All I know is that the tank does not have a formal spall liner made of Kevlar in or behind the plate of armor inside the Abrams. It’s unfortunate, however, I do have a list of other things that can be done to help the Abrams in its current situation.
Put in a Bug Report for the Abrams Turbine being excessively loud. It’s excessively loud compared to the T-80.
Request a Spall Reduction on the 50mm Turret Ring. This will lower your chance of being one shotted without a spall liner.
Request a Flak Jacket upgrade for the Crew. Since documentation states that the Abrams was not outfitted with a Spall Liner, they chose to provide Flak Jackets to the crew. This will essentially make your crew more durable against Spall.
Convince Gaijin to add the A3 Dart. While not effective against Relict, it will certainly help against T-80U and lower vehicles using ERA with KE protection such as Contakt-5.
Request the ability to take off the SEPv2 ERA package. It makes the tank excessively heavy, and the ERA does nothing now that stock AP is present at rank 8.
Request modeling of the Turret Ring since it will act as a pseudo spall liner.
I’ve been looking at that post for a while, however, I’m currently tired and not exactly the most intelligent person. I’m just sharing what I do understand. I have documentation which states it does not exist and others have documentation which says otherwise. I have not been able to find any inside the turret through images as some claim and cannot verify if it’s inside the armor. All I know is that if it is inside the armor, it doesn’t make sense to me based on my drawing above.
I do hope someone proves Gaijin and me wrong since I want the Abrams to have this, but I can’t see or convince myself it exists outside of suggestion.
As for vests, even though it doesn’t suggest there is no spall liner, it would still be a good thing for the Abrams to receive.
While helpful, Abrams tanks don’t get shot in the armor most of the time. It’s typically in the turret ring, which will not be helped by a spall liner or increase in hull armor.
That’s where my 6 suggestions above come into play.
Even with that change, it won’t help much against tanks like the 2S38 sadly.
The turret will be a weak point no matter what you do. My suggestion is to make the Abrams more silent and increase armor where its weak points aren’t. This way you end up in a similar situation to the 10.3 Abrams.
The tank can take a hit from a misplaced shot but can’t sustain a hit from a well-placed shot. The tradeoff is that you’re faster in both mobility and fire rate.
Unfortunately, the top tier Abrams currently suffer from obesity while lacking armor even outside of their weak points.
And that’s the Abrams alone. I dare not mention the Merkava or Ariete lol. Those things need serious help.
While I do not have a document on hand at this moment, it was a requirement for the SEPv3 to have added Turret and Hull Protection. I could be wrong, but I believe this was called NGAP.
Nothing about DU armor other than this, but the sources used for this book are truly amazing. It’s just the fact that nobody is going to discuss the DU armor in detail since it’s strictly classified so gaijin needs to improve the way they think about modern vehicles functional characteristics if they want to market themselves as a realistic tank shooter game. The quality of their assumptions is at the lowest point as of now.
These paragraphs are hilarious because they simultaneously extol the virtues of certain individuals championing what would inevitably become the standard of armour, whilst pointing out that the US procurement establishment is systematically extremely haughty and bigoted.
On an unrelated note (I’m being sarcastic here)
I have found evidence which would seem to indicate M1A1HA has 0 hull armour improvements compared to the basic M1A1.
As Army units prepared for deployment to Saudi Arabia for Operation DESERT
SHIELD in 1990, Army leaders determined that the M1A1HA was the only version
superior to Iraqi tanks.
Army Chief of
Staff GEN Carl E. Vuono ordered that all units be issued the M1A1HA or receive
additional armor plating.
Fair enough, but my main point was specifically about the DU.
Technological advancements happen all the time. They could very well have achieved the better protection with other materials than DU. We have no clue what NGAP is made of.
TUSK was meant for urban warfare, SEPv2’s improvements have been listed in Army Weapon Systems Handbook, which among other things states:
Improved Frontal and Turret Side Armor
TIGER Turbine upgrade & Transmission upgrade for improved reliability
Improved APU
Block I FLIR upgrade
Common Operating Environment upgrade
Yesn’t. There’s a lot of complicated math involved in spalling and depending on the hardness of the backing plate it might not actually spall to the degree observed in-game.
CATTB’s spall liner was expected to be about an inch thick, and for the turret crew compartment to clock in at around 1,250lbs with about 5.7lbs per square foot. Source here: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA228389.pdf
More a slap in the face “Hey guys we totally screwed you back in December of 2023, by pushing out the SEPv2 which is worse than the SEPv1 by most metrics and released yet another wallet warrior premium, but don’t worry we’ve released another SEP this time with the DU hull you wanted for you to grind out!”
Not like they haven’t been provided just under half a dozen estimates posted on the forums between the UVZ book they consider ‘unreliable’, Paul Lakowski, the estimates that Zaloga pulled probably out of thin, Michael Haskew’s estimates, and Tom Clancy’s estimates.
UVZ was 750KE on LFP, which was in the original hull bug report that got forwarded.
Paul Lakowski’s estimate was between 720mm and 770mm KE on the LFP depending on the size of the APFSDS penetrator, with it reduced to between 520 to 540 at 45°. Seen here: http://www.ciar.org/ttk/mbt/armor/Modern_Armor_III.pdf
Zaloga puts the hull at 600mm for M1A1HA, in M1 Abrams vs T-72 Ural (ever subject of debate, since no one’s really sure where he got those estimates, and it’s telling his latest M1A2 book doesn’t include armor estimates at all)
Michael Haskew’s estimate puts the hull at around 650mm KE in his Tanks book.
Clancy in Armored Cav Guided Tour puts the baseline M1A2 hull being at least 18-inches of RHAe, or around 457mm.
It’s not like they didn’t have options to straight up low-ball it. Lakowski does provide the math behind his estimate, where as most of the other sources don’t.
And even if they did buff the LFP, it’d still leave the ever vulnerable turret ring which has decent odds of either:
Killing your entire turret crew
Punching through the firewall on your blowout panels and killing you that way
Leaving you crippled if by some divine miracle you survive the first two.
Yeah, they were truly bigoted and even to this day must be. The whole book is full of drama that was built around the creation of Abrams Tank, they hated the British because they came up with new type of armor that they did have to adapt and hated the Germans as they created much better cannon which they also had to adapt. Even a very nice TV series can be made based on the whole story if Hollywood was interested :D Also, it’s nice that military individuals didn’t hesitate to talk about these historical details of events instead of preferring being silent.
It’s actually kind of funny, the Army Combat systems handbook shows about an equal amount of information about armor upgrades regarding Sep v2 and Sep v3. Both brochures say improved armor and pictures with weight simulation plates. I’d say the sepv2 brochure includes slightly more detail as it mentions armor improvements on the front and side.
The Sepv3 is from the 2016 edition and later publications of the handbook don’t mention
any more information on the armor upgrades. But all things considered why would anyone believe the Sepv3 has better armor and not the Sepv2 when the same level evidence exists for both.
