Ian, a few points in your very well video:ġ. Please keep any and all criticism of this post humane and free of foul language. You are not required to participate if you do not wish to do so. Or, per the usual, find your favorite toys before they get trashed if you’re crazy enough, force your way into the tank and hijack itĨ. Or conversely, if you’re a paratrooper trying to fend off a tank, what do you do?ħ. have a few infantrymen ride as tank-descants so that they can spot the danger and perhaps nail it.Ħ. pile sandbags and tool boxes on the tankģ. Just get a heavier tank with thicker armor, then run down the idiot holding the light anti-armor weaponĢ. Given a choice, how do you wish to improve protection of a tank against stuff like the RPG-7?ġ. Like carbonizing the rest of the section, which most ATRLs are entirely too good at. The plastic bits (which started out as chips but were basically blown to dust by the propellant charge going off) lost velocity within 3 meters, so while standing right behind the launcher when it was fired wasn’t too smart (anyone for sandblasting?), as long as you stayed back about ten feet, or a yard or so to each side, you could safely fire it from a hotel room window without problems. Same net momentum both ways (M x V), without the flamethrower effect of a rocket launcher or “conventional” recoilless gun. The Armbrust (German for “arbalest”- a heavy crossbow) was a one shot/reloadable recoilless AT launcher, shoulder-fired, that worked on the classic Davis Gun principle the HEAT round going out the front was counterbalanced by a mass of plastic particles going much faster coming out the back. Ironically, it was Germany in the 1970s that came up with a tactical equivalent. Giving them time to fire a carrier’s worth of bombs (three rounds) and beat it before the men in feldgrau with MP40s came pounding up the stairs. Oops.)Īs such, it was a very effective weapon for irregular forces in MOBUA, because a couple or even three or four targets could be engaged before the enemy could localize the AT team. (If you didn’t hold it tight enough, though, it would knock you flat on your a$$ and not recock itself. It also had a relatively low muzzle signature due to most of the firing blast being contained within the bomb’s hollow tail boom and used to recock the spigot. But unlike Bazookas, Panzerfausts, Panzerschrecks, etc., it could be fired from inside an enclosed space, like a room in a building, without a backblast that would kill most of the detachment. Its large bomb had a Cyclonite (RDX) shaped charge that would still penetrate most tanks today it was horrendously effective on WW2 era armor.ĭue to its operating principle, it had no backblast, just a H*ll of a recoil. The WW2 British PIAT (Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank) was a spigot mortar type weapon. A variety of rocket types have made them much more than a dedicated anti-tank weapon, and they will be found used against everything from personnel to aircraft. Today they are found in virtually all third world conflict zones. The solution to this dilemma was the development of shaped charge warheads, in which directed explosive energy could be used much more efficiently than simple high explosive or even simpler kinetic energy.Īfter several earlier developmental iterations, the RPG-7 was introduced in 1961 by the Soviet Union and would prove to be an extremely effective, inexpensive and simple weapon. Over the course of WWII, the armor on tanks quickly became too heavy for man-portable anti-tank rifles to defeat. The RPG is a rocket-propelled shaped charge antitank weapon that took its philosophical foundation from the German WWII Panzerfaust (although it shares little with that weapon mechanically). This example is one of the few live and registered RPGs in the US, and it belongs to Movie Gun Services (if you saw Black Hawk Down, you saw it in use…). The RPG-7 is pretty far from being a forgotten weapon, but I was not going to pass up an opportunity to take a closer look at a live one.
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