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Electric Armor
Ch_Omega and others wrote in about a new type of reactive armor in development. As far as I can tell, what they're talking about is essentially large capacitors on the outside of the vehicle, charged up by the vehicle's electrical system. Anti-tank warheads use a shaped charge to create a jet of molten copper that pierces armor, but in this case, when the jet bridges the capacitor plates, it immediately becomes a conductor for X coulombs of current, which effectively vaporizes and disrupts it enough that it won't pierce the vehicle's armor. (Conventional reactive armor does the same thing with explosives.) Interesting idea, if it works.
No, you'd somehow have to peirce the outer plate to get a discharge... I wonder if this will have any side effects on electronics, though? Also, would anyone inside be able to hear after a round hit? Even if it didn't penetrate, it would be like being trapped in a gong... which is still better than being dead, though.
Basically, the system can protect the weaker areas of a tank (the top or back) or a smaller, more moderately armored vehicle from HEAT attacks.
It's not good on too-lightly armored vehicles as even a dispersed molten copper spray will do some nasty damage. It's not good for the front of a main battle tank because they're all impervious to HEAT rounds anyways.
It also doesn't protect a tank from the most lethal of tank killing objects - the discarding sabot "long-rod" penetrator. Which is essentially a long, pointy rod of some appropriately dense material (depleted uranium being popular) that uses pure kinetic energy to annihilate the other tank.
So it is a useful technology, but some people are getting far too excited about it. It's a solution to a couple of problems - namely that battle tanks can't have heavy armor everywhere and that medium vehicles are sitting ducks for anti-tank rounds.
Yes, antennae are targets, but I've never see an armored vehicle with out them ( and I servered 6 years in a armored division. ) In fact, US tankers are trained to shoot at the target with the most antennae as that is most likely a command vehicle or otherwise crucial to the cooridnation of the enemy.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson
This kinda sorta sounds like what Archer does to the Enterprise everytime he goes into battle (yes, I know it's just fictional entertainnment, calm your ass down). Remember all the /.ers scoffing at the "bring the armor plating online" script line for the first episode this season?
But the thing is, sabot rounds can only be fired by large, hypervelocity tank cannon. These days, that is a much rarer threat than small, man-portable HEAT weapons like RPGs which are in abundance. The foes Western powers are most likely to face have precious few tanks, but a hell of a lot of RPGs. This system will potentially allow much lighter vehicles to enjoy the same protection against HEAT weapons that only the heaviest of tanks today have. This could make lightweight tanks viable, which is important as the weight of current MBTs prohibits their being able to be quickly deployed to a crisis.
I know this because Tyler knows this.
In order to be man portable (one soldier can carry the entire system himself) the weapon cannot carry effective tandem warheads. And the whole reason that the TOW II was designed (tandem warhead, top down attack) is that the TOW IB, which had the largest warhead of its generation of ATGM's, was not able to effectively penetrate the laminate style armor used on Challenger, the M1, and the Leopard II. An RPG hit to the rear or flank of the tank might get a mobility kill, although even that is questionable. The RPG hit my tank took was on the turret flank, no penetration, some minor damage to the sponson box on that side of the tank (tool stowage).
The new top down attack ATGM's like TOW II, Milan, etc. are quite effective against tanks, until the tank crew starts putting effective fire on the missile crew, since they have to hold their sites on the tank for as long as 15 seconds. A main gun round and several hundred machine gun rounds will just screw up your whole day.
In my universe I'm perfectly normal, it's not my fault you don't live in my universe.
The M1A1C and M1A2 armor is highly classified. But not because of some super secret surface coating. The surface coating, and this isn't classified, is designed to easily shed battlefield chemical weapons, like Sarin gas. The coating can actually withstand Sarin for up to 24 hours.
What's underneath that is so secret that if a tank crew breaches their armor and sees what's under the surface they are immediately quarantined until they can be debriefed by Army Intelligence types. They have to sign stringent non-disclosure agreements and could spend many long years in Leavenworth for disclosing what they saw.
There is no way that a surface coating would be effective against the primary tank killer, the long rod penetrator, since it is a kinetic energy weapon. That's pretty basic physics.
In my universe I'm perfectly normal, it's not my fault you don't live in my universe.