Transcript Slajd 1

TANKS – METAL FORTESSES
SEBASTIAN BEBLIK
MiBM – MB8
Rok akad. 2007/08
A tank is a tracked armoured combat vehicle
designed for front-line action, combining strong
offensive and defensive capabilities. For offense the
tank carries a large calibre gun and machine guns
while heavy armour and good all-terrain mobility
provide protection for the tank and its crew.
Leopard 2A4 in Polish colours
STRUCTURE OF THE TANK
1. caterpillar drive
2. Tank cannon
3. mudguards
4. launchers of smoke
grenades
5. anti-aircraft machine
gun
6. engine range
7. turret of the
commander
8. tank machine gun
coupled with the
cannon
9. lowered front armour
10. side machine gun (not
applied after the II
world war)
HISTORY OF TANKS
Tank development, originally conducted by the
British Navy under the auspices of the Landships
Committee was sponsored by the First Lord of the
Admiralty, Winston Churchill and proceeded
through a number of prototypes culminating in the
Mark I tank prototype 'Mother' The first tank to
engage in battle was named "D1", a British Mark I,
during the Battle of Flers-Courcellette on 15
September 1916.
HISTORY OF TANKS
British World War I Mark IV tank with experimental "Tadpole Tail"
HISTORY OF TANKS
World War II was the first conflict where armoured
vehicles were critical to success on the battlefield
and during this period the tank developed rapidly as
a weapon system. During the Invasion of Poland the
Panzer II and the captured Czechoslovakian Panzer
38(t) light tanks predominated. The Somua S35 and
Char B1 in the French Army and the Panzer III and
Panzer IV medium tanks appeared in numbers
during the Battle of France, while the North African
Campaign brought the British Crusader and Matilda
into combat with the panzers.
HISTORY OF TANKS
The Panzerkampfwagen 38(t) was a Czechoslovakian
tank used by Germany during World War II.
HISTORY OF TANKS
In Operation Barbarossa the Wehrmacht
encountered the Russian T-34 and this
prompted development so that during the
Invasion of Normandy from June 1944 the
Germans were fielding the Panther and Tiger
tanks against the Allied Sherman. By 1945
and the final stages of the war the Tiger II,
Pershing and Iosif Stalin tanks dominated the
battlefields where they saw action.
HISTORY OF TANKS
Four tankers and a dog
(Czterej pancerni i pies) was
a
very
successful
warthemed Polish television
series of the 1960s (based
on an eponymous novel by a
Polish
writer
Janusz
Przymanowski, himself a
Red Army volunteer) which
made T-34 tank number 102
an icon of Polish popular
culture.
HISTORY OF TANKS
The commander and gunner sit on the right of the turret, and the
loader on the left. The commander has six periscopes that cover
360°. He also has a x3 sight for the 12.7-mm machine gun, and an
optical extension of the gunner's primary sight (GPS). This GPS has
dual x10 and x3 day optics or x10 and x3 thermal imaging night
vision, a Hughes laser rangefinder, and sight stabilization. The
gunner has a x8 auxiliary sight. The loader has a x1 periscope that
can traverse 360°.
HISTORY OF TANKS
As of 2005, there were 1,100 M1 Abrams used by
the United States army in the course of the Iraq
War, and they have proven to have an
unexpectedly high level of vulnerability to roadside
bombs. A relatively new type of remotely-detonated
mine, the explosively formed penetrator has been
used with some success against American
armoured vehicles (particularly the Bradley fighting
vehicle).
HISTORY OF TANKS
M1A1 on a live fire exercise in Iraq, 2003.
TANK DESIGN
The three traditional factors determining a tank's
effectiveness in battle are its firepower, protection,
and mobility. In practical terms, the cost to
manufacture and maintain a given tank design is
also important in that it determines how many
tanks a nation can afford to field.
TANK DESIGN
Firepower is the ability of a tank to identify, engage,
and destroy a target. Protection is the tank's ability
to resist being detected, engaged, and disabled or
destroyed by enemy fire. Mobility includes tactical
(short range) movement over the battlefield
including over rough terrain and obstacles, as well
as strategic (long range) mobility, the ability of the
tank to be transported by road, rail, sea, and/or air,
to the battlefield.
FIREPOWER
The main weapon of all modern tanks is a single, large
calibre (105 to 125mm) gun mounted in a fully traversing
turret. The typical tank gun is a smoothbore weapon
capable of firing armour-piercing kinetic energy
penetrators (KEP), also known as armour-piercing
discarding sabot (APDS), and high explosive anti-tank
(HEAT) shells and/or anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM) to
destroy armoured targets, as well as high explosive (HE)
shells for engaging soft targets or fortifications. A modern
type of tank ordnance arising from the close range urban
combat in Iraq is a 120mm calibre "shotgun" round for the
M1 Abrams which will fire 1,100 tungsten pellets.
FIREPOWER
An anti-tank guided missile
(ATGM) or anti-tank guided
weapon (ATGW) is a guided
missile primarily designed to
hit and destroy heavilyarmored tanks and other
armored fighting
vehicles.
ATGMs range in size from
shoulder-launched
weapons
which can be transported by a
single soldier, to larger tripod
mounted
weapons
which
require a squad or team to
transport and fire, to vehicle
and aircraft mounted missile
systems.
The Javelin Anti-Armor Missile - M72
LAW rockets
FIREPOWER
The Leopard 2E - of the Spanish Army - firing the new
120mm L/55 gun.
FIREPOWER
The Rheinmetall 120mm L44 gun was the most powerful tank gun by
the time the Leopard 2 MBT was entering service with the German
Army (1979).
PROTECTION
A tank's protection is the combination of its ability to avoid
detection, to avoid being hit by enemy fire, its armour to
resist the effects of enemy fire, and to sustain damage and
complete its mission, or at least protect its crew. In common
with most unit types, tanks are subject to additional hazards
in wooded and urban combat environments which largely
negate the advantages of the tank's long-range firepower
and mobility, limit the crew's detection capabilities and can
restrict turret traverse. Despite these disadvantages, tanks
retain high survivability against previous generation RPGs in
all combat environments by virtue of their armour. By
contrast, tank survivability against newer generation tandemwarhead anti-tank missiles is a concern for military planners.
PROTECTION
German Panther illustrating early use of camouflage
ARMOUR
To effectively protect the tank and its crew, tank
armour must counter a wide variety of anti-tank
threats. Protection against kinetic energy
penetrators and high explosive anti-tank (HEAT)
shells fired by other tanks is of primary
importance, but tank armour must also aim to
protect against infantry anti-tank missiles, antitank mines, bombs, direct artillery hits, and (less
often) nuclear, bacterial and chemical threats,
any of which could disable or destroy a tank
and/or its crew.
MOBILITY
The mobility of a tank is described by its battlefield
or tactical mobility and its strategic mobility. Tactical
mobility can be broken down firstly into agility,
describing the tank's acceleration, braking, speed
and rate of turn on various types of terrain, and
secondly obstacle clearance: the tank's ability to
travel over vertical obstacles like low walls or
trenches or through water. Strategic mobility is the
relative ease with which a military asset can be
transported between theatres of operation and falls
within the scope of military logistics.
MOBILITY
T-72 Ajeya of the Indian Army with reactive armour
Thank you for your time