My Old Ride

The M1(IP) I was assigned at Panzer Kaserne taken just before the unit started getting M1A1(HA)

 

I've always had a soft spot for MOPARs...

The location of this photo is now a PX! 

DR OF An AK Magazine

GURPS, generally, does not track the DR of equipment except to figure out how to damage it.

It does have rules on p. B557 to calculate the DR and HP of objects.

A loaded, steel, AK magazine should have DR 5 and 3 HP.  That gives a Cover DR of 6 (p. B408).

A 7.62x51mm round doing 7d pi will do an average of 24 points of damage, 6 will be absorbed by the magazine and 18 will penetrate to the torso of the mook, doing 18 damage.  24 points also does 9 points (piercing damage is halved on injury tolerance: unliving) to the magazine which is enough to, possibly, kill it.

00 buck, doing 1d+1 pi will do an average of 4 points of damage.  It will neither hurt the mook, nor damage the magazine enough to make it useless.

#4 buck, doing 1d-1(0.5) pi- will do a average of 2 points of damage which is utterly useless at penetrating both the cover DR of 12 from the magazine protecting the wearer and the DR 10 of the magazine itself.  Remember; that (0.5) doubles the DR.

Mr Fleetwood's recollection of #4 Buck failing to penetrate an AK magazine in a chest rig GURPS! 

Grumble Grumble

People are going to watch YouTube videos about tanks and think they learned something.

They will be wrong.

While the M60 machine gun was offered as a solenoid fired variant in the M60E2, none were adopted.

Listening to the same dude from Australia repeat that the M60 was used in the... uh... M60 drives me nuts.

Battlefield Vegas doesn't have a coaxial gun and their M60A1 RISE clearly has the cradle for an M240.

Ask.  Me.  How.  I.  Know.

By the way, it's not the M240C.  The M240C feeds from the right side of the gun.  You find those in Bradleys.  The tank version of the gun is M240.  Feeds from the left.

Ask.  Me.  How.  I.  Know.

Prior to the M240 there was the M219 aka M73A1.  Prior to that there was the M73.

Thus ends the list of coaxial machine guns used in US M60 tanks.

Just to head off the, "maybe he got it confused with the M48," crowd.

The M48 starts with the .30-06 M37 machine gun and when it's finally upgraded to the M48A5 standard, it's gets saddled with the M219.

Even worse is his "history" and mention of the cupola.

The M60 has a .50 in that cupola, the M85.

He goes on to show lots of the mods made to M48A3's in Vietnam, including one where they removed the gun from the cupola and mounted it to a pintle on top of the cupola.

Did you know the MG in the cupola was an M2HB?

He doesn't.

It ticks me off because even War Thunder gets this stuff right and it only takes a couple of minutes to find it out.

What Wasn't VS What Was

Doing research for Twilight: 2000 often means ignoring things that happened in the real world because they wouldn't have happened in the Twilight setting.

But most of the materials have the answers to the real world when I actually look at them.

Three things caused the Army to divest of the M1128 Stryker MGS.

First was the autoloader was problematic.  With only 142 made, one could argue that it never really left the prototype stage.  One could also argue that with more than 20 years of development, Teledyne should have been able to get it to work.

Second, unlike the other Stryker variants, the M1128 couldn't have the hull adapted to an angled floor because of the turret taking up floor space.  This lack of protection against mines was considered a big deal.

Third, they expected the M10 Booker to be joining the light brigades and supplying the firepower the M1128 provided.  Never mind that the M10 was nearly double the weight and larger than the MGS version.  When the generals kept screaming it wasn't a light tank they were not lying.

Bonus!  Firepower upgrades to other Stryker versions were, in theory, making a 105mm armed vehicle in the formation unnecessary.  Time will tell.

Begat

The M8 Buford started out as the FMC CCVL (Close Combat Vehicle, Light).

It beat the Cadillac Gage Stingray and Teledyne AGS (Armored Gun System).

