"hesh round v conventional tank armor" Topic

would a british scorpion light tank with its 76mm hesh round be capable of taking out a russian cold war t55 or t62 with conventional single plate armor .how thick a sheet of armor plate would it have been effective against.

Yes,remembering my old gunnery days, it could, now to how thick i cannot remember, but yes due to the effect of hesh, it could,iirc a 76mm round fired by Kuwaiti army saladin knocked out iraqi version of t-62

The problem isn't so much the kill probability; it is the hit probability.

HESH/HEP round are very slow moving and have a high ballistic trajectory because of that.

That means that, if your aim is slightly off (in elevation), you're probably not going to hit like an APDS round would (with a relatively flat trajectory).

Worse, observing the fall of shot is a lot more dangerous because of the slow-moving round, so the firer is exposed for longer while waiting to see whether he hit and what kind of adjustments he'd need to make to bring the round onto the target.

But it could indeed kill a T55 or T62 if it could hit. I don't have the specs on how thick the armor would have to be before it negated interior spalling for a 76mm round.

Well, remembering this from something I read in the early 1980s (so I might be off a bit), I think the claim was that it could defeat 240-280mm of armor.

Considering that concentrated fire from USMC LAV-25 20mm cannons were knocking out Iraqi T-55 & 62's during GW1, I'd say it's a pretty darn good bet.

Yes they could--in the same way the main gun on the BMP could knock out an MBT…But it was all about getting the angle right..The main advantage of the HESH round is that it also has a reasonable HE capability….

As for a Scorpion taking on anything toe to toe…mmmm you may get one round off and then die badly--"Aluminium" and "armour" are not two words that should be in the same scentence…. ;)

yuss the t55 and t62 are going to take a beating and hitting is not all that hard if they have there act together alright.

AIUI the thickness of armour is not the main determinant of HESH effectiveness, as HESH does not work by penetrating armour.

Jizbrand raises a good point about the difficulty of getting high first-shot hit ptobability with HESH, which was the reason it was not selected as the UK's primary anti-armour nature (at one point a 183mm auto-loaded HESH-firing gun was being considered, a "one size fits all" approach to demolishing anmy level of protection). At the time when HESH was popular, ranging MGs were the preferred method of securing a first-shot hit with the main armament, and this would have been a good answer at most battle ranges for the Centurion or Chieftain main gun or and of the 120mm recoilless rifles (BAT, Mobat, Wombat, Conbat). Unfortunately Saladin and Scorpion were never equipped with ranging MGs, so they would be reduced to pottering about with the co-ax if they wanted to do any ranging better than the stadia reticle gives.

All the best,

John.

"at one point a 183mm auto-loaded HESH-firing gun was being considered, a "one size fits all" approach to demolishing anmy level of protection"…

John do you have any more info on that? I read ages ago (20 years +) that the British tried to put a 185mm gun(7.2inch) on a Centurion but it didn't really work(suprise suprise)…Is this the same thing???

But it could indeed kill a T55 or T62 if it could hit.

My gunner and I could hit anything, moving any speed. Yes, slow moving round compared to any sabot, but still very good as a direct fire round. You could conceivebly get a round off and it still be travelling to the target and you get whacked with a sabot round.

I forget the HESH muzzle velocity – I think but don't quote me, it's around 540 m/s.

There was no ranging MG set up for the Scorpion as John says and trying to range with the coax would be a total waste of time in my humble opinion as the different trajectories means absolutely no sight picture match. Good range estimation or my favourite laser binoculars work just fine.

The Scorpion 76mm gun sight is calibrated to 2000m for direct fire. "Battle range" or point blank is 500m, ie, 500 is the lowest hash mark, for 500 or less, you put the 500m hash mark on the target.

With semi-indirect fire (for area targets like a really distant objective, but not for point targets like a tank) you can reach out to 5000m.

-"Aluminium" and "armour" are not two words that should be in the same scentence

Thank heavens I personally never had to find out for real.
--
Tim

HESH/HEP does not penetrate. It finds imperfections in the armor plate and causes pieces to come off on the opposite side from the strike of the round (to include things welded to the inside of the armor). All of these items become spall that are hazardous to crew, equipment and ammunition. HESH/HEP was used in the 73 AIW and hits on Arab armor left pie plate size impressions on the outer skin of the armor. My only experience is with 105mm rounds. At longer ranges, the round has a definite downward trajectory. Farest range I've seen a hit obtained with a HEP round is 2900m. First round was just overline of the stationary target and after a slight correction the next round hit in the running gear.

