Best tank-busting armament

hole in the ground · 07-01-2006, 12:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DerAdlerIstGelandet

Im with Les as well. The Hs-129 with better engines could have been the ultimate anti tank aircraft of WW2. Hell it was a flying tank and could carry a hell of armament. She was just underpowered from hell.

.....
so couldn't carry a hell of alot of armament???

The Tse-Tse was indeed used in an anti shipping role. Very effective at popping subs pressure hulls if caught on the surface.
Would've thought that it wasn't a bad reference to have for tank busting.

lesofprimus · 07-01-2006, 04:00 PM

But it was never used as a tank buster, therefore, useless in this thread....

Open up a thread about it if u feel so inclined...

As for the Hs-129, there were several variants that were used... The Hs 129B-2/R2 added a 30mm Mk 103 cannon with 30 rounds in a tray under the fuselage....
Hs 129B-2/R3 used a 37mm BK 3.7 gun instead...
Hs 129B-2/R4 mounted a 75mm Pak 40L in an underfuselage pod with 12 rounds.... Weight and stall speed increased to 6.9 tons and 91 mph, respectvely....
Hs 129B-3/Wa with the 75mm BK 7.5 cannon and 26 rounds instead.... The pod could be jettisoned in an emergency.... Only 25 were made, due to the gun being too much for the airframe.....
Hs 129C, which was the planned upgrade, would have used two 627-kW Italian engines and had a limited traverse ventral turret with two 30mm Mk 103 cannons..... The design was dropped after Italy surrendered and the engines became unavailable....

What if.........

plan_D · 07-01-2006, 04:12 PM

I may be wrong, but I think the Tse-Tse was used in the ground attack role over the Normandy beach-heads. Whether it attacked tanks or not, I don't know. So, I'm wasting my time.

delcyros · 07-01-2006, 04:15 PM

...not to forget the early 30 mm gun in the Hs-129, the MK 101. The ballistics of this gun imply a better penetration ability (same projectile but higher mv, lower rof) than the MK 103.
What about the british 40 mm gun or the soviet 37 mm guns?

lesofprimus · 07-01-2006, 05:20 PM

The mk 101 was phased out rather quickly in the Hs-129......

Gnomey · 07-01-2006, 06:44 PM

Agreed, if provided with decent engines the Hs-129 could of been (and would of been) the best anti-tank plane of the war. Although I think they would still have been shot down in droves when the Germans lost air superiority but then the FW-190F could still operate so not all would be lost.

DerAdlerIstGelandet · 07-02-2006, 11:14 AM

Agreed. The aircraft would have been the best at its intended purpose throughout the war however once the Luftwaffe lost airsupperiority she would have been a sitting duck.

In some ways she was similar to the Ju-87. She was very good at her job but not very maneuverable and sluggish, shot down in droves without propper protection.

I still think she would have been a ***** to take down though. She was a tank with wings!

Gnomey · 07-02-2006, 12:14 PM

Yep! She would of been even harder than the Il-2 to knock down, and with the Russian fighters light armament they would of found it very hard to shoot it out of the sky.

Tony Williams · 07-02-2006, 11:52 PM

The best gun was probably the Soviet NS-37: it was smaller, lighter, faster-firing, more powerful and had a much bigger ammunition supply than the German BK 3,7 (which was just a modified Flak gun rather than being specially designed for the job). However, the BK 3,7 had better ammunition - the tungsten-cored Hartkenmunition - which gave it more penetration in most (but not all) circumstances.

The 'Tsetse' Mosquito was originally designed for tank-busting, but the RAF went off the idea so they were handed over to Coastal Command instead. A pity really, the gun was very accurate and powerful.

If you want to know about the performance of the different anti-tank guns, you'll find it here: TANKBUSTERS: AIRBORNE ANTI-TANK GUNS IN WW2

Rockets were too inaccurate to be really effective as anti-tank weapons. The RAF calculated that in action only about one in two hundred would score a hit. Bombs were even less accurate.

The most effective airborne anti-tank weapons were probably the Soviet and German cluster bombs - a shower of small bombs dropped from a container. These covered a wide area with a strong probability of hitting a tank, and they could blow a hole through the top armour.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum

lesofprimus · 07-03-2006, 12:08 AM

The Luftwaffe had a better rocket launch to hit ratio with the Fw 190F than the RAF did, but it was an inaccurate way to destroy a tank...

I still feel that the heavy cannon was the better way to destroy enemy armour on the move... Tanks were usually dispersed, not crowded together, making cluster bombs partially useless....

And besides, bombing was a much less accurate method, cluster munitions or not...

Tony Williams · 07-03-2006, 01:48 AM

From "Flying Guns – World War 2: Development of Aircraft Guns, Ammunition and Installations 1933-45":

"Also introduced at Kursk was the PTAB (Protivotankovaya Aviatsionnaya Bomba = anti-tank aircraft bomb). Versions weighing 1.5 and 2.5 kg were used, and these relied on a hollow-charge warhead to penetrate up to 60-70 mm of armour. Some 192 PTABs were housed in a KMB canister, of which four could be fitted into the internal bomb bays. These were usually released en masse from 70–100 m altitude, covering an area of 15 x 70 m (i.e. an average of one for every 1.3 m2) and were highly effective, being rated by the Soviets as the best method for dealing with tanks and two to three times more effective than ordinary bombs."

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum

delcyros · 07-03-2006, 03:55 AM

...sounds plausible to use bomblets with hollow charges.

Here some penetration figures for
(from close distance, >500 yrds and with a speed advantage of ~320 fps against a plate of Q:1.0 and el:20%, standart high quality US armour plate)
40 mm (Hurricane IID): 59 mm at best impact obliquity, lowering down to
~17 mm @ 60 deg. impact obliquity
NS 37: 95 mm @ 0 deg. impact obliquity, lowering to 23 mm @ 60 deg. impact obliquity, sufficiant to defeat most german tanks, except for Tiger and King Tiger.

Tony Williams · 07-03-2006, 03:59 AM

Thanks for that. Where did you get the NS-37 data from? The only sources I've found say 48mm/500m, although that's always seemed a bit low to me.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum

delcyros · 07-03-2006, 09:04 AM

M79APCLC calculator for penetration of homogenious armour. Used the shell body of the standart US M79 AP round, which is in the middle of blunt shaped and very pointed. If You know the metal properties (source the net) and some ballistic datas (most important beeing weight, size, impact velocity and impact obliquity), the program does the penetration physics for You. Depending on nose shape the program is correct in more than 92% of the cases.

Tony Williams · 07-04-2006, 10:38 AM

It's curious that the Soviet penetration data should be so much worse than the results of the calculations. Furthermore, I have a German ammo test chart (they tested everything they could get hold of) which lists the penetration of the NS-37 AP at 45mm. Maybe it was something to do with the quality of the Soviet AP projectiles (which were a bit iffy in tank guns IIRC).

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum