What’s weird about M735? It seems like a normal APFSDS round? Right? Well… not really, you see for reasons I am still confused about, the US army decided to adopt an elongated teardrop design for the core of their first tungsten alloy APFSDS, this is an absolutely awful design for a few reasons I’ll state right now.
First: when an APFSDS round impacts a fairly angled plate, it ejects a lot of of mass from its nose, as shown in the simulation below:
And you may notice the problem, the largest part of the alloy core, is at the front, which will be ejected, and wasted…
Also, having a rounded nose rather than a flat nose means it will more easily deflect more mass from the nose on angled plates.
It gets worse, as the round continues to penetrate you may also notice the core tapers off, this means the further along the rod gets the smaller the hole will become, and subsequently the less shrapnel it will have when it penetrates…
M735 however long ago it was, was nerfed not because the documents were “fake” or whatever rumor they perpetuate on Reddit, rather it’s just not a good round, and a really odd design for APFSDS, no wonder it was phased out so quick lol.
I’m pretty sure however the US designed it like this to save on tungsten and also decrease the amount of pressure the gun would need to exert to shoot it, decreasing servicing. So the minimum needed to penetrate Soviet tanks at the time was used, and I suppose by that effect it did its job and wasn’t terrible.
Even if it was very quickly outdated
credit goes to theallmightyego “AmphiTheDolphin”
