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Originally Posted by Mobhack
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Unit 3 FT-18: called FT-17 "male" in Finland. No APCR ammo was available, so Weapon 12 (37mm Puteaux) should be modified to have an AP Penetration of 1 and the Sabot rounds transferred to AP. Correct total number of rounds was 233. No radios, radio code 1.
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Why does everyone assume that a sabot round has to be a superior anti-tank round over any plain AP???
This gun is the precise opposite. It was deliberately given a short-range special round so it can only penetrate armour at minute range, but still have a decent range for its (primary) HE round.
Note the range for the sabot - the only AP round for the Puteaux 37mm! - is 4 hexes... it is not a tungsten-carbide HVAP!. (If you gave it an AP round with 1 AP value it would be able to plink armoured cars etc with 1 armour at its maximal range of 1.5 km on occasion.)
Andy |
Okay Andy, I understand what you mean and what's the rationale behind the short range "Sabot" round, but my point is that such external ballistics are quite unrealistic for the kind plain jane AP shot the gun actually fired (basically a big bullet). The shot was a heavy steel slug with fairly high sectional density and low muzzle velocity.
Without knowing the projectile shape one can't fully estimate its ballistic coefficient, but chances are the V(drop) was not very high. In other words, penetrating 20mm at 50 meters and less than 5mm at 150 meters is not how the physics work for such projectiles. It
is, however, pretty much how they work for high velocity but relatively light and odd-shaped APCR projectiles, especially early ones, which were quite unstable.
I added the AP Pen 1 as I suggested, looked at the results of APCALC, and frankly the penetration numbers of the AP look much better and more realistic to me. AP Pen is 1 and Best AP is 2 until 150m. After that you get best AP 1 until max range (1500 meters), which is not that unrealistic if the likelyhood of Best AP occurring is really only 0.1 percent as the WW2_APCalc_Help.TXT file indicates. Even if it's one magnitude higher, plinking an armored car at 1500 meters with a 1% chance does not sound bad at all -- after all, most of those ACs and tankettes with armor value 1 in SP had only 5 to 9 mm of armor in reality.
There is one final point to this discussion: the French actually developed a real APCR round for the 37mm L/21 SA18 gun in the mid-1930. It was issued to modern light tanks with that gun (R-35 and H-35) and was used in 1940 with good effect against German PzKw I and II light tanks. Armor penetration was really about 30mm at 100 meters and useful range about 500 meters (that means penetration was equal or better than the 19th century vintage AP shot up to 500 meters). I see it is even modeled in the French OOB as Weapon 12 37mm SA18 m.37, although as much more expensive round it never fully replaced the old shot in real life.