the west The Matilda desert became obsolete in 1942.

However, it is contemporary, the Valentine could be improved to carry the six-pounder cannon. Several Valentines were also converted to carry the 17-pounder anti-tank gun as Valentine archers, where their effective life was as a tank. ended, of course, there are quite a few examples of tanks that were successfully fired. I mean, you can think of the Panda 3. There are four fans here and I guess probably the most famous one is the T-34, which has a bigger turret. The cannon and the t-34 76 became the t-34 85. Throughout the war there was still a great need for tanks to support the infantry, most of the 50,000 Shermans that were built were equipped with this.

The M3 75 millimeter gun, which is a good weapon in many ways, is based on the French 75 millimeter field gun of the First World War and, in terms of infantry support, it is very, very good at firing foreign 75 millimeter high explosive with ap. It can also deal with a good number of earlier German tanks. I mean, certainly, Panzer III. Panzer Four things start to get a little complicated when it encounters the heaviest German armor of the latter part of the war. I'm probably thinking of Panther and Tiger. The heavy reliance on the Sherman tank by the American and British armies made this a major problem.

The U.S. Army would eventually upgrade its Shermans with a more powerful 76-millimeter gun. The British Army wanted to implement something before D-Day, so their solution was to shoehorn the proven 17-pounder anti-tank gun into the Sherman turret. This was incredibly difficult as the 17 pounder was a much larger weapon and involved cutting off the rear of the turret and welding a bustle on and the breach had to be redesigned to open. sideways instead of vertically and the crew had to be reduced from five to four, but the result was the Sherman Firefly, which would fire a 17-pound armor-piercing round that would penetrate up to 162 millimeters of armor at a range of up to a thousand meters and is extremely heavy, I really don't know how in the confines of that turret this could be loaded into the gun gap.

Around 2,000 Shermans were armed as fireflies in British and Polish Commonwealth units and deployed as one per conventional weapons troop. tanks is a solution that was demonstrated near Cong in July 1944, when a firefly from Northamptonshire's Yeoman Rim destroyed three tigers in 12 minutes and five shots. Now the tiger itself was built to pack a big punch. The Tigers were designed around the Camphavagan Konona 36 tank gun and that itself was derived from the Flak 36 anti-aircraft gun that had been used with great success in the early stages of the war in an anti-tank role because it has a huge muzzle velocity and almost a flat trajectory, a large weapon was now needed. mounted on a large tank, so here you have an example of a proven anti-tank weapon that influences the design and the final size of the vehicle it is mounted on and this is the ram that fired, this is the 88 millimeter and it was capable ruining the day of many Allied tank crews.

I feel really privileged to be sitting here in the gunner's seat of tiger 131 next to the breach of the 88 kwk 36 gun. um, the whole point here is that as guns naturally improve, does the range of the artillery increases, so in World War I you are looking at a maximum of 200 yards to achieve a hit on the target, probably considerably less in World War II, which in some cases reaches over a thousand yards, although in positions of combat is usually The average is around 500 yards, but 10 points, okay, cool things like the turret. Tour times are also improving, we're looking at maybe 15 to 20 seconds for a full 360 degree tour.

We also have improvements to things like weapon stabilization, it won't. Arriving at the scene during World War II when it is possible to accurately advance the movement that will happen in the postwar period. There are other things too, I mean things like improvements to the weapons sites and particularly to the German tanks, things like the Panther and this Tiger. Magnificent optics. adjustable magnification and reticles allowing for accurate range measurement and obviously that is extremely important in terms of accurate artillery as tank guns become larger and more powerful their appearance is starting to change now this Churchill is mounting a gun six pounder and at the end there's a counterweight and that's a very simple piece of kit, it's a heavy weight and all it does is balance the gun so it's easier to raise and depress manually, something you find on a lot of gun barrels. tanks, they are accessories like this.

It's called a muzzle break and what that is, it all has to do with dealing with the recoil. Now remember Newton's third law of physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so the projectile goes in that direction and the gun jumps back if you have ever fired. with a rifle, you'll know it hits your shoulder, but if you scale it up to something like a tank gun, that can be a big problem because the amount of force coming back at you is enough to damage the gun and its mounts, now that? a muzzle rest is just a very simple adjustment, but it has vents on the side that face slightly rearwards when the gun is fired, some of the muzzle blast comes out to the sides, like I said, slightly rearwards and oddly enough It seems, it is enough to moisten it. at 50 recoil, the rest is handled by the hydraulic recoil cylinder on the gun mount.

World War II is the period where the tank as a weapon system really comes of age and you just have to look at the contrast. between this early War Matilda and this late War Comet to understand that the other thing is that even at the end of the war we did not come up with something called a universal tank and that is a tank that is capable of fulfilling all the necessary functions, whether it is fighting other tanks or infantry support or whateverwill be dominated by the main battle tank tanks that can engage a variety of targets, from armored vehicles to soft skin vehicles, infantry buildings and fortifications within both, this is the chieftain main battle tank of the 1960s and later.

