Tank Warfare: Russian Armour vs Western Armour

Overkill. The 3BM-69/70 subcaliber shots are massive; they utilize a recalibrated version of the Object 195 vertical carousel:


They also pierce only slightly less armor than actual 152 mm APFSDS on account of the slower muzzle velocity - as they use pretty much the same shafts. As they are these rounds would have no problems piercing the very latest M1A2 SEPv3 at 3km, front to back.

Instead the 3BM-69/70 are almost exclusively designed to counter an Armata-level threat. Anything lower and 3BM-59/60 is more than enough.

Not that it matters much, since the 3BM-59/60 rounds have already done one of their main tasks without being fired once in anger. By forcing the Aybraps to adopt even more deadweight armor they pushed the weight of the Abrams way past the point of capacity of NATO's military and civilian transport infrastructure:

Good luck deploying and sustaining these hunks of steel in Eastern Europe's less developed infrastructure. Instead of an unbreakable spear tip NATO got a heavy ball and chain in the Aybraps - great job btw.

My concern was highlighted after checking the below video .

Anyone else thinking that enormous area of upper hull with a super thin sheet of plain old metal armour with no layers or special materials that stops very energetic rounds simply because of the plate angle means it is slicing down the metal rather than punching through is a bit suspect?

I mean such a thin piece of steel will heat up with the penetration, and a battle zone is not flat... if it is driving downwards the plate is exposed to a much shallower angle... I mean even a shaped charge hand grenade or 40mm grenade launcher grenade would punch through that like a hot knife through butter... it seems to be a small area at line of sight but from above it is a huge area that most shaped charge top attack weapons could penetrate easily.

The video above shows the APFSDS penetrator being obliterated by the impact but is that true?

The forces on the penetrator are enormous but would it just vapourise like it appears to do in that simulation?

When penetrating vertical armour plate it would be pushing aside rather more material than what it is pushing aside in this simulation, and Soviet and Russian penetrators tend to be thicker and heavier than much thinner western penetrators...

The video above shows the APFSDS penetrator being obliterated by the impact but is that true?

The simulation shows perfectly fine penetration.
It is designed to work like that in order to minimalize ricochet.

Let's focus on some principles here.
The top hull plate of M1 is made of steel 2' thick.
TWO INCHES.
That's it.
Seeing it for the first time, one can be surprised.
It is very sloped indeed, but at the end of a road, we have approx. 380 mm of RHAe LOS equivalent.
And that should tell us one more thing: this is a base level of protection M1 was constructed with and applies to every single part of a frontal armor package varying from 350 to about 400 mm of RHAe.
That's it.
And that applies to ALL western tanks of the era, that is L2 and Ch2 as well. Actually, Ch2 was even less protected, the project for shah was designed with maximal protection of about 350 mm. A quantum leap over the Chieftain's 250 mm of mild steel, yet ...

So only by having the basics, we can make calculations and opinions.

What we have is a perfectly fine penetration made with old projectile, and appliable to every single M1 in service, no matter the fancy letters.
This penetration leaves the driver dead, and the tank out of action with 99% guarantee.

These simulations are quite fine but do not consider one important parameter.
That is the angle of impact.
Even very fast penetrating rods are not being shot with a 0 angle for longer distances. For 2000m, it won't hit absolutely head-on, which is the simulation's most important element. Adding even a few deg to the impact geometry makes the relative LOS lower.
As Garry mentioned, tanks are dynamic. The terrain is dynamic. So those sims are only valid to some degree.

That reminded me of my nice chit-chat with already mentioned lt. col. with his "even Hellfire haven't managed!" contested with Soviet-era 3BK29, which pierced 850 mm - much better than the Hellfire

ahmedfire wrote:
My concern was highlighted after checking the below video

The shaft design is all wrong - GIGO:

The 3BM42 APFSDS is a 1986 round with a complex segmented Tungsten penetrator design - one of the first such examples, if not the first. The Aybraps upper front plate is the same sheet of steel since the first M1 obr. 1978 designed when the Soviets were using all-steel ammo.

Use your common sense.

These sims also have some funky stuff going on with replicating normalizations - namely they can barely do them.

Also the front hull armor of the Aybraps has never been updated until the latest models.

Just goad them to attack out in the open and even the Mango will pierce the hull front to back.

That depends on what you consider "the latest models".
Different NERA panels structure was introduced quite fast, as only they figured that a brand new tank is actually behind the Soviet competitors decade older.
Still it was not a Wunderwaffe, just implementing some non metallic layers, and finally dense DU made net/rods.
Nothing fancy if we keep in mind "combination K" or "kvarz" or "korund" fillers used by the evil backward Soviets since the 60s.

Well, if all other tools fail Russia still has those little FAB-3000 bombs.

Kh-38 will deliver a 250kg payload to a target 40km+ away, which is about five times heavier than the 50kg IEDs that took out Abrams tanks in the Middle East.

An anti armour LMUR with a 30kg shaped charge warhead would be interesting if they don't already have it...

But Vikhr and Kornet and even Ataka and Khrisantema are already overkill.

There is a Combat Approved episode about Khrisantema where they actually have a cube of armour over 1m square that they hit and penetrate with a Khrisantema...

If you are using Smerch or Grad or Uragan then top attack HEAT submunitions would easily defeat an Abrams... the surface area of the front hull and the top of the enormous turret and the huge engine deck would make it an enormous target for top attack submunitions...

Grouping them together for an offensive it is going to be difficult to get enough fuel trucks in such a small area without being noticed.

Agreed... all the super HATO training in the world means nothing against enemy artillery and air power attacks...

