that’s still 4 distorting plates and having the round “guillotined” twice which would negate tipped APFSDS and that’s not even accounting for the fact that those “slats” overlap each other. And structural steel and rubber absolutely affect APFSDS, composite armour and NERA especially is ENTIRLY based off that fact. It’s not that they offer a significant level of protection on their own, but that when paired with other materials their different shockwave propagation speeds causes distortions in the materials that break up the penetrator.
Where is this asymmetric Plate? There is no second flyer plate only a pair of offset (9 degrees) 4S20 / -22 tiles.
K-1
K-5
And the M1’s Composite side screen is made up of DU. and yet barely does anything considering that 65mm of composite somehow barely adds 30mm(29.4mm) RHAe (87-(30+27.6)) of protection. even though it incudes multiple DU elements & a 20-25mm RHA strikeface.
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What says that it is DU? Special Armour =/= DU
Try actually reading what I typed
Source? and even if it is, DU offers the same single hit protection as tungsten alloy but we are not talking about the Abrams in anyway, what ever the Abrams side skirts are made of is not related to how Kontact or Relekt work
First time I’ve heard of asymmetric explosive being used in the 4SXX series, or in any type of heavy ERA. It seems to me that inducing rotation in the flyer plates could improve effectiveness at certain impact points, but at others it might significantly reduce it. Depending on the impact angle and the direction of rotation, the projectile could actually encounter less material along its path and it would be even more problematic with a 4S23 sandwich.
I can’t find exact details for it, just that one side of the explosive was a little thicker than the other to produce more rotation in the flyer plate, so I’m not making any claims it was some type of magic, just that they did account for and improve it’s ability to deal with less that optimal impact angles
Special Armor in the context of the report denotes;
“Special Armor referred to in this document consists of the specific Tri-plate installed in the first generation Abrams Tanks and its associated threat mechanisms”.
Theoretically nothing, but it’d be pretty hard to weld plastic, as the guide instructs for repair.
I guess it could just be a alternating Plastic-Steel-Plastic panel similar to Chobham as it would make sense in terms of a “Tri-Plate” (Three element). But it differs as there is no space for bolts of any kind and directly mounting Plastics to Metal without encapsulation if difficult and Glues or Epoxies probably wouldn’t have the service life in the environment considering the vibrations involved in the life cycle of a vehicle, or be easy to repair since de-bonding plastics is exceedingly difficult to do non-destructively.
Let alone how else the skirt + side armor would meet requirements for 350mm against a KE threat at +/- 25 degrees, when it’s only got ~57-75mm of RHA otherwise.
Are they somehow not a motive element that would work to bend a penetrator out of alignment? They do seem to be hinged and it’s not like none of the energy from a penetration would be imparted to the skirt. and with the spacing between the hull being about 400mm a reasonably long penetrator would form multiple points of contact simultaneously with the skirt and side armor. So may segment the penetrator.
Possibly, it doesn’t take much yaw to be imparted to the penetrator to begin to have a significant negative effect on it’s ability to penetrate the armour, I think its something like if the tail of the rod is 2 degrees out of alignment with the tip it will lose about 6% of its penetration.
also looking at the picture of it you have a RHA plate backed by NERA, so A HEAT or APFSDS would strike the RHA then as it penetrates the strike face the NERA would distort to try and break apart the tip of the HEAT jet or rod (I don’t now if it would be enough to break the tip of an APFSDS) which causes extreme degradation to the penetration ability, HEAT will lose about 30% of it’s pen and and APFSDS about 20%.
Also sorry for the slow response, it was nearly 2am here so I needed to sleep.