anti tank guns still relevant in the modern world

On the downside, the vehicle was difficult and exhausting to operate because the Firefly turret was not made for such a big gun and became incredibly cramped. A typical example of this effect would be the Sherman Firefly – its 76,2mm 17pdr gun was an obvious upgrade compared to the old mid-velocity 75mm of the standard Sherman, but the tankers in Normandy rarely encountered German tanks heavy enough to warrant such a performance increase.

While a bigger gun can, in many cases, be put into an older turret, such a thing can drastically reduce the comfort of the crew, making the vehicle harder to operate and the crew easily fatigued. This can, naturally, be solved by increasing the turret size as well, but that makes the entire process more complicated by an order of magnitude. New ammunition, however, needs to be both developed and actually produced – is it worth setting up the whole process if your enemy is using armored vehicles even your older gun can defeat with relative ease?Įrgonomics – fitting a bigger gun into the same turret obviously reduces the space left for the crew. If the new gun uses existing (older) ammunition, the performance increase will, naturally, be relatively small. For one, you don’t only need the new gun you also need ammunition for it.

“Does the tank really need that big of a gun?”īefore answering it, a number of the things have to be considered:īattle need – does the tank really need a bigger gun? Upgrading a gun compared to existing standards leads to all sorts of secondary problems after all. There are multiple elements of this equation and, over the past one hundred years of armored warfare, the tank designers have been asking the same question over and over: When it comes to tanks, the concept of firepower versus armor race is as old as the vehicles themselves, but it’s not as simple as using the biggest gun that the chassis can possibly carry.

Anti tank guns still relevant in the modern world