I am under the impression that “reactive” armor is mostly for defense against shaped-charge (HEAT) type penetrators, not so much kinetic penetrarors (discarding-sabot). Am I wrong about that?
yep, against shaped charges and other explosive methods, meant to either penetrate or deform armor.
kinetic slugs are dealt with by using very hard sloping armor like ceramics. i’m just not fully sold (or well-versed) with DU sabot rounds. even though the slug diameter is only around 50% of the gun bore, the weight of the slug must approach that of a modest full caliber round. that means there is not much gain in velocity over a full-caliber round. with tungsten slugs, velocity gain is around 200%. so the advantage with DU must be greater energy concentrated in a smaller area.
then again, DU armor is supposed to have “no yield” so how will it react with a high speed DU slug, or tungsten (harder but lighter than DU?) the old LOSAT missiles can defeat the abrams’ DU, i just just don’t know what happened and why the LOSAT is a no-go. i might be outdated on this though.
Apparently, by the most recent combat experience – the 2nd Iraq war – armor is winning the battle against armor-piercing.
There were a number of Abrams tanks that were disabled in the war – not necessarily by battle damage. The military decided to destroy them rather than risk them falling into enemy hands. Supposedly, point blank fire from other Abrams tanks was unable to penetrate and destroy the disabled ones.
I’ll look around for a cite for this.
just a question for the boyo, with all due prespect: which is more powerful, given equal circumstances and ammo: the rheinmetall 120mm or the soviet 125mm?
Jeez, I got no clue. The Abrams has won all the tank fights against Russian gear, but whether it’s a superior gun, or superior armor, or even superior training, I wouldn’t know.
I haven’t found a decent cite for my claim above yet. The Wiki page on the Abrams makes a brief mention of what I said – that Americans had a great deal of trouble destroying their own tanks – but that’s hardly authoritative.
just by numbers, the russian seems to win out but with better ammo and different stages/foci of tank and armor development of the two sides, the german seems better at the moment.
the weird thing, both designs are more than 30 years old.
The advantage of the long narrow rod is that it will have the same energy as a fatter, shorter slug; but that energy is expended on a much smaller area, thus making it easier to penetrate.
The problem is that circumstances and ammunition aren’t equal. The ammunition available to the 120 has far better armor penetration, is more accurate out to longer ranges thanks to a superior ballistic computer, and isn’t burdened by an auto-loader. Auto-loaders, particuarly the one used by the former Soviet 125 have major problems and baggage associated with them. They can only fire 8 rounds a minute, even a mediocre crew manually reloading can get rounds out of a 120 faster than this. The gun barrel on the 125 also has to return to a specific elevation for the reloading process and while it is then supposed to return to the elevation that it started from it was rarely exact so follow up shots on the same target if the first round had missed or failed to destroy or visibly disable the target subsequent shots suffered in accuracy compared to manual loading. Ammunition also has be stored in a hopper in the crew compartment of the turret to be fed to the autoloader meaning a round penetrating the turret has a very good chance of setting off the ammunition killing the entire crew and causing the Jack-in-the-box effect where the turret is blown off of the chassis dozens of meters into the air. Modern manually loaded tanks usually have the ammunition in the turret separated from the crew compartment by a panel that is only open when the loader draws a fresh round from it. The ammunition compartment has ‘blow-out’ panels where the armor is deliberately made thinner so an explosion in the ammunition compartment will be directed outwards away from the crew and prevent the jack-in-the-box effect.
Other alleged advantages of the auto-loader are reduced crew size and a smaller tank with a reduced silhouette. Having only 3 crew rather than 4 means one less warm body to perform daily maintenance and other tasks required of the crew. This was made particularly worse with early versions of the 125 autoloader in the T-64, which had the nasty habit of getting a limb or clothing caught in it resulting in horrific disfiguring injuries or even death. The cramped crew compartment to keep the tank as small as possible didn’t help this problem. The small turret size also meant that the T-64/T-72/T-80 series could only depress the gun it -5 degrees, meaning it could not take a proper hull-down position, attempting to do so could even expose the thinly armored underbelly of the tank to direct fire as can be seen on this diagram.
