Thursday, October 31, 2013

Shot in the face by a T-72 tank?


Here's a video clip to give you the willies.  It was apparently shot (no pun intended) in Jobar, outside Damascus in Syria.  It shows a T-72 tank traversing its turret, aiming directly at the cameraman, then firing a 125mm. shell at him.





No word on whether the cameraman survived.  If he did, I daresay a quick change of underwear would have been in order . . .





Peter

11 comments:

Donald Sensing said...

Shopped.

The main gun projectile's trajectory is flat as a pancake out to several hundred meters because they are extremely high velocity. You can see a parabola in the movie's putative projectile.

Peter said...

Not necessarily shopped. The APFSDS round (for anti-tank use) is indeed very high velocity, between 1,700 and 1,800 meters per second. However, the HEAT round is much slower - just over 900 meters per second. That could, indeed, produce a parabola effect such as that shown.

Data source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/125_mm_smoothbore_ammunition

Donald Sensing said...

Sorry, Peter, not at that short range.

Besides, the HEAT round is not finned.

And besides that, look at the projo and you can see it remains in focus throughout. Um, no.

But an entertaining vid, tho!

Stuart Garfath, Sydney Aus. said...

Apart from the above three comments, I pose the following.
WERE this genuine, HOW did the images captured on sensitive electronic equipment survive?.

If it looks like a rat, sounds like a rat, and SMELLS like a rat,
well, there ya go....

Rolf said...

Fake or not, it's still pretty cool, and not a place I'd like to be filming.

Angus McThag said...

The SD card is MUCH tougher than the rest of the camera so the recording could easily survive the destruction of the camera itself by a near miss.

I've watched friend's footage from cameras that were destroyed by the car rolling over them when things went wrong at the track, so it's plausible.

Our HEAT rounds had fins! Smoothbore guns have to stabilize the round somehow. It's moving consistently with how I saw rounds moving when I was in.

I don't remember if the Russians ever stopped using a short portion of rifled barrel near the chamber to overcome straightness and concentricity issues in making their tubes. That round is not rotating at all.

Angus McThag said...

By the way:

It sure looks like this round:

BK-14m

raven said...

That camera was rock steady. I don't think it was handheld. Also don't think there was a person around it,that it was set up on a tripod just for that shot.
Seriously, if you saw a tank swivel it's gun toward you, would you hang around?

Dirk said...

Setting aside whether it was real or not, I swear the bore of that cannon got bigger as it sat there pointed at the camera for a few seconds.

Will said...

What I thought was odd is all the jitter of that barrel. That thing is wiggling around like it was mounted on the rear of a pickup truck, instead of a MBT. Doesn't look real.

Peter said...

Will, the Soviet 125mm. tank cannon is known for the 'whipping' action of its barrel - it was never the sturdiest. See this link for more information:

http://fofanov.armor.kiev.ua/Tanks/ARM/2a46.html

Only after Western equipment was obtained were later models of the cannon manufactured to higher standards and more rigidly. I daresay the tank in the video clip was fitted with one of the older cannon. Syria obtained T-72's after the Yom Kippur War, so it may be quite old.