Re: New 'electrical active' Armour to defeat hand held anti-tank rounds

On Tuesday, August 20, 2002, at 02:59 PM, KH.Ranitzsch@t-online.de
wrote:
> http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,539143,00.html
Ah, interesting...

> Does anybody have an idea about how good it would be against kinetic
> energy penetrators ? As these are