All the way in - HEAT-T or TP-T, our most common training round at Knox. All the way out - HEP-T. In the middle APDS-T, which was NEVER used at Knox.When I got to Knox in '76 for the Basic Course, we fired a lot of HEAT-T, but I don't remember any sabot at all. Even when I graduated and went down the street to the 4/27th Armor, we shot mostly (95%) HEAT-T and HEP-T.
But, when I got back there in '85 for the Advanced Course, we shot a heck of a lot of TPDS-T Mainly on Yaho and St. Vith ranges. I feel like I spent the whole summer at St. Vith. As I recall, that was a beautiful range, nestled between two big ridges near the Salt River. That place was absolutely gorgeous
Knox ain't Knox any more. Nowadays, it's a Finance center, with lots of REMFs and DA civilians keeping it open.
2 comments:
It's also home to Human Resource Command - possibly the most hated people in the Army.
And since they moved the treadheads to Benning, Benning isn't really Benning, anymore, either. They even changed the name of Infantry Hall.
And they changed the names of the courses, too, at least for the officers. No more IOBC, AOBC, IOAC, AOAC, etc. Now it's Maneuever Basic Officer Leader Course and Maneuver Captains Career Course.
The really funny thing is, apparently the computer program that HRC uses for ORBs can't handle the old and new course designations at the same time. When I was checking my ORB before the LTC board, I noticed it listed me as completing MBOLC and MCCC. So I called up my branch manager and told him I did IOBC and ICCC (or Ice Cubed as we called it). He told me about the archaic computer system, and that, since it couldn't handle both old and new names, it just automatically used whatever the current course was called.
With everything at Benning being 'Maneuver' now instead of 'Infantry', I wonder if they changed the name of the old I Bar at the O club? (The I Bar, I'm told, once even boasted strippers, until some CG's wife put the kibosh on it. It had been shut down for a while when I got there in 1996, but could be signed out for groups to use, as my IOBC platoon did on one occasion.)
We didn't get TPDS-T until I was in Germany. I saw it first for the 1976 gunnery cycle. Instead of the tungsten carbide penetrator of APDS-T, the target practice version had an aluminum sub-projectile.
Ballistically the two rounds were identical out to a couple of thousand meters, IIRC. After that, the target practice projectile, being MUCH less dense, shed velocity MUCH faster, allowing it to be shot on ranges with more or less standard range fans - the areas that must be guarded in the event to errant rounds leave the target area.
Using TPDS-T, one got to practice with sabot firing characteristics. The hypervelocity projectile could not be tracked in flight until they passed the 1200-meter mark because they were so stinking fast that your eyes couldn't see the tracer.
MC
Post a Comment