Tank Busting Armaments... Whats The Best Setup???

[cheddar cheese]

Yup its Bentley.

I know that British items are great (Triumph, Austin-Morris, Rolls Royce etc) but the way theyre built is just dreadful. They rust, breakdown all the time, dont start in the cold and always give up the ghost a few days after the warranty runs out (sods law )

Im not saying I dont like British things, just they they could be a lot better. Their badness is part of the appeal for me 8)

The Italians cant build stuff properly for shit But everything they make looks so DAMN good I forgive them, entirely.

 

[Maestro]

Hmmm... I don't even know WHO is Bomber Harris. So I can't really back you up on that...

 

[Nonskimmer]

Hmmm... I don't even know WHO is Bomber Harris. So I can't really back you up on that...

That's ok, it was a bad attempt at humour anyway.

He was the head of RAF Bomber Command.

 

[Maestro]

dont start in the cold

Hmmm... Considering that (for British) -10° C is cold, I would like to see how the react at -30° C... That our average temperature in January/February.

 

[cheddar cheese]

Never mind -10, 5C is cold for a British car

 

[Maestro]

Hmmm... I don't even know WHO is Bomber Harris. So I can't really back you up on that...

That's ok, it was a bad attempt at humour anyway.

He was a big wig of British aircraft production.

Oh...

Thanks for the information.

 

[MP-Willow]

Tony thanks for the reat Reading!

 

[Tony Williams]

Well, the point is it was the same rocket section. All the sources refer to the 3" or 3.5" rockets as having been supplied by the British....

I don't know why, other than that there were a load of British made rocket sections available.

I have been through the section on aircraft rockets in the official History of the US Army, the volume which deals with the Ordnance Department. This goes into great detail over the development of the US RPs but makes no reference to American use of British rockets or rocket motors. The two US rockets - the USAAF's 4.5 inch and the USN's 5 inch HVAR - were of a much larger diameter anyway so could not have used the same motors. The British connection was simply that the UK already had much experience with rocket motors so supplied all the technical data to the US to enable them to make their own more quickly.

My applogies, I misread that. But you also say the HVAR warhead was 40 lbs with an ~7.5 lbs HE load where data I've found says 55 lbs with an ~20 lbs HE load.

On checking the official Army source above, I see that the data there is slightly different from the other source I used. It states for the HVAR a warhead of 48 lbs with a content of 7.8 lb HE.

The footage I have was never released to the public. I have the entire stock of guncam footage from my Father's attack squadron 1951 and 1952 tours. He was the squadron CIC officer and took a lot of photos from his plane's cameras, and some 8mm footage from a wind up camera he kept in the cockpit, though often it's from too high to make out much detail. I have located several films of rocket attacks on tanks, but only in a few of them are the results clear. Often the smoke and/dirt (often hard to tell the difference) in the air makes evaluation difficult within the short period of the film clips. I have a good number of shots of tanks that have been destroyed, but it is hard to tell exactly how they were destroyed. And I have a large number of before/during/after photos of bridge attacks.

Fair enough. One of the main reasons for overclaiming in WW2 was that the dust and smoke thrown up all around the tank by the rocket strikes made the pilots sure that the tank couldn't have survived, but they were usually wrong. Viewing from a fast-moving aircraft in the heat of battle is not the most reliable method of determining what happened!

In the end though, I have to go back to his statements that firing rockets one at a time, you'd probably hit the tank within three shots, and a salvo of 4 rockets (fired in 2's) was enough to hit a tank well over half the time.

That may have been true in Korea, but for whatever reason the performance of all RPs in WW2 certainly fell far short of this. Analysis of knocked-out tanks after the major battles showed that very, very few had been hit by RPs, and nearly all of those were probably British ones. Which returns me to my bottom line; whatever the theoretical accuracy may have been, and whatever they may have achieved later, the RP proved an ineffective anti-tank weapon in WW2.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and Discussion forum

 

[MP-Willow]

So, now we have divebombers?

 

[lesofprimus]

That was a great discussion between RG and Tony... Very informative and concise....

I still believe tho that cannons were a better way to destroy tanks than rockets.....

 

[zuzik]

Lol Imho the best antitank weapon is PTAB

Find in Google:

http://www.internetelite.ru/aircrafts/bomb-ptab.html

http://www.faqs.org/docs/air/avil2.html

 

[cheddar cheese]

Nah

Welcome to the site z...Enjoy your time here!

 

[Lightning Guy]

PTAB was more advanced that a lot of the other options, but I still think guns were the best option. Something in the range of 37mm to 40mm would have be the ideal.

 

[MikeMan]

This discussion is very intresting.

Here is a very intresting site that has a lot of information about US rockets from WW2's 3.25" FFAR, 4.5" FFAR and 5" HVAR systems all the way up to the current Mk.66 Hydra 70 systems.

 

[plan_D]

PTAB weren't ideal unless they caught the tanks all bunched up.

 

[Lightning Guy]

Maybe they weren't ideal, but they did foreshadow the weapons that were to come. And being design specifically to attack a tank's upper surfaces was an advanced idea.

 

[the lancaster kicks ass]

there's very few medium tanks that twin vikers s guns couldn't rip apart..........

 

[Lightning Guy]

I'm not saying heavy cannons were ineffective (I think they were the best option available in the war) but the PTABs were more of a point towards the future.

 

[MP-Willow]

A point to the future LG, that was a lot of systems from WWII that did that

I will agree, guns seem to be the way to go.

 

[lesofprimus]

I would think that more Allied tanks were destroyed by the Ju 87-G2 than any other Axis plane......

I would also think that more German tanks were destroyed by the Il-2M3 than any other Allied aircraft.....

Both utilized a 37mm cannon for the job.....