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?

Question

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

Answer 1

In general, air craft are hard to hit, but if you hit them with anything they are screwed.
While tanks are relatively easy to hit, but you really need to hit them hard to do damage.

So as a result, the warheads of anti-aircraft weapons tend to spread a little bit of damage all over the place.
While anti-tank weapons concentrate all the force in a tiny space.

So for example the famous WW2 German 88mm was originally designed to shoot at aircraft, it would send a flak shell really fast so it could explode high up near where aircraft were flying.
But then they needed to kill tanks, so they would load a different kind of shell, one that was really hard and would only explode a while after hitting something.

If they tried to shoot a flak shell at a tank, the shell would explode every where and not really bother the tank.
If they tried to shoot a anti-tank shell at a plane, unless they got really really lucky, the shell would miss the plane and do nothing.

Modern missiles are variations of that, you can make a missile go really really fast and accurate, but an anti air missile will still have a relatively small explody bit, which spreads damage all over the place. While an anti-tank missile will have less stuff to get the missile going, but a bigger explody bit that concentrates all the explosion in a small place.

Because the two ideas are very different they can’t really be done at the same time.