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Pretty sure he was trying to describe a HESH round, not a HEAT round. HESH rounds deform on impact to act like a shaped charge, but they don’t penetrate the armor. Instead, the shockwave caused fragments the inner surface of the armor, which in turn kills the crew if the crew compartment doesn’t have a separate armored shell, or if the HESH round hit spaced armor, it’s charge is disrupted against the second armored surface. Certain composite armors can defeat HESH as well.

HEAT round are designed to bore a hole through armor, by various means. And HEAT rounds are defeated by a combination of reactive explosive plates and/or composite armor plates such as Chobham, or Composite Metal Foam.

SJ

 Peregrine wrote:

 Mmmpi wrote:
Except to achieve that effect, it's heated to semi-plasma and has to blowtorch it's way though the armor. The high speed just lets it keep moving forward, rather then splatting against, and filling in the crater it formed in the armor plating. The effect it has on the crew is from the super-heated hull exploding, and then spalling.

WTF? No. None of that is true at all. Please do some basic research on the subject before posting nonsense. HEAT rounds are purely a kinetic weapon, penetrating armor by applying a lot of force to a small surface area and punching a hole in it. HEAT is an acronym and has nothing to do with temperature.

correct. They get hot because of the extreme pressure applied and in gen 2 shaped charges without copper liners it is a jet of plasma that does the cutting, however note that this is not a heat but a force effect.

There are 4 distinct generations of shaped charges all work on the principals discovered by egon Neumann and a guy named Monroe.

Gen 1 is a flat area of explosive, because explosives explode away perpendicularly to the surface a flat bottom helps concentrate the explosive force. This is much the same as the British and their precious hesh head rounds.

Gen 2 has a conical cavity which due to the effect mentioned above concentrates the force to a single point. This will compress the air to a plasma but this IS NOT A HEAT EFFECT it is a force effect.

Gen 3 uses this effect to invert a copper liner and accelerate it at hypersonic speed. At hypersonic speed it obviously has a lot of kinetic energy and at these speeds metals behave in a semi liquid fashion, however they are not liquids

Gen 4 is the self forging penetrator and effectively turns a dome of copper into a fast but not hypersonic bullet. It is less efficient than gen 3

 jeffersonian000 wrote:
Pretty sure he was trying to describe a HESH round, not a HEAT round. HESH rounds deform on impact to act like a shaped charge, but they don’t penetrate the armor. Instead, the shockwave caused fragments the inner surface of the armor, which in turn kills the crew if the crew compartment doesn’t have a separate armored shell, or if the HESH round hit spaced armor, it’s charge is disrupted against the second armored surface. Certain composite armors can defeat HESH as well.

HEAT round are designed to bore a hole through armor, by various means. And HEAT rounds are defeated by a combination of reactive explosive plates and/or composite armor plates such as Chobham, or Composite Metal Foam.

SJ

Armor spacing also helps as it allows the plasma jet to spread out between armor layers.

If you're comparing Earth as it is to the Imperial Guard as it is, then we'd lose every time. Imperial Guard could arm a few shiploads of troops with sharpened sticks, and they'd overrun us through sheer numbers. But if you break it down evenly...

Infantry - Ultimately, I think we have a slight advantage here. Flak armor is better than what we have, the trusty lasgun is better than what we have, but we build stubbers with the best of them, and flak armor only protects from the chest up - and doesn't do much to help against explosives. Our real advantage would be through coordination, training, and tactics. Our basic infantry communication systems are better than what they have, and our training is better than the Imperial average (there are outliers, but the general picture painted is of a mass of barely-trained bodies). And the more we win, the more gear we can collect from the fallen, which lessens their technological advantage.

Tanks - I'm going to call this one even. The main armament is pretty similar, and while we don't have a great comparison of armor material strengths, we have the ability to make ablative armor for plasma, and our current armor isn't shabby. We'd also have the advantage of speed and profile - Leman Russ tanks stick up so high, they'd attract way more fire than an Abrams. At the end of the day, you don't have to breach the armor - you just have to limit the mobility or incapacitate the crew.

Super-heavy - We don't really have a good answer to the Baneblade or its ilk. Clear advantage to the Imperial Guard.

Artillery - Clear advantage goes to us. Aside from the old, wobbly, crotchety Deathstrike missiles they drag out of storage now and again, their long-range missile support is negligible. They rely on relatively dumb artillery, and on paper at least, it seems to be around the same level of firepower as our good old batteries here, and guided missile support has the advantage over a Basilisk any day of the week. The Imperial Guard relies more on direct tactics, and we've invested a lot of money into fighting battles from afar. And artillery wins wars.

