earticle

영어

‘APFSDS(Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot)’ and ‘HEAT(High-Explosive Anti Tank)’ are most commonly used tactical ammunition types for modern main battle tanks to confront against hostile armor vehicle. Due to the technical advancements for ordnance field, ballistic performances of those ammunitions have been improved, but they still have limitations against targets in none line-of-sight range. Moreover, protection level of the modern main battle tanks has been greatly increased due to the contemporary countermeasures such as ‘ERA(Explosive Reactive Armor)’ and ‘APS(Active Protection System)’.
In order to resolve those urgent issues, the concept of smart top attack munition has been focus recently which is able to strike preemptively none line-of-sight targets in long range.
In this paper, the development status and forecast of foreign smart tank ammunition is investigated to make provisions for the ‘KSTAM(Korean Smart Top Attack Munition)’ program. The system concept for the 120mm KSTAM which had been obtained through the joint technical cooperation between ‘Poongsan’ and ‘DBD(Diehl BGT Defence GmbH & Co. KG)’ is presented.
Also, through following detailed analysis and comparison to currently ongoing smart ammunition programs thoroughly, distinctive superiority of the KSTAM has been proved objectively and fully described in this paper.