HESH/HEP does not penetrate. It finds imperfections in the armor plate

It does not require imperfections.
-Kle.

Can't speak for HESH rounds, but in the US Army, the 165mm HEP round was extremely effective against immobile targets (bunkers and immobile armor). But that thing was like a flying watermelon, so slow you could actually see it travelling downrange. The maximum effective range on the 165mm HEP was also abysmally short -- 900 meters or some such. But it sure made a nice boom when it got there…

Let me add to Ditto Birds' comments. I too have fired a few thousand of those fun 76mm rounds.

The projectiles were slow, really, really slow. Although they were pretty decent for direct accuracy even out to about 1,500m for a first round with a practiced eye. Waiting that three seconds for flight time to a kilometer and a half seemed forever but it did give time to load the next round in the breach and still have time to turn and observe.

Could they kill a T55 or a T62? Absolutely.
I had a number of friends who did a tour of Somalia in Cougars. Mowag 6x6 armoured cars with a Scorpion turret. Whenever they found equipment, they made it a point to see the equipment was destroyed despite what the UN wanted. The before and after pictures of the inside of a T55 turret were telling. An inch and a half thick inside slab of the turret wall, about four foot square, simply flaked off the inside of the turret and flew across itself to pancake everything in its' way on to the opposite inside wall. Now if ammo or say crew were in the way you might get more liquifying and explosive results. Yes, it would be able to take out T55 and T62s. Mind, you're better off in a tank than either an armoured car or a recce tank.

The real danger is in return fire. If you could park the vehicle behind appropriate terrain, the top of the turret actually made a pretty small target. Once hit, it wouldn't have stoped much. I think it might have been rated to take up to 12.7mm or maybe even 14.5mm fire, but that was it.

There were some gadgets and toys that helped with sighting and ranging. Some had British designed Radnis sights that were supposed to be useful for shooting at night. I always found them to be both troublesome and generally useless. There were laser rangefinders that were available, likewise, I found these to be a waste of time and just another piece of useless kit. The best results always came from using the Mark 1 Eyeball and a lot of practice for range estimation. It wasn't like we were shooting tank 105mm's out to 3 or 4 kilometers directly. I used to pride myself on it. Some people were absolutely phenomenal, other pretty funny.

I guess Jav98 was a combat engineer (or hung out with them).

Sounds like the answer to the question is YES, (proven in combat).

javelin98 wrote:

Can't speak for HESH rounds, but in the US Army, the 165mm HEP round was extremely effective against immobile targets

Oooh, I think you can speak pretty well for HESH. HEP is merely the American term for HESH; and, after all, the 165mm is a British gun.

archstanton73 wrote:

John do you have any more info on that? I read ages ago (20 years +) that the British tried to put a 185mm gun(7.2inch) on a Centurion but it didn't really work(suprise suprise)…Is this the same thing???

I can't imagine that it's any different; although I have only ever seen 7.2in referred to as 183mm (a more exact conversion than 185mm), and the hull that mounted it I believe was Conway, not Centurion. From memory only two prototypes were built, one manually-loaded in a turret, one with an autoloader; I believe the intention may have been to mount this in an oscillating turret. A pal of mine who worked at Chertsey used to have a photo of one of the prototypes as his screen-saver, as it was the most impressive anti-tank gun ever proposed by British tank designers (back when we used to have tank designers).

I don't think the idea was ditched because it didn't work, so much as because it was considerably more powerful than anyone would have needed for killing targets like Stalin 3s, which were the big bogey tank at the time.

Somewhere, and you'll have to forgive me for being too idle to look up the document piece number right at the moment, there is a PRO document giving the results of test shoots on an up-armoured Conqueror target. Conqueror was pretty well-armoured in any case, but they added some extra plate, and proceeded to give it a pretty rough time -- it was shot at with 105mm, 120mm, 165mm and 183mm HESH, and Malkarra. There was no doubt that 183mm HESH was effective; every hit was considered to have been sufficient to inflict a K-kill, in some cases also exerting sufficient stress to warp the hull boat and jam the turret ring. However, it was decided that 183mm was over-egging it rather, as 120mm and all larger calibres also inflicted 100% kills; only in 105mm were some hits considered survivable.

I also seem to recall a PRO report on 120mm Wombat firing trials against a radio-controlled Stuart target. A problem there was that, even with an inert projectile, the 120mm round was capable of knocking the turret off the target tank.

All the best,

John.

A quick question for the Scorpion crews, just out of, er, morbid curiosity…

If the balloon had gone up and the Red Horde (TM) headed West, were you tasked to set up ambushes with your Scorps on the enemy armour?