Air Support - Again, I don't think we have a clear picture of how a Valkyrie compares to, say, an F-22, but we invest a lot in our air superiority strategies, and we have a lot of very effective, very long-range anti-aircraft systems. We also have more direct ground-support tools than the Imperial Guard seems to. Without further Imperial Navy support, I think we have the advantage here.

So, in summation - if you were to drop a single Imperial Guard army with no Navy or Astartes support, and they were fighting against a single NATO army, I think we could eek out a victory. Our supporting tools - air support, artillery - appears to be more advanced than what they typically run with, we have better training, and we can lessen the technological gaps (where they exist) with time.

That being said, once you bring in just about anything else, we're pretty well and truly screwed.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Mmmpi wrote:
Except to achieve that effect, it's heated to semi-plasma and has to blowtorch it's way though the armor. The high speed just lets it keep moving forward, rather then splatting against, and filling in the crater it formed in the armor plating. The effect it has on the crew is from the super-heated hull exploding, and then spalling.

WTF? No. None of that is true at all. Please do some basic research on the subject before posting nonsense. HEAT rounds are purely a kinetic weapon, penetrating armor by applying a lot of force to a small surface area and punching a hole in it. HEAT is an acronym and has nothing to do with temperature.

No, High Explosive Anti Tank (HEAT) are not kinetic kill. You are thinking Sabot rounds which are nothing but a hard and very fast dart (ours are made of depleted uranium).

HEAT:


Sabot:



(by the way, I was a tanker on M1A1 and M1A2s and know a bit about the topic).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 jeffersonian000 wrote:


Yep, we don’t have hard exoskeleton powered armor like Astartes, and probably won’t for at least another 10 years, if not quite a bit longer. The issues with 40k PA in real life are specifically the power supply and that any protection it can give is easily defeated by anti-vehicle weapons that are already widely available. Which means that while Astartes can ignore our small arms, they’ll still eat it to cheap anti-tank rockets and armor piercing high caliber rounds, just like they already due to the 40k equivalents.

10th Mountain is going to be testing a legs only eco suit this year. SOCOM has a full body suit they are testing.

The imperium's 'industry standard' militarum regiment is the cadian template.

This is not a bad approximation at a basic infantry level - squad by squad they probably have an edge.

microbead vox are standard personal issue in: tanith, cadian, vostroyan, valhallan regiments. Lacks the non-voice data capability of some modern armies but squad level tactical comms is not uncommon.


The lasgun is pretty much identical to an assault rifle. Comparing the two in the guard RPG, 'only war', their range and basic punch is identical. For point of reference, the accatran pattern autogun in siege of vraks is called out as an 8mm weapon, so assume ak47-esque punch.

Autoguns have the advantage of fully automatic fire, making them good for suppressive fire, whilst lasguns only do 3 round bursts, max.

Lasguns have superior ammo capacity (approx x2 shots per 'clip'), and the option of giving up the higher shot count for harder hitting overcharge shots. The latter aren't quite as nasty as bolt shells, but they're close. Probably not too important in human versus human but good at stopping soft skinned vehicles or chopping up hard cover.

Flak armour is again, superior. Note that it has a small but meaningful chance of stopping a heavy stubber, which is essentially a .50 cal.


The militarum's biggest weaknesses are in tactical comms and the ability to call fire quickly on fleeting targets. But, ultimately they're a product of the wars they fight. You don't need drones and smart missiles to stop a tyranid swarm: you need an artillery park of basic howitzers and the ammo to keep firing whilst you chew through millions of foes that cannot be suppressed or broken.

See John Ringo's posleen saga for a good discussion on this, and what would happen if a tyranid or ork invasion hit us.


Astartes.....its a completely different kettle of fish. Comparing the novels or RPGs, it's like facing captain america in an iron man suit. They have more alert senses than you, faster reflexes than you, total data sharing comms and high-tech sensors, they can kill you with glancing wounds through light cover and you need at least light antitank weaponry to threaten them. Walking across a kilometre-wide open field,theyre as dead as any light armour, but in, say, a close-packed building fight, a combat squad of marines will basically go through contemporary military like the expendables through generic goons.

 CptJake wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Mmmpi wrote:
Except to achieve that effect, it's heated to semi-plasma and has to blowtorch it's way though the armor. The high speed just lets it keep moving forward, rather then splatting against, and filling in the crater it formed in the armor plating. The effect it has on the crew is from the super-heated hull exploding, and then spalling.

WTF? No. None of that is true at all. Please do some basic research on the subject before posting nonsense. HEAT rounds are purely a kinetic weapon, penetrating armor by applying a lot of force to a small surface area and punching a hole in it. HEAT is an acronym and has nothing to do with temperature.

