Where is the Apache’s armor it is meant to resist up to 23mm cannons
Resist to 3 or 4 23mm shell on all the surface of the chopper and not in critical parts…
Not to a burst of 40 shells…
Yet neither is modeled. 7mm machine gun fire and graze the engine and destroy it.
It’s pretty much designed to protect the pilots only. Kind of like the A10. So its the glass, cockpit, instrument panel, sides, floor of cockpit.
Not much of a difference in the variants. None mention armor for the engines. Best not to assume it as any. Much like anything else that isnt the fuselage.
It’s quite literally designed to protect critical engine parts
I don’t know if you don’t recognize this but if a plane’s engine fails it can glide, a helicopter can not glide
If the engine fails the pilot is going to die
I’ve made 3 bug reports on Apaches armor using AH-64A maintenance manual. I plan on doing more as there’s other stuff missing.
I can say that the engine and transmission has no armor, at least not large armor plates that cover the whole thing. That manual pretty much breaks down the entire helicopter.
What I can find is armor is located around these central parts: crew, fuel tanks, hydraulics. Other parts have small armor plates to cover absolute vital parts but not the entire piece.
In order to understand armor protection, you need to understand priorities and what the Apache was designed for. Apaches we’re designed to fight in all our war, their armor is very much “all or nothing”, instead of armor everything, make the non critical pieces able to handle taking a hit, in their case they tested every un armoured part to be able to take at least 1 50 cal.
You may be thinking engines are critical so why aren’t they armoured, it’s because you have 2 of them. The transmission was designed to take a 50 cal and able to work for iirc an hour.
Critical parts that can’t get hit and can’t be made resilient and thus has to be armoured are: Fuel tanks, crew, hydraulics, the 3 things I named that are armoured.
Fuel tanks on the Apache are protected with Kevlar and ballistic foam, they’re designed to not burst into flames while hit and while crashing. Post crash fires were a large cause of casualties in helicopter crashes.
Crew is self explanatory, crew is protected by rather thick armor plates (designed to protect against 23mm HE rounds) and seperated by a blast shield, important note that the windscreen is not armoured, the front is made of glass while the side is made of acrylic. One of the reasons the canopy is unarmored is the chances of getting hit by a bullet is low and heavy doors can impede evacuations of a helicopter, Apaches canopy has blast cords in them. Also adds alot of weight.
Hydraulics are also self explanatory, you need them to control the helicopter. They’re protected by full armor channels that cover them fully.
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