On Sun, 27 Sep 2015 08:22:20 -0700, Larry Jaques
wrote:

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.

OK, perhaps I am expecting too many explosions when a tank is taken
out. I thought that most anything which penetrated a tank would also
hit the stray munitions inside, causing a large explosion. Too many
movies?


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

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

What I've had trouble wrapping my mind around is how a wad of nearly
molten copper, which is much softer than armor plate, can penetrate
the hardened steel. Is sheer velocity/mass the reason? Or do they
melt their way through? I can see how the super tough, pointed
tungsten rods in many KE tank-busting rounds can do it, but how about
the rounded EF copper glob?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaped_charge says that shaped charges
are kinetic rather than relying on jets of molten metal to melt their
way through the target. Interesting.


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.

Ah, OK. I know that penetrators do a frenetic dance inside the cavity
they penetrate, bouncing around for quite awhile, destroying anything
they touch.

Look up "spalling"