No, High Explosive Anti Tank (HEAT) are not kinetic kill. You are thinking Sabot rounds which are nothing but a hard and very fast dart (ours are made of depleted uranium).

HEAT:


Sabot:



(by the way, I was a tanker on M1A1 and M1A2s and know a bit about the topic).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 jeffersonian000 wrote:


Yep, we don’t have hard exoskeleton powered armor like Astartes, and probably won’t for at least another 10 years, if not quite a bit longer. The issues with 40k PA in real life are specifically the power supply and that any protection it can give is easily defeated by anti-vehicle weapons that are already widely available. Which means that while Astartes can ignore our small arms, they’ll still eat it to cheap anti-tank rockets and armor piercing high caliber rounds, just like they already due to the 40k equivalents.

10th Mountain is going to be testing a legs only eco suit this year. SOCOM has a full body suit they are testing.

just because you were a tanker doesn’t mean you know jack about the science behind the weapons. HEAT Is a just an acronym. It is a pure kinetic kill weapon that takes advantage of blastwave shaping to deform a copper cone into a hypersonic copper spear. At these pressures and temperatures plasma is created buy has nothing no to do with cuttIng through armor. Do I need to post the us dod documents on the effect?

You're thinking of Discarding Sabot Rounds. (APDS)

HEAT rounds are plasma blowtorches.

HESH (High Explosive Squash Head) rounds work by causing spalling and concussive force through the hull of the vehicle.

Nothing about the HEAT round is a kinetic kill weapon. Seriously, you just had a tanker tell you that, and the US military actually trains their troops in how their weapons work. There might be a kinetic effect at the very end when the super heated internal hull explodes from it flash super heating, but that doesn't happen until after the weapon melts it's way through the armor. And before you mention the Munroe Effect, it's only part of the equation, with part of the high explosive used to create a void in the explosive charge to amplify the effect.

The first two use kinetic force, one via high velocity, the other by transmission of a shock wave. HEAT rounds don't. It's why heat resistant ceramic composites were developed for armor. If it was just a kinetic shot, then they wouldn't need that specialty.

I would consider getting your own facts straight before you accuse others of having a lack of education.

 Mmmpi wrote:
You're thinking of Discarding Sabot Rounds. (APDS)

HEAT rounds are plasma blowtorches.

HESH (High Explosive Squash Head) rounds work by causing spalling and concussive force through the hull of the vehicle.

Nothing about the HEAT round is a kinetic kill weapon. Seriously, you just had a tanker tell you that, and the US military actually trains their troops in how their weapons work. There might be a kinetic effect at the very end when the super heated internal hull explodes from it flash super heating, but that doesn't happen until after the weapon melts it's way through the armor. And before you mention the Munroe Effect, it's only part of the equation, with part of the high explosive used to create a void in the explosive charge to amplify the effect.

The first two use kinetic force, one via high velocity, the other by transmission of a shock wave. HEAT rounds don't. It's why heat resistant ceramic composites were developed for armor. If it was just a kinetic shot, then they wouldn't need that specialty.

I would consider getting your own facts straight before you accuse others of having a lack of education.

omg you are impervious to facts. I’ll post the us army’s own study when I get home where they specifically call out the effect is not a temperature based effect. I know because this is what I do for a living


Automatically Appended Next Post:
http://www.arl.army.mil/arlreports/2007/ARL-SR-150.pdf

You'll get an answer after I find the time to read a 124 page document.

How about page 5 where it calls out jet temperature is 500c




Automatically Appended Next Post:
A better document http://www.arl.army.mil/arlreports/2008/ARL-RP-232.pdf

For the 2nd document I can't find what I'm supposed to be seeing. I'll admit I'm a bit tired right now, and I'll give it another read through tomorrow.

As for the part on page 5, I need to refresh my knowledge of the effects of high speed and pressure on metal before I comment.

Here’s a really good thread on the subject https://aw.my.com/en/forum/showthread.php?91755-Know-your-shell-Shaped-Charge

gendoikari87 wrote:

 CptJake wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Mmmpi wrote:
Except to achieve that effect, it's heated to semi-plasma and has to blowtorch it's way though the armor. The high speed just lets it keep moving forward, rather then splatting against, and filling in the crater it formed in the armor plating. The effect it has on the crew is from the super-heated hull exploding, and then spalling.

WTF? No. None of that is true at all. Please do some basic research on the subject before posting nonsense. HEAT rounds are purely a kinetic weapon, penetrating armor by applying a lot of force to a small surface area and punching a hole in it. HEAT is an acronym and has nothing to do with temperature.

