invention of the tank

it's the silhouette that brings fear 70 tons of armored Firepower that can kill once every 4 seconds in every corner of the world the tank has proved all Conquering the Iron Fist that crushes armies and shatters morale these Mighty Machines of War represent the culmination of a centuries old struggle to Perfect The Art of mobile armored combat most generals would want to go to war with the tank up this is the second platoon D company part of the famed first Cavalry division of the United States Army we're riding out with them as they Advance into the field at Fort Hood Texas they're aboard the Abrams M1 A2 the culmination of a century of tank design as this killer machine is put through its Paces we'll reveal how the tank was perfected over time the gun has evolved into an awesome weapon that can take out a moving Target 3 km away than left T first identified on the way Warheads can now punch through almost 32 in of Steel tank armor has had to become strong enough to repel weapons like these yet remain light enough to maintain a tank's speed and Mobility the effectiveness of this the ultimate tank was proven in 1991 when the Abrams first saw action during Operation Desert Storm over 1,500 Abram's tanks went head-to-head with 4,000 Iraqi tanks under the command of Saddam Hussein despite the appalling conditions the Abrams had the edge according to leftenant General Paul Funk we were on a 25 km front and the winds were gusting up to 60 m miles an hour I mean I called the Cavalry squadron commander the great Terry Tucker and I said what's your visibility like he said 1 to 300 M but we know they're here somewhere right after that boom we slammed into them and I can still see that fight with the tracers a pause and then a tank turret going 60 ft in the air when all that ammunition and everything else blew up as a result of the hit by our tankers in 4 days us US forces wiped out most of the Iraqi tanks without losing a single tank crew member first battan Commander we captured in the war we asked him why did you give up cuz he surrendered he said the tank on my left blew up catastrophically the tank on my right blew up catastrophically and I knew I was next the ease with which the fast moving fast shooting Abrams hauls its 70 tons around the battlefield belies the humble beginnings of this quintessential War Machine in the early 1900s engineer David Roberts was working to devise a way to drive a tractor across the muddy fields of Eastern England without the wheels sinking in he came up with the idea of chain belts fitted with wooden [Music] blocks his tractor would lay out its own Rolling Road under its Wheels as it moved [Music] along this was the first steerable tracked vehicle the tracks acted like snowshoes spreading the load over a wide area preventing the tractor from sliding and sinking into into the mud it wasn't hard to imagine these tractors carrying armor and guns instead of plowers and hay bales in the muddy battlefields of northern France the first world war had ground to a spluttering halt troops were pinned down in their trenches by the murderous efficiency of the machine gun what was needed was an armored tractor that could break the stalemate but the tank that was born out of Roberts's invention looked nothing like the tank we know today as military historian David Fletcher explains this is a markv tank from 1917 the gun is in a sponson on the side the main reason for this is that within the tank the engine occupies most of the center of the vehicle that in turn is due to the fact that the tank was designed with CrossCountry movement as its most important feature the Gunnery is really a secondary matter the original purpose is simply to break the siege that had grown up around the lines of trenches and wire its job was to crush down the wire so the Infantry didn't get tangled up in it to keep down the heads of the machine Gunners kill them if possible so the Infantry were not massacred and then drive into and over the trenches 1917 the battle for combre in northern France the markv tank was an instant success breaching the German defenses and shielding the advancing infantry from machine gun fire but the markv had an Achilles heal even though the tank moved no faster than walking pace the crudely riveted track could break leaving the tank a Sitting Duck its track often failed from metal fatigue caused by vibration modern tracks are cast in a Foundry and are designed to last much longer to minimize metal fatigue in modern track shock absorbing rubber bearings are fitted to the pins that connect the links the rubber bearings also ensure a snug fit reducing play and wear rubber pads are fitted to the underside of the track sections to dampen vibrations from the [Music] ground compared with the plodding warhorse of World War I the modern Abrams is a thoroughbread it's padded track tracks can last the course for up to 3,000 Mi and give the tank agility at speed but it's taken almost a century to give the tank this much Mobility the