The installation of ERA on T-64A, T-72A and T-80B tanks, that already had sufficiently powerful armor plating, virtually depreciated at once the existing arsenals of antitank guided weapons of potential adversaries and brought to the foreground the armor-piercing finstabilized discarding sabot projectiles. |
 his question has arisen after the advent of armored vehicles which consequently involved the problem of their protection. Since that time, the competition has progressed with variable success.
 |
| T-72S tank with apron ERA |
While the main destruction weapons were kinetic energy armor-piercing projectiles, the competition proceeded by increasing the dimensions of the gun caliber, the armor thickness, or the armor inclination angles. This development can be traced to battles between German and Soviet tank armaments and armor during World War II. The advent of hard-core armor-piercing projectiles for tank and antitank guns brought little change to the protection concept. Shaped-charge projectiles made a revolution in terms of their penetrating power compared to the protective abilities of homogeneous steel armor. The problem of armor enhancement could not be resolved conventionally owing to the unacceptable increase in tank weight. This gave an impetus to the development of a new generation of Soviet tanks (T-64, T-72, T-80) which were provided with combined frontal armor that included such fillers as glass textolite and ceramics. They ensured abnormally high protective anticumulative properties which correspond with those predicted by the hydrodynamic theory of Academician M. Lavrentyev, who had substantiated the advantage of relatively light fillers over steel armor when affected by a cumulative jet. The nature of this anomaly rests mainly in the active destructive effect of the cavity-surrounding filler on the cumulative jet. The effect is due to the release of energy accumulated by the filler during the passage of the cumulative jet, as well as to the released internal energy of the filler itself when glass and ceramics are used as fillers. The advent of such combined armor became possible due to the purpose-oriented and well-coordinated work of a host of fundamental and applied science institutes working under the supervision of talented scientists and specialists. At the same time, the problem was solved for protection against fin-stabilized armor-piercing discarding sabot (APDS) projectiles, whose penetrators contained tungsten carbide or tungsten cores, as well as against the high-explosive squash head (HESH) projectiles which contained plastic explosive. Since then, armor protection had to be designed while keeping in mind two rival destruction weapons: the APDS projectiles and the HEAT (shaped charge) ammunition. It should be noted that the combined frontal armor of the Soviet tanks in the 1970s ensured their protection not from the entire range of shaped-charge ammunition but against the most massive ammunition of the time, such as the HEAT projectiles for the 105mm tank and the antitank gun, and shaped-charge grenades. The competition of the tank armor with antitank ammunition continued until the early 1980s. Further upgrading of fillers ensured the protection against HEAT projectiles from 120mm rifled guns.
 |
| 1. Condition of cumulative jet
after penetration of ceramics |
At the same time, the arsenals of all countries continued to accumulate antitank guided missiles with HEAT warheads whose penetrating ability was 1.2 to 1.5 times higher than that of HEAT projectiles and, hence, exceeded the protective properties of tank armor. full article is available for subscribes only
|
|