No, High Explosive Anti Tank (HEAT) are not kinetic kill. You are thinking Sabot rounds which are nothing but a hard and very fast dart (ours are made of depleted uranium).

HEAT:


Sabot:



(by the way, I was a tanker on M1A1 and M1A2s and know a bit about the topic).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 jeffersonian000 wrote:


Yep, we don’t have hard exoskeleton powered armor like Astartes, and probably won’t for at least another 10 years, if not quite a bit longer. The issues with 40k PA in real life are specifically the power supply and that any protection it can give is easily defeated by anti-vehicle weapons that are already widely available. Which means that while Astartes can ignore our small arms, they’ll still eat it to cheap anti-tank rockets and armor piercing high caliber rounds, just like they already due to the 40k equivalents.

10th Mountain is going to be testing a legs only eco suit this year. SOCOM has a full body suit they are testing.

just because you were a tanker doesn’t mean you know jack about the science behind the weapons. HEAT Is a just an acronym. It is a pure kinetic kill weapon that takes advantage of blastwave shaping to deform a copper cone into a hypersonic copper spear. At these pressures and temperatures plasma is created buy has nothing no to do with cuttIng through armor. Do I need to post the us dod documents on the effect?

I know exactly what I am talking about. SABOT kills with kinetic energy, i.e. a kinetic kill. No explosion, pure velocity and mass applied to the target.

HEAT, which I know fething well is an acronym, (I actually spelled it out in my post) uses a a shaped charge (see the pictures), NOT kinetic energy to breach armor.

gendoikari87 wrote:
How about page 5 where it calls out jet temperature is 500c




Automatically Appended Next Post:
A better document http://www.arl.army.mil/arlreports/2008/ARL-RP-232.pdf

500 degrees isn't going to do much to steel though.

I thought the point behind the heatwarhead was that an effective kinetic jet can be formed explosively at the target rather than needing to fire the projectile super fast. So its still.a.kinetic effect just caused by the warhead going bang rather than the shell propellant going bang.

I remember reading that every imperial guard world was to tithe 6000 of its best trained troops. These in turn are your basic Imperial Guardsmen.

For planet Earth there must be 100k special forces at least world wide. So take the top 10% of our special forces and tithe them to the Astra Militarium. Give them real war time experience on world after world, Year after Year....We are talking about some bad ass m**therf**kers! Oh and those are the lowest and most insignificant units in the game.

Nuff said.

 admironheart wrote:
I remember reading that every imperial guard world was to tithe 6000 of its best trained troops. These in turn are your basic Imperial Guardsmen.

For planet Earth there must be 100k special forces at least world wide. So take the top 10% of our special forces and tithe them to the Astra Militarium. Give them real war time experience on world after world, Year after Year....We are talking about some bad ass m**therf**kers! Oh and those are the lowest and most insignificant units in the game.

Nuff said.

You are making a poor argument, as the only quality a survivor of fighting on world after world is luck at not dying to any one of millions of potentially mortal accidents. IG grunts are trench warfare experts, not skirmish warfare experts, nor guerrilla warfare experts. IG excell at gunlines and WWI era armored combat, not modern day combined arms mobile combat.

SJ

40k universe is wierd. Because of STC. There are some technologies which are supposedly far in advance of our current science, but which the 40k people themselves don't know how it works.

Stuff like lascannons and plasma guns sound pretty amazing, and if thats the basic stuff, and the weapons on the superheavies are far stronger versions on those guns, then that kind of weaponery is more powerful than the guns that the typical army on earth uses these days.

They also have void shields, ion shields, invulnerables saves. Anything that gives invul saves is far better than what our technology can do presently. You could fire off tons of missiles to blanket a whole area, and then those three imperial knights or that warlord titan just shrugs it all off because of their ion shields and void shields.

They have massive starships and battle barges that can perform exterminatus on a planet with planet killing weapons. Which we don't have. Not to mention the ability to travel massive distances via the warp.

But they have no idea how most of these stuff all works.

 jeffersonian000 wrote:

 admironheart wrote:
I remember reading that every imperial guard world was to tithe 6000 of its best trained troops. These in turn are your basic Imperial Guardsmen.

For planet Earth there must be 100k special forces at least world wide. So take the top 10% of our special forces and tithe them to the Astra Militarium. Give them real war time experience on world after world, Year after Year....We are talking about some bad ass m**therf**kers! Oh and those are the lowest and most insignificant units in the game.

Nuff said.

