@Anonymous #17B8  

Yep. Still in use on combat engineer vehicles, as far as I know.  
The adorably stubby 165mm demolition gun on the M728 springs to mind.
 

Oh, sweet merciful mother of Cthulhu, why?!  
I can’t even.
 

Oh, right. I’d read about that before, but forgot.
 
As for the multi-purpose usefulness of the M40 for modern high-mobility detachments, you’re preaching to the choir. :D  
It actually occurs to me they probably should carry some HESH with them, in case they encounter dug-in hostiles.
 
That tandem HEAT warhead sounds quite interesting too. As in useful. And somehow so quintessentially Russian.

@Exhumed Legume  

 
Read printed material from the UK on antiarmor weapons from the 80s and 90s and they were still obsessed with big fat HESH warheads decades later. I think it got stuck in their consciousness, so to speak, from their wartime experience with needing tank main gun ammunition that performed better against concrete pillboxes. HESH excels at that. Large caliber HESH prior to the 1960s advent of spaced and laminate armor was a fairly good antiarmor round too, and is also a good antipersonnel round. Dependence upon spalling as the lethal mechanism meant that against the frontal armor of a T72, even 120mm HESH is a non-starter. I used to have a printed “encyclopedia of engineering & technology” from the UK printed in the 1980s. In the section on antiarmor weapons, the writer was absolutely convinced that large-caliber HESH was the best thing ever. In the real world, not so much.
 
These were the people who thought the Blacker Bombard was a good idea too. Look over the description carefully. The Blacker Bombard was another HESH weapon, though it was only barely capable of lobbing its shell far enough that fragmentation didn’t endanger the crew. “Nobel #808” is an early form of plastique.
 

 
The M40 is 105mm in caliber, but the Army designated it as a 106mm as its ammunition was not interchangeable with that of the earlier M27 105mm recoilless rifle.
 

 
True, but it could be kind of useful when the guys at the sharp end start taking small arms fire from that little cave entrance hundreds of meters up the mountain from them. “o hai! you have just won a 106mm HE shell from the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes!” bloop!
 
For that matter, in the 1990s the Russians developed an extremely impressive, extremely effective tandem charge HEAT round fired from the RPG-29 ‘Vampyr’ rocket launcher that they have exported so widely. It’s capable of penetrating 750mm+ of rolled homogeneous armor and loses less than 15% of its penetration after going through explosive reactive armor tiles, or at least Russian 1990s export ERA tiles. Internet rumor has it that the Israelis captured numerous intact examples in Lebanon in 2006 and reverse-engineered them, and now manufacture a copy of the shell for the M40. The RPG-29 was bought by Iran and given to Shi’ite terrorists in Iraq around the same time, and they managed to knock out Challenger and M1A2 MBTs with them, including shots through the glacis plate. It’s really an outstanding performer.
 
Imagine these shells coming from a modernized M40 with laser rangefinder and thermal sights. The T80 and T90 aren’t nearly as well protected as an M1A2 or Challenger. A Toyota Hilux or fifty-year-old surplus Jeep with an M40 on the back and fifteen or twenty rounds of dual-charge HEAT is capable of killing even the most modern Russian and Chinese tanks, including–some people think–the ones they don’t export. Amusingly enough, in 1955 the M40 was more than capable of killing the IS-3 and T-10M too, but no one knew it at the time.

@Anonymous #17B8  
Just going by what I read, and apparently the FV4005 was a response to IS-3 specifically, but the British military ultimately opted for the UK-Australian Malkara vehicle-launched ATGM instead, largely for size and mobility reasons.
 
BTW, what’s with the Britbong obsession with HESH at the time? Both the gun on the FV4005 and the Malkara used a HESH warhead despite shaped charges already being the gold standard of anti-armor warheads since 1940.  
Oh well, at least they eventually learned HESH works better for demolition and clearing obstacles than antitank use.
 

*105mm. I’ll assume that was a typo.
 

Well, yeah. Took some 30 years for wire-guided missiles to really come into their own.  
There were still ATGMs in service since the ’50s, even if most of them never saw combat use and were primitive and clunky compared to a TOW.
 

And I most definitely agree with that argument, but the enemy in such wars generally doesn’t have tanks, so that’s kind of irrelevant in this context – although the logic does have parallels to the ditching of FV4005 in favor of missile launcher trucks.
 

Just like the FV4005! :)

Love me some good EAW artwork.
 
@Anonymous #17B8  
You certainly know your history.

@Exhumed Legume  
<autism>I think part of the motivation for it was that at the time the Soviet military–and that of allied puppet governments in Eastern Europe–were using very heavy tanks like the IS-2 and IS-3 and had more in development like the T-10M. In the 1950s, guided missiles were still at the “we think this idea has potential” stage rather than the “this is obviously the best tool” stage–see also, the Navy’s Snark cruise missile, which project engineers got in trouble for calling “the Civil Service Missile, it doesn’t work and you can’t fire it.”
 
As such, the US and UK were at the time experimenting with really big guns on armored vehicles to kill things like the IS-3. The UK built a ginormous 183mm gun and the US built a small number of heavy tanks with 120mm guns. What made it obvious at the time that things like the FV4005 were not the way forward was Royal Ordnance in the UK developing a super-high-velocity 105mm tank gun in the 1950s that is still in use worldwide 65 years later. Also there were developments in shaped charges that were not dependent upon velocity to achieve good levels of penetration and lethality, that were adapted to places like the US’s M40 106mm recoilless rifle and the UK’s WOMBAT 120mm recoilless rifle, that were at least on paper capable of killing the IS-III and similar designs.
 
Lots of money was spent on guided missiles, including antitank missiles, but they were never a priority, and they were never used in combat on any large scale until the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Russian designs a decade old astonished and horrified Western analysts with their effectiveness and lethality against what were at the time current US and UK tank designs. This caused the US government to switch away from things like the M40 to more guided missiles like the TOW and Dragon for the role.
 
Some argue that for counterinsurgency wars in extremely rugged and inaccessible terrain, of the type the US just spent twenty years fighting, lightweight vehicles with something like the M40 would be highly useful for fire support for the infantry units at the sharp end, especially if the recoilless rifle had a laser rangefinder and thermal sights bolted onto it, which are cheap off-the-shelf technology now. But nobody outside Germany is talking about tank guns larger in caliber than the current ones. The Germans have been spending money on a 140mm tank gun since the 1970s. But either you need a significantly larger vehicle to carry it or you get a tank that can only carry twenty rounds of ammunition for its main gun, and so far nobody’s willing to make that trade, not while the 120mm guns everybody in NATO is using are still getting improved ammo types with better performance, that look like they ought to work fairly well against Russian T80s and T90s.

@Sapphie  
Well acktshyually, the FV4005 was a self-propelled 183mm anti-tank gun.
 
Actually looked that up just now, don’t think I’d ever heard of this one before.  
Probably because it never made it beyond prototype stage – anti-tank missiles were more practical in every possible way, even in ’57.

Wart Hunder in Equestria? Could it be?

>tank faggotry  
>not drawn by t72b  
something is amiss
 
jkjk, it looks fucking s i c k my dude