Future Tank Gun Systems

[2RHPZ]

Future Tank Gun Systems

Simple, effective, and outdated? Some may say that the age of the Big Gun is over, but it may just be a technological revolution away from a new era.

http://www.military.com/pics/SoldierTech_TankGun1.jpg
120mm M1A1

Full article (http://www.military.com/soldiertech/0,14632,Soldiertech_TankGun,,00.html?ESRC=soldiertech.nl)

[GazB]

unaffected by explosive reactive armor, relatively inexpensive and brutally efficient, the KE penetrator drives armor development.

Ummm, doesn't the writer of this article keep up to date with ERA development? Soviet ERA from the mid 80s was able to effect sabot rounds by reducing their penetration by a significant amount.

Regarding the article itself I personally would prefer to go in baby steps rather than try to make a leap. EM guns might be able to accelerate small objects now to 6,000m/s, but the research I have read suggests that 2,500m/s is a real velocity goal in that once velocity reaches this level you get more penetration by increasing projectile weight rather than increasing speed.
A good next step would be liquid propellent guns. This would offer huge advances in crew safety as they could use two non reactive liquids that will not burn and store them in widely seperated parts of the vehicle to be combined in the gun chamber. When combined they become rather more powerful than solid propellent... much like liquid propellent rockets are still rather more powerful than solid propellent rockets.

When the tank makes the full change to all electric drive (ie electric motors drive the tracks, the turret and the sensors) then making the main weapon electric would make sense. The power supply then would probably be a gas turbine engine that is set up to generate electricity. We would need huge advances in capaciter technology to store and use this energy, but many ships made that change (to allow reversing propellers as easy as reversing the poles on the electric motor rather than having to stop the diesel engine and then restarting it in the opposite direction...)

[Operation Ivy]

I like the idea its just like GazB said its gonna take time for us to be able to store that enegry and to store it safely