When compared to those soviet 76mm and 85mm unique APCR designs, sure, but you’ve said it yourself:
The base plate on the M93 HVAP is solid steel while the rest of the carrier is aluminum. It must contain about 50% of the total carrier’s mass. I will do the math tomorrow, but this might be enough to account for the ~300fps discrepancy in the ballistic limit for that .40 cal WC core test.
I’d take one formula that reasonably replicates most rounds. The odds of that happening are zero but maybe Gaijin ground devs will wake up one day and choose to consider maybe they can listen to the players.
The effective mass of the penetrator is a sum of the actual core’s mass and some extra mass that pushes on it, until the moment it enters the target to a depth greater than its length. If the penetration process is finished before then, the effective mass of the penetrator, and therefore its penetration, is simply the sum of both parts.
In most situations of interest here the tungsten subcaliber shell is penetrating thickness of armor much greater than that, therefore the effect will be cosiderably smaller.
Since we are comparing two projectiles of the same Diameter attacking the same target, the variables D, T and K are equal and will cancel out resulting in this equation:
Let’s look at a schematic of the 3.7cm PzGr.40, since its most similar to the soviet 45mm APCR of which I dont have a detailed schematic:
Spoiler
so, if we take the m_p variable to equal 83g, then the mass ratio in the equation will equal 0.62 and the ballistic limit of the full shell against a target of thickness less that the core’s length, will be ~79% of that of a naked core.
Against a reasonably thicker target the effect might be about half of that, or ~10% increase in ballistic limit.
Applying this adjustment to the 45mm APCR limit we get 840 * 1.1 = 924m/s BL for a naked core. Using this as reference to estimate the BL for the .40cal core in the US testwe get 2970fps, very close to the actual obtained limits of 2990fps and 3040fps.
My gut feeling tells me: Because nobody, especially the Germans, will accept a ±10% dimensional tolerance spread on manufacturing of anything this important.
I see. Then probably an error based on the fact that 5 easily turns into 6 based on the fact they are so close toghether and can easily be misidentified in print.
Makes little sense to produce both 15x58 and 16x58mm cores.
Nah that sounds unlikely. Theres some German manual on the usuage of the tungsten ammo and it says it only provided better arrmor penetration up to 150m.
The bullet has a less aerodyanmic flat base design copared to the the AP round, probably to save weight. But that reduces the effective range.
So for a tank it seems rather impractical. Most AT gun shields just provide some protection from fragmentation or maybe SMG rounds.
I guess if you give every rifleman and machine gunner a bunch of rounds, you just end up with a lot of tungsten ammo.