modern heavyweight Abrams tank of today boasts impressive Speed and Agility its early ancestors like the British markv trundled at a gentle walking pace among the first tanks that could move a little faster were these 1917 Rena smaller and lighter than most other tanks at the time they traveled around the battlefield with a top speed of just under 5 mph as with all tanks of the time speed brought with it increased vibration this placed enormous strains on the Tank's components not to mention its crew this time the solution didn't come from Farmers but from the automobile industry Jay Walter Christie an American engineer in the late 1920s discovered that equipping each of a tanks Wheels with independent suspension gave much more than a comfortable ride these Christy prototype tanks were lightweight and agile when the Communist Russians heard the Americans hadn't used the suspension system they snapped up christe's design for their new tank this is the Soviet t34 deemed by many to be the finest tank of the second world war its most interesting characteristic by far is this suspension system the method of springing that enabled tank to travel fast across country without completely wrecking the physical health of the crew you'll get the chance to see a Christy tank on the move over Rough Country going fast these wheels are literally bounding up and down quite independently of one another but they're giving the crew a superbly comfortable ride for their day more important than Comfort was the additional speed that christe's suspension gave to these tanks fully armed and Laden the t34 could go into battle at 25 M an hour during the battle of the kers in the summer of 1943 wave after wave of Russian t-34s prove too much for the German armored divisions 60 years later and the bigger heavier Abrams can cross the battlefield at over 40 mph as well as speed it boasts the Tank's second great asset a powerful gun this gun can launch deadly projectiles that can kill at a range of almost 2 miles but first you have to find your enemy and get them in your sights in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 outnumbered us tank forces were fighting on unfamiliar Terrain in atrocious conditions and at night but when it came to hunting down their targets the Abrams had the technological Edge they had night capability but we had the thermal imaging sites and capabilities and so we could see about at night three times farther than they could first Contact this unit had with the Enemy came in poor visibil ility at night we got off the first set of rounds Iraqis were turning their turrets at the same time we got off the first set rounds 2third of Iraqi tanks were on fire the next volley from our guns before they could fire and all of them were dead the Abrams is packed with the latest technology to find and kill Targets in Operation Desert Storm it was all about seeing the enemy in all conditions day or night the Abrams thermal imaging system works by detecting any object on the battlefield radiating heat because it sees heat not light it can work in Pitch Darkness tank fire and adjust using his thermal imaging screen the tank commander scour The Horizon an enemy tank appears as a hot silhouette its heat signal shines brightly on the screen he passes this on to his Gunner sitting in front of him tanks there's left tank identified up on the way our job is to work together as a team pc pc they've located the target to fire accurately and kill the Gunner needs to know the exact range fire and adjust on way I have a Laser Rangefinder when I see the target I'll press these buttons here it sends out a laser which comes back and gives me a Range to that Target the laser rang finder is the last word in accuracy it works by sending a laser pulse in a narrow beam towards the Target and measuring how long it takes for the PS to bounce off and return to the Abrams as the speed of light is constant it's a simple calculation for the onboard computer to make thanks to their Laser Technology the Abrams crew can seek out and hit a moving Target while traveling at full speed over rough terrain Roger white one is engaged and destroyed three enemy tanks two sets of troops time now slant one continue Mission even though the tanks on on the move the crew have a clear image of the world all around them back to 1916 and in the tanks of the first world war Gunners had very little technology to help them in the Mayhem of battle they worked out the range to the Target using trial and error it was a technique passed down from their artillery ancestors of the 17th century we've asked asked artillery expert Colin Harriet to demonstrate how difficult and slow it is to aim a big old gun and hit the target Colin will try to hit this the proverbial barn door from about 100 yards away his only Aid is a homemade replica Gunner's rule the 17th century equivalent of a Laser Rangefinder this is the Gunner's rule she's a mark stick I aim the bottom mark on the gun as rule at the muzzle ring and aim it at what I want