Quote:
Originally Posted by JtD
There are explosive AP rounds.
Aircraft weapons were very well capable of destroying tanks, the biggest difficulty was to hit the target. And that was easiest with guns.
One can also be sure that a single hit of say a 100g projectile of a 20mm cannon penetrating armour and then exploding inside the tank would not always destroy the tank. That's something not even a ~6kg round of 75mm cannon would manage all the time. But, nonetheless, against medium tanks say up to Pz IV size, even the small 20mm cannons did occasionally work as tank killers, provided they had a high muzzle velocity and a heavy projectile with decent AP qualities. The Hispano for instance had all that.
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The thing with armour piercing rounds is that if the round hits the armour, it either bounces off, breaks up, or goes through. If the round breaks up, it won't go through because it's no longer a single mass but a bunch of smaller masses. When a round goes through armour, then the armour has broken up and the projectile retains most of the kinetic energy it had when it first hit the armour, so it does a lot of damage from that, if it gets into the engine comparment probably breaks the engine. There may be an explosive payload, but to do damage there doesn't really need to be.