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Now, these are serious ballistics!
Posted by David Hardy · 2 April 2006 01:38 PM
The 120mm gun on the M-1 shoots a depleted uranium fin-stablized round. Nice pics here. Weight of projectile is about 10 kg (22 lb) and muzzle velocity upwards of 5,400 fps. I read somewhere that, due to its incredible ballistic form, it's still going upwards of 5,000 fps at a mile range.
Here are some tales of its use ... one shot going thru two Iraqi tanks and destroying both, a shot right thru the cover (a sand dune) to nail a tank on the other side (its exhaust was seen by the heat imager).
· shooting
Yeah, the buggers are fun as heck to shoot, too. Consider that an M1 series tank weighs about 70 tons, and the recoil moves it backwards.