Shotgun Tank Round

The Tank Cartridge, 120mm, Canister, XM1028, is a tank round comprised of 1150 (est.) tungsten balls, which are expelled upon muzzle exit. There is no fuse on this round.

Tank Shotgun Round

WMS

nuts...

whats the point?

still, seeing all those targets drop at the last couple of seconds was kinda impressive, in that you really get a sense of the spread of the thing...

oh, and is that a actual shockwave i see on the slowmo part?

Same thing you use a regular shotgun for in the military: urban combat.

Penetrator rounds, heck even solid slugs, would punch through multiple buildings. Explosive rounds are likely to collapse structures. A shot shell will rip through a wall or two but probably won't make it completely through the building.

Otherwise the many heavy armor assets the US has are limited to their coaxial weapons which typically are less than what you'd mount on a Bradley.

Not a very discriminate weapon though. You're mainly relying on the fact that most non-combatants run for cover when the gunfire breaks out.

I'd have to say the point is *shudder* anti-personnel. I'm guessing it won't do much against armored vehicles, but a person will get torn to bits.

Think of it like grape shot.

The Israelis used canister rounds (indirectly) as anti-missile rounds in the 60s & 70s.

The ATGMs of the day had to be manually guided to the target, meaning no fire-and-run-like-hell. The tank crews were trained to fire a canister round at any unexpected puff of dust, because it could be a ATGM launch, with a gunner nearby.

If the guy firing the missile wasn't killed outright, he was forced to duck, which usually made the missile miss.

Yes, that was the shock wave. now just load it with gel rounds for urban pacification.

Egad, what are you going to do, stuff a bean-bag chair down the barrel? *thinks about it for a moment* Hehe, that would be a thing to see.

Based on the muzzle velocity of a 120mm HEAT round (which is probably about the same weight), that cannister round leaves the barrel somewhere around mach 3. So yeah, that is a sonic boom.

It's cool. If you look and watch how the shot clump breaks up into the pattern, that's exactly the same mechanism as a regular shotgun.

More like canister... I believe the round was developed in response to or anticipation of "human wave" attacks, where a single Tank simply can't machine gun or HE enough bodies to stop them overrunning it. Human wave => Human mist.

More like human hamburger. Ewww.

-paws

PS
Q. What's a ghoul's favorite quick-and-easy meal?
A. Manwich

Bringing chunky salsa to a battlefield near you...

Lets go goose huntin'.

I would point out that gel rounds at those speeds will kill. So much for magical nonfatal rounds.

more like thunderbird huntin'...

They'd have to use some kind of compressed foam in the canister. That way when it expanded it would decelerate quickly. Of course, "quickly" and "immediately" are not the same thing and at Mach3+, that's a lot of ground that can be covered at still-fatal velocities.

Plus the cannister cup can take someone's head off. Or maybe leave the head and take out the entire torso.

make it hard-rubber and shoot at ground/walls so they bounce like . . i don't frigging know whatever you english people call them, over here in germany we call them flummis . . now imagine that stuff being shot into a tunnel . . or into a building with not too many windows through one of those windows . . many ouchies . .

Tank fired freeze fome rounds an runners worst nightmare. And would be jolly good at stopping those hostiles getting to your tank when you build a wall around them.

People should park tanks in their house wiht these rounds so as to shoot burglars.

Or we could mix ideas...

I have to admit, the thought of a tank cannon that fires 1,150 superballs down my foyer is quite an attractive idea to me. Makes me wish I had more long hallways.

Hrmm... I suppose a superball at Mach 3 would still be pretty deadly and would probably break my house. Maybe we need to consider Nerf tanks.

They won't be doing mach speeds for very long, though, and if you were designing for nonfatality, you'd limit the velocity so that people not seriously fucked up just by the muzzle blast might not die if hit by the scattering projectiles. But hails of plastic BBs will still take out eyes.

And cause a major tripping hazard as they roll around on the ground after taking out the eyes...

Interesting. Apparently the US military has had these for a while.

My concern as the tank commander would be, what's it do that the three machine guns also mounted on the Abrams tank don't already do at least reasonable well? One of the major limitations on tanks is their ammo capacity on the main gun. I would be concerned about using up ammo capacity on these when I could have had HEAT or HE rounds instead.

But I guess they see some use, so what do I know? The Abrams Wikipedia entry says you can use the shotgun rounds to knock man-sized holes in concrete walls at 75 meters - you can use them to make doors for infantry.

I tend to think of tanks as existing to battle and defeat other tanks, not as urban infantry support. The more nimble Striker and Bradley are built for that job.

Since 1776. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

A triplet of MGs doesn't have the area of effect that one of these rounds does, and can not cause as much potential damage, either. We'd need to see how tank commanders adapt their tactics to integrate the weapons before we can evaluate their worth. I believe that making more options available to commanders in the field is always a good idea.

What use is HEAT in an Urban warfare situation? Same goes for APFSDS rounds. Until tanks become a common feature of urban warfare (hint: they're not, right now) there's no need to mount Anti-Tank weaponry for urban missions. HE does not perform adequately for anti-infantry purposes in urban warfare, where infantry are more likely to be dispersed and deployed in ambush due to the complex terrain.


I suspect that anyone on the other side would find the situation rather unpleasant, as well.


This is one of those strange misconceptions, if tanks existed to take out other tanks why do nations not avoid spending millions on new tanks? Common claims, of course, will be "military-industrial complex" because a scapegoat has to exist to cover peoples' ignorance. I think the misconception originates in "strategy" games, where tanks are used to battle tanks and buildings to "balance" tanks.

Tanks are mobile artillery, they exist to bring the strength of the gun into direct fire roles to support deployed infantry assets equipped with small arms. Tanks are best targetted like artillery and kept moving to avoid exposing their weaknesses to enemy fire. Tank vs. tank warfare originated because, as artillery, they're one of the few direct fire weapons deployed with infantry that can counter another tank in the field of battle.