Talk:Composite armour

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Abbreviations[edit]

Can someone in the know clean up the abbreviation mess? I think I'm fairly well read in (military) history and current physics, but I cannot make anything out of RHA, DOI, ERA, EDZ. Others may even have trouble with APFSDS and HEAT. Stephan Schulz

Done, although RHA still defeats me. Dan100 11:36, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)

RHA means Rolled Homogeneous Armo(u)r. Rolled as opposed to cast and homogeneous as opposed to face-hardened. It's quite an antiquated navy term from even before WWI, I believe.

HEAT is an abbreaviation of High Explosive Anti Tank round.

MWAK--84.27.81.59 13:47, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Shaped charges[edit]

Some anonymous poster (IP# 81.62.59.111) wrote this:


It is incorect!
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.

Can anyone confirm this? I have never heard anything about it before, though I don't doubt that the former Soviet Union did deploy some form of composites.

europrobe 22:45, 2003 Dec 17 (UTC)


The history of the use of composite armour for Soviet tanks is extremely complicated. In the Fifties, the physicist Karolyev (Koroljof) researched, in the context of rocket development, the properties of several ceramics. Soon tank developers learned of the excellent qualities of boron carbide, and the help it could offer to protect their creations against HEAT (kumulatif) attack. So the very first T-64's were equiped with a BC-composite. Then the time came to make the transition to full massproduction. And now the central committee that at first had been so pleased with the superior fighting power of their new tank, became, on being shown the projected costs, strangely hesitant to spend the equivalent of 50 billion dollars on its armour alone. The producers were ordered to come up with something much cheaper. Quickly. They did. And the result was chaos. Having in fact been given the liberty to do what they wanted, as long as they remained within spending limits, each zavod fitted their version of their tank type with every possible and impossible configuration; and worse, they frequently changed these configurations during the production run, reflecting shortages of materials, money and manpower. Very rarely now boron carbide could be applied; if available industrial grade silicon carbide was favored; if not, anything at hand would be used: alumina, silicon oxyde, laminated steel, just steel or even simply nothing (giving the concept of "spaced armour" a whole new meaning). The only thing that mattered was whether the production quotae were met and the budget limits not exceeded. This is why the the text in the lemma is so deceptive: although the numbers are more or less the official ones, they are only accurate for "show models", test vehicles that were specially "cared" for. The average soviet tank falls far below the official specifications.

However, while production standards were in decline, at the same time the very capable Soviet engineers kept inventing better and yet cheaper composites. Also they resorted to the obvious expedience of simply thickening the armour. This other movement, towards better quality of protection, got a new impetus in the early Eighties by the introduction of ERA. The military eagerly pushed the production of reactive armour, as it promised an easy escape from industrial incompetence. At the same time the very existence of ERA had somehow to be justified. Why was it necessary, if Soviet armour technology was so advanced? The real answer: you never know exactly what the zavod has deigned to put in your tank, is of course not acceptable. So the pretence was created that all that composite armour was never meant to stop those nasty big ATGW's in the first place, just normal, common ("massive") HEAT-rounds and LAW's. You never heard them say that in 1972, though.

Confused? We were, in the Seventies, when every other month an excited agent sent in a report that now the real secret of Soviet armour had at last been revealed. But the poor guys on the oher side were too, as even a humble company commander could not be sure that all the tanks in his unit had the same protection level. Nobody held track.

As we are talking about confusion anyway, it might be added that the lemma is very confused about some western tanks also...

MWAK

Wow. First paragraph is pure fantasy (GREAT exaggeration at best), as for second, in reality "soviet military" resisted even the very idea of ERA by all means! Only after succesful employment of (their own version) ERA by the israelis, old soviet projects were pulled back from the shelf and given a new life. 195.98.64.69 03:30, 12 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

In the line about Desert Storm, the fact that M1's killed tanks outto five miles isn't very relevant to armour, is it? That has to do with weaponry.--MaxMad 10:51, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Worse: it was a Challenger that did it! :o)

MWAK--84.27.81.59 23:23, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

How could UK tanks have destroyed 300 Iraqi tanks in 1991 when they fired less than 100 DU rounds (mostly in training)? Were they mainly using a different type of round? Also agree that the 'five miles' tid-bit ain't too useful, so removing it for now. Dan100 18:56, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

The British troops met mostly T-55's. Against those a HEAT-round would be indicated, I suppose. It's best to spare your sabots for an emergency. Also the curved turret of the T-55 will sometimes deflect the penetrator. And as the Challenger is much less vulnerable to HEAT-rounds, there's a lessened chance of fratricide.

