Yes, I realise this is not in fact a brilliant idea but I am not an engineer and I was wondering what the effect would be.
I recently watched a Youtube clip about firing various guns into a swimming pool, to the surprise of the people doing it the larger and heavier rounds actually lost momentum much more quickly than slower and lighter ammunition types.
I have just finished reading about tanks and various means to protect them. What, if any, protection would placing blocks filled with three or four inches of water around various parts of the tank provide against various tank rounds AP, APFDS, HEAT etc? I’m aware that water is incompressible and in the experiement above the bullets slowed almost to a stop within inches of entering the pool.
Let’s assume, for a second, that whatever amount of water you used, did, in fact work.
The main problem I see is the weight. I know, steel weighs more, but water sloshes, water leaks, water has to be sealed around all the gaps…steel, they just rivet it on and over lap it, done.
But bigger than that. One shot and it’s over, the water is drained out. Even if you make sections, the shooter still knows that they just have to hit the same area twice and they’re through. I think that would really be the problem. With steel, if I hit an area with some kind of artillery, the steel deforms and if I hit it right there again, the people inside will probably still be okay. With water, after the first shot, all the armor is gone. It’s like a video game where you just have to jump on/shoot the bad guy twice. After the first time he flashes, then the second time he’s gone.
There might be better ways, but I don’t think any kind of liquid would be it.
Now, I’m going to hit Submit and see if someone already simul-posted with how it’s already in use and works great.
Have you calculated how much weight 3-4 inches of water and the frame to hold it would add to the tank? Have you compared the stopping effects of 3-4 inches of water versus modern composite materials that include depleted uranium? Using water that’s heavier and less protective than armor and going to drain out of the blocks after a hit doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Looking at firing human-carried guns into a swimming pool and coming up with tank armor ideas is kind of silly. Rifle bullets are going to bounce off of the armor on any tank from late WW2 on, so seeing that they stop in a foot of water isn’t all that surprising. An M1-Abrahms main gun is estimated to punch through more than 20 inches of steel plate, so expecting a couple of inches of water to do much to it is a tad on the optimistic side.
I’m not really sure what answer you’re expecting, ‘your water system is probably heavier and less effective than modern composite armors and probably even WW2 era steel’ seems to sum it up.
There was nothing sarcastic in my post, I asked if you had figured out the approximate weight of your proposed contraption, and whether you had compared the effectiveness of the armor you want to use against actual armor in use. I suspect the answers to those questions are going to be ‘quite a lot’ and ‘way less’, but I’m certainly not going to put effort into calculating or comparing after your response.
I thought you were being sarcastic from this sentence, if not I apologise. But its pretty obvious from my OP that I don’t think its actually going to work.
The first post after mine mentions reactive armor. I’ve never heard of it (or I have and I’m just not familiar with the term), so I checked the wiki page for it, and right near the top it specifically says “Reactive armor can be defeated with multiple hits in the same place”, so, I’m not that far off with my theory. Don’t forget, this isn’t like hitting a moving target with a rifle at 300m and then doing it again a few minutes later. This could be hitting a non-moving tank with a large caliber gun leaving an 8 inch welt in the side of it, then quickly firing off another round without making any adjustments to your equipment.
Apparently there’s also something called Tandem-Charges which are designed (in part) for just this application. They’re projectiles that initially damage the armor just like any other round, then detonate in the now damaged area.
I have a relative who worked on something similar to these at some point. He even mentioned some of them that delayed the second charge for up to 24 hours. The idea was that they could be dropped on, say a road or airport runway and the second charge would detonate when people would show up to start rebuilding. FTR, he didn’t work on the actual bombs, he’s just an engineers that happened to make timers that were used for that and probably things in your own house.
I have heard that the military has experimented with ooblek-like materials for use in body armor: It’s flexible enough for free movement, but acts solid when hit by a high-speed bullet.
I don’t know what the results of those experiments were, though.
I think any solid material would work better than water, assuming you use the same amount (same mass). It’s mainly the water’s mass that stops the bullet. All materials have mass. Any solid material has greater tensile strength than water.
I have though of water armor, and think it could be used, perhaps a very cheap, one shot type of armor. Easily defeatable with some sort of scatter shot blast, but it’s one protectected shot and would require the enemy to carry different types of ammunition.
I would say it’s water’s incompressibility and it’s inability to get out of it’s own way when a high speed object strikes it. Basically the projectile has to accelerate a lot of water all at once to make it’s path.
Not a crazy idea at all. A liquid like water or diesel fuel has around 3 times as much resistance to chemical energy armor piercing warheads, aka shaped charges or HEAT, as steel per unit weight. However it takes up a lot more space, and as mentioned obviously it has the problem of the protection flowing out if there’s a hit, not just at the exact spot of the hit (which isn’t very likely to be hit again) but over whatever area is covered by a particular tank of liquid above the hole. Also the protection systems of modern tanks rely mainly on materials other than steel, and particular combinations of their properties, so steel ‘rolled homogeneous armor’ (RHA), is only a general benchmark and being superior to it doesn’t mean optimal.
But for example the front fuel tanks on a US M1 tank are considered part of the protection system (outweighing the potential flammability, and yes, the tank is less well protected if it’s almost out of fuel), and in general the research on alternative tank armors after WWII culminating in modern composite armor arrays considered liquids.
Of course liquids, water or oil, were also a part of the protection systems of armored warships, particularly vs. underwater explosions.
That sentence was a simple and direct statement of my opinion, there was nothing sarcastic about it. When you move from rifles to anti-tank guns, you’re talking about at least an order of magnitude better penetration. I’d be happy to stand behind an wall with inch of hardened steel on it while you fire rifles with regular ammo at it from 100 yards away, only if you go up to a .50BMG rifle with armor piercing ammo are you going to make me worry. (I’ve actually got 25% more armor than I think I’d need based on a quick google, but I wouldn’t bet my life on that). If you’re firing a tank gun, I wouldn’t take the chance on standing behind two feet of hardened steel. A few inches of water will significantly deflect a rifle bullet, but I wouldn’t expect it to be even very noticeable to an armor piercing tank round.
Setting aside modern sophisticated armor, and speaking of plain old simply resisting penetration by the bulk of the material itself, we have that if water has a density = 1, steel has a density = 7.6 to 8 depending on alloy. Big difference.
What about using high pressure directed water streams to deflect or slow projectiles before they hit the tank? Using radar or other imaging tech and near future electronics, the targeting could be perfected within a few years. The question to me is: can the system create enough pressure and react fast enough to reduce damage? If so, how much does it weigh compared to its utility?
I have read about space ship shielding, and one solution I found somewhere suggested that a few meters of water can reduce cosmic ray radiation significantly, and provide some self-repair ability. The idea is that if there is some spongy material on the outside of a space ship, and it is hit with a small projectile that causes a small leak, the water would flow out and freeze, plugging the hole until a repair-bot shows up to take care of things.
I wonder if using water in a Kevlar-like spongy layer (between hard layers) could help reduce projectile penetration by converting momentum to steam, cooling the shield materials so it holds for longer, and allowing the outer armor to flex so it can absorb extra energy. Again, I think this would be more useful for a spaceship than a tank, but you never know.