I feel a disturbance in the force, like a discussion about weapon fuzing and effects is taking place… AND I MUST LAY DOWN KNOWLEDGE
So fuzing and weapons effects are… complicated at best. What you think makes sense doesn’t always, and what we normally see in video games is in some ways more realistic, and less realistic than what we think, at the same time.
First off, Tanks and bombs. They don’t mix particularly well, and by that I mean to get your desired weapons effects. 500 pound bombs are in general not very effective against tanks. Your average lightly armored BMP or BTR, hell yeah it will annihilate that but a full blown MBT not so much. The crew inside will probly be very unhappy if not unconscious but you will likely not perform catastrophic (K kill in weaponeering terms) damage to a tank with a direct hit from say a GBU-12 or Mk-82 500 lb weapon.
The reasons for this are many, but the greatest reason is the tank is armored, and even though you have a 500 pound slug hitting it at a decent clip, if you instantaneously fuze it, it explodes on contact with no penetration and all the blast and frag will essentially go off away from the tank. The bomb just does not have enough explosive for an HE/frag effect to significantly penetrate the tank.
If you delay fuze it then you are running into the other problem with 500lb GP weapons, they are just not designed for that. and you may put a hole in the tank, IF you hit it at the right impact angle and it doesnt just broach off. Your standard Mk-82 has no penetration cap or capability (or GBU-38 for that matter) and a GBU-12 is even worse because of that soft seeker kit on the front. So even with a hit that manages to penetrate you are more than likely looking at either a broken up bomb body or a dud fuze.
Now will this disable/damage the tank/concuss or kill the crew inside/ make them hate their lives? probly all or at least some of the above, however a catastrophic kill that we see in DCS almost every time we get a hit with a bomb on a tank is highly unlikely with a 500 lb weapon.
What ultimately this is getting at is that if you realistically want to kill MBT’s with bombs, upgrade yourself to a 1-2000 lb weapon. These do have enough of a warhead and weight that they can start to send fragments through the top armor of the tank, and are heavy enough and will have enough velocity on impact that as long as you get a decent (high) impact angle they will most definitely annihilate the tank without destroying the fuze inside or breaking up on impact.
And the ultimate conclusion is if you want to kill tanks use weapons designed for it IE Mavericks with shaped charge warheads designed to penetrate armor/ other specific anti-tank weapons.
As to bouncing, weapons broach all the time after embedding in the dirt just depends on their impact angle and velocity.
Nose/Tail fuzing determines which fuze wire is pulled when the bomb releases. You can install an impact fuze in the front of the bomb (classic M904/5 fuze from vietnam) or an inertial fuze in the tail. With retarded bombs you pull both so that the noze fuze arms and the tail fuzing simply pulls the retard mechanism. With LGB’s you can pull one or the other because sometimes you have a different fuze in the front than in the back so you can then choose the fuzing. JDAM’s have programmable fuzes so you generally just pull N/T as a back up on those. If you have a straight up dumb bomb you can pull fuzing depending on either a specific attack (low altitude, low impact angle likely go with the inertial fuze, high altitude high impact angle go with the impact fuze) Or both just as a backup. All depends on the target, the weapon and what you are trying to achieve.