You are making a poor argument, as the only quality a survivor of fighting on world after world is luck at not dying to any one of millions of potentially mortal accidents. IG grunts are trench warfare experts, not skirmish warfare experts, nor guerrilla warfare experts. IG excell at gunlines and WWI era armored combat, not modern day combined arms mobile combat.

SJ

That's not necessarily true. Most of the books have them in trenches in grinding combat, but there's plenty of elites who carry out hit and run missions and skirmish battles. You only have to look as far as the Tanith First to see them in all manner of combat situations that involve them sitting in battles of attrition. Then there's Storm Troopers and Scions who are said to handle missions comparable to what modern day special forces deal with. The Imperium will have the full spectrum covered with the size of their forces.

 Flinty wrote:

gendoikari87 wrote:
How about page 5 where it calls out jet temperature is 500c




Automatically Appended Next Post:
A better document http://www.arl.army.mil/arlreports/2008/ARL-RP-232.pdf

500 degrees isn't going to do much to steel though.

I thought the point behind the heatwarhead was that an effective kinetic jet can be formed explosively at the target rather than needing to fire the projectile super fast. So its still.a.kinetic effect just caused by the warhead going bang rather than the shell propellant going bang.

in essence yes. But it’s much more complicated. Shaped charges literally shape the blastwave and concentrate it. In gen 3 the most common, this force is put into creating a hypersonic copper needle. But the complicated part is that at those forces and velocities metals don’t behave like solids, more like two fluids. So it is a kinetic chemical kill weapon and definitely not a thermal kill.

I think that the IG use WW2 style tactics. Just not on the table top. The basic IG squad is basically a rifle section and a MG section, just like in WW2. From what I have read of the fluff most of the time it is not trench line but fortified WW2 style. I think that WW1 style Guard is more of a meme than anything.

Yeah, DKOK are explicitly a WW1 throwback. Elysians and Harakoni Warhawks are paratroopers a la 'A Bridge Too Far'. Scions are Special Ops. The Imperial Guard are actually quite a varied bunch.

I think the whole attritional trench stuff is a consequence of the enemies they come up against. The Taros Campaign is a pretty decent approximation of how the Guard might work in a real world manner. With Marine support and with orbital superiority I don't think we have anything that could stop them. The Tau win that campaign through ambushing Imperial Fleet assets and deploying never-seen-before Titan-killing weapons.

Even at this, the Raptors' armoured right hook nearly defeats the Tau single handedly, only over stretched supply lines halts it.

I think the bureaucracy that the Guard operates under would be our greatest asset. It literally takes weeks for them to get any operation off the ground.

 Flinty wrote:

pm713 wrote:
How exactly are they shooting it down? The whole point of a Drop Pod is the time it takes to launch it and land it is so fast there isn't really time to aim shots accurately enough to destroy it and it has enough self control to stay relatively on course.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-400_missile_system

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-12_Equalizer

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-in_weapon_system

I'm not sure the GAU-12 is going to be hugely useful. A drop pod is likely moving faster than the actual round, and it only has a 3km range. Anti-ballistic missile weaponry is probably a better option, so the most recent versions of the S-400 are relevant. CIWS systems run into a similar problem to the equalizer, as well as a drop-pod being a fairly heavily armoured target in comparison to the targets the latter weapons are targeted at normally. Its also got evasive capability.

I'm not sure the doctrine of Astartes suggests that they wouldn't act to suppress enemy air defences either?

Lythronax wrote:

 Flinty wrote:

pm713 wrote:
How exactly are they shooting it down? The whole point of a Drop Pod is the time it takes to launch it and land it is so fast there isn't really time to aim shots accurately enough to destroy it and it has enough self control to stay relatively on course.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-400_missile_system

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-12_Equalizer

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-in_weapon_system

I'm not sure the GAU-12 is going to be hugely useful. A drop pod is likely moving faster than the actual round, and it only has a 3km range. Anti-ballistic missile weaponry is probably a better option, so the most recent versions of the S-400 are relevant. CIWS systems run into a similar problem to the equalizer, as well as a drop-pod being a fairly heavily armoured target in comparison to the targets the latter weapons are targeted at normally. Its also got evasive capability.

I'm not sure the doctrine of Astartes suggests that they wouldn't act to suppress enemy air defences either?

It doesn't matter if the drop pods is moving faster than the round if it's closing. Also if the drop pods is coming I to attack a vital installation, it's more likely to have such a defence system and be within its effective range. It's more that we currently have automated predictive firing systems that can track fast moving things and drop a lot of pointy and/or explosive things directly in their path.

I’m 100% sure drop pods decelerate significantly before impact

yeah..... i'll just leave this proto bolter here.