Katare wrote:Karan,
Do you have a link for the ARDE interview you are refering too?
I thought you had all the sources. After all, you told us that it was common knowledge what mm the DRDO round was at. You mentioned it two posts back.
As of now I have not seen any open source info that DRDO APFSDS fired from Arjun has more than 400-425mm penetration. (1970s technology)
The sources are there. Please find them. I am tired of this back & forth.
If the DRDO round has 400-425mm penetration (it actually has a bit more) then it is actually 80's technology, since BM42 DOI was 1986 and it claims 450mm at 2km certified, with a maximum possible of 500mm. Which is fairly ok, since it to
On the other hand the IA officer who conducted the comparative trials have stated that Arjun Sabos have lower penetration than T-90s who fire mangos that have penetration of 500mm. (1980s technology)
First - that was not the IA officer who conducted the comparative trials. It was a Brigadier from the Armoured Corps who was mentioning the actual results of the trials. All three gentlemen on that show were retired. They could not have conducted any of the trials.
Second, you don't know what rounds those tanks fired. The T-90s that are in India today are of two batches. The first batch were imported with Mangos. But India has been working to include more rounds into the T-90. Bottomline- don't assume that the benchmark is the Mango.
Third - this stuff of 400-425mm is 1970s tech, 500mm is 1980's tech is all bunkum as well. Countries like India, Israel, Russia have developed multiple classes of rounds within the same decade, each with drastic jumps in performance. To put decade long year bands around the rounds just shows a very casual attitude towards the whole topic.
Further, you add-subtract 50-100 mm at whim based on whatever you choose to interpret from that "interview", claims of 400mm class or 500mm class in the previous post. Now its 450mm or 400-425mm. And 500 class became 550 mm, 600 class became 650mm.
Why are you posting these numbers? What guarantee do you have of any of these? Its a waste of time to even respond to such generalizations.
First, to respond in specifics means that I provide estimates of in-service IA rounds, which I or nobody sane on this board is stupid enough to do.
Second, those arbitrary bands you are applying based on a journalists speech are all over the place. They are nowhere near accurate and totally miss the topic by a mile and a quarter.
On top of that DRDO cheif Sarswat has stated that DRDO only has technology for 450mm penetrators and they are in trial for 550mm penetrators while another program for building a 650mm penetrator is on the cards. It was also stated that 650 is IA requirements in the same interview.
Here we go again..with all these mm claims..
Lets play it by your theme.
In other words, if what you are saying is right, DRDO has the same technology as the BM42 rounds India is importing, and the current rounds (which already cleared initial trials in 2010) are already ahead of the BM42.
The stuff about current penetrators being at xxx mm etc, as mentioned earlier, if you take that interview as gospel and keep repeating that to me as some insight - suffice to say, you are just wasting my time.
Given these realities VKS was right in asking GoI for large imports of 650mm class penetrators.
Again, your assumption, because VKS did not ask GOI for imports of 650mm class penetrators!
The Army has asked for ANY rounds, note ANY which can supplant AMK339 and AMK340A. Both rounds are given as baseline to judge new rounds by. They did NOT set a new level.
This is well known to anyone who has followed the issue, since the Army went public with the information in 2010 itself!
Just because the IA may have asked DRDO to develop its round further, you have jumped to the conclusion that such rounds are available in the open market for IA to import (when IMI has been blacklisted) & you think that these are what the IA is getting!
Have you even spoken to one Russian arms developer offering tank ammo? Even at an arms fair? Please do so. It will be very educative, and then you will not waste our time with all these increasingly pointless back and forth about this mm and that mm, with an air of certainty based on a joke of an interview and half baked information!
If you do so, you will realize that the Russians, as much as they hate it, tacitly accept the presence of the Israelis, because customers like India can go to Israel and then make up the ammo deficiency by importing rounds. That is helping their product succeed in the Indian market. And they accept this with great reluctance, because they do not have more modern rounds in series production!! This is why India went to Israel and became the only export customer at the time, for the 125mm round from IMI.
What India is importing from Russia are BM42 Mango rounds, not some magical "650 mm class" rounds, a figure you have seized on from a pretty messed up back & forth conversation!
The BM42 Mango is certified by Russia as firmly in the "450mm-500mm" range, something India had better rounds than quite a while back thanks to the Israelis.
VKS/IA are just stuck with BM42s thanks to pathetic planning from the Armoured Corp who assumed that IMI TOT would flow well and hence did not pay sufficient attention to developing an alternate source of supply.
Besides 650mm rounds, large quantity of mangos is needed too for large inventory of T-series tanks.
Hello...this is just some theory that you are coming up to claim that both rounds are needed and the procurement fiasco somehow makes sense!
If India were getting "650 mm" rounds, for the T series, that would be all it needs. It would not need Mangos of the order of 100,000 rounds. Indian T-72s fire both AMK-340A and AMK-339/BM42. Its only the first tranche of T-90s which are known to have issues with AMK-340A!
Anyhow, it is converting all T tanks to Indian BCs to accept any rounds it inducts.
There are no 650 mm rounds coming, first of all - since Russia has no rounds of this class in series production to begin with and second, the AMK339/BM42 was purchased with T-90s because the Russians refused to provide ballistic computer source codes for India to integrate their own AMK340A rounds in the tank! India has developed its own solution to that via TATA, utilizing the Arjun BC.
Right now, it does not matter, because there is only one round available off the shelf and that is the BM42.
Once DRDO round clears trial it can supplant and eventually replace imports.
We know that.
On technology front -
600-650mm Tungsten penetrators were first developed in the early 1980s. Since than (~30 years) no one had developed a tungsten round with significantly better penetration capabilities. 650mm is widely considered the limit of material properties of tungsten alloys. Materials heavier than tungsten are way too expansive (gold, platinum) or too exotic.
