tanks should be able to swap ammunition without firing with a 2x reload time due to having to take the shell from the breech and put it back in storage and getting a new shell and putting into the breech
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they would never do that - you shoot what you have loaded as standard practice.
Or you move unloaded and be prepared to load anything depending on what target presents itself - this is a more realistic option - it is what modern tankers do at least.
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I doubt that. Firing the gun to discharge it when you want to swap rounds sound idiotic, you would give away your position and waste a round on nothing or an ineffective hit.
Pretty much all tanks guns in existence have some sort of manual breech lever to open the gun up and eject whatever round there is. There is no reason not to portray this in the game. Just make the reload longer, since it would be more complicated to move the old round back to storage than with an empty casing.
Why would you have a round loaded in the first place, if you haven’t identified a target?
But let’s say you have…
1/ HE loaded and a tank appears - well you can risk taking the round out and is possibly not coming out clean as per the possible scenarios in the manual below - or you can put a 75mm HE onto the target tank - the HE will still go BANG - the target still almost certainly won’t know where you are but will be discombobulated by the BANG… and 5 or 6 seconds later you have an AP on hte way…
2/ AP loaded and infantry appears - you can wait until they are in MG range, open uip with hte coaxial, fire hte AP and have HE ready pretty shortly thereafter having used the machine gun for all that time rather than having everyone wondering if the round is going to come out cleanly.
It is true that guns CAN unload - they have to do so for misfires and there are always procedures - but in some cases it requires a special tool that has to be removed from storage - the usual extraction system relies upon the recoil to do the job.
For example here is the manual for the M24 Chaffee light tank - which is contemporary in 1944 - on Page 338 it gives the process to unload: (https://ia800200.us.archive.org/2/items/TM9-729/TM9-729.pdf)
Damn, i stand corrected then.
I thought sending a round off by firing it when there is no actual target would be dangerous as you cannot ever truly insure it won’t bounce off or ricochet somewhere else. I based that from a general firearm rule of not just discharging a firearm in any direction.
I’m curious tho what were the actual practices of the crews during that time then. I’m sure there were instances where a loaded round was in the gun, but a TC didn’t want to waste a round and risk sending it downrange to… somewhere. It’s common after all for soldiers of any kind to not always follow the manual.
Interesting to learn tho!