But a pencil-sized hole with no spalling...?
Sounds like it went thru our best armor and hardly noticed it was there.
Suppose somebody built a rail-gun or coil-gun that worked outside the laboratory and launched a dense penetrator at ultra-high velocities...(?)
I'm thinking 20 km/s or higher....(?)
--Boris
I'm thinking 20 km/s or higher....(?)
--Boris?
Or an APFSDS sabot round for their 2A42 30mm gun used on the BMP2 and BMP-3 Mech Infantry vehicles like the 25mm sabot rounds we have for the Bradley's Chain Gun, with performance somewhere between that of the US 25mm and the 30mm GAU-8 tank-killing Gatling Gun of the A10 *Warthog*.
There's a shoulder-fired 23mm Russian antitank rifle, too, a semirecoilless weapon something like an oversized M82A1 Barrett .50 caliber AMR. Maybe a really high performance round like the .50 Raufoos shaped charge has been developed for it, or maybe a light tripod-mounted 30mm version has been worked up....
I don't think we're quite to the point where a usable rail gun could be fielded in a package any smaller than roughly a 40-foot semitrailer truck or container, though it's certainly going to happen in the near future. But whether an electromagnetically accelerated projectile, a hypervelocity kinetic energy round, or an advanced small caliber chemical energy HEAT warhead, it's bad news for the crews in the Abrams...and worse news for those in Strykers.
-archy-/-