Just your opinion, passed off as gospel. Now you have the inside track on what material limit of tungsten alloy rounds are, apparently. May I ask as to how many you have personally observed & put in service to know this "material limit", please?
If you actually follow this topic, you'd know that the current leading edge round for T-type tanks, offered for quantity production is claimed to be 600 mm (current!) Not developed in the 1980s. Not developed in the 1970s. Developed in the late 2000's and available for sales in the past couple of years.
This is the latest round marketed by IMI since 2011, which IA would have chosen for import if it was not banned in 2009. This is that round!
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-52cwi67Vd9g/T ... f+RHA+.jpg
And to claim that since the early 1980's, nobody has developed a tungsten round with better penetration, is stretching the heights of credulity!
That figure above - does not even elicit the slightest of shock from western arms developers who have been dealing with unitary rounds for a while now! That limit above is an artificial limit imposed on the round by the autoloader. At least two German rounds, with L55 all approach DU performance levels and are widely accepted to be very dangerous for the most advanced conventional armour in service today.
Making a 10" or 25" tungsten rod needs same technology (but bigger equipment) and it is surprisingly simple, old and inexpensive. You can buy tungsten coating blanks as big as 2 meter long in thick plates, pipes and rods pure or doped/alloyed with plethora of other metals made same as penetrators. Typical target would achieve close to theoretical density, four nine (.9999) purity and under 10 micron dimensional accuracy.
Yes, its very simple & if you think that the same rods w/o any special treatment are used for machining actual penetrators, then I think the discussion is clearly at a close.
In the meanwhile, the world over, armour conferences are being held to figure out how to keep pushing tungsten rod manufacture to the next level to meet increasing improvements in armour profiles.
I mean what was the point of the above para? Do you seriously think it added anything to the discussion? Obviously the the challenge lies in determining the exact composition of the monobloc penetrator and manufacturing methods therein. Its what a company like Rheinmetall excels in, what IMI has spent a lot of money in developing, and which is why their rounds outperform those from former east european states! And then to test these rounds against actual targets, to find out what set of targets the round actually performs against, and to make those targets mimic enemy threat profiles to the greatest possible extent to get accurate results. All the while trying to extend known published equations like Andersons and other formula to match experimental results, and try and save expensive developmental time as versus going into dead ends.
All this is known. So what exactly is the point of saying "tungsten rods are very easy to manufacture" and "you can buy tungsten coating blanks ... same as penetrators"? One would think that there are a million companies in the world ready and willing to give you tungten blanks of the correct composition and voila, penetrators are ready. If not, your statements added nothing substantive, and completely missed the point re: IMI retaining control of the crucial monobloc tech.
For sabbos, trick lies in perfecting the round in all aspects to support/stabilize a high L/D rod which is now much weaker in one direction. This weakness causes round to go off track, vibrate, shatter and also bend at impact . Finding an inexpensive, manufacturable process for the round that has enough precision to support a thin extra heavy rod of a hard and brittle material in extremely high acceleration, shock and vibrational energy fields cuts down most options a designer can use.
All known..and a sabot does not need to support/stabilize a high l/d round because it falls off much before impact...its primarily meant to keep the subcaliber round in the larger barrel and also to impart a flat trajectory when firing by having it mimic a full caliber round..its parasitic mass which is dropped off as soon as possible.. FYI, the overall round matters, its about finding an actual design that flies the fastest, has a penetrator design that can "dig" into the armour without yaw/or shatter at impact, about a round that maintains stability despite facing composite armour that is designed to produce competing sectional stress in the shaft to shatter it, its also about sabot design that puts the least amount of parasitic mass onto the round, its also about a sabot and penetrator combo that have a perfect flat trajectory...the list goes on and on..
And all this is known stuff.
I fail to see exactly what you think you are doing.
DU rounds are the only reliable choice for higher penetration than 650mm. They are much simpler to make, dirt cheap compared to tungsten and much more deadly because the round burns at impact with radioactive dust.
Actually, the term you are looking for is pyrophoric. And the other term is adiabatic shear. FYI, there is one western non DU manufacturer which claims to have adiabatic shear capabilities in its rounds already. They are taken rather seriously.
Unfortunately, DU rounds are not exactly dirt cheap to make given the environmental concerns involved in their manufacture, not to mention testing them & certifying them during peacetime is another pain. So, no - they are not much simpler to make and dirt cheap compared to tungsten - not for those nations which don't have large isolated testing ranges and also large quantities of DU.
Next, the claim that they are the only reliable choice for penetration greater than 650mm - a figure which you seem to have picked on from that interview is also incorrect.
Right now, there are at least a couple of KE round makers who point out that their rounds w/L55 series guns can match/outperform several recent DU rounds. These rounds are conservatively estimated to be ahead of 650mm.
Sorry, but Katare, I am done talking to you. You seem to revel in argument for arguments sake and think that doing so confers some sort of advantage. It's actually a waste of my time.
Unfortunately, you know little about Indian ammunition procurement or even what the state of affairs is.
Because, all you have to go on is that "interview", and five minutes into that interview & I already knew what rubbish was being said by Gupta after having interrupted VKS.
But you are quoting it as gospel to me. Its just a big huge waste of time.
On top of it you are quoting all sorts of random "mm" ranges tying it to decades, claims of material limits and so forth none of which are remotely correct. I have been around enough w/ developers at public events to know what you are saying is not something the industry believes or quotes as any sort of gospel, despite what you are insisting.
Please use somebody else as your sounding board to "debate" this further. I am done.
Thanks much.