A10 tank buster video5/18/2023 The Soviet Union was known to be deploying a new main battle tank, the T-80. Meanwhile, efforts to future-proof the M1’s armament were coming in handy. Most importantly, the M774 could penetrate the T-72’s frontal hull and turret armor, where armor was the thickest. By comparison, the larger Soviet 125-millimeter gun on the T-72 tank could penetrate 450 millimeters of armor. The M833 DU round, however, could penetrate 420 millimeters of RHA positioned at a sixty-degree angle for maximum armor thickness. The standard tungsten antiarmor round for the M60 tank, the M735, could penetrate 350 millimeters, or 13.7 inches, of steel rolled homogenous armor (RHA), the standard measurement for armored vehicle protection. The pyrophoric nature of uranium and steel would cause the DU to catch fire upon penetration, causing catastrophic damage inside the tank. Accelerated to extremely high speeds, this allowed a depleted-uranium (DU) round to smash through an unprecedented amount of armor. A byproduct of nuclear reactor fuel, depleted uranium was harder and denser than existing tungsten-tipped penetrators. Moreover, a later version of the tank, later called M1A1, would come standard with the larger M256.Īt the same time, the United States was researching the use of depleted uranium as an armor penetrator. A compromise resulted, in which the M1 would be initially manufactured with the M68 gun, but would be upgradable to the M256 at a later date. A larger gun would also “future-proof” the M1, allowing it to defeat future tanks with heavier armor. The civilian leadership felt obliged to use the gun in part as a way to offset German participation in the NATO AWACS program. Pentagon officials, on the other hand, wanted to equip the M1 with the larger German-designed Rheinmetall M256 120-millimeter smoothbore gun. An even larger gun would further reduce ammo capacity to a mere forty rounds. The M1’s turret could only accommodate fifty-five rounds of 105-millimeter ammunition, a reduction from the sixty-two rounds the older M60 tank could carry. The M68 had armed the M60 series of tanks for decades and was considered a proven “good enough” gun. The Army had preferred the 105-millimeter gun, the British-designed Royal Ordnance L7, also known in the United States as the M68. The M1 Abrams tank was first fielded by the U.S.
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