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Sturgeon's House

COMPETITION Steel Chariot of The Prairie: The Lone Free State's First Battle Tank (2247)


Sturgeon

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6,600 lbs of fuel so far. That's a 900 mile range. So y'all better git on mah level.

And for the record, that 900 mile range is with the full 1200 horsepower motherfucker version of the 1790. If I downrate it to 930hp I get well over 1,100 miles, and 930 is the estimated minimum horsepower I need.

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@Sturgeon naïve question, but the pressure that we should use for our guns when calculating performance is the 70,000 PSI peak operating pressure, right?

 

My second "high threat" gun option is a brute of a thing (5 inches, 55 calibres) and I just want to make sure that I'm speccing it out to be all that it can be. I mean, if I'm going to have to reload in two parts, I want to make damn sure that whatever is on the receiving end of this thing is very, very sorry to be there.

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29 minutes ago, Toxn said:

@Sturgeon naïve question, but the pressure that we should use for our guns when calculating performance is the 70,000 PSI peak operating pressure, right?

 

My second "high threat" gun option is a brute of a thing (5 inches, 55 calibres) and I just want to make sure that I'm speccing it out to be all that it can be. I mean, if I'm going to have to reload in two parts, I want to make damn sure that whatever is on the receiving end of this thing is very, very sorry to be there.

 

Yes 70,000 PSI is the number you want to show on your sheet. If you're using QuickLOAD, 85,000 is the max pressure you put in the spec, and when you run the table it will spit out 70,000 PSI.

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So here's another revelation about non-reactive armours: if you want to use blends of textolite and HHA, the best ratio is something like 1:1. What this gets you is a material that has almost exactly the same TE as ordinary RHA against both kinetic and chemical threats, but also has 1.54/1.64 KE/CE mass efficiency. This means that, to get the same protection as a given of RHA against KE, you can use a blended plate of the same thickness but around 2/3 the mass.

 

So... is an all-fibreglass tank (with lots of HHA plates inside) an option?

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1 hour ago, Toxn said:

So here's another revelation about non-reactive armours: if you want to use blends of textolite and HHA, the best ratio is something like 1:1. What this gets you is a material that has almost exactly the same TE as ordinary RHA against both kinetic and chemical threats, but also has 1.54/1.64 KE/CE mass efficiency. This means that, to get the same protection as a given of RHA against KE, you can use a blended plate of the same thickness but around 2/3 the mass.

 

So... is an all-fibreglass tank (with lots of HHA plates inside) an option?


I’ve never seen fiberglass used as a construction or supporting material for anything over 3 tons. Not quite sure how you’d make a 20+ ton tank out of it. 

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2 minutes ago, Lord_James said:


I’ve never seen fiberglass used as a construction or supporting material for anything over 3 tons. Not quite sure how you’d make a 20+ ton tank out of it. 

Never seen a boat before?

 

In all seriousness though: you can make big, heavy things out of fiberglass. It's just a) hella expensive and b) complex, given the need to mold metal inserts everywhere you have a mounting point, bearing, axle etc.

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9 minutes ago, Toxn said:

Never seen a boat before?


From what I’ve seen, many large boats have fiberglass hull plating, with metal supporting frames. I haven’t seen a multi ton, all fiberglass boat, just canoes and small personal craft... but then again, I don’t go looking. 
 

17 minutes ago, Toxn said:

you can make big, heavy things out of fiberglass. It's just a) hella expensive and b) complex, given the need to mold metal inserts everywhere you have a mounting point, bearing, axle etc.


Sounds good. I know in high performance race cars, they have similar issues. 

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2 hours ago, Toxn said:

So here's another revelation about non-reactive armours: if you want to use blends of textolite and HHA, the best ratio is something like 1:1. What this gets you is a material that has almost exactly the same TE as ordinary RHA against both kinetic and chemical threats, but also has 1.54/1.64 KE/CE mass efficiency. This means that, to get the same protection as a given of RHA against KE, you can use a blended plate of the same thickness but around 2/3 the mass.

 

So... is an all-fibreglass tank (with lots of HHA plates inside) an option?

 

What do you mean by blend?

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2 hours ago, Lord_James said:


From what I’ve seen, many large boats have fiberglass hull plating, with metal supporting frames. I haven’t seen a multi ton, all fiberglass boat, just canoes and small personal craft... but then again, I don’t go looking. 
 


Sounds good. I know in high performance race cars, they have similar issues. 

 

There's plenty of quite large vessels made of glass, including racing sailboats -- the VOR 70s are designed for round-the-world racing and are about 14 tons (metric) all up. The first fiberglass 12-meter yachts are also in the 12-25 ton (metric) range, but they were built in the 70s if I remember correctly. I would suggest that composite structures of this type were very poorly understood at the time, and would be extremely difficult to lay up properly -- while boats with 2-3" thick solid fiberglass hulls were being built in the '60s and '70s because they didn't know how strong fiberglass was, there were also severe quality control issues that needed resolving.

