T114 Tank Destroyer

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Source: http://shushpanzer-ru.livejournal.com/1819422.html

Here’s something that’s probably not well known. The T114 tank destroyer. It was built on the T114 APC chassis. The T114 came in service as the M114 AFV and was used in the Vietnam war, where it proved to be a disaster and was relatively soon pulled from service.

This is a project to actually mount a turret with a 106mm recoilless gun with automatic loading from a magazine on the right side of the gun. An interesting design by any means. The British experimented with autoloading recoilless guns as well, although they used drum loaders to feed them.

This prototype was apparently developed between 1957 and 1960.

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37 thoughts on “T114 Tank Destroyer”

      • Also, recoilless guns are smoothbore (if the barrel has rifling, its a recoilless rifle), so no go from WG.

        • …*are* there even smoothbore recoilless guns? I can only recall having read of rifled ones… and the US 105mm recoillesses since Korea have certainly been rifles by what I know of it.

          • Yes, there are smoothbore recoilless guns. Although that number drops once you remove guns from the list that had rifling added to them to improve accuracy before or after mass production. Although a few smoothbore recoilless guns have hit production over the years… The germans had a few in WW2.

      • Oh, you mean like tier 10 TD OPness we have in game now? Thank god we don’t have smoothbore guns… Normal guns with the same pen as smoothbore ones are ok though… WG Logic.

        /sarcasm

          • Before you go all nerdy with the technical stuff, my question was why are smoothbore the devil if they have 300mm pen, when we have guns in WOT that have way beyond that. Why is one ok and the other not?

            • Smoothbores pretty much *start* there and then go off to the nuttiness of APFSDS. And you really don’t want that. The devs certainly don’t, AFAIK in no small part because penetration mechanics get all weird at those kinds of sectional densities and energy concentrations.

              By the by, are you actually dim enough to think non-normalising HEAT penetration is directly equivalent to normalising kinetic-penetrator pen in game terms…?

              • Exactly.
                If they allow smoothbores, it will only get worse, like, really worse.
                people cry about 300+mm pen HEAT gold n00b ammo q_q
                imagine if they would allow stuff with 500-600-upto800mm pen at 2000 meters, that eqals to penetrating two T95 fronts melted together.

                They had to draw a big nasty line somewhere, and suffocating the problem from its roots (smoothbore) is for the best, there is no way they would be able to balance it all in the current setup, maybe if there were 30 tiers and at least 2 big dividing lines (1-15; 16-25; 26-30). However, that would be the most radical change and WoT might loose it’s popularity.

                Long story short, they won’t do it. period.

                • Answer this.

                  What property of a smoothbore could they not balance the same way they balance a rifled gun?

                  Penetration? Yep they can balance that.
                  Accuracy? Oh hey, they can balance that too!
                  Shell flight speed? Yup that’s a variable too.
                  Rate of fire? Yeah I’m pretty sure they can balance that!
                  Aim time? Sure thing!

                  In other words, none. A smoothbore would be just as vulnerable to Wargaming’s balance whims as any rifled gun in the game. As it is we’ve got rifled guns like the RO L7 and the 120mm M58 that are nowhere near their real-life penetration values ingame, all in the sake of balance.

                  Don’t fool yourself. The same could be done for a smoothbore. And I’m willing to bet at some point we’ll see smoothbore guns. Wargaming also said there would never be tier 10 arty, tier 10 TDs, tier 10 mediums, general lights above tier 5…but oh, look..

                • Answer this: why bother letting that genie out in the first place? Smoothbores are such a can of worms in no small part because historically they were something of a herald for a generation shift in tank building, quickly followed by composite armor and other funny stuff.

                  Most of which works by quite different dynamics than the old big rifles and solid steel plates, ie. it’d be hard to avoid a lot of system reworking which has “messy” written all over it.

                  The fact that they could throw out older-style ammo at pretty stupid muzzle velocities hence producing some pretty potentially appalling penetration values even without descending into the lunacy that is finned long-rods doesn’t exactly help. By the by, IIRC just about the first ones to start putting both smoothbores and composite armour into tanks were the Soviets… do I need to spell out the implications?

  4. …wait, am I reading those gun drawings right? Pretty much the whole barrel ‘recoils’ *forwards* upon firing, which presumably also operates the loading mechanism? Makes sense I guess.

    • If you look about half way along the right hand side you will see a hydraulic motor and a rack (linear gear). Motor drives the barrel forwards, a shell is placed behind the barrel, the motor moves the barrel back over the shell and a partial breech block shuts over the end of the barrel. The drawings do not show the barrel all the way back and the breech block is only fully shown in the first drawing. The mechanism is driven by hydraulics or pneumatics not by recoil or ported gasses from the barrel. Much more dependable and less of problem if there is a misfire but the repeatable accuracy may not be good as with every shot the barrel is reset with every shot and not fixed to a solid part of the tank.

      I think the French use pneumatics to drive their autoloaders.

      • I think the french system uses a spring loaded system. In fact its a semi-automatic loader.
        Commander or gunner turn the drum of their choice – one cartridge rolls down and is pushed into the gun by a spring-loaded rammer (spring is loaded by recoil). In fact it has two drums with 6 rounds each, one cartridge in the gun, so can fire 13 rounds before reload in real;).
        This is how it works on Kürassier, and its a slightly modified AMX 13-system.

        • Later AMX-13 upgrade packages apparently included fully automatic loading mechanisms, but then I for one I have no idea if Herman is talking about the Fifties “barillet” jobs or more recent stuff – though I’d be very surprised if the Leclerc’s wasn’t hydraulic or electric.

      • Makes sense I guess, certainly I was having a hard time trying to figure out how the backblast (per definitionem vented out of the rear) could be used to push the barrel forwards. Makes you wonder if it wouldn’t have been easier to move the “breech” section back to create the space needed to feed the next shell though… less mass to shift and the mechanisms less exposed to combat damage, you’d think.
        But then I’m no tank or gunnery engineer.

        Random musing: am I imagining things or does the system retain the ubiquitous .50 spotting rifle? The much thinner tube by the main gun seems to have no other readily apparent role…

        • I do not think it is a good solution as an overall auto loading system but the reason is to keep the whole thing compact and reduce the overhang of the gun when in transit. If the mag and loading mechanism were located behind the breech then the whole thing would be longer. So the gun would stick out further at the front of the tank or the autoloader would stick out at the rear or a bit of both. Since it is a recoilless gun the pressure in the barrel never gets very high compared to closed breech weapons so the barrel need not be very thick and may even be made of light alloy so having it move need not be all that slow.

  7. Can we please stop with the “historical” values are high thus WG can’t put it in. WG appears to be bogged down far too much in the historical nonsense. For example, why do smoothbore guns matter? Use the historical values as starting points and re-balance accordingly.

    • yes, but think of the small camo value, standard round being a 106mm HEP-T (HESH) round :) and firing three from the autoloader.

  10. Thing would be far better as a Light Tank. About 7 tons, over 20 hp/t, 58 kmh, very small, no armor, gun is already “balanced” with three shells in the autoloader, based on the M114 Command and Scout Carrier (ie, recon vehicle).

    It’s role in the game. Passive scout, ambush. Muzzle velocity is kind of low. Can easily be balance from Tier’s 8-10 with soft stats, reload, etc.