On Sat, 26 Sep 2015 17:31:42 -0400, Joe Gwinn
wrote:

In article , Larry Jaques
wrote:

On Sat, 26 Sep 2015 12:19:05 -0400, Joe Gwinn
wrote:

In article , Larry Jaques
wrote:

On Fri, 25 Sep 2015 11:11:59 -0400, Joe Gwinn
wrote:

In article , Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Fri, 25 Sep 2015 08:40:25 -0500, Ignoramus32266
wrote:

On 2015-09-25, Randy333 wrote:
ICBM's are rather fragile things and I think a laser could do some
damage. An A-10 is a tank buster, what can a laser do to 10" plus of
armor plate?

500LB laser guided bombs might be the replacemnet for an A-10. They
did use these in the gulf war for killing tanks.

I thought that lasers only operate at a small radius, under a few
miles.

It takes an ICBM a few seconds to fly that distance.

i

Lasers are nowhere near capable of taking out an ICBM today, or a
tank. Maybe in the future. For now, as Randy says, it's the new
super-smart bombs that are the tank killers.

Sensor-Fuzed Weapons, how to break a massed tank assault. This from
Textron.

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HkauuIyDsM

I saw many dozens of skeet go off but only one explosion on a ground
vehicle in any of those shots. Doesn't look very effective, but it
sure looks and sounds impressive while it's being ineffective, wot?

I saw that too, but the picture resolution was not sufficient to see
what they were hitting.

This weapon is intended to devastate a mass of tanks attacking, so
think of it as a hi-tech kind of grapeshot, one that works on targets
well beyond line of sight. They probably don't care that not all the
grapeshot hits something, so long as the attack is broken, or the
staging area well behind the front is devastated.

To have been impressed by that video, I would have needed to see about
4x the kills they got from the ordnance. Seeing only one effect on
any of the ground vehicles/targets per instance left me flat. Nothing
was blown off any tank or target, no targets fell over, etc. Just the
one explosion per. I'll bet the designers were underwhelmed, too.

The armchair generals (and other politicians) probably loved the sound
and fury of it all.

You are missing something critical, the explosively-formed penetrators.
They are solid metal projectiles formed by specially-designed shaped
charges. The projectile will be going about 2 kilometers a second, and
is quite capable of devastating a tank. But it doesn't make that big a
blast.

.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_formed_penetrator

.http://www.google.com/patents/US6186070

The most effective IEDs are EFPs from Iran.

.http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-sees-new-weapon-in-iraq-iranian-efps/

It makes little difference that those tanks look OK from the outside.
The heavier the armor, the stronger the effect. The inside of a tank
hit by such a penetrator is dust and red mush.

Joe Gwinn

Ayup...bounce a 5 oz piece of copper around the inside of a tank at
2000 feet per second..and there isnt much left of the crew or the
controls. It bounces around like a Ronco Slice and Dice.