I’ve been wondering why the leopard 2’s composite armour on the hull is only around 330-400mm, and in the turret cheeks about 400-500mm, even though every source I have seen online says it’s supposedly up to twice as much. Are the values in game correct or is this some kind of artificial nerfing again?
If the sources claim “800-1000mm”, they’re probably referring to LOS thickness.
The 2A4’s hull in-game is 35mm HHA/520mm NERA inserts/45mm RHA which is 600mm LOS thickness - but it’s ~300mm effective in-game because a lot of that is just the air between the NERA plates.
Most of the sources I have say that it’s around 700-800mm KE for the turret cheeks and around 500-600mm KE for the hull, I don’t know if these are all correct but almost all of the values are higher than what’s in game. And also, composite armour usually has better protection than what the LOS thickness says, since it’s not steel and reacts differently to steel when hit by penetrators.
Sources:
https://web.archive.org/web/20111125204600/http://www.whq-forum.de/cms/27.0.html
http://www.btvt.narod.ru/raznoe/leopard2/Leo2a4.htm
Composite armor ingame is all fake anyway. It’s mostly classified so for modern tanks it’s all just guesstimation and that guesstimation can be used as an excuse to make armor values whatever they want them to be.
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Composite armor most certainly does not have better protection than LOS, compared to pure RHA.
This is generally only true for something like DU (which also weighs more).
The main purpose of composite armor is in defeating chemical projectiles and allowing for more efficient armor arrays instead of simple RHA. They can generally allow more protection for less weight, but that doesn’t mean they go above 1:1 with the same thickness of RHA. It’s just a lot more efficient to use composite.
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Those aren’t sources though, they’re just random websites.
That doesn’t make any sense.
Composite armour generally consists of different materials which are spaced apart within a steel cavity, the density of composite armour is much less than what an equivalent solid mass of steel at the same LoS thickness would have.
The Leopard 2 uses different armour packages, the one that represents an early '80s model would offer the following protection:
- 350mm RHAe vs KE @ 60° frontal arc (turret).
- 700mm RHAe vs CE @ 60° frontal arc (turret).
- The hull was to resist 105mm KE and the MILAN missile.
- From a 60° arc, 30% of the vehicle offered 400mm of protection, 65% of the vehicle offered 300mm of protectiom.
Later Leopard 2 models featured an improved package which offered:
- 415mm RHAe vs KE @ 60° frontal arc (turret).
- 750-800mm RHAe vs CE @ 60° frontal arc (turret).
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The protective performance of NERA is mainly related to the material, if there is more rubber, then the protective performance will be biased towards CE, if there is more titanium alloy, silicon carbide, boron nitride and so on, then the protective performance is more biased towards KE. If you build NERA (RHA+SiC+RHA+ titanium alloy +RHA), his CE and KE will be better than the RHA of the same thickness, but it is very expensive.