EnsignExpendable

T6 pilot yes. They kept using it as a test bed as the years went on. Note it has the early/first? one piece lower front casting as well at this point.
 
The sexton pilot or not will be using whatever they had on hand that suited the conditions they wanted to test I suppose, just like the Ram or the M3 or M4.
 
 
https://imgur.com/a/4Dty1l9
 
Track types and details from the Ram manual 1943 and Canadian tank data book 1944.

Supremacy of glorious T-72 over filthy Kharkovite tractor
 

Supremacy of glorious T-72 over filthy Kharkovite tractor
 

Supremacy of glorious T-72 over filthy Kharkovite tractor
 

Supremacy of glorious T-72 over filthy Kharkovite tractor
 

Supremacy of glorious T-72 over filthy Kharkovite tractor
 

Supremacy of glorious T-72 over filthy Kharkovite tractor
 

Supremacy of glorious T-72 over filthy Kharkovite tractor
 

Some photos from forest near my house. From this summer started to run in it.

 
 

"I understand bringing the Enfield, but was the 1907 pattern bayonet necessary?"
 
"You really need a surplus flamethrower to defoliate the camp site?"
 
"Is bringing an AAVP-7A1 to this park and the boating docks even legal?"
 
"Why are you pointing the pre B CZ75 at ME!?"

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000498195.pdf
CIA T-72 breakdown, includes loads of details

Let's say you're developing a tank with a unique (AKA non-historical) gun for one of our competitions here on SH. It would be nice to have an idea of the size of the gun, its shells, and what their performance both in terms of shell weight and velocity but also penetration, wouldn't it? Well, fortunately there is a way to do this with reasonably accurate results using your solid modeling software and some free to use browser tools.

First, you want to have a general idea of the size and performance of your gun. For this example, I decided I wanted an optimized, high velocity 85mm caliber gun with a case about as big as the 7.5cm KwK 42 (as it happened, I ended up with a case that had significantly greater volume, but that fact is unimportant for this example). The cartridge I decided on has a 130mm wide rim and a 640mm long case, of course in 85mm caliber. My first step was to model this case in SolidWorks:


 
You will also need to model your projectile, in this case a tungsten-carbide cored APCR round:


 
Next, we need a bit of freeware: A Powley computer. Originally developed by DuPont engineers for small arms ammunition, the Powley computer is an accurate enough tool to use for much larger tank rounds as well! When you click the link, you'll be greeted with this screen:
 

 
You'll note the dimensions are in inches and this thing called "grains" (abbreviated "gn"). The grain is an archaic Imperial mass unit equal to 1/7000th of a pound which is still used in the small arms field, today. Another quirk of small arms has the case capacity - a volume measurement - listed in grains as well. This is in fact grains of water (gn H2O), or the weight of water that will fill the case to the top. To find this, simply multiply the volume in cubic centimeters by 15.43 - which is also the exchange rate between the metric gram and grains mass.
 
Finding the volume of the case is easy with a solid modeling program; simply model the interior as a solid and find the volume of that solid:


 
Filling in my Powley inputs gives me this:
 

 
Note that I typically use the diameter of the projectile across the driving bands for "Bullet Diameter", but it really makes very little difference.
 
So far, though, we haven't actually produced any results. That's because our gun is well outside the bounds of DuPont production IMR powders, hence the output "Much slower than (IMR) 4831" in the lower left. So, we need to override the computer by checking the box next to the blue "Pressure" function, and typing in a pressure value in CUP that is reflective of tank guns of whatever era we are trying to represent. My tank gun is trying to represent something from about the late 1940s/early 1950s, so I'm going to use 45500 CUP EDIT: USE 41000 CUP for APCBC and 42800 CUP FOR APCR (or better yet, do your own calibration!):
 

 
This gives me an estimated muzzle velocity of 3,964 ft/s for my L/50 barrel. Not bad! Note the outputs on the left, which tell you a bunch of fun facts about your round but aren't terribly relevant to what we're doing here today. Next, we need to put this gun's performance in terms of penetration. The way I like to do this is through comparative analysis.
 
The first thing we need is to know to find penetration the ballistic performance of our round. We can estimate this using JBM's ballistic calculator and a few rules of thumb. When opening the calculator, the first thing you'll see is this:
 

 
We care about basically none of these settings except BC, velocity, and maximum range. Caliber, projectile weight, chronograph distance, etc are all pretty irrelevant to us. Keep the environmental settings (temperature, pressure, etc.) set to their defaults. First, change the ballistic coefficient type from G1 to G7 using the dropdown menu. Then, change the muzzle velocity from 3000 to whatever the muzzle velocity was that was calculated by the Powley computer. Finally, set the maximum range to your desired distance - in my case 2,000 yards.

