Don’t pay much attention to Extreme Engineering Simulations videos. I’d say pretty much all the sim vids I’ve seen of theirs are nowhere near accurate.
The Tungsten and DU alloy compositions are pretty well known actually. Well, depending on the group doing the sims at least. The DU is almost always U-0.75%Ti, but the newer alloys have better yield and tensile strength due to improved quenching and treatment processes. The exception is the Russians, which use Uranium-Nickel-Zinc Alloy. And the WHA is still usually Tungsten/Nickel/Iron. But with the newer alloys, the tungsten has been processed to have much finer particle granularity.
Again, thickness is not equivalent to protection. Although, the thicker the better 😉
I was already proven wrong on the UFP. My original comment was referring to the weld line on the LFP.
No, protection is not based on thickness. 30mm of era can act like a 185mm thick plate against heat rounds. The same concept for kinetic. The material used matters. Thin Steel plates with steep angles can have similar properties/values as thick non angled steel plates. Thickness/angle/materials all matter.
This is where the miscommunication took place, I was referring the LFP and you were replying to the UFP. I know this was a month ago, but I just noticed this while scrolling through the comment chain.
We’re talking steel plates, not reactive armor. Steel will not explode and deflect munitions. It is steel.
No, not at all. As I’ve said, protection is directly affected by thickness. Even if its an NERA material like rubber, 5mm of rubber will offer the protection of 5mm of rubber, while 200mm of rubber will offer 40x that.
Same goes for the front plate. It’s 38mm of steel, and no matter what, it will always be 38mm of steel. Its protection will always be that of a 38mm plate, and in no situation can it be as effective as another thickness, especially with monobloc darts and their effectiveness against angled material.
And they will not offer the same protection. If that angle is changed even slightly, its effective thickness is dropped down to paper-thin numbers. 200mm flat is 200mm flat, while 200mm at 54dg will be ~340mm.
That 200mm plate will not match a 340mm plater. It will not offer the same protection as a 340mm plate, no matter how much it is angled.
We’re not sure if it is 650mm vs KE at 20degree or 650mm vs KE at 30degree
As British source put M1A1 turret cheek armor at 460mm vs KE at 20degree
But on US source they put somethings like 600mm vs KE at 30degree (export M1A2 Sweden) and CIA report which show 400mm vs KE (likely at 30degree for IPM1 and M1A1 as this would match with British source which show 460mm vs KE at 20degree )
Just to make sure we’re on the same page here
You mean 0 degree base on turret cheek (red line) or 0 degree base on whole turret front (green line) ?
(not counting vertical . Only horizontal)
I edit the picture. So it easy to understanding what i’m talking about.
It can’t, if the performance is cited for heading angle of 0, the performance within the ±20/30 degree arc would be only slightly higher than that of C-technology’s armour that the Leopard 2A4s used starting 1987 (around ~430mm RHAe KE ± 60 degree arc, about ~560mm at 0).
The numbers here are very likely to be for a ± 20 degree angle from either side of the vehicle, and as such, M1A2s turret armour in the game is currently underperforming by a small amount (last I checked, the armour at a heading angle of 20 was only giving about ~620mm RHAe vs KE rounds).
This predates the BRL improvements mentioned above
BRL ‘improvements’ were never carried out on any serial production M1s until at least SEPv1, @Necrons31467 had posted documents before that showed if all new armour solutions were to be put onto the tank back then, the weight would exceed 72.5 US tons, bringing the M1A2 to about ~65.5 metric tons of weight, and as we know, M1A2 weighed nowhere near this amount.
which seems to further indicate that the performance of the turret armor is at a lower degree… probably 0-20 degrees. Not 30.
The snipet literally gives you the angle there, “460mm ± 20°”
i see. So you meant that 650mm vs KE are likely for 0° angle on both vertical and horizontal against turret cheek.
That would give a lot of performance when being shot at when angle.
In the context of what we’re talking about (SA-1/2/3 armour packages), that is very much true. None of them got implemented on the original M1A2, in fact 2 & 3 were outright canned (upper plate & turret roof add-on armours) - SA 1 which was meant to deal with the insufficient protection of the hull (Tandem Ceramic Armour) was also withheld until later variants due to weight concerns.
but gives us a good idea of the effectiveness of the armor for the weight gain. iirc the testing from 1991 provided 1.6-1.8x the volumetric efficiency of the latest RHA equivalent armor.
I dunno what you’re trying to say here by calling upon “volumetric efficiency” (it’s about the volume of air drawn into an internal combustion engine), since that is not something that concerns tank armours, refer to either Mass Efficiency or Thickness efficiency instead - in which case, only the former makes sense, because if they had indeed achieved the outright impossible TE of 1.6 - 1.8x, everyone would rush to copy it.