to shoot at spot on he'll keep firing till he finds the range and hits the target it's a technique known as straddling un cover your vent firing give him fire so we've overshot with that so let's depress the barrel see if we can get a considerably lower and so we may fall short we just have to see that's how we straddle and then if we if we do fall short we know the next one we just raise it a little bit more and we should hit the target fire give him fire seem to have kissed in front of the target there so so we got to elevate just a little bit more to try and smack somewhere in the middle firing give him fire Colin is a skilled Gunner and working quickly he can only fire two to three rounds a minute every Telltale puff of smoke from his Cannon gives away his position making him a Target that's got the range yeah that's got the range trial and error one over one under and one in the middle fast forward 300 years and first world war tank Gunners were just as slow at finding their range I'm in the position of the starboard Gunner he's got this control arm sticking out here which fits under the right armpit his right hand then goes forward to this Pistol Group Arrangement under here and then he sets his eye to the telescope Here and Now using his body weight he can Elevate depress the gun and even to some extent swing it round to track a Target the gun will fire out to about 7,000 yards in fact in anything more than a th000 you'd be lucky to see anything never mind hit it if the tank was to improve the whole process of aiming and firing needed to be speeded up the Breakthrough came from the war at Sea rather than the war on land the British royal Navy had used an optical system to calculate range for some time it helped their Gunners hit targets many miles [Music] away but the rang finding equipment was big and heavy not easy to fit into a turret it wasn't until towards the end of the second world war that this Optical rang finding technology was made compact enough two lenses were positioned on either side of the turret each lens was connected to the same eyepiece by prisms as the distance between lenses is known the distance to the Target is calculated using trigonometry the Gunner sees two images one from the left one from the right turning a hand crank pivots the lenses on either side till the images line up and [Music] merge better Optics and rangefinders meant tanks could hit targets at far greater distances this encourag tank designers to fit much bigger guns with more power one of the most feared tanks of the second world war was the German tiger with the most powerful gun yet mounted on a [Music] tank it's an 88 mm High Velocity gun that was originally designed for anti-aircraft work and the British had already come to dread it in the desert the Germans had enough f F ability in their system to convert their anti-aircraft guns into the anti-tank roll with a gun like that the sort of accuracy and hitting power it's got you could take out other tanks at ranges where they cannot effectively take you out in return that's its real asset that big gun even as it destroyed everything it came across the tiger had one weakness it couldn't fire its gun on the move the gun's powerful recoil would have seriously damaged the turret unless the tank was stationary the Tank's crew had to Halt swing the turret unlock and Elevate aim then Fire by the time they'd done all this they might have lost the advantage of their big gun and become a Target themselves even tanks with smaller guns couldn't fire accurately on the Move simply because their barrels bounced around so much Engineers had to come up with a mechanism that would keep the barrel steady however rough the terrain they began with this a gyroscope a gyroscope is a spinning wheel on an axle once spinning it resists changes to its direction due to the forces created by the fast rotation of the wheel if a spinning gyroscope is put into an environment that rolls around found it'll remain stable connect the gyro to the controls that position the gun and the gun remains locked to the gyro it's totally stabilized the gyros in an Abram's tank keep the gun barrel steady even as the tank crosses the roughest terrain by fitting further Gyros it's possible to keep the gun locked on target so it can fire on the move with [Music] accuracy now the tank had an accurate and powerful gun that could fire on the Move designers could turn their attention to what it fired its ammunition during the second world war designers came up with an evergrowing arsenal of deadly weapons one of these was known as the squash head to kill a tank crew it doesn't even have to get through the armor to demonstrate the deadly nature of this weapon we've asked chemist and explosives designer Sydney Alford to set up an experiment so here we have 150 g of plastic explosive Sydney has welded steel armor to a metal plate and bolted this in place on the side of a mockup turret I'm going to plunk it onto that Target that his challenge to destroy the inside of the