Shortround6
Major General
The Squash head round is a special projectile, it may have a DP use as a substitute HE round but normal HE ammo cannot act like Squash head ammunition against armor.
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Would it in terms of destructive HE effect over twin 30mms?That would make a right mess! 20mm firing ap-he at a far higher rate and velocity would be a more effective weapon though, 4 x MG151's for instance!
He frag would be effective against infantry, but anything armoured, even lightly and you have a problem, little he rounds are not effective against armour, and the chances of a hit are lower with these weapons, and it's hard enough as it is!
For a a reality check the 30mm mine shell carried around 85 grams of explosive, A British no 36 grenade carried 69 grams of Explosive. A German stick grenade (potato masher) had about 6 oz. or 177 grams. German tank hunters wrapped 6 extra charges around a central grenade to form a bundle charge of 42 oz . (1.42kg)
View attachment 297664
This worked when thrown on the engine decks of Russian tanks. This is also almost as much explosive as a 105 howitzer shell carried.
Or try the British No 73 Grenade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._73_Grenade
with this explosivePETN is one of the most powerful explosive materials known, with a relative effectiveness factor of 1.66.[2]
The Mk108 rounds had 72 grams per round of HE. Several hits of that on engine deck armor should have an effect.
Some rounds had 85 grams:
Komet weapons: MK 108 cannon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentaerythritol_tetranitrate
with this explosive
I think you grossly overate the effect small amounts of HE has on armour, the whole point of armour is to prevent penetration by blast and fragments, and the whole point of AP rounds is to defeat armour plate.
They fired AP at armoured vehicles for a very good reason, as I mentioned above, I witnessed 30mm RARDEN fire hitting the side of an Fv432 and the sum total of the damage was a few scoops in the surface, the side of an Fv432 is less than half an inch thick, and a RARDEN has a much higher muzzle velocity than a Mk108!
72 grammes is not a lot of explosive, it's not going to worry an armoured vehicle much unless you get lucky as cause a fire!
I had a funny feeling that film would crop up!
Your comparing a thin aluminium wing skin, hollow inside the structure and no protective plate to an armoured vehicle designed to keep blast and fragments out, it's not remotely comparable!
Your arguing blowing up a bean tin is the same as punching through an anvil!
Its also the tracer version of the HE round, not the most explosive of rounds. I take your point, but against 15-20mm of armor 85 grams of concentrated aimed/focused Hexagon (not a grenade layout where it disperses the blast effect) should be enough to breech it. The issue you are right about is getting hits with 2 vs. 4 guns, lower velocity, and lower rate of fire.
15mm-20mm of armour would only be breached by a shaped charge of that size, blast is a weird force, it always follows the easiest path unless you aim it, if they had developed a 30mm AP round there's no doubt that would be capable if disabling armoured vehicles, but plain old HE simply won't cut it.
Its also the tracer version of the HE round, not the most explosive of rounds. I take your point, but against 15-20mm of armor 85 grams of concentrated aimed/focused Hexagon
What "aimed/focused" effect are you talking about? The German mine shell was no more aimed/focused than a Hand grenade was.
The idea behind the German bundle charge was that ALL the grenade heads would go off at the same time ( or darn close) creating one big blast, not 2-10 little blasts spread out over time and distance. When dealing with explosives timing can be critical. PETN "burns" at 7-8,000 meters per second. TNT "burns" at 5,800m/s. A 1/2 dozen cannon shell hits, even in one second, are still 6 little distinct explosions and in no way comparable to the same amount of explosive going off "all at once".
You can use Chemical energy to breech armor, you just need to use specialized shells/projectiles and not general purpose or simple high capacity HE rounds. Of course these specialized shells/projectiles don't work as well against non-armor targets.
As far as using shaped charge projectiles from the MK 108 goes, Kyten has made a pretty good guess. Shaped charge penetration was advancing quite a bit during WW II so early performance was quickly improved but that advancement continued for quite a while after the war if not right up to today. What modern 30mm rounds can do bears no relation to what WW II rounds would do. Early (1940) shaped charges would not even penetrate a thickness of armor equal to their own diameter (and that is for an unspun projectile, spinning the projectile seriously degraded performance) while penetrations of 4 times the diameter were achieved in the 1950s in service ammunition and some rounds/war heads were heading for 7 diameters by 1960. Again, unspun. The spinning was such a problem that the French AMX 30 tank used a special double wall shell in it's 105mm cannon. The inner shell held the shaped charge and was separated from the outer shell by ball bearings, The outer shell revolved at high speed, the inner war head revolved much slower. The smaller diameter war head was traded off against the slower spin.
Can you demonstrate that 75 grams of Hexagon explosive couldn't penetrate 15-20mm of armor?