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Your own choice of mount when Luftpanzers had first taken the field had equipped with relatively conventional armament consisting of a coaxial machine gun and a 3.7-centimeter tank cannon, suitable for modest support application and perforation of enemy armor. Yet this was a test platform, and what choice for the daring was appropriate besides the latest invention to come out of weapons research and development? At least, one that had practicality, and apparently, a bright future.
The 10-centimer “recoilless rifle” was thus mounted to the tank, a curious weapon that utilized venting a great deal of force out of its back end while also propelling its shell forwards, in order to create a high-caliber weapon that could be made particularly lightweight, due to a solid receiver block and recoil mechanism being made far less necessary. The man in charge of its development, one Doctor Bazilhof, insisted that it was the future of warfare. You’d have to see about that, because the weapon, while intriguing, certainly wasn’t perfect.
Primarily, the problem lay not with the weapon itself, but how it was mounted on your vehicle. The recoilless rifle had to vent out of the back, in a very dangerous and forceful fashion, so the gun had to run through the length of the turret. Impossible to do without compromising protection in some way, but the Luftpanzer was ever only lightly armored. The pivot point for the gun was at the rear of the turret while the turret mantlet had an open spot so that the elevation degree was respectable. The setup was awkward, and there was definitely a better solution somewhere for the problem of vertical traversal, but for now, this was the state of the prototype. With the gun being so large and needing its own space, maybe it was such a diva that it needed its own turret within your turret…
If it was like anything from R&D it would be a couple more iterations at least before it hit the field. Time to do your part.
“Load Hollow Charge,” you told Zolldom, another Dhegyar crewman, “Let’s make a lovely triangle of testing here and see if that works, or if the engineers made it too twitchy again so it bursts too soon.” A proper standoff necessary for the shaped-charge’s titular mode of armor piercing to work to its best extent.
The breach opened, and the ring of a shell climbed up and alongside before a closing and a latch shut, along with the rear hatch being opened. The engineers had made sure that in order to load the cannon, said opening had to be wide. A safety measure against blasting yourselves with the venting propellant and recoil mass.
“Targeting the two-hundred-meter hulk. You have it on your periscope?”
“Obserrrrved.”
“Firing.” <span class="mu-s">*BOOOMM*</span> Recoilless was a misnomer, though the tank had no trouble absorbing the recoil. This gun was <span class="mu-i">loud</span> as <span class="mu-i">hell</span>, though. Considering it was two guns counterfiring, it was unsurprising.
