Anti Tank Rifles

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Midnight_Carnival
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Anti Tank Rifles

Post by Midnight_Carnival »

"ineffective against modern armor"... "Rpgs, etc are much better"... "you'd need over 20 mm with a high muzzle velocity which would kill the person firing it ..." ... etc...

So, why would people even want an anti tank rifle in modern warfare?
- I mean really, it's just compensation, isn't it?

Well, how about this?
Tanks are expenisve, very expensive. By comparison, even a 20mm depleted uranium round (really, that is a bad idea! who thought giving your soldiers chunks of uranium to carry around would help anything?) is cheap. The modern warfare solution is to go more hight tech and more high tech, so that "war" seems to be a largely economic exercise. Some countries seem to have adopted the strategy of producing more fancy more expensive toys which their enemies would need to spend more money developing ways to counter. A point will be reached somewhere along the line where thing are getting so fancy and so expensive that they are only really effective at being a waste of money and making the enemy waste more money finding a way to counter them.
What happens then?
Well how about this? Somebody decides to go crude, like 20mm crude, and I'm not talking about 20mm but with a special build it computer and bloody gyrascopes or some rubbish, I'm talking about basically making an over-powered cannon which gets the job done regardless of what the mathematics and accounting says.
Countries spend fortunes developing (need I add "entierly impractical" here?) mechanised armor for soldiers which is designed protect them, etc. What about this? infantry is expendible anyway, stop trying to build robocop and make a cheaper lighter version which does not protect the solider from bullets, grenades, etc but only enables him/her to effectively fire a 25mm anti-tank rifle with high muzzle velocity?
In one shot the tank could be - not destroyed, but rendered ineffective. The army using them would need to find a way to drag them back home to patch up the holes, change the expensive computerised parts which were so crudely smashed by a huge shell and then get them back out - this seems a little unlikely to me in a situation where the army using the tanks is invading a territory where they encounter a very dynamic and unpredictable form of resistance (such as using "impractical" anti-tank rifles effectively). What I find more likely is that they will treat the tank as though it had been hit with a RPG or some other "effective" anti-tank weapon, take it as basically out of action and get on with their business of trying to make the enemy army spend more money on countering their other fancy toys. What if the enemy managed to capture the "out of action" tank?
It starts to really mess with the numbers which some seem to believe modern warfare is all about.

:lol: :lol: :lol:
Spoiler:
[edit]
I remember watching this weird old (I think it was sort of robotek era) anime about this beat-up soldier which was kind of the inspiration for this thread. He was trained to fight mechs with this anime-level massive overpowered rifle. Anyway, the above speculation was inspired by this 1/2 forgotten series. Basically the mechs were very expensive very advanced pieces of equipment, regarded as "kings of the battlefield" until one side decided to break the mech arms race by simply traning soldiers to fire these unrealistic guns. I dismissed the premise of this series as abosolute rubbish until I started reading stuff about why anti tank rifles were "ineffective against modern armor"... "Rpgs, etc are much better"... "you'd need over 20 mm with a high muzzle velocity which would kill the person firing it ..." ... etc... which reminded me of that series. Now I can't remember what it was called or find it anywhere! :cry: :augh:
[\edit]
...apparenly we can't go with it or something.
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doofus-01
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Re: Anti Tank Rifles

Post by doofus-01 »

Midnight_Carnival wrote:so that "war" seems to be a largely economic exercise.
As it always has been.

I'm not quite sure what your argument is, but your observations seem stranded in time. Cold War and IEDs, for example, are not new.
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Dugi
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Re: Anti Tank Rifles

Post by Dugi »

There is a difference between a tank and a tank.

The tanks for WWII are far worse armoured than the modern ones. The anti-tank weapons are improving as well as tank armour is improving. Tanks from the sixties are still used, but they are no match for newer anti-tank weapons. Tanks from 21st century are well armoured and almost invulnerable to various old weapons most armies of less developed world have.

To pierce the armour of a tank, you can't just shoot a high-velocity heavy bullet or a railgun shot. The armour is too good for that. It deflects the kinetic energy over a large area where it dissipates with little damage. The shots that can pierce tank armour are specially designed for piercing armour. Usually, there is an explosive with a conical cavity. When the explosive blows up, it sends a shockwave near the axis of the cone. On this axis, the shockwave from all directions meet and is sent the only available direction, towards the bottom of the cone. As it moves that direction, more parts of the shockwave meet it and also escape towards the bottom. This concentrated shockwave then hits the armour with massive force at one point and pierces a hole through. Then it delivers its payload through the small borehole, blowing up the insides of the tank. This means that anti-tank missiles destroy tanks, but suck at destroying everything else compared to other weapons of that size.

Be aware that a lot of stuff about weapons that appears on the internet relates to mall ninjas, not actual professionals. Many people also exaggerate and simplify (or they just don't understand it and see it as it fits them) in order to promote their cause, which seems to be about economic problems caused by war.
Wussel
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Re: Anti Tank Rifles

Post by Wussel »

How did this topic start? Looks like somebody split it somehow from somewhere?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_rifle

I did not know that this was ever used. Have fun with your tank rifle.

I have been told that any tank can be blasted away with an appropriate roadside device. Results are without armor penetration. So after a good clean you could mostlikely give it to a new crew.

If this is somehow game related you could come up with some kind of "bomb master".
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Midnight_Carnival
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Re: Anti Tank Rifles

Post by Midnight_Carnival »

Wussel wrote:How did this topic start? Looks like somebody split it somehoWw from somewhere?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_rifle
Nah, all the topics I start are like that, I'm a highly random person.
doofus-01 wrote:
Midnight_Carnival wrote:so that "war" seems to be a largely economic exercise.
As it always has been.
I disagree. There was war before money, it was a genetic thing, kill off the enemy males and take the females (sometimes the children too) to be part of your group or kill them too. These days people tend to think that wars can't be won without money and that the richest country will win. History says otherwise.
People call me a neophobe and say that my thinking is better suited to a different time period - I say that if people had started learning from their mistakes we wouldn't have war. We make exactly the same mistakes we did in 1300, only now we've found ways of making those mistakes cost more money.
as for "they spent so much money developing tanks that you can't destroy them without spending a lot of money yourself" - to that I have only this to say: "You can't kill me, I'm wearing magic armaaAAArghhh!" :lol:
...apparenly we can't go with it or something.
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Iris
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Re: Anti Tank Rifles

Post by Iris »

Yeah, I usually just replace my Lancers with Anti-aircraft guns/Mobile SAMs instead of upgrading them to Anti-tank guns.
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Eagle_11
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Re: Anti Tank Rifles

Post by Eagle_11 »

You are doing it wrong, build Flak 88 then (ab)use it as anti-tank emplacement. :p
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Midnight_Carnival
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Re: Anti Tank Rifles

Post by Midnight_Carnival »

you're making me hungry!
...apparenly we can't go with it or something.
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