Comment on Estonia is digging a 40 km trench to stop Russian tanks — and 600 bunkers are next

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Warl0k3@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Aight so that was sad enough I figured I’d do a couple physical sims just to answer the question definitively:

turns out a T72 would need +35° of elevation to clear this if you approached at 1kph

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But at +14° elevation, it'll just barely clip the top at 30kph

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And only needs to be going ~46.02kph to clear the berm

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But to cross at 30mph, you’d only need to rotate the barrel ~20° off center-line to clear the berm (which if Warthunder is to be believed (hehe), will take 5/8^ths^ of a second to return to axial - this is as close as I could get to the actual figure but it’s probably closer to a full second, I couldn’t find acceleration curves for the T-72 turret traversal (go figure)).

So you’re right, most likely a T-72 crew would have to rotate the turret some to clear this berm unless they’re going flat-out across that field, which is possible for them to achieve but the offroad speed of the T-72 isn’t super reliably reported (again go figure) so lets just go with you’re right.

And with that side topic settled, back to my point: this ditch ain’t going to force an AFV to slow down. Like at all.

Disclosures:

I used the absolute shortest value for ground support length which is only 5.5m, used the common 106" ditch crossing value for ease instead of calculating it custom as soil dynamics sucks to define, used the most generous estimate I could for ditch dimensions (4m wide w/ 90° slopes) and just traced the outline of a T72 where I couldn’t find specific dimensions in the manual I’ll pretend I have sitting on my desk but which I just googled around to find, and I also just totally ignored ground compression for the same reason (but eyeballing it, it should roughly even out)

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