 

Laying up the structure itself would prove difficult, as you need to ensure appropriate resin fill during the layup process and you don't really have vacuum bagging or pre-impregnated heat-activated resins at this time.  Most epoxy or polyester/vinylester resins set in an exothermic reaction, and are also extremely flammable. In very thick layups, like a >12" thick turret front, this could result in the layup heating up sufficiently to spontaneously combust. 

 

Plus, laying up composites is time consuming and miserable work that kills the necessarily quite skilled workers with silicosis from thickening agents and VOC poisoning from the epoxy unless they wear respirators, and if the vehicle gets hot enough it melts. 

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4 hours ago, Sturgeon said:

 

What do you mean by blend?

25mm of HHA, 25mm of texto, all in layers. You could do something sneaky like embed plates in textolite to allow you to make curved surfaces, but honestly layers sounds like less of a chore.

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2 hours ago, A. T. Mahan said:

 

There's plenty of quite large vessels made of glass, including racing sailboats -- the VOR 70s are designed for round-the-world racing and are about 14 tons (metric) all up. The first fiberglass 12-meter yachts are also in the 12-25 ton (metric) range, but they were built in the 70s if I remember correctly. I would suggest that composite structures of this type were very poorly understood at the time, and would be extremely difficult to lay up properly -- while boats with 2-3" thick solid fiberglass hulls were being built in the '60s and '70s because they didn't know how strong fiberglass was, there were also severe quality control issues that needed resolving.

 

Laying up the structure itself would prove difficult, as you need to ensure appropriate resin fill during the layup process and you don't really have vacuum bagging or pre-impregnated heat-activated resins at this time.  Most epoxy or polyester/vinylester resins set in an exothermic reaction, and are also extremely flammable. In very thick layups, like a >12" thick turret front, this could result in the layup heating up sufficiently to spontaneously combust. 

 

Plus, laying up composites is time consuming and miserable work that kills the necessarily quite skilled workers with silicosis from thickening agents and VOC poisoning from the epoxy unless they wear respirators, and if the vehicle gets hot enough it melts. 

Textolite is phenolic resin rather than epoxy, although still an exothermic reaction.

 

I knew a guy who used to be the plant manager for a plant that used phenolic to make grinding disks. Apparently he had one of the cooling loops on a large tank go out in the dead of night as it was setting up and it blew the top off the thing. He also had a tank that failed less spectacularly but ran to completion in the tank. Apparently some poor bastards had to spend a week jackhammering the hardened resin out from the inside of the tank.

 

One advantage to phenolics though: they don't melt, and they don't really burn. Instead they keep structural integrity more or less up until the point that they char, then crumble. Hence the use in grinding disks.

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4 minutes ago, Toxn said:

Textolite is phenolic resin rather than epoxy, although still an exothermic reaction.

 

I knew a guy who used to be the plant manager for a plant that used phenolic to make grinding disks. Apparently he had one of the cooling loops on a large tank go out in the dead of night as it was setting up and it blew the top off the thing. He also had a tank that failed less spectacularly but ran to completion in the tank. Apparently some poor bastards had to spend a week jackhammering the hardened resin out from the inside of the tank.

 

One advantage to phenolics though: they don't melt, and they don't really burn. Instead they keep structural integrity more or less up until the point that they char, then crumble. Hence the use in grinding disks.

 

Fair, I've never done work with phenolic resins, just epoxy and polyester/vinylester. 

 

Fun fact, if you accidentally drop a pint or a quart or so of hardener into a 55-gallon drum of epoxy, it eventually will throw flames about 30' in the air. There were scorch marks on the ceiling of the building hall from that.

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56 minutes ago, Toxn said:

25mm of HHA, 25mm of texto, all in layers. You could do something sneaky like embed plates in textolite to allow you to make curved surfaces, but honestly layers sounds like less of a chore.

 

Hahahahah imagine not using 180 quarter inch plates in your glacis!

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58 minutes ago, Toxn said:

25mm of HHA, 25mm of texto, all in layers. You could do something sneaky like embed plates in textolite to allow you to make curved surfaces, but honestly layers sounds like less of a chore.


OK I'm a little confused, the TE of HHA is stated in the OP to be 1.5x (versus 2x before). How does that improve the textolite array?

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8 hours ago, Sturgeon said:


OK I'm a little confused, the TE of HHA is stated in the OP to be 1.5x (versus 2x before). How does that improve the textolite array?

It lowers ME but improves TE. The end result of a 50:50 composite is a material with a TE that's exactly the same as RHA, but weighs much less. You know, for all those backing plates and what-not that you regrettably still need to have behind a layer of ERA.

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3 hours ago, Toxn said:

It lowers ME but improves TE. The end result of a 50:50 composite is a material with a TE that's exactly the same as RHA, but weighs much less. You know, for all those backing plates and what-not that you regrettably still need to have behind a layer of ERA.

 

I don't see how a reduced TE improves TE. TE of HHA was previously 2 now it's 1.5.

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1 hour ago, Sturgeon said:

 

I don't see how a reduced TE improves TE. TE of HHA was previously 2 now it's 1.5.

It improves the TE of the composite versus one made of pure textolite. Remember that textolite has a TE of something like 0.39, but an ME of a bit over 2. HHA has a TE of 1.5 and an ME of 1.5.

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