For my round, I now have inputs that look like this:
 


We also need to get some idea of how fast our projectile loses velocity, something we can't know for certain without actually building a real gun and test firing it - or at least without some really sophisticated simulations. However, projectiles with the same shape tend to fly the same way, and that's something we can exploit here. To figure this out, we need a graph showing us the performance of a real-life gun. Fortunately, there is a handy one for an IRL gun similar to what I'm designing, the 90mm M3 from World War II, and its M304 HVAP-T, which is broadly similar in construction and shape to my 85mm APCR projectile:
 

 
Based on this chart, we see that the M304 should drop from its 3,350 ft/s muzzle velocity to about 2,500 ft/s at 2,000 yards. Doing a little trial and error with JBM tells me that this means the M304 has a G7 ballistic coefficient of about 1.13.
 
Now, our projectile will not have the same ballistic coefficient, due to it being a different size and mass. But, we can figure out what its ballistic coefficient would be by finding its sectional density and comparing that to the sectional density of M304. To find sectional density, take the projectile's weight in grains and divide it by the square of the projectile's diameter in inches, times 7000. So for M304, we get:
 

 


And for my 85mm, we get:


 

 
This means that the ballistic coefficient for an identical-shape projectile with our size and weight will be about 1.019/1.330 - or 76.6% as much - as that of the 90mm M304. That means a BC of 0.866 G7 should be approximately correct for my 85mm APCR round. Let's plug that in:


 
And then scroll down to the bottom to click "calculate", which gives us a big ol' chart that goes out to 2,000 yards:
 

 
O-Kay! Now we have some data. It looks like at 2,000 yards, my projectile holds about 2,800 ft/s striking velocity. It's important to note here that what we really care about isn't the striking velocity of the projectile per se, but the velocity and energy of the projectile's core. The core is what's actually doing a lot of work to the armor, so for now let's stop thinking in terms of the whole projectile, and take a look at these two cores, that of the M304 90mm HVAP, and that of my 85mm APCR round. The core of the 90mm M304 is an approximately 8 pound lump of tungsten-carbide that is about 45mm in width. My penetrator is also 8 pounds, but it's longer and thinner in proportion - just 40mm wide, rather than 45mm. This means my penetrator will penetrate more armor at a given striking velocity, and we can estimate how much more by taking the specific energy of the rounds and comparing them. That is, the energy in Joules of the penetrator alone, divided by the penetrator's diameter squared:
 

 


So the specific energy at 2,000 yards is about 826J/mm^2. Now, we need to find out at what impact velocity the M304 penetrator produces this same specific energy. Do do that, we go backwards, using the figures for M304:
 

 

 
Therefore, the equivalent impact velocity for my 85mm APCR round at 2,000 yards is 3,150 ft/s for the M304. That means, in theory, that the M304 would have to impact a target at 3,150 ft/s to produce equivalent penetration of RHA to my 85mm APCR striking at just 2,800 ft/s.

Now, we head back to that chart:


 
On the left side of the graph, we put our cursor on the line that corresponds to approximately 3,150 ft/s velocity, and follow it over until it hits the curved line that corresponds with the angle of plate we care about - arbitrarily, let's pick 20 degrees. Then, we follow that point straight down until it hits the x-axis:


 
Therefore, we estimate that at 2,000 yards, my 85mm has just over 10 inches of RHA penetration - not bad at all for a lowly APCR round!

Check out my underbarrel grenade launcher
 

Check out my underbarrel grenade launcher
 

Ideologically acceptable diorama complete. 
 







All photos

The obvious solution is to store the taller infantrymen horizontally.

Aluminum tracks for the M60 (includes track weights): http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/b008723.pdf

A wehraboo read my blog while sitting in that vehicle.

Clearly, a "paratrooper" variant of the taller infantrymen is needed, so they can be folded for stowage.

The obvious solution is to store the taller infantrymen horizontally.

Heavily used T-28 track pins.
 

Pounding the front armour with HE is a losing proposition unless you have something really beefy like a 122 or 152 mm gun, the pro tip is to plant a round just above the tracks and knock out the floor of the sponson. If you do that to a German tank, congratulations, you just caused an ammunition fire.