turret without penetrating the armor I pling it I plunk it a bit more this plastic explosive he's patting into place will replicate the behavior of the real squash head that now represents the explosive which has arrived in inside a shell which has squashed itself against the target take Detonator inserting The Detonator turns the harmless inert putty into a lethal explosive that could blow most of the roof of a house there's a melon sitting in for the crew goodbye melon I said firing Four 3 2 1 oh here we are at first glance it looks as though Sydney's squash head has failed to do its work but if you look around the back of the plate I think I see one former melon which is no more and here still warm you would not like to share the inside of a tank with this traveling at I would guess roughly the speed of sound this scab of Steel has been blasted off the inside of the armor um what I'll do now is unbolt this and we can have a good look there we are the squash head shell looks like any other as it leaves the gun tube on impact with the turret it sticks to the surface like a cowat the shock waves from the explosive cause little damage on the outside but Devastation on the [Music] inside more powerful guns and shells meant armor had to get thicker an escalating duel between ammunition and armor had begun the story of the tank has been an escalating dual between Firepower and armor As Weapons got more powerful and the ammunition more sophisticated armor had to get thicker in the second world war the German Tiger quickly earned a reputation for being almost Invincible but it was severely compromised as a fighting machine its armor is thicker than virtually any tank before it over 100 mm at the front it weighs something in the region of 56 tons as a consequence it comes with all manner of limitations to give any example in order to bear this great weight extra wide tracks are needed and loads of Wheels to press on the tracks it is so heavy that it is endlessly stressing the engine and gearbox you get this thing into a really difficult country you stand a pretty fair chance of having it completely disable itself it was totally on the limit in terms of weight and power for anything that had been seen in action [Music] before tank designers needed to come up with lighter armor without losing any [Music] Protection One solution came from the Russian t34 with an innovation that others were to copy sloping armor this piece of armor is 4 in thick when positioned vertically angled at 30° it becomes twice as thick at 8 in to keep the armor at 4 in thick only requires half as much steel making the tank significantly lighter on the plus side some conventional shells simply bounced off sloping armor forced weapons designers to think again they were looking for something to penetrate this new generation of protection the struggle between ammunition and armor entered a new phase in their quest to come up with more deadly weapons designers looked back into history and surprisingly found the answer in a principle discovered in the 17th century in the days of the big sieges Gunners observed they were losing power from their cannons a cannonball had to be loose enough not to jam in the barrel this allowed a lot of the force of the gunpowder to escape through the Gap around the sides Gunners devised an ingenious way to plug this Gap a tightly fitting wooden bung called a Sabo or wooden shoe well I'm just fixing the Sabo here onto the base of the Round Shot or can ball if you like 400 years on we've asked artillery expert Colin Harriet to demonstrate what a Sabo round does it's just a piece of wood like that when the Cannon Falls if you just got a cannonball in there you lose a lot of power with this lump of flat wood the blast would hit it and before this blows apart and disintegrates in that millisecond that will give the initial impetus and will throw the cannon bble further and faster that was the theory Colin has two attempts to Pro prove it he'll fire his cannon at this makeshift Target the first round will be a plain shot without the Sabo and the second will have his homemade Sabo attached TI him over for both shots the distance to the Target is the same the amount of powder and charge and the size and weight of Cannonball identical it's a test to see which round has more power the plan is to shoot a naked ball Ball's got in she's primed and she's ready to go C fire the first round hits the target but it's very low down here's the ball she he's come through there hit there and bounced off will the shot with the Sabo attached do any better leave it give him fire W look at that smack dead center Ball's gone through a good 4 in of very strong Douglas fur not only does a Savo give it more power but it do give it more accuracy she pled right through let's have a look around the back end see what it's done there the simple addition of a small disc of wood has effectively increased the punching power of Collins Cannon by a third come through pretty fast we then had the second time Target