Chapter 533: Fin-Stabilized Armor-Piercing Discarding Sabot Projectile

The integration of Europe, especially the issuance of the euro (which deprived the United States and Canada of foreign exchange, seized all American companies in Europe, and froze funds) made Germany's purse burst.

Yannick was finally able to spend money on military research and development. The huge amount of money he spent really had an immediate effect, and various new achievements were gushing out.

For example, the new armor-piercing shells for tanks.

Armor-piercing shells have been fighting on the battlefield as early as the 19th century. At that time, it was mainly used against armored warships and was not widely used. It was not until the advent of tanks in World War I that armored shells rushed into the battlefield in a hurry, and their performance was greatly improved. During this period, armored shells were a kind of armor-piercing shells with a suitable caliber, that is, the diameter of the armor-piercing body was the same as the caliber of the armor-piercing shell body.

According to the different shapes of the head, ordinary armor-piercing shells can be divided into pointed armor-piercing shells, blunt armor-piercing shells and capped armor-piercing shells.

The shape of the bullet of the pointed armor-piercing projectile is a simple conical streamline, but with the increase of shooting distance, the simple streamline cannot guarantee the shooting accuracy of the bullet. The head resistance of the pointed armor-piercing projectile is small when penetrating the armor. It has a higher penetration ability for tough armor with lower hardness, but when penetrating armor with higher hardness, the head is easy to break and it is easy to bounce off the inclined armor.

Blunt-nosed armor-piercing projectiles avoid this disadvantage. Because the contact area of ​​the blunt-nosed armor-piercing projectile is large when it hits the armor, the bullet head is not easy to break, and the stress state when hitting the target is improved, which can prevent ricochets to a certain extent. The blunt head is easy to destroy the armor surface and is easy to cause shear impact damage. Therefore, in many cases, especially in the case of high-speed inclined collision, the armor-piercing ability of the blunt-nosed armor-piercing projectile is higher than that of the pointed-nosed armor-piercing projectile, and it can be used to deal with homogeneous armor and inhomogeneous armor with higher hardness.

The structural feature of the capped armor-piercing projectile is that a blunt cap is brazed on the sharp head. The function of the cap is to avoid ricochets when the inclined armor-piercing is penetrated as much as possible and to protect the bullet head from breaking when hitting the target. The cap has lower hardness than the projectile body and better toughness. In order to facilitate the pitting, the top of the cap is surface quenched to increase the hardness. When hitting the armor, the stress transmitted to the head of the projectile through the cap is greatly reduced, thereby protecting the head of the projectile.

When hitting, the cap and the armor surface are destroyed, while the pointed projectile itself continues to penetrate with less resistance, and it is not easy to bounce off when it hits at an angle. Therefore, the armor-piercing ability is improved.

In addition to the above, there are other common armor-piercing shells, such as semi-armor-piercing shells, also known as armor-piercing blasting shells. Its structural characteristics are that it has a larger chamber and a large amount of explosives. The kinetic energy of the armor-piercing shell itself is used to make the warhead drill into the target and then explode, and the target is destroyed by shock waves, fragments and projectiles.

Although the tungsten core armor-piercing shells equipped by Germany at this time can destroy all active tanks, Yannick is not satisfied. He needs to absolutely crush the enemy's advanced weapons in terms of range and power. The enemy was beaten to a pulp by our side before he even got close. It's so cool to think about it.

In the middle and late stages of World War II in the original time and space, heavy tanks covered with thick armor rushed to the battlefield. As the saying goes, "where there is a spear, there must be a shield, and where there is a shield, there must be a spear." Soon, sub-caliber armor-piercing shells appeared, that is, armor-piercing shells whose diameter of the armor-piercing body is smaller than the diameter of the shell. In the shell of this sub-caliber armor-piercing shell, there is a core made of hard alloy. Since armor-piercing shells rely on the kinetic energy of the projectile to penetrate the armor, when the projectile hits the armor at high speed, the high-strength and small-diameter core can concentrate most of the energy on a very small area of ​​the armor, thereby penetrating the "turtle shell" in one fell swoop.

Sub-caliber armor-piercing shells can be divided into two types according to their appearance: spool-shaped and streamlined. The spool-shaped structure is to dig out the metal part between the upper and lower centering parts of the projectile as much as possible, so that the projectile is shaped like a spool. The purpose is to reduce the weight of the projectile. It can show the advantage of high armor-piercing ability at close range, but the speed decays quickly at long distances. The streamlined structure has a better projectile shape, but the specific kinetic energy is limited.

In order to deal with thicker armor and overcome the defects of sub-caliber armor-piercing shells, armor-piercing shells with discarding sabots appeared. The armor-piercing shells with discarding sabots consist of a flying part (projectile body) and a falling part (retainer, belt, etc.). After the initial chambering of this kind of shell, the airtight part will be discarded, leaving only the slender sub-caliber shell.

Although most of the later generations fired armor-piercing shells with discarding sabots were large-caliber smoothbore guns (for armor-piercing shells with discarding sabots, rifling not only does not play any role, but will drag down the stability of the shells and bring unnecessary resistance), the stubborn British held on to their rifled guns and developed a method for rifled guns to fire armor-piercing shells with discarding sabots.

They installed fins on the armor-piercing shells with discarding sabots, and the four fins were arranged in a cross shape at the tail of the shells. When the shells are first chambered, part of their huge kinetic energy will be converted into angular kinetic energy, so that this kind of shells can spin and obtain stability even if they are fired with smoothbore guns. Shells designed in this way are called tail-stabilized armor-piercing shells with discarding sabots.

In later times, the fin-stabilized discarding sabot armor-piercing projectile became one of the most important equipment for tanks in various countries, completely replacing the status of traditional armor-piercing projectiles and becoming a tank killer used by tanks.

Alfred Jr. introduced. "Your Highness, we have completed the research and development of 75mm and 88mm fin-stabilized discarding sabot armor-piercing projectiles. The performance of this type of armor-piercing projectile far exceeds that of existing ordinary armor-piercing projectiles. The 88mm fin-stabilized discarding sabot armor-piercing projectile can penetrate 200mm homogeneous vertical armor at a distance of 2,000 meters." Then he added. "It's just that the cost of this type of armor-piercing projectile is a bit high."

Yannick nodded with satisfaction. The frontal armor of the turret of the US T26E4 Super Pershing is only 152 mm; the thickest part of the Stalin II armor is 120 mm. That is to say, the German 88mm tank gun firing a tail-stabilized armor-piercing projectile can penetrate these tanks 2,000 meters away.

Of course, the premise is that it can hit. However, Germany's aiming equipment is the most advanced in the world, and with the excellent ballistic performance of the 88mm tank gun, it is still possible to do it.

As for the cost issue, how high can it be higher than the price of a tank?

After turning around, Yannick asked. "What's the progress of the 105mm tank gun?"

Little Alfred said respectfully. "Your Highness, the research and development is progressing smoothly. It will be completed and put into actual combat in about a year."

"Very good." The L7 rifled gun in the original time and space can be said to be enduring. As a tank gun developed in the late 1950s, it has not been completely eliminated more than 50 years later. The main reason is its firepower. The earliest armor-piercing discarding sabot (APDS) projectile has a penetration depth of easily exceeding 300 mm. It can not only easily penetrate five pairs of wheels, but also easily deal with the IS-3 heavy tank known as the invincible iron turtle.