#Tanks

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Ready for some history?

The Orbital ATK MK44 30mm BUSHMASTER II fired from Kongsberg MCT-30 turret on GDLS LAV

When in Russia and Moscow, you should take time to visit the Kubinka Tank Museum.

The First World War was a nasty conflict. It’s slaughter is something we often fail to comprehend if only on the sheer scale. Working to avoid direct trench assaults, the Entente developed the first tanks, which when employed struck terror into the German troops. Despite being slow, they pondered on through withering fire that no man could have survived.

As a researcher and history enthusiast, one of the issues I often have to wrestle with is that of eyewitness accounts, specifically when to trust them and when not to. That subject itself is one for another time, but today I want to look at a specific example of an eyewitness account as an illustration of how they can be misleading to someone trying to reconstruct historical events.

So you like to compete with guns? USPSA, IPSC, IDPA? Perhaps a little 3gun or Cowboy Action? Well these guys compete with tanks lol. There is a Tank Biatholon among other competitions. From this video it looks like helicopter manipulation.

One of the problems of small arms ammunition is that of swept volume. That is, the most ballistically efficient projectiles are the longest and thinnest ones, which cut through the air more easily than squatter, fatter projectiles. Yet, the best projectiles from a propulsion perspective are the widest ones, as they have the most area at their base for the expanding gases to push on, making them more efficient, especially from shorter barrels.

The Houston Chronicle recently ran a story about the Normandy Tank Museum shuttering its doors and selling off all their assets. As listed on the auction site Artcurial, thousands of military items, including tanks, vehicles, equipment and accessories will be liquidated as the museum closes due to lack of attendance.

After the Wednesday round of the 2016 SHOT Show, I sat down for an evening of quiet work, to finish up a few articles I had from the day’s show-trekking. Less than an hour later, I was standing in a crowd at Battlefield Vegas, watching a Chieftain tank crush a sedan.

Saw this on U.S. Army WTF moments on Facebook. The post says “The ultimate engineering test in Germany” The video clip is short. It shows a soldier pouring a beer and placing that beer on a special table mounted to the muzzle of the barrel. Then the tank is seen rolling at high speed and the barrel appears to be stabilized by the fact that it does not spill the beer.

Last week, we took a look at the troubled American M73 tank machine gun, designed to be the ultimate rifle-caliber tank MG. Tanks and other armored fighting vehicles together are another fascinating subject that is often closely related to that of small arms. In light of that, our Blog of The Month for August is Tank and AFV News, a blog similar in concept to this very site, but with a pivot towards armored warfare in all its forms. Following our coverage of the M73 family, TaAFVN posted their own piece on the weapon adding not only an article from Small Arms Review, but also two PS Magazine articles on maintaining the M73. I recommend anyone interested in the M73 tank gun and its history click through and read the whole thing.

The period from 1945-1970 did not represent the figurative finest hour in US small arms design. From the problematic M60, to too little too late M14, to the disastrous initial fielding of the M16, US small arms design during the time seemed to simultaneously reach to far and grasp too little. One family of firearms that was a product of this period of development was a short-action armored fighting vehicle secondary machine gun design, incarnated in the M73 7.62mm and M85 .50 caliber, and later M219 7.62mm types. (EDIT: I don’t really think the M85 should be thrown in there, as it’s a substantially different design, though it shares some features with the M73 and M219. Mea culpa.)

The Hungarians have re-purposed some surplus Russian Military hardware to make “Big Wind”. It is a T34 tank with its turret removed and replaced with twin MiG jet engines mounted to the treads. It spews water to put out massive fires. It is a giant double barreled super soaker on wheels. Actually it has 6 nozzles over the MiG engines. As it sprays water the engine jet blast sprays the water forward. The water is moving at a maximum rate of 220 gallons of water a second, or twice what an average U.S. household uses in 24 hours. If you hooked up this machine’s water pump to a typical suburban swimming pool, it would suck it dry in about 50 seconds.

Just when I thought I had seen everything …