GM Fox question

Hello everybody,

After ten years of hard work our GM Fox has started to look lived in to the point of being shabby to say the least, so it's time for a respray. The last time round we painted the interior of the hull in matt white, but was this correct? Could it possibly have been gloss? It would be a whole load easier to keep clean if it was.. Any ideas folks?

All the Best,

Stefano

....And also, any ideas on the finish of the various fixing bolts used for the accessories, would they have been black phosphate? I can't immagine that they were originally painted white...

Cheers,

Stefano

It looks exactly tight to me: grubby and lived-in.

TBH I haven't got a clue about this vehicle: before I found this post I had never even heard of the beast.

WRT interior decorating. I once read about a crew taking delivery of a brand spanking new vehicle (pretty sure it was in the North African desert, a Sherman or maybe a Grant) and they were disgusted to find the interior painted with a nice thick shiny coat of gloss white, which they then spent days chipping off, because if they could chip it off, you can be sure that first time it took a hit (with either a kinetic or an explosive round), the paint would flake off on the inside and shred the crew.

It may have been due to this phenomenon that some bright spark invented the HESH round.

HESH (HESH-T for the pedants, because the round includes a trace element) is a high-explosive round designed to destroy armour. The casing is constructed in such a way that as the thin-walled tip strikes the armour, it deforms into a cowpat. The detonator is toward the rear of the round, and does not detonate until the cowpatting is complete. The force from an explosion is perpendicular to the surface of the explosive (which in the HEAT round is otherwise concave to concentrate the explosion into a point). When the HESH round explodes, it sends a shock wave through the armour. If the explosion does not penetrate the armour (which would of course kill the crew and potentially detonate the ammunition). If it does not penetrate, when the shock wave reaches the inside of the armour plate, it reflects back on itself. The leading edge of the shock wave meets the trailing edge of the shock wave and amplifies itself. This leads to massive instant metal fatigue on the inside of the armour, breaking off a scab the shape and size of the explosive cowpat on the outside. This scab, with its massive energy, flies around inside the vehicle like letting off a hand grenade. End of vehicle and crew.

There are numerous reasons why HESH is superior to HEAT:

HESH is not particularly sensitive to the attack angle at which it strikes the armour and will function perpendicular to the armour even at high angles. A HEAT round has the detonator on the tip, causing the shaped charge to explode at exactly the right distance to focus the explosion on the armour and create what is generally described as a narrow plasma beam to punch through the armour and cause similar destruction within, but by entirely different means. But HEAT is extremely sensitive to the attack angle at which it strikes the armour and if not close to perpendicular, may fail to explode. HEAT is the preferred round in man-portable weapons and popular in Bundeswehr Leopards.

HESH is still essentially a high explosive round. Detonated against any target other than armour, its effects are very much like a normal Shell (high explosive) round, making it the perfect dual-purpose round and carried almost to the exclusion of everything else on Scorpion. As already shown. HEAT, 1. may not explode at all; 2, is extremely concentrated in its effects.

Unfortunately, post-Cold War cost restraints mean that goverments are looking to use a single (Rheinmetall) barrel on Leopard, Abrams and Challenger. The preferred tank-destroying round of the MBT is the Armour-Piercing Fin-Stabilised Discarding Sabot round (APFSDS or Fin for short), the only round suitable for attacking composite Chobham-like armour. Unfortunately, Fin has been shown to perform far better out of a smooth-bore barrel than a rifled barrel. I understand (but stand to be corrected) that the Fin round for Challenger is actually designed to counter-rotate in the barrel so that when the sabot is discarded, there is no spin in the finned round and it flies straight and true. Again in these cost-cutting times, it makes far more sense to share the cost of ammunition production with the USA and Germany. Though this does of course beg the question, "Where do we get our ammunition (and barrels) if the Germans kick off against us a third time?"

HESH range and accuracy are severely inhibited by being fired from a smooth-bore gun and it would seem that its days are numbered. Which is a pity because when the infantry need an instant artillery strike on a target, a handful of direct-fire HESH rounds from the accompanying tank troop will usually be quicker and more accurate than calling up a fire mission from the artillery some miles away.

In the 1970s, we tried not to paint the inside of our Scorpions (see where we came in). If we were absolutely compelled to paint the inside, we used silver, because of its non-flake constituency.

HTH