Or were you completely tasked with recce, the '76 being used to 'get out of trouble' should nasty surprises occur?

Either way – rather you than me!

Some had British designed Radnis sights that were supposed to be useful for shooting at night. I always found them to be both troublesome and generally useless.

They were horrible. The x10 day sight was beautiful, though, and I actually liked it much better than the Leopard C1 CFCS and it had a wonderful FOV which beat the hell out of x7 Elcan binos.

There were laser rangefinders that were available, likewise, I found these to be a waste of time and just another piece of useless kit.

I loved them. It was great to get lazy with range estimation, especially in Suffield where range estimation could sometimes be a bit tricky.

If the balloon had gone up and the Red Horde (TM) headed West, were you tasked to set up ambushes with your Scorps on the enemy armour

Scorpion was a recce vehicle, not an MBT. Normally, recce in defence means a screen, but given the forward defence concept, there was not much room for screens. All the exercises I was on in Europe, we acted as CENTAG reserve (with leopards), so i haven't got a clue how the forward defence postions were set up.

I know guys here are talking about how they could whip a T-55, but I'm not sure about a T-62, and here's why.

One of the Canadian regiments equiped with the cougar (Scorpion turret) was tsaked with ACE Mobile force and were part of CAST – I forget what the acronym stood for, but they were to be deployed to Normay with their vehicles. Norway at this time was felt to be a secondary objective and Soviet armour there would hav been T-62 vintage, not T-64s. I attended a briefing by the CO of the CAST regiment who had just returned from Norway doing a recce of their various planned battle positions. his intelligence at the time was that the 76mm would do little against these tanks, but because the Canadian defensive positions would be high in the mountains and the approaches were through valleys, we would be able to rely on turret and hull roof hits to take out the T-62s, but would be SOL if meeting them head on.

Thus, I've always thought the T-62 was pretty tough for the little 76mm HESH round. I remember intelligence bulletins that gave a couple of vulnerable points on the T-62 front, like the sight…
--
Tim

Boo--Should have mounted a 7.2inch gun as an antitank gun..That may have scared the Soviets a bit!!

I guess Jav98 was a combat engineer (or hung out with them).

Indeedily and/or doodily! But I never played one on TV.

I think spall was probably the greatest danger to enemy armor crews from the HEP round, with missile danger being the greatest threat to exposed infantry. That being said, we conducted live fire practice on old M114's and some kind of tank (might have been an M48 -- couldn't really tell at the time) at Ft. Irwin, and the HEP round took the APC's apart like nobody's business. If nothing else, the suppression value of that big a boom would have been helpful to covering dismount sappers or infantry.

Ditto Bird wrote:

Scorpion was a recce vehicle, not an MBT.

Exactly. In BAOR, the sort of task medium recce (now formation recce) regiments would have been given would have been forming a recce matrix in order to identify the enemy axis of main effort, in order that the friendly corps or division commander could plan a counter-stroke into its flank. The usual practice was recce by stealth. In the event that it was necessary to deal with MBTs, that would be a task for which a recce squadron's GW troop (with Striker firing Swingfire) would be much better suited, or, if in a close-range ambush, the support troop (with Spartan carrying assault troopers trained in infantry and assault pioneer skills). Soviet doctrine put great emphasis on the counter-recce battle, and they might have assigned up to a third of their strength to it, including MBTs, so the recce blokes would have had quite enough of a challenge without attempting to take on the enemy main body.

All the best,

John.

John, the development of the 7.2 inch or 183mm et cetera was really stopped by ammo improvements in the early fifties, particularly the APDS round for the 20pdr of the Mk111 Centurion, and later especially the 105mm rounds.

If you have to have a scheme for each tank kill, your life expectancy would be rather short.

Scorpion fans remember, they are a recce vehicle.
The Recce mottoe is still the same, "I like to watch".
If you are a good recce soldier, you might live long enough to add in, "and breath really hard as I report".

That little 76mm was fun though. I had my quota of fun at great taxpayer expense.

Cheers Gents,

many thanks for the explanations. Always liked the Scorp ever since it was my Action Man's armour!

Always thought the Saladin was a neat vehicle. And yes, I started my military training in dismounted Recon … The idea was not to engage … And as some have already alluded to … any weapon on a Recon AFV is really more for defense then offense. Your first action is to get out of there and not engage. However as a last resort … you Shoot & Scoot. Any Recon vehicle going toe-to-toe with an MBT is really pushing his luck. But as we saw with the Kuwaiti Saladin … it can be done …