What makes a weapon anti-air or anti-tank? Would anti-air be effective against tanks? Could we create one weapon that covers both, or even all possible targets?
In: 864
Aircraft are difficult to hit, but if you hit them, they’re easy to damage. Even famously durable aircraft like the A-10 can’t take the same kind of hits that tanks can take. If you built them that robustly, they would be too heavy to fly.
Tanks are hard to damage but fairly easy to hit (although they can go much faster than you might expect).
Anti-aircraft weapons typically have a lot of fancy sensor equipment to track and hit a target faster than a human mind can handle it. The most expensive and complex equipment operated by the United States Army belongs to the Air Defense Artillery branch, including anti-aircraft missile systems, related radar systems, and computer systems. They have the longest MOS (job specialty) training in the entire Army. Technically, the Special Forces pipeline is longer, but most of that is for all of Special Forces, the parts to any one specific MOS within Special Forces (out of weapons, communications, engineering, medic, and officer) are an important but relatively small portion of that training pipeline.
In addition to all of the fancy radar and computer stuff, they also try to put a lot of metal downrange in the direction of the target in order to maximize the possibility that you get a hit. The original way was by machine guns and autocannons. The ubiquitous M2 .50 machine gun was originally bought by the Army Coast Artillery (precursor to Air Defense Artillery) for this purpose. The VADS (tracked vehicle with the same 20mm Gatling cannon as F-15, 16, and 18) and ZSU-23-4 (similar Soviet vehicle with four 23mm autocannons in a turret) are major Cold War examples, but currently, they have fallen out of favor and have been replaced by missile launchers of various sizes for most uses. The Phalanx CIWS (same gun as VADS, big giant radar system on top, mounted on ships to automatically shoot down incoming missiles and aircraft based on parameters set up by the operators) has been used by the United States Navy for around 40 years, but they’re phasing it out for a system that does that with missiles. The Army started using something called a C-RAM (pretty much a CIWS on a truck instead of a ship) in Iraq and Afghanistan for shooting down incoming indirect fire.
The munitions used for anti-aircraft tend to be explosive, especially if they are heavy enough that an explosive shell is not a war crime (yes, this is a thing, and why explosive shells historically have usually been at least 37mm in diameter). This is so that you don’t need to get a direct hit to get enough of a hit to damage an aircraft. This enabled bigger guns that are too heavy to be autocannons, and many missile systems work like this. With, for example, the famous German 88mm FlaK cannons, they don’t fire as fast as a 20mm, but they can get a shell higher into the air. Initially, they had to fuze the shells to explode (and hopefully fling shrapnel into a nearby aircraft) upon reaching a specific altitude (such as by pressure sensors in the fuze), but proximity fuzes (a UK/US invention, mainly based on short-range radar pulses) made anti-aircraft shell LS much more dangerous.
Anti-tank ammunition has to worry much more about penetrating armor. That has always involved applying force upon a small area in such a way that the armor can’t handle it, rather than trying to get a lot of stuff out there to maximize the possibility of hitting the target. As armor has become more complex (starting as just thick steel plates, now with layers of ceramic, steel, other stuff, even air pockets), that has become a more difficult task. It used to be that a simple high-velocity cannon firing a solid piece of metal was what you needed (and the 88mm FlaK cannons were adapted for this purpose because you need a high muzzle velocity to get a shell that high into the air). Now, the main types of solid projectiles that are used are essentially large tungsten or uranium darts fired with a sabot around them wide enough to get the much thinner dart to fit a 120mm barrel (and then fall off after leaving the barrel). Some types of explosive charges are used, particularly shaped charges (where the explosive material has a cone-shaped indentation in it to focus as much of the blast as possible in one direction). Because shaped charges can be mitigated with essentially metal cages around the armor, there are also tandem charges, where the weapon has two shaped charges in a row. The Indian military calls this “penetration cum blast” when talking about shells fired by their Arjun tank for some hilarious reason. One type of anti-tank munition that the British have been particularly fond of is High Explosive Squash Head, designed so that the shell flattens against the armor and then explodes. The idea is that even if this doesn’t make a hole in the armor, it might cause spalling, which is when the inside of the armor breaks apart and turns into shrapnel from the stress, thereby shredding the guys inside (although prevention of spalling is now an important design consideration).
Latest Answers