over here it's hit it so fast it's almost as if the wood doesn't even know it's been hit right [Music] through late in the second world war in 1943 a Belgian scientist working for the British took the Sabo principal one step further ladislas peruta calculated that a smaller projectile would fly through the air much faster than a big shell and if this projectile were made from a dense heavy material like tungsten carbide it could penetrate even the thickest armor but how to fire a small projectile from a big gun Pam's solution a Sabo that encased the projectile increasing its girth making it fit snugly into the barrel no power was lost when the gun was [Music] fired this is a relatively modern version of what pamut invented in 1943 and what we have here is the penetrator which is enclosed by this boot or this Sabo which uh carries the uh this penetrator up the gun barrel and when the whole assembly leaves the gun barrel the Sabo becomes separated by the air resistance that is offered to the Sabo and it's essentially like a very fast move moving crossbow bolt as it sits in the Bree the Sabo holds the projectile firmly in place when the gun is fired the assembly moves rapidly up the barrel almost immediately the Sabo peels away and falls to the ground on impact there's no explosion the speed and density of the penetrator cuts through armor causing complete Devastation this is an example of a Target that's been struck by a 120 mm Sabo round and here we have the type of projectile that was used and as you can see around the outside of the target we can see quite a significant amount of plastic defamation in other words the material has moved apart and has been permanently deformed formed uh as the the projectile penetrates these super penetrating weapons inspired New Concepts in armor designers realized that thick steel no longer offered enough protection and it was [Music] Heavy they experimented with special composites using layers of ceramic and glass fiber sandwiched between steel some layers reduce the transmission of shock from squash head rounds others provide resistance to new penetrating [Music] projectiles the Abrams is clad in layers of composite armor designed to offer the best protection for its crew in the first Gulf War of 1991 Superior armor gave us forces another tactical Edge in Desert Storm we knew we could not be penetrated in the frontal 60° Arc which is generally the best protected part of any fighting vehicle uh we knew that we we could not be penetrated at ranges of over 500 M so our idea was we were going to stand off at least 500 m in any kind of a direct fir fight with tanks or with their missiles and we believed we could defeat them without losing our own crews in fact that proved to be true good arm meant Abrams Crews felt safe enough to get in closer then hit harder with their powerful gun I can recall one battalion Commander talking about his guy calling him back one of his company commanders and telling him the RPGs are bouncing off the tanks up here he thought that was pretty good as he said and I thought it was Dam am good I mean that's a great feeling uh not one that you want to go out and try every day but nevertheless when you have that happen you know that gives you a little extra uh boost because you know your equipment's working the way it was supposed to in the contest between ammunition and armor more weapons were being devised with ever more devious powers of Destruction one of them was the shaped charge first used in battle during the second World War this simple handheld disposable weapon could immobilize a tank if you could get close enough it quite literally changes shape to do its deadly work it's better known today as the rocket propelled grenade or RPG the shaped charge consists of a thin copper cone wrapped with explosive on impact the explosive is detonated and a powerful shock wave turns the copper cone Inside Out creating a high-speed jet of hot copper when the shell hits the tank and the explosive is detonated it's this jet which literally cuts through the armor we've brought together two experts in explosives to demonstrate the devastating power of a shaped charge Manfred HT and Sydney Alford they'll fire a shaped charge at a stack of Steel plates mounted onto the side of a scale mockup of a tank turret they stack up 10 plates of Steel each fractions of an inch thick that's almost 2 in of armor yeah I agree but the plates are angled at 30° like sloped armor this doubles the thickness to just under 4 in 30° agre yes can we move it in please leave it in 3 cm what is the stand of exact 250 mm 250 and you 1 two Manford and Sydney have allowed some distance between the copper cone of the shaped charge and the armor plates to replicate the way a real charge behaves better not tell him what's going to happen [Music] no a steel witness plate is hung behind the melon to record the penetrating power of the charge Sydney inserts the Detonator and Retreats okay ready to fire fireing 4 3 2 1 so that charge behaves as a