The M8 program came out of several attempts to replace the Sheridan.

The first one that showed promise was the AAI Light Tank, which has several versions and names.  HSTV-L (High Survivability Test Vehicle - Light) is the one most familiar to most people, but T2K players call it the LAV-75.

The XM4 program sought a 105mm armed light tank and that festered while Cadillac Gage, FMC and Teledyne figured out their proposals.

The Stingray made it to production, Thailand bought about 100.

Teledyne's AGS spawned the turret that ended up on the Stryker MGS.

I do wonder if the Teledyne turret on a Buford hull might not be the way to go.

But they never ask me.

M60A5

I already made stats for the M48 getting its turret replaced with the Teledyne low profile turret for my GURPS: Twilight 2000 conversion.

There was a planned M60 version too!

 Shaves 8.1 tons off the baseline M60A3 TTS+

Teledyne's 1994 literature says that the turret was amenable to being upgraded to 120mm. 

Teledyne actually made a prototype based on a Centurion hull.  Overall it saved 5.5 tons and had several upgrades to the hull protection.  I'm about 1/3 done with the GURPS stats for the various versions of the Centurion, and this one will get added.

Because Teledyne was operating in a post-Cold War environment, they also developed kits to upgrade T-54/55 and T-62!

Even included the French and an AMX-30 upgrade.

The Soviet tanks aren't getting the upgrade in my T2K conversion.

How Many Years Is It Now?

When did the 82nd turn in their last M551A1(TTS) Sheridan?

1997.

How many attempts have there been to replace it?

At least two versions of the LAV-25 with a 105mm gun.

The Ares light tank beloved by Twilight: 2000 players as the LAV-75.

The M8 Buford was type classified and accepted for procurement, but never produced.

The M1128 Stryker Mobile Gun System was fielded, but not for airborne use.

And now the M10 Booker has been type classified and accepted for procurement... and won't be produced.

It doesn't change that there's a need for something like a Sheridan and has been for 27 years.

The funny thing about the M551 is all of the early newsreels of it don't tout it's ability to go toe to toe with main battle tanks.  They tout it's mobility and speed with oversized firepower for its weight.  They issued them to non-airborne units.

Then found that a light tank isn't a good substitute for a main battle tank when one is called for and nuked the entire idea for everyone BUT the airborne who could show they needed a light tank they could bring with and drop with.

Maybe if we had more than one airborne division we'd care more?

Lumanumb

According to Pyramid Magazine 3/85 the DR of an inch of "high strength" aluminum is 35.

This is different from what I'd found earlier.

It makes more sense too, I think.  Otherwise we'd have gone to aluminum armor for MBT's before we realized how it liked to burn.  We made a LOT of Bradleys before we admitted that.

The Sherman Was A Fine Tank

In point of fact, the Sherman was in the inventory of all the winning Armies in WW2.

People keep talking as if we won the war in spite of the thing.

They concede that it was OK if you consider the Firefly (which is a horrid adaptation).

The fact is that most Shermans had the "ineffective" 75mm M3 gun.

What one has to do when determining if the M4 was a good tank or not is to remove German propaganda from the research.

No, the M3 gun isn't as good at punching armor as the 76mm M1A1, but it was good enough against the Panzer IV right up to the end of the war.

It was definitely used incorrectly often, but that's not the fault of the design.

It's armor wasn't as thick as some other tanks, but it was enough to win most engagements.

No, it didn't catch fire more often than other tanks once it took a penetration.

Even if it did, you were more likely to escape from it than most other tanks.

No, it was not designed as an infantry support tank, even if infantry support was one of the main tasks tanks were expected to perform.

Kit Bash Goal

What if you put the turret from a Bradley and a 120mm main gun from an Abrams on an M3 Lee hull?

 I wanna build this!

Old Tanks

One thing that's nice about making GURPS stats for old tanks is the thickness of the armor is the same as the rolled homogeneous armor equivalent!

3" on the armor diagram is 3" of armor and DR 210.

