DD000
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My initial thought was that the tip was designed specifically to defeat K5, but according to the Swedish document, Kontakt-5 features an angled 17mm front cover plate. The tip looks to be about 20-25mm in length, but since the entire tip is a cone, the actual working length might be about half that. So the entire tip might be defeated by the cover plate alone. Furthermore, if a tiny thing like that stuck to the front of a long rod could defeat K5, then there would be no need for the much larger steel tip of the M829A3. Its purpose is rather perplexing to me.
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I've seen the notched tip design before, such as on the charm 3, but the notched tip on the swedish 120mm apfsds seems exceptionally tiny. It seems to me like the tip would be designed to penetrate the ERA/NERA panel without setting it off, although I'm not sure how it does that exactly. If it does set it off though, then it probably doesn't do much of anything. It's easy to see how it could be completely worn away by penetrating the outer plate and front NERA plate, especially if it was a thicker NERA plate of high hardness steel. So while it does technically have a special tip, it's so tiny that I don't think it would perform much differently than a "standard" rod without any special tip in this instance, at least for the test shots on the front wedge and high obliquity shots where it would have needed to penetrated a lot of steel before getting to the NERA filler material.
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Which british documents would those be? Edit: Also, if the Swedish CE protection estimates are exaggerated against tandem warheads, then could it also be said that their KE protection estimates are exaggerated against long rods with precursor tips like the M829A3 or those with special segmentation?
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Well, regardless of what the triple-charge design was supposed to do, apparently it didn't work that well, as the Russians haven't pursued such a design since, to my knowledge. Nor has any other nation even attempted to adopt such a design. Seems like the tandem charge is here to stay for the forseeable future.
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Wouldn't that depend on how much spacing there is between the main jet and tertiary jet? If the head of the main jet were touching or nearly touching the tail of the tertiary jet, then I imagine that the bulging of the NERA when initiated by the tertiary jet could still catch the main jet. My impression is that this isn't a true triple charge design in terms of delay between the 3 charges, but that the the main and tertiary charges are used to create a single long jet by precise timing. Also, something to keep in mind that having a hole in the middle of the main charge does decrease its efficiency. So perhaps a reason that this design hasn't caught on is that it's not the most mass efficient choice when designing a warhead.
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Yes. Just because it has the same energy doesn't mean it's going to do the same thing. The point of an HE fill is to create a cloud of fragments to cover a wide area. A metal slug impacting at 3 km/s is just going to create a big hole at the point of impact.
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I was going to comment on this yesterday, but I wanted to confirm something first. You can't really find the total RHAe penetration of two charges by just simply adding the precursor penetration to the main charge penetration. The crater produced by the precursor is small in diameter, so when the jet from the main charge arrives some of its energy is expended widening the crater due to the interactions between the jet particles and the walls of precursor crater. But even if the target material were sufficient low strength/low density that the precursor could create a crater wide enough that the entire main jet could reach the bottom without interacting the walls, there would still be issues. You'd run into a situation where the inner crater produced by the main jet is wider than the crater produced by the precursor closer to the surface. This crater profile redirects the penetration ejecta towards the path of the proceeding jet, disrupting it. Also, when material is inhibited from leaving the crater, penetration is degraded. When trying to optimize penetration with multiple charges/penetrators of different sizes, it's much more efficient to go from big to small than small to big. But this is a silly ordering when trying to defeat stuff like ERA. In the paper "Behavior of Segmented Rods During Penetration" by G. E. Hauver, there were experiments with segmented tungsten rods. They found that the tungsten segments were leaving too much residue at the bottom of the craters, that the subsequent segments had to penetrate, so they tried using gold segments. Gold being much weaker than the tungsten segments they used, and would thus erode more completely and leave less residue. But what they found was that the subsequent gold segments were getting destroyed by the redirected ejecta from the previous segments (due to the "scalloped" profile of the penetration craters).
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I tried looking through my papers for where I first saw it referenced, but all I could find were references to how a K-charge was used as the main charge in the Hellfire. It's possible that I was misremembering things, but considering that the reduced slug for precursors was one of the original selling points for the K-charge, it would be strange if it wasn't used for that purpose. A jet from a 40mm shaped charge would get pretty messed up from any typical NERA layer, but the overall influence of it would depend on how many NERA layers there are. If there were multiple NERA layers, then the precursor wouldn't do much. If there was only a single thick NERA layer, then the influence of the precursor would be much greater.
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Main Ground Combat System (MGCS) and Euro Main Battle Tank (EMBT)
DD000 replied to FORMATOSE's topic in Mechanized Warfare
Quick question. Usually there are export models of MBTs with the armor downgraded when sold to other nations, to keep the design of their best armors secret. Was this not the case when the Leclercs were sold to the UAE? Did the Leclercs have indigenous armor? -
If that were the case, then I don't expect the precursor to do much at all, since most precursors are tiny in comparison to the main charge. However, I was thinking that since apparently NERA is a major component in a lot composite armors, then the precursor could pacify an entire NERA plate or two for the main charge, which I imagine would be fairly significant. It all depends on the exact layout and design of the armor. Although given how long tandem warheads have been around, I would be surprised if modern armors didn't take them into account. Also, there are modern shaped charge designs such as the K-charge that are designed to produce minimal slug, and are used as the precursor in a lot of modern western ATGMs for that reason.
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Very late to the party, but in the swedish document where it describes the protection estimates for the Leopard 2 improved, it assumes a single charge for the CE protection value, right? I'm curious as to how tandem charges would affect those estimates, as pretty much all serious atgm threats these days are tandem charges.
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I had originally sent this as a PM, but I'm going to post this here as well for general critique and stuff.
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This is interesting. Also very useful. What's the source for this exactly? One thing that jumps out to me is that the values for the mass efficiency against APFSDS is similar to the values you'd expect against small arms bullets, which lends credence to the theory that the nano-ceramics used in the AMAP modules would be about as efficient against long rods as they would against AP bullets. What does it say for the 6th material down? The one with a density of 1.0 - 1.1 g/cc. (Also, it triggers me that the rows for the material and values in the second table aren't aligned...)
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Just to clarify something, is the 0.6 TE and 6 ME for glass in comparison to RHA for long rods or shaped charges? Those numbers seem feasible for a shaped charge in a laboratory setting with large spacing behind the module, as SM_HH attested to in his post, but the flow of your post seems to imply that those numbers were for long rods. Considering AMAP-B, one of the most advanced ceramic armour modules available, is designed specifically for defeating KE threats and advertises a ME of 'only' ~4.2, I have a hard time believing that whatever type of glass they used in those tests decades ago would be close to 50% more effective.
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Am I reading this right? This graph seems to state that there's a 120mm KE round introduced in 2003 that penetrates 950mm armour. I assume it's referring to the M829A3, but 950mm is way higher than even the most optimistic penetration estimates for it I've seen. There also seems to be a pretty large increase in protection from US 1992 levels to 2002 levels (from 650mm to 850mm). I also assume that this is the upgrade from the M1A2 to the M1A2 SEP, but it's surprising as well. I thought the SEP upgrades were mainly to its electronics, with some upgrades to its armour, but nothing so dramatic. Do you suppose that the CE protection to KE protection ratio has remained constant all this time? If the original M1 had 400mm KE protection and 750mm CE protection, then... M1A2: 650mm KE, 1219mm CE M1A2 SEP: 850mm KE, 1594mm CE