Anti Tank Vespa
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Kids today are living the good life.
https://onlinebicyclemuseum.co.uk/colins-new-book/?tax=tour&...
That was a surprising statement! A 37mph crash on a scooter isn't going to leave you in particularly good shape for fighting.
ie. Will reach the tank but not ram it at high speed, so timed grenades or something will do the job.
You'd have to have balls of steel to fire that thing while riding the scooter. It's recoilless, but you are sitting right on top of it.
Correction, I should have wrote:
I wonder if backblast could be a problem? I suck at physics. Does Randall Monroe read hacker news?
> Err, yeah that comes out of the back of the recoilless rifle so only an issue for the people behind you not the person firing it unless they are too close to a wall or similar. With something like the RPG-7 the backblast is from the recoilless stage not the rocket.
(Read on for needlessly aggressive semi-amusing rest of the reply)
While I have only personally fired one M72 rocket, and one round from a Carl Gustaf recoilless rifle, neither of which was in combat nor on a vehicle, I am still vaguely familiar with the concept of 'backblast'.
I was concerned that the effects of said backblast against things like the terrain, and possibly things on the terrain, might negatively effect the continued ability of the Vespa and it's occupant to conduct a last ditch suicide attack towards an enemy tank at high speed.
Another comedy invention had the counter-mass of recoilless designs come from a second projectile that would fire out backwards which was abandoned for obvious reasons!
I am curious, why would you do that?
You joined the Legion to die, and we are sending you where you can do that.
No, we do not cover you with life insurance.
I'd take the Vespa option any day of the week.
Fast forward to today. In a video from Gaza a Hamas fighter runs toward Merkava and manually puts a blast-fragmentation warhead onto its armor (not for the lack of weapons as he shoots a tandem warhead from an RPG half a minute later). I have a hypothesis what is going on in that video - the Trophy active defense system would shoot down an incoming warhead, yet it wouldn't react to a person running toward it (like in Dune and similar where cold blade weapons is used because defense systems deal with the fast incoming threats), and the tanks don't have infantry right by the tank because system like Trophy damages the accompanying infantry, and the Trophy really performs a lot of tank defensive tasks that the accompanying infantry would otherwise be tasked with. So, the first warhead - the one manually placed on armor (and that warhead wasn't shaped charge) - explodes and takes out the Trophy, and after that the Hamas guy shoots the tandem warhead which would penetrate the reactive armor and the main armor.
Furthermore: there are lesser vehicles, such as Humvees and IFVs that have thinner armor where these anti-tank guns would work better against.
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Actual anti-tank hunter-killer groups used guided missiles even as early as the 1960s (with Nazi designs from the 1940s!!!), and today use automated fire-and-forget homing missiles.
Guided missiles have far more range and reliability. Early guided weapons were just a radio (or even a wire attached to the rocket in the earliest designs).
Imprecise terminology often causes bad thinking. A “tank” could be a MBT, or it could be an armored personel carrier with very limited offensive capabilities.
You can also equip like 30 people with that weapon and scatter then around forests, taking advantage of the tanks relatively poor visibility. (Tanks have cameras, periscopes and other optics, but usually are pretty bad at overall awareness unless the commander sticks their head out the top to look around)
The kind of armored vehicle you've got mostly matters in duels with other armored vehicles.
At 3km+ out, no Panzerfaust or AT4 can hit the tank. Only a guided Javelin, but those are heavy (heavy for an infantry to carry at least) and expensive.
But yes, the whole plan of today's combat is combined arms. Tanks doing what tanks do best: long range sniping and sometimes taking advantage of armor to say... get rid of anti-personel land-mines and other lesser explosives.
A APC isn't a tank, it's an APC.
If it's got say an autocannon, and/or ATGM it would be called an Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV)
Both those and tanks would all be considered Armoured Fighting Vehicles (AFV).
So, an army needs infantry. Infantry will, at times, encounter enemy tanks without sufficient friendly tank support.
When that happens, things like these can be very helpful to bring antitank weapons to where they’re needed.
The existence of such weapons also can act as a deterrence.
The Panzerfaust served a similar role and was effective at it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzerfaust#Germany: “However, the threat from the Panzerfaust forced Allied tank forces to wait for infantry support before advancing. The portion of British tanks taken out of action by Panzerfäuste later rose to 34%, a rise probably explained by the lack of German anti-tank guns late in the war and the increased numbers of Panzerfäuste that were available to defending German troops”
I was trying to be funny.
Of course infantry anti-armor weapons have their place.
Of course motorcycles can be effective means of transport.
I just found the mental image of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) a teenage kid would experience when he is given a motorcycle with an anti-tank weapon on it...I foud that funny.
That's a real WW1 thing, not an Age of Empires 2 cheat code.
> It’s probably a publicity picture, not something the army would actually try to employ. The elephant would not respond well to the sound of that machine gun a few inches from his ears.
"La Vespa 150 TAP o "Vespa Bazooka" como la llamaban algunos tuvo su bautismo de fuego durante la guerra de Argelia (1954-62), en que varios cientos de estas motos fueron desplegadas y utilizadas por las TAP y la Legión Extranjera." [1]
Googla translation:
"The Vespa 150 TAP or "Vespa Bazooka" as some called it had its baptism of fire during the Algerian war (1954-62), in which several hundred of these motorcycles were deployed and used by the TAP and the Foreign Legion."
I haven't found other sources, though.
[1] https://laescaleradeiakob.blogspot.com/2013/12/la-vespa-150-...