On the Challenger was the 120 millimeter L11 gun from the Royal Ordnance Factory, it was considered the best tank gun in the world when it was introduced and certainly brought with it some innovations; in fact, it is a challenge to mount the gun l11 has the record of The longest tank in the tank kill by knocking out an Iraqi T-55 at a distance of 5100 meters. I'm here in the loader operators position on the left side of the turret of one of the British Army Chieftain tanks and this is the violation of the l11 gun now the l11 um is a 120 millimeter rifled gun and it can fire armor piercing bullets , it can fire high explosive bullets, it can also smoke quickly, now the most commonly used armor piercing bullet in Modern Warfare is one of these and this is apfsds what that means is a stabilized armor piercing fin discarding Sabo uh, it's a little complicated, for What we often call a thin round for short, what it is is the center bit is a DOT of a very, very dense material, something like a tungsten alloy or, very often, depleted uranium that is encased in a Sabo.

What is it? It's a jacket that actually guides you through the canyon. As it exits the barrel, the Sabo falls out and the dart continues toward the target. The dart travels up to 1,800 meters per second or four thousand miles per hour and the effect of this bullet of extremely dense material traveling incredibly fast produces catastrophic amounts of kinetic energy. The bullet will penetrate the tank's armor. Armor Plus Fragments. The bullet itself will destroy almost everything in the target area. Crew systems. You know, depleted uranium is also a pyrophoric meaning. that the hot fragments of the bullet ignite if they are there and burn the interior of the vehicle if your vehicle is hit by an apfsds bullet you will likely be shredded or incinerated or both now you will see that this is a very confined space and Due to the increasing size of modern tank rounds, what we do today is split the round and the propellant into two so you learn the round to start with and then you load something called a bag charge and this gives us a little more flexibility because this is a half bag, so this is what you use with something like a hash round, a long low LOB, and then this is obviously a hole punch.

Magazines, this is a full bag, so that is the maximum amount of propellant and that is what you would use with a fin round. with apfsds because that will have a maximum force behind it increasing the range and you know we are talking about over two kilometers here, but the need for better technology along with the thermal and artillery observation site used on Chieftain and Challenger one allows targeting the enemy assets. At night, in poor visibility and at extreme ranges, it is obviously a big advantage in tank combat to be able to move far away, but what does it take for that?

What's called a fully stabilized weapon took a long time to get right and was the first, uh, British one. designers and then yes, the techno designers came up with a stabilization system, the stabilization system uses gyroscopes and servomotors, but if you keep the gun straight and level while the tank moves, but if you combine it with a laser scope, trying to say, and an artillery computer, you have a gun, you have a tank that can fire and hit another tank while both the target tank and the firing tank move when you start looking at modern tank guns like the l30a1 in this Challenger 2 main battle tank, there's even more humps and dings um now to start if you look at the shroud around the barrel which is a thermal lining and it's a bit like a delay around a hot water pipe or something um than What it comes down to is whether there's um some kind of external factor, like a chilly breeze blowing in from One Direction or fierce sunlight, could cause the barrel to warp slightly.

Now this will be submillimeter, but if it's aimed at a target that might be a few kilometers away, that's enough to make a difference is that then you have the big hit in the middle, that's what we call the fume extractor. Now, when the gun fires, the barrel will fill with poisonous fumes. If you breach them, they will go back to the crew compartment, which is not very good for the crew. What the smoke extract is about, inside it is a circle of holes drilled in the barrel when the bullet rises. The vacuum created draws all the dirt into the fume extractor and acts as a reservoir when the bullet exits. flows at the end, uh, it's extracted by the vacuum and you can see this if you look at a tank gun firing the gun, the Recall will come close and there will be a little puff of smoke at the end, which is the fume extractor venting and then you have the little cap right at the end of the barrel, now underneath there is a little mirror, this is what we call the lady's mouth reference system.

The reason we have it is that the tank's guns and sights must be very accurate. aligned quite obviously and can be removed, but using Mrs. Gunner you can look through her sights and adjust them accordingly so that the gun and sights are precisely aligned. The Challenger 2 gun can fire APF SDS and can shoot smoke or can shoot these, this is Hesh's high-explosive pumpkin head. What this is is a garbage can load. It shot with a half-bag load and a long, low LOB. Now what you use this against quite often is against soft skinned vehicle structures, but you can use it against enemy armor as well, a hashish bullet hits the armored vehicle and detonates the transmitted Force, expels a very nasty metal crust and destroys the inside of the armor and sends it flying into the vehicle.

The only thing about Hesh is that it has to be fired from a rifled gun and that is why the British Army is almost the only one at the moment that still puts rifled artillery on their tanks. Everyone else has gone for the smoothbore because you don't need a rifle barrel for an APF SDS, you don't need one for high explosive anti-tank. um, I mean, what rifling is all about is that your grooves cut through the barrel, they make a quarter turn on the way down and what that does is it rotates the bullet and it makes it more accurate, more stable in flight, However, the British Army is expected to be next.

The Challenger 3 generation MBT will mount a softball gun that will be put into service later this decade and will finally bring the British Army into line with other NATO countries. In this video we have seen how the tank's distant power has become much more precise and much more devastating. More sophisticated, the science of tank artillery has come a long way from the Mark One, World War I, almost point-and-go techniques to the long-range artillery feat achieved by the Challenger in the first Gulf War as battlefield. Technology evolves, so even newer and more ingenious methods of destroying enemy targets will need to be devised if we want the tank to remain relevant for another century.

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