A Guide to Tank Ammo | Koala Explains: Tank Ammunition Types and their Differences

🅱️ E S H

you forgot APHEFSDSHSG (HS) Armor Piercing High Explosive Fin-Stabilised Discarding Sabot Hand-of-Stalin Guided (Hardened Stalinium)

"but you'll also hear them referred to as HEP" - I was like where 🅱️ESH

How did I miss Koala making this channel? It's everything I've ever wanted in one convenient place!

Well done. As an ex tanker who was explaining tank ammo to a friend I looked it up and we enjoyed the concise explanation and graphics.

ancient: arrows centuries ago: cannon rounds now: darts never change: pay to win

the holy 🅱️ E S H of antioch

I would love to see some super slow motion footage of a HESH shell hitting a thick steel plate

2:24 This is a misconception thanks to War Thunder but IRL, shrapnel shells are not APHE shells. Shrapnel shells are air burst munitions that are specifically an anti-personnel rounds. Think of it like canister shot, but you shoot the gun at the enemy and then the gun fires mid air, creating a cloud of bullets. Also, APCR rounds had a aluminum body but used a Tungsten core. This made them expensive and not widely used during WW2 or after.

Imagine being the loader in a challenger and the gunner/commander says "Load B E S H !"

This is the most tank nerds I've ever seen in a comment section. There's custom acronyms flying around here like ordinance in an actual battle.

I love how much of this I've been able to glean from War Thunder over time. Even the history, watching APDS and HEATFS rounds come into play in higher rank vehicles as technology improved and became standard. It's given me such a great understanding of this stuff, enough to understand the real history I've seen since. One thing I didn't expect was APHE rounds being so ineffective. From playing War Thunder, you'd think they were god's gift to tankers all the way up to the invention of HEATFS. Almost every tank in the game before the Cold War era has APHE rounds which are incredibly effective at getting one-shot kills if aimed properly. It's kinda surprising to hear that in reality, they were passed pretty quickly in favor of heavier solid rounds.

Well done. Concise, accurate and still basic enough for a beginner to understand without boring a veteran. Very glad I subscribed. Now you just need a video on how to know when you’re being Gaijined and how to counteract that curse. Perhaps a step by step guide on appeasing the hamsters?

To add to this, Caps were really needed to essentially be padding. For very hard steel or especially tungsten carbide shells, the impact on the armor (especially high-hardness armor) would shatter the shell like glass, because of the brittleness that accompanies hardness. So the cap gives a soft metal cushion to reduce the stresses on the shell, and it does a fantastic job of preventing shattering, from all the simulations I've seen.

The big reason behind the switch from rifle to smoothbore is that as projectile velocity passes a certain point the gasses start to erode the rifling which means that after a limited number of rounds the gun begins to lose accuracy. This was discovered during testing of the new sabot for the 105mm rifle in the M60A3. To prevent the spin of the rifling causing the round to curve like a golf ball at longer ranges they installed ball bearings in the sabot of the round so that the penetrator would rely on the fins to stabilize it. In testing the new sabot could destroy the rifling in the barrel in one or two days of heavy combat. This led to the adoption of the smoothbore gun in the Abrams which allows much higher muzzle velocities.

Good video, subbed. Short note on gyroscopic stabilisation (GS) though: longer round do not "respond negatively" to GS, but it is simply unfeasible to apply it. The sabot rounds were becoming longer and heavier, thus in need of much higher rotational speeds to stabilize them. This creates a few problems in itself: the extreme amounts of spin imparted on the projectile will create a lot of gyroscopic drift, and the rifling cannot be expected to survive for very long because of the extreme stresses. For these reasons it is more suitable to use fin stabilisation and a smooth bore gun. If a long spin stabilised projectile is not sufficiently spun it will tumble end over end, but it is not a product of the spin itself.

Well done. Concise, accurate and still basic enough for a beginner to understand without boring a veteran. Very glad I subscribed

I was on tanks for 7 years and learned from guys with cumulative experience in excess of probably 200years between then. Heat rounds push physics to the extreme. The insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan had used this to great effect against armored vehicles using EFPs. The explosive force puts incredible pressure on the copper plate or cone, also compressing it into a single jet. The pressure alone is what causes the copper to actually liquefy and heat up. For a split second it is near its boiling point and will cut through the armor like a plasma jet. The tell is looking at the penetration and seeing the deposited copper. These also need a specific distance to be effective. If they are directly against the armor, no pen. Too far from it and the hot copper simply splatters on the surface like weld spatter. That's what the cages around vehicles and tanks are for and spaced armor as well. US troops in Iraq used 5gallon water cans over doors to completely negate EFPs before effective countermeasures were fielded. My MRAP had side armor and we still put a bunch of mess in and filled the space with full water bottles because of how effective water is at stopping anything and everything. It's non compressible unlike all other elements involved, and so it bleeds off an incredible amount of energy off any incoming projectiles or fragments.

3:01 with subtitles, this mixture of TNT and amity makes the shells as powerful as nuclear bombs

I was looking for a video to clearly explain how APFSDS rounds worked (specifically why it had the jacket around it) and your video was the first one that actually explained it in a way that made sense to me. Plus all the other info about tank rounds was super cool too! thank you.