Dorchester armor?

[Bfn42]

Anybody know why the L/30 was chose over the l/44 for the chally 2?

 

[Wooki]

Anybody know why the L/30 was chose over the l/44 for the chally 2?

The L30 is a rifled gun and therefore gives you greater HE shell capacity than a smooth bore gun, so as a general rule, a rifled gun is superior to a smooth bore for taking out "soft" targets.

Using a rifled gun also allows you to get the most out of the (design and use) of HESH rounds.

HESH rounds have the advantage that they do not use KE to defeat armor and as such their performance does not taper off at longer ranges.

I think someone mentioned the Chally holds the record for the longest ranged defeat of an armored vehicle. That is why.

It is truly an awesome tank, especially once the commander's site is/was upgraded.

The disadvantage of the rifled gun is maintenance. You get more shots with a smooth bore as a general rule (less thermal stress) and this also makes it less complicated to maintain your desired accuracy.

The 2nd disadvantage is that KE penetrator rounds are a lot more complicated than a smooth bore round and that is needed to even approach the same penetration performance of the smooth bore APFSDS.

New developments in Supersonic Ram jet technologies will make the rifled gun redundant for the short term until some bright spark comes up with something better.

cheers


W

PS re Dorchester, M1A2, Leo 2, LeClerc and Merkava 4 survivability suites... The M1A2 uses DU for a specific reason that is attractive to the US Army and The British use Dorchester for different reasons again. Normally the "shopping list" for an army buyer is:

1) protection
2) weight
3) maintenance
4) ease of repair
5) cost, both for initial purchase and life of armor
6) upgrades, the ability to meet future threats
7) size or bulk (will this increase my silhouette?)

You will find that in the above tanks that these factors have been given different degrees of importance, resulting in different designs. But as a whole the survivability suites are all top notch with no single suite standing out above the rest when all the above factors are taken into consideration.

Its a bit like asking what is the most poisonous land snake? The answer is the The Australian Fierce snake, but as I understand hardly anyone ever encounters one, so it doesn't present a high threat. Then you have the common brown snake which is very venomous, they are more frequently encountered, but it might have small fangs, etc, etc.

The same with talking about armor. It really depends on what the army in question is trying to achieve with a MBT as to what armor package it ends up with.