Last year we read the panicked accounts of ex-HATO special forces veterans who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq and all sorts of other places as heroes leaving the conflict in Ukraine because they didn't like it when their own air power and artillery didn't work and the enemy had working air power and working artillery.

That sort of paradigm shift is all that is needed to make a fun game (where they die all the time in large numbers and your side rarely loses a tiny few or none at all) to a not so much fun game anymore.

During the cold war their enemies were tougher because they were supported and assisted, but post cold war their enemies have largely been on their own.

This is their first real peer enemy for 30 odd years... which is not to day the Serb air defence should have been a wakeup call for them just as an example.

Not to mention:

But to be honest all these "super tanks" will enter this battlefield with a huge disadvantage against Russian anti-armour weapons.

And that is the thing you are watching now bro.
Applies to every single Ukro structure.
They are being decimated at a fraction of the Russian cost.
And objectively it is scary.

ALAMO wrote:
That depends on what you consider "the latest models".
Different NERA panels structure was introduced quite fast, as only they figured that a brand new tank is actually behind the Soviet competitors decade older.
Still it was not a Wunderwaffe, just implementing some non metallic layers, and finally dense DU made net/rods.
Nothing fancy if we keep in mind "combination K" or "kvarz" or "korund" fillers used by the evil backward Soviets since the 60s

The Aybraps would not receive a heavy metal layer to its hull armor until the SEPv3. A full 30 years after the Mango has ripened.

It should 't come as a surprise, the Swedish leaks have long confirmed just how pathetic the Aybraps lower glacis really is:

The Aybraps would not receive a heavy metal layer to its hull armor until the SEPv3. A full 30 years after the Mango has ripened. Razz
It should 't come as a surprise, the Swedish leaks have long confirmed just how pathetic the Aybraps lower glacis really is:

SEPv2 is a model with DU elements in frontal hull armor, and I am sure about that - but that's a detail.
Anyway, only by inspecting the data you have provided, we can conclude that there were some changes to the front hull package.
Original M1 has quite a low CE factor, and that is perfectly understandable knowing how the armor package was constructed. Steel sheets with rubber shock absorbers and empty space are not much effective against a cumulative charge.
But we know from the history records, that ceramic elements for NERA structures started to be applied by the Germans with L2A4.
So here we are in our perfectly mid-80s.

As - again I will remind that - a whole project was common, technical solutions were common, and used patents were common for all the NATO tanks of a generation, there is no point in arguing that this improvements does not apply to M1.

That is why you can see a sharp increase of CE protection equivalent, it is perfectly adequate for using ceramic layers.
Was there a change in frontal hull armor composition for IP-HA-A2?
I am not sure.
But none of those retained the vanilla M1 layout, and that is sure.

ALAMO wrote:
SEPv2 is a model with DU elements in frontal hull armor, and I am sure about that - but that's a detail.

Anyway, only by inspecting the data you have provided, we can conclude that there were some changes to the front hull package.
Original M1 has quite a low CE factor, and that is perfectly understandable knowing how the armor package was constructed. Steel sheets with rubber shock absorbers and empty space are not much effective against a cumulative charge.
But we know from the history records, that ceramic elements for NERA structures started to be applied by the Germans with L2A4.
So here we are in our perfectly mid-80s.

As - again I will remind that - a whole project was common, technical solutions were common, and used patents were common for all the NATO tanks of a generation, there is no point in arguing that this improvements does not apply to M1.

That is why you can see a sharp increase of CE protection equivalent, it is perfectly adequate for using ceramic layers.
Was there a change in frontal hull armor composition for IP-HA-A2?
I am not sure.
But none of those retained the vanilla M1 layout, and that is sure.

You misunderstood - the Swedish leaks configuration is the one with the upgraded hull armor. Yeah...

The SEPv3 is the only one with DU. The weight increase between SEPs is simply too small to account for the DU layer for the hull, and can be better explained away by known additions like APU, RWS and such. Only the SEPv3 has the extra mass budget for a reinforcement of the hull armor with a heavy DU armor.

The-thing-next-door wrote:
As far as I am aware western tanks use light NERA, which is good against CE, but not very volume efficient against KE, so you can expect to subtract 100-200mm effective KE resistance from western tanks when comparing their arrays to the more volume efficient Russian ones.

Russian armor can afford to be much denser compared to Western analogues because the turret design removes the need for side armor. Most of the armor weight can thus be distributed to the massive turret cheeks.

Yes, I know that, as it represented the Murican struggle to compete with Strv122
Highly unlikely
But you can keep my word for SEPv2, I have those in a backyard
The point is I guess that the mass parameters are highly doubtful.
There is a "short tone" vs. metric tone, while the first one is 907 kg.
A lot of Anglosaxon made materials refer to the short one, as it is calculated from the pound both share.
SEPv2 weighs 71 short tones, which equals <65 metric.
SEPv3 weighs 73 short/66 metric.
There is a quite impressive, about 3t weight increase in all the milestone generations, that is M1/M1A1HA/M1A2.
And the latest was tested with additional weight balance welded on the turret front, so expect another weight increase as they will hit 70 metric shortly.

Russian armor can afford to be much denser compared to Western analogues because the turret design removes the need for side armor. Most of the armor weight can thus be distributed to the massive turret cheeks.

There is much less area to be covered first of all, and that is because of superb engineering rather than compromising ergonomy.

The trick is to subtract a tenth to get the metric.

Doesn't help that apparently there are several mods on the SEPv2 and we're probably talking about different versions of a version of the tank...

But anyway, point still remains: the Aybraps front hull is a very vulnerable target for any anti-weapon that is even remotely considered modern. And they used the same design for their possible next gen MBTs....

You can see it by yourself and make your own conclusions I guess.