Sloped at 30° and it's DR 315.

Sloped at 60° and it's DR 420.

Simple!

Something interesting I read is that 1" of hard aluminum armor is the same as 1.2" of RHAE.  I'll bet there's a solid reason that it doesn't get too thick though.

Oh My Gods

Yes, you are very clever having looked up some information on the internet.

But you missed some shit.

Yes, Kontakt-5 was developed in 1985.

Yes, that predates the deployment of the M900 APFSDSDU.

The date you give for the deployment of the M900 is wrong, we had it in the tanks in 1988, not 1990.  I was there, saw it with my own eyes what it takes to turn in and sign for "nuclear materials" when we traded in the M883 rounds.

Yes, Kontakt-5 premiered on the T-80U, which also first appeared in 1985.  But they didn't field them until closer to 1990.  Again, I was there.

While the US intelligence agencies missed a lot of things about how good or bad Soviet stuff was, we had our own eyes to see what was right across the damn border.  Forgot the USMLM exploits, didn't you?

No, the T-72 didn't get Kontakt-5 in 1989 except at trade shows.  The Russians had the same problem with defense spending we had then, the Cold War was ending around them before it ended around us.  T-72B3 didn't get into deployable numbers until 2010!

Plus!  In 1990 we got to see what the East Germans had.  Some of that was sobering, much of it wasn't.

Armor and penetration values are very hard to make apples to apples comparisons with.  It's especially hard to get two sources to use the same methods.  Is that penetration value at the muzzle or is it at 2,000 meters?  Is it LOS thickness, is it the actual thickness at 0°, is it "rolled homogeneous armor equivalent"?  Lots of times it doesn't say and you get to make assumptions.

Take the, speculative, penetration values for M900 for example.  The 520mm value I found against RHAE is almost certainly the 2km @ 0° value.  The 650mm value I found recently is probably the 100m value (which is the cannon equivalent to muzzle velocity.)

There's a lot on the internet that's presented as absolute values without considering that the first appearance of something isn't the date that it's really available.

If that were true, 3-34AR would have had M1A1's instead of M1(IP)'s in 1987.  They still had M60A3(TTS) (and were called 2-37AR) the day I arrived in the midst of a unit designation change AND turning in the M60's.  The M1A1(HA) starts production in 1988 but we didn't get any until 1990.

See how that works?

So stop telling me, from Canada, to ignore my lying eyes.  I am what historians call a primary source!

Courage

Watching a vid about the Conqueror heavy tank.

You have to admire the British for being brave enough to have several electrically powered essential systems on their tanks.

Yes, those systems work as well as anything Lucas put in anything else.

M1952A Vest

In 1967 the issue fragmentation body armor vest was the M1952A.

In GURPS terms it's 8.5 lb., $400 and gives DR 4/2*.  The higher DR is vs pi and cut, lower against all other types.  The * means it's flexible armor.

The later M1969 vest is almost identical in GURPS terms.

Linothorax

YouTube disagrees with GURPS.

It happens.

I've watched several videos where cloth and linen armor does better than expected.

There's a bit of an explanation in an optional rule...  I'll get to that.

But one claim that comes up, over and over, is that the linothorax was lighter than a similar level of protection from bronze.

In GURPS a linothorax is either reinforced medium layered cloth, DR 3 with DR 4 vs cutting; G$437.50, 25 lb. or reinforced heavy layered cloth, DR 4 with DR 5 vs cutting; G$750, 35 lb.

DR 4 bronze is medium segmented plate for G$3,600, 24 lb.  Very similar in protection and weight with the medium reinforced cloth!

DR 3 bronze light plate is G$4,000, 8 lb.  No bonus against cutting, but MUCH lighter than reinforced medium cloth.

DR 6 bronze medium plate for G$10,000, 20 lb.  Lighter and better protection than reinforced heavy cloth.

Linothorax is much CHEAPER than bronze armor and probably a lot more comfortable.

