Re: who can kill an M1 Abrams?
I have been reading this discussion regarding top attack anti tank devices for quite sometime now.What surprised me is that no one mentioned the STAFF(small target fire&forget) top attack round developed by the US for it's Abrams. Although the programe got cancelled due to escalating procurement costs (and the fact that a new round called TERM was underdevelopment(still is)) it would have proved to be an effective counter to advanced armours such as the Chobham.The staff featured a heat seeker in it's nose and would after firing pop up like any antitank missile.During it's descent the seeker would look for the target's heat signature upon which it had locked on before firing and the controlling fins at the back of the round would adjust it's flight acording to the target's position and movement.Another projected role for the staff was to be used in an anti helicopter role(where in it got replaced by MPATT).
An excerpt from a file I have on different types of tank ammo:
Tank Ammunition - Other ammunition.
Although tanks have traditionally carried HE ( H igh E xplosive)
shells, the Germans and Americans do not field anything but
APFSDS and HEAT for their 120 mm guns. As a result, all anti-
personnel work has to be done with HEAT rounds, which have infe-
rior blast and fragmentation patterns compared to HE rounds of the
same caliber. The Russian tanks, on the other hand, have always
fielded HE rounds, and they form the largest proportion of each
tank's ammunition load. (The current 125 mm HE round is the
OF26 .) This means Russian tanks are far better equipped to tackle
infantry, especially in urban conditions, than any of the NATO armies.
The Swedish Army has a similar ammunition doctrine to the Russian
army, and they field a 120 mm HE round on their Leopard 2s. The
120 mm and 125 mm HE rounds are fast enough and heavy enough
to cause catastrophic damage to lightly armored vehicles, like APCs
and some IFVs, and even MBTs cannot ignore the damage a direct
hit can do to the running gear and optics.
Other ammunition types, like flechette, canister, and smoke
rounds, were all produced for rifled tank guns of previous genera-
tions, but they haven't been fielded for most 120 mm and 125 mm
systems. The US Army is currently developing a 120 mm canister
round for its Abrams tanks, but experiments with an Israeli prototype
of a flechette round proved to be a failure. Smoke rounds simply
haven't been considered important enough to be developed yet.
The US Army has fielded an anti- helicopter round, known as
the M830A1 HEAT- MP- T, or MPAT ( M ulti P urpose A nti T ank), since
1992. This small saboted HEAT round has a muzzle velocity of 1,410
m/ s, to enable it to reach distant targets quickly, and it has a prox-
imity fuse to detonate it when it passes near an airborne target.
When the proximity fuse is switched off, the round can be fired at
ground targets, but the small size of the MPAT warhead means
penetration is less than the basic M830. The US Army partly developed a top-attack round for the Abrams, called the XM943 STAFF, but the pro-
gram was canceled before the round reached production. Work is
continuing on another ambitious smart round program called TERM,
but it will not produce rounds before 2007 at the earliest.
