20mm DM43 Penetration

dm63 core measurement

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Sooooo one quick crash-course in Blender, and here I am!

5435.56mm^3 = 5.43556cm^3

If we assume the density of Tungsten Carbide is 15,63g/cm^3, then this penetrator core weighs 84.9578g or ≈ 85g

So now 85 out of 108 grams is accounted for.

The remaining 23g of projectile weight is probably the aluminum nose cone and/or base plate? I will try to model these later

Update:
Phew, I modeled all the major parts!

Aluminum “Base” Cap - 16.83g
Tungsten Carbide Core - 84.95g
Aluminum Nose Cone - 1.17g
Plastic Sabot - 6.47

It all adds up to 109.4g, only 1.4g over the specified weight of 108g

This difference may be due to modeling errors, different densities, and/or missing tracer cavity (in the core)

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Weird, is that really the entire tungsten carbide core?

It has that subcaliber tip, which seems rather odd.

Maybe explains some of the performance results.
I remember that the round struggled to penetrate more than 60mm of armor, most likely because of that tip.

I can only assume that the design is a compromise for overall good penetration at all angles, and that the tip, probably breaking at higher impact angles, reduces the amount of deflection the round is going to experience at higher impact angles.

Edit: I think I was thinking about M601 when I wrote that, which should be the same as DM43.
There was this US document that showed that the 0° penetration was somewhat lacking.
But they just have a regular sharp tipped tungsten carbide penetrator, unlike the DM63.
So I’m not sure what’s going on.

Yes, it seems so! It looks like that in all the cross-section images I could find.

I’ve been dabbling in Ansys, I will definitely try angled performace after I get this figured out!

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Bumping this for attention, since this effects so many vehicles in game. And now we appear to have the SuperHind using this ammo, as well as the Luchs (obviously). Its still shocking how drastically worse this is in game compared to reality.

Oh yeah it’s been a while

Some other stuff popped up IRL so the whole 20mm ordeal got put on the back-burner

And ANSYS Student wasn’t really suitable for the tests I was after, I don’t think I’ll pay up for a full license

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Understandable, this is just a personal obsession of mine. Its extremely unfun and just unfair using vehicles with this ammo especially while every other autocannon is performing quite well and very useable. I guess the germans and french just don’t deserve a decent autocannon.