MWAK--84.27.81.59 13:47, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

And of course they used HESH-rounds :oS.--MWAK 18:28, 23 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Changed. Dan100 11:36, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)

Composite armour research during WWII[edit]

An comment on sci.military.moderated [1] has few details about composite materials research during WWII, especially by Soviet Union. Pavel Vozenilek 23:46, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Chobham armour[edit]

It seems to me that this article is pretty much redundant as it is all covered in Chobham armour?Billlion 08:55, 14 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree since Chobham is just one, well known type of composite armour.--Senor Freebie (talk) 13:33, 22 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This article seems to focus on chobham armor instead of composite armor in general. The description solely mentions how chobham armor works, but doesn’t even give a passing mention to other types. Obviously composite armor is a hard topic to fully break down, owing to the fact that so much information is classified, but there’s definitely enough to broadly describe other types instead of focusing so much on chobham. The focus on chobham makes significant portions of this article entirely redundant to chobham down wiki page. Deathdragon228 (talk) 21:55, 11 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Compound vs. composite armor[edit]

What's the relation between composite- and the 19th century compound armor? The basic principle - combining different materials with different protective qualities - is very much the same. To my understanding, which may well be faulty, the use of layered armors had been discontinued between the end of the compound armor in the 1890ies and the invention of the chobham armour - which en.WP says is an instance of composite armor - in the 1960ies. Can the compound a. still be called a predecessor of the composite a.? Could it even make sense to integrate them into one article? -- 790 (talk) 09:09, 14 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The difference is what it is trying to "do". Compound armor was built in an era of low-quality brittle steels that would shatter when stressed. The compounding attempted to back the steel with a softer material to help it absorb the impact. Composite armors were developed in an era of HEAT rounds which "burned" their way through the plate. The ultimate armor against HEAT would be a large chunk of jello, but this would do little against KE. Composite attempts to combine two very different concepts into one armor, while compound was making up for poor quality metals. Similar but different? Maury (talk) 16:36, 12 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, that sheds some light on the difference of the concepts. But now I'm not quite sure if you get the concept of HEAT right, as to my knowledge, the destructive power of these shaped charge projectiles is not based on heat, as the name would suggest, but rather on swaging, which takes place at comparatively low temperatures - so, projectiles based on kinetic energy wouldn't really be a contrary to HEAT. -- 790 (talk) 11:47, 14 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
All too true! But there is history here, if you look up references from the 1950s you will often find language about "burning". I'm not sure if this was a real misunderstanding of the physics (which I doubt) or a deliberate simplification on the part of the lay press or the people feeding them this information. In either event, the basic idea of composite armor is the break up the jet; one way to do this is to use air spaces like the MBT-70 or Leopard 2 (sorta in the later), or any sort of low-density material that would "scrub" it down. Steel will do this too, but only at a thickness that would make the tank too heavy. Modern armors, at least the ones from the 70/80s, were far more "solid" than these designs, but used alternate materials like ceramics that had a high inter-grain adhesion to maximize the energy between you and the penetrator (of any sort). DU does the same, but through pure mechanical density. Maury (talk) 12:26, 14 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Information bias?[edit]

It seems to me there might be an information bias here to a small degree. The article mentions explicitly the success of the Chobham armour in the first war against Iraq but it fails to mention that it has since been defeated, while not on a regular basis, at least a few times by RPG's and shells in the second, more intense ground war. A reader, unitiated in these facts might make the assumption that this stuff is veritable gold and unpenetrable!--Senor Freebie (talk) 13:36, 22 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

What about "Super Dolly Parton"?[edit]

Elsewhere in the wiki, when reading about the T-64 it mentions the "Super Dolly Parton" armor, rubber encased in steel. It's actually mentioned on a number of pages about add-armor and things of that nature, while being brought up in a lot of books and websites. So I want to know why it's not mentioned on this page when the composite armor invented before and after is brought up? 68.3.68.53 (talk) 20:48, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Glass stronger than steel? Yeah right.[edit]

"The stopping power of glass exceeds that of steel armour on a thickness basis and in many cases glass is more than twice as effective as steel on a thickness basis."

Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaah no. While glass is significantly harder than most steels it does not have more 'stopping power'. A shot that would ricochet off a 1/4" steel plate will shatter a pane of glass four times the thickness. It is, however, more disruptive to the jets produced by HEAT rounds, and when sandwiched between two steel plates can better absorb more energy. I'd change this myself, but what the article really needs is someone a bit more in-the-know on the subject. Xander T. (talk) 00:20, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Fused silica is a lot harder and stronger than ordinary soda lime glass, and with adequate hydrostatic confinement, backing and densification its thickness efficiency relative to RHA is greater than 1. This is the point of composite armors, that different components of the system have synergistic effects. I agree that the text leaves the reader with the wrong impression, but frankly the entire article makes me weep for its gross oversimplifications and misrepresentations. Doing the topic justice would require a book (or several). Perhaps it could be rewritten to resemble the Food article: a highly general description, lacking mention of specific materials and effects, with sub-articles for specific subtopics. Like the Food article, Composite armor is dealing with a topic of tremendous scope. TTK (talk) 00:21, 16 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This is a direct quote more or less from here: www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=AD0524050 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.190.109.88 (talk) 08:29, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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