Tank ammunition. There are many different types. Let’s start with the basic two types: explosives/ chemical shells, and kinetics/ armour piercing shells. First: solid shot. It’s a big ass lump of steel chucked in the general direction of the enemy armoured vehicles. It damages the enemy via spalling, or being directly hit. The latter is self explanatory, but spalling is when you rip armour apart and turn it into shrapnel to shred the core inside, that’s essentially how all kinetic rounds work, even modern APFSDS shells. Then there’s the basic HE or high explosive shells. They do damage in a few ways: explosive damage, direct hit damage, shrapnel, and over pressure. First two are easy to understand. Shrapnel is small pieces of either metal, or in some cases wood as people used to detonate shells in tree lines for anti personnel purposes. Over pressure is when explosives create a vacuum due to air consumed. This is what makes grenades and high caliber explosives so deadly. Or it creates a pressure wave, which then expands and essentially smooshes any unlucky fucker caught in it.

Next, we have the capped rounds. Capped is essentially a normal round coated in a soft, bendable metal that deforms against angled armour to right itself, essentially neutralizing angled armour. However, this causes a noticeable drop in shell velocity, meaning it is less effective against non angled armour than its uncapped counterpart. Then we have ballistic capped, which is capped with an aerodynamic design that causes it to speed up and be better against non angled armour, like the frontal armour of a tiger 1 tank. Finally, we have the capped ballistic capped shell, which combines both capped shells aspects, making it the best capped shell.

The next kinetic penetrators are the discarding sabots. There are some. First, APDS, or armour piercing discarding sabot. It’s a sub caliber shell, meaning it needs a sabot to be fired by a tank, usually made of tungsten carbide, it is used to destroy thick, non angled armour, like the tiger frontal armour, however, if used against angled armour like that of a T-34 or panther, it has a high chance of shattering, in which the little slive of metal inside of the sabot fragments into many pieces that explode like shrapnel. Next is The APFSDS, or armour piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot, used in modern tanks, they are made of depleted uranium, long as fuck, and the special property of the shell means that when penetrating armour, the depleted uranium sets itself and armour fragments on fire, further increasing spalling, which essentially liquefies the insides of tanks. They can penetrate more than 700 millimeters of non angled steel armour, and contemporary tanks as of 2040 can pen much more.

Now, for the chemical shells. High explosive proximity and fuse can be bundled together. Fuse explodes after a set duration of time, used for anti aircraft or anti personnel purposes, while proximity explodes once it detects it’s a certain distance away from a solid object. Used almost exclusively for anti aircraft or helicopter purposes. Then we have the HEAT round. This round is double edged: it triggers on contact with anything, but at the same time it destroys both heavily armoured and lightly armoured vehicles, as the High Explosive part is true as much as the Anti Tank bit, what happens is when the round touches anything, the sensitive fuse triggers, exploding the filling of metal, probably copper, into collapsing and turning into a thin, jet like substance, punching through metal by literally burning it, which makes spalling even more deadly. Modern Explosive Reactive Armour mostly neutralized this type of ammunition type, but if it’s a two stage HEAT, being the tip is an explosive designed to take out ERA, the latter being the actual lethal charge.

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The modern version of HEAT is HEAT-FS, FS meaning fin stabilized, essentially being the same an normal HEAT but better, just like how APFSDS is just better.

Next, we come to HESH, or high explosive squash head. Modern day composite armour with air gaps make this round ineffective and completely obsolete, not useable obsolete, but useless obsolete, like a musket vs machine guns. What it does is simple: the thicker the non air gapped armour, the deadlier it is, as it says on the label, it squashes plastic explosive onto enemy armour, before detonating, and the detonation causes interior spalling without actually damaging the outer armour. The FV 4005, or lovingly nicknamed British shitbarn, (I kid you not, it’s in urban dictionary and if you search it up on chrome the first image you see is of the tank turret replaced with a photoshopped barn. The text ones are war thunder, Reddit, and world of tanks, which is hilarious.) is one famous user of the shell.

Next is the concrete buster shell, which is basically an upgraded APHE, but with less AP, and more HE. Overpressure, here we come!

The semi armour piercing is a shell that is half AP half HE. Normally used by ships such as cruisers, battleships, and other types, it can be minimized for use against unarmoured or lightly armoured vehicles, like Toyotas with an MG on the back, or things like a BMP.

Missiles are a whole different ball game, but so similar at the same time. There are three types of missiles: LOS/ line of sight, or FF, or fire and forget.

The first is like the TOW wire guided missile, you can’t hit something you can’t see with it. In videogames, this means your aiming must be spot on.

A fire and forget missile is when you fire it, and have to do nothing else. An example is the NLAW, or next generation light anti armour weapon. Essentially, when fired, you don’t have to keep track of the enemy targets. Some anti air and a bunch of anti tank missiles are like this. A better, more well known example would be the javelin and hellfire missile, one used by infantry, the other mounted on vehicles, mostly drones or helicopters, but being able to be mounted on trucks as well.

Rockets are unguided missiles, usually with explosive filler.

Then we have the outlier: canister shot. It’s just a big ass shotgun shell, fired from a tank barrel. Shreds infantry, low flying drones, helicopters, and lightly armoured or unarmoured vehicles, useless against APCs and tanks.

(Thank you for coming to my PowerPoint presentation. Written in one day because I know too much about useless shit.) If I’ve missed anything, please tell me and I’ll edit.