classic shape charge the piece of copper forming the conb which started with a diameter of about 65 mm has been squeezed down into a Long Rod which was traveling exceedingly fast going through the plate through the melons and the other side of the tank remember remember the witness plate that we hung up inside the melon has exploded the jet has divided to give two holes it's impressive and deadly Sydney's small charge has blasted through almost 4 in of steel plate it's only got a fraction of the power of a real rocket propelled grenade this type of Warhead can penetrate approximately 300 mm of Steel so if you take a look at this steel stack that I've got here that means it can penetrate one 2 three layers of Steel other variants of this type of Warhead can penetrate anything up to between 7 or even 800 mm of Steel so it's a very very dangerous threat but what can be done to stop shaped charges penetrating a tank turret a young man from HT went to the Middle East after the Six-Day War of 1967 to test shaped charges against the armor of wrecked tanks left in the desert he saw it as an opportunity to work with real armor out in the field as he filmed his work he noticed some tanks were less damaged after the explosion Manfred had stumbled on something with amazing potential he'd hit on what he called explosive reactive armor a new theory in tank protection after the Six-Day War of 1967 explosives engineer Manfred HT discovered a revolutionary Concept in tank armor he called it explosive reactive armor explosive reactive armor consists of a sheet of high explosive sandwiched between two steel plates when a penetrating weapon hits it the explosive lir detonates forcing the two metal plates apart repelling the incoming missile Manford H's design comes in the form of explosive boxes fixed to the outside of a tank it's one of the more recent Concepts in armor to demonstrate manfred's invention we've asked him and Sydney Alford to fire another shaped charge what we'll do now we'll fire exactly the same charge at exactly the same distance at exactly the same Target but this time we now have a layer of Professor hel's armor one drawback with explosive reactive armor is that anyone outside the tank is in danger of being hit by flying shrapnel Sydney has built a protective canopy to try and contain the fragments everybody ready I am ready okay firing 4 3 2 1 wohoo ah some of the steel plates look as though they've been penetrated this is interesting it's deflected the shot considerably the actual penetration is I think much less and M congratulate you professor H has worked very well it hasn't come through when the 10 steel plates are laid out alongside those from the previous experiment its clear explosive reactive armor has protected the inside of the turret the charge has only penetrated the top three layers of armor I think that this is a pretty unambiguous demonstration of the effectivess of reactive armor that's pretty conclusive it's [Music] conclusive explosive reactive armor marked a watershed in the battle between weapons and protection new technologies mean the future may lie with active armor systems that detect and detonate Warheads before they get close to a tank for designers this is the holy grayer they could take away tons of passive heavy conventional armor and devise smaller lighter Vehicles this would answer some strategists who feel that the concept of the tank is outdated and that modern armies need faster vehicles for Rapid reaction forces I think you're always going to have a tank-like vehicle hell let's not call it a tank anymore I don't care call it a horse but I think what we have to have is what is it that's going to fulfill the role that the tank plays today on tomorrow's Battlefield one proposal is this the striker it doesn't yet have active armor but it's lighter and more mobile than the Abrams it's available in many different versions and was designed to be airlifted into war zones loing inside a self-loading gun and a virtual Battlefield on screens add to the complexity of the technology that can go wrong used in the recent conflict in Iraq it was found wanting its armor couldn't keep out cheap and readily available rocket propelled grenades once equipped with the extra protection needed the striker becomes too large to be airlifted and deployed quickly over the last 100 years the tank has benefited from countless improvements in technology and established itself as the Supreme armored Fighting Vehicle the big question is has it reached its limits as the escalating battle between Firepower and protection gathers Pace once more designers have plenty to keep them busy to keep this machine of War the tank in the front line imagine not knowing who you are imagine not recognizing any family or friends at all next in a new series of extraordinary people we meet the man with no memory of his 25 years that's next

Channel: Eric Cartman

Views: 715,826

Keywords: googlevideo

Id: 6Z9o5oPMWss

Length: 46min 50sec (2810 seconds)

Published: Wed May 23 2012