Quote:
Originally Posted by Wild Goose
The underbarrel 120mm is a smoothbore gun so that you can use sabot ammo on the Tanks. It's implied that it's the same 120mm sabot shells used in the Rheinmetall 120mm tank gun that basically became NATO standard. Standardisation of ammo yo.
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Okay, then why are
they using smoothbore cannons? IRL, tanks use them because of fin-stabilized discarding-sabot and HEAT rounds (where the spinning would mess up the jet of plasticized metal). But neither of them really offer anything of worth aginst the BETA; an APFSDS round still can't front-pen a Destroyer without consecutive hits, and there's really nothing ot use a HEAT shell against.
An AP/HE shell is going to be good for taking down Fort-class, but those aren't all that common. I would think that (by far) the most useful round would be canister shot (because what 120mm caniter does to anything without heavy vehicle aror is just terrifiying), and it doesn't really require either barrel type.
Also, looking at the Assault Cannon pictures, the cannon barrel seems
extremely short; no more than 2.5-3 meters long if the weapon as a whole is ~8 meters (compare to the Abrams/Lepord main gun, which is 5 meters and change). With that kind of barrel length, the internal ballistics are going to be more like a mortar.
Considering that, it would need a much larger propellant charge to achieve anywhere near similar muzzle velocity. This makes sense in light of the absurdly small magazine size; in most of the Assault Cannons shown, the Chaingun mag seems only slightly larger than the cannon magizine. If my slide rule isn't lying to me, a 120mm shell should be about 37 times larger than a 36mm round, meaning you could theroitically pack 54 of them in the same volume as 2000 chaingun rounds. Packing efficiency will drop because of the larger shell and the mag isn't quite as big, but I'd still expect at least four or five times as many rounds per mag, which fits with the idea of a larger powder charge.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wild Goose
Another issue with regard to distracting lasers, btw. Trying to distract lasers with arty is a losing proposition. Lasers basically mean that a Warsaw Pact-style artillery battalion can till that battalion runs out of ammo, and the Lasers will have intercepted damn near all of their rounds.
For context, a WarPac arty battalion is on the order of 57 guns.
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Well, how else are you going to reduce the threat?
Throw the ships of the UN 3rd fleet one by one into the path of the lasers?
Anyway, each laser has a minimum interval of 12 seconds between shots. Assuming perfect accuracy, that means it can shoot down five shells a minute.
The standard WarPac piece (2S19 MASTA) in U/A has a peak fire rate of 8 rpm, meaning that a 57 gun battalion fires a peak 456 rounds per minute, meaning it's going to need at least 91 lasers to stalemate it.
But that's Warsaw Pact. A U.S. Crusader SP Gun has a peak rate of fire of 12 rpm (with active barrel cooling for sustained rapid-fire), meaning it's going to need at least 2.4 lasers to stalemate each gun. That's at least 136 lasers.
But this, of course, is forgetting the MLRS. 12 rockets in 'less than forty' seconds for the real-life version, presumably the designers of the U/A version would be aware of the presence of lasers and thus spec their system to do at least as well. Once you have the lasers focusing on the howitzers, you hammer them with a MLRS battery, dumping several dozen rockets on them in the time they can fire maybe twice. And if you can wear down the number of lasers present, that makes the whole job a lot easier.
And them there's AL rounds. Laying down a heavy metal cloud makes artillery more effective, though I cannot find any hard-and-fast rules on the extent.