Now, that optional rule:  On Low Tech p.102 under Blunt Trauma and Edged Weapons you need to get a hit that punches more than twice the DR to get the bonus from cutting weapons.

So reinforced medium cloth would need a hit of 9 or better to cause actual cutting damage.  A hit of 5-8 is just crushing; it will also fail to reach the skin so no effects from poison and the like.

This optional rule helps explain why cloth armors are performing better in youtube tests than we expected.

DR 2 light layered cloth prevents a cut from up to 4 points of damage, even if the wearer took 2 points of crushing damage from it.  The testing media almost never has a way to measure the impact under the armor and would rule that a no-penetration hit is complete protection.

A ST 12 person swinging a short-sword will do 1d+2 cutting damage and that averages 5 points of damage, so most of the time they're penetrating the light layered cloth and getting the cutting bonus and doing 4 points of damage.  That same hit against reinforced medium cloth will just get one point of crushing damage through (and be ruled as didn't hurt on YouTube).

Armor Of Proof

I did a post saying that for your armor to be "proof" against an Elizabethan musket you needed to protect against the average hit from 4d+2 pi++.  That's 16 points of raw damage.

But "armor of proof" isn't supposed to protect you from a musket.

It's to protect you from the opposing cavalry whom will be using pistols.

A pistol of this period is a wheellock doing 2d-1 pi+ or a petronel doing 2d+2 pi+.  That's 6 and 9 respectively.

That's a much easier target goal to hit achieve.

More importantly, DR 6 is affordably available for the average adventurer and demi-lancer.

New Information

A while ago I speculated about why the T-64, T-72, T-80 and T-90 would, routinely, have catastrophic ammunition fires.

The Cheiftan has a chat about that.

The ammo scattered about the turret and basket unprotected and among the crew would do it.

108

Today marks the 108th anniversary of the first use of tanks on the battlefield at The Somme.

Death before dismount!

We've All Kinda Been There

I am more down on the Wehraboos than a normal person might be because I dealt with different flavors.

First was making 1/35 scale models.

German armor is very popular.  I've made my fair share.  Panzer IV and Panther are my favorite tank subjects and the early sdkfz 232 8-rad armored car with the big cage radio antenna being my wheeled fave.

Boy howdy do you get to hear about how great the Tiger was.  Mostly from the spectators who come to model shows.  And if you, yourself, have German tanks on display, you get to hear why the Tiger was better than Panther and why Panther is better than T-34 and so on...

Then there's TTRPGs.

There's a couple of WW2 German guns that are ahead of their time.  The MG.34 and MG.42 are modern GPMG's.  The 42 is still in service and production as the MG3.

The FG.42 is an FAL eleven years early in most game systems stats.

The StG.44 is an AK six years early, with a weight penalty.

Clever players grab this "too soon" kit if you let them.

But you get subjected to the "as good or better than the..."

No.  No they were not.  Even the milled AK is better than an StG.44 (aka MP.43, aka MP.44).

The FG.42 is nowhere near as good as the FAL and is much more fragile.

Most games don't account for the fragility factor.

I've taken an FG.42 on a couple of characters to get something like an FAL too soon, but the truth is the first of any class of gun tends to suck but hard especially when compared with what comes after it.

Cat Brakes

Does a Panther tank have disc brakes or drums?

Turns out, yes.

Also, no.

A disc brake runs between the pads on a caliper that pushes the pads together into the rotor.

A drum brake runs around the shoes that push outward against the wall of the drum.

The brakes on a Panther do neither.

The "disc" is a drum...  The pads are inside it and press outward against the faces, rather than the wall, of the drum.  It's kind of a combination of the two ideas.

The brake levers push the outer pad ring out and into contact with the spinning drum.  They're set on springs and they rotate a little bit when they come into contact with the drum, this forces ball bearings into channels between the pad rings to force the inner pad ring into contact with the drum's other side.

Huge mechanical advantage.

I cannot find a single picture that clearly shows it, or a clearer description than I just gave.