The truck shouldn’t be too hard to find I reckon, but the data on the ammunition might be a bit harder, though. According to Jagerplatoon it had APHE, SAPHE, HE, Shrapnel and Canister Shot. I only have some data on two Swedish projectiles used for the 57mm L/48 Marinkanon m/89, which was made by Maxim-Nordenfeldt/Finspång Bruk and seems to be the same or copy that Finland used.
So theirs should be similar or the same I feel as that was pretty standard early in the century. I don’t know what ammunition they may have produced later on, however. So take it with a grain of salt.
Design illustrations of shells
Design of the HE/SAP (note that it uses a base fuze). Name: Vanlig Granat/Common Shell.
Shell Weight: 2 575.75 grams (2.575 kg), ±25.92g.
Explosive Weight: 78.08 grams
Fuze Tube: 67.715 grams Total Projectile Weight: 2 721.55 grams, ±27.22g.
The other drawing I found show two shells, one being simply “Granat” which basically just means “Shell”, and the other one is more interestingly an anti-armor shell, “Pansargranat”.
The drawing only has one table of data, so I’m unsure if both had similar weights with just slightly different dimensions, or if it’s just data on one shell but not the other. Nevertheless, these are the weights for the parts given (converted to grams):
So, both designs are very similar to eachother, but on the second one the explosive weight is increased slightly with basically identical projectile weight (0.45 grams difference). The muzzle velocity is likely the common one on the gun of 540 m/s (not to be confused with 704 m/s which is only for the B-version with an L/55 barrel).
The poster on Twitter mentioned indigenous APDS developments, and even a prototype L/68 barrel for the 100mm. He claims that they can be found in a publication of a Finnish armor magazine. Source
Here’s a rare picture I found of the modernized Finnish ZSU-57-2, which was known as the ZSU-57-2M. For a bit of history these vehicles were an attempt from the FDF to increase the lifespan of the aging ZSU-57-2’s in the 1990s. The original plan was to upgrade the whole fleet of ZSU’s, but after the upgrade costs proved too expensive the project was canned after only a few vehicles were upgraded. The upgrade included a radar (which can be seen in the photo) as well as configurable ammunition (HE-VT) among other smaller upgrades such as electronic calculators and better sighting systems.
As for the caption it reads: “A modernized ZSU-57-2M vehicle Ps 462-4 photographed at the Armored Brigade. The picture shows for example a new angular part that was added to the back of the turret in the modernization. This part housed a lot of the modern components which were responsible for hardware managment.”
The picture and some parts of the text were sourced from the Finnish armor guild’s magazine. Regretfully it didn’t really give any new info on the ZSU-57-2M, but at the very least we got a new clearer picture of the vehicle.
Where did the HE-VT shell come from? Would they have bought it from Chinese? I can’t remember if they were also made in Eastern Europe for the towed guns.
I’ve own only a couple of the newest numbers physically. But on the armor guild’s website they have an archive of old issues. I actually managed to find the number that had the article about the T-54, unfortunately it wasn’t available to be read.
As you can see the same picture of the T-54 is used here, so this is unmistakenly the right issue. I’ll try to get my hands on this magazine, but no promises.
I’m not 100% sure as to the origin of the new shells, I at least don’t think they’re the same as the chinese ones. My guess is that they are likely either of domestic origin or just bought from the USSR. Since the soviets did make a HE-VT shell for the 57mm gun, they just never used it on the ZSU-57-2 but rather on the towed AA guns.
Added the T-54 with the caged armour and the Modernized ZSU-57-2 onto the list now
Now here’s a Terrangbil m/42 in Latvian service
I’m posting this since A: all 3 of the Baltic nations operated them (10 for each 3 Baltic nations) and B and the most important part is that the Baltic Terrangbil m/42’s had the 8mm removed and replaced with DShK-M’s. If anybody has images of Baltic m/42’s mounted with DShK’s please post them
This is a picture of a truck convoy transporting coastal guns from Saimaa to lake Laatokka in August 1941. Below is a picture from the same event. These are in no way or shape combat vehicles, they’re literally just guns loaded onto flatbeds. They’re not ingegrated into the vehicles, they wouldn’t be able to fire, and it unlikely that they even carried ammunition in the same loads. Cool photo but nothing for WT I’m afraid
Has anyone tried figuring out which T-34-85 variations Finns had? I’m pretty sure all of them had S-53 gun and all were produced in 43 or early 44, but further than that I don’t know. For that a better source is needed.
There are at least two somewhat important changes which happened during war time T-34-85 (S-53) production. First is a slight armor increase and second was addition of electrical turret drive or rather it’s return. I don’t know why it was not installed in all vehicles and what the handcranked turn speed was.
I have tried looking into this thing but i honestly don’t think any other images of it exist, its fairly unique and mentioned in the topic list for this forum but i can’t find anything else on it. I assume it must’ve been a one off thing that was quickly pulled from work to focus on other projects.
ye, from what I can tell in a little looking a while back, it feels like a one off, but at least we already know all the gun stats :D
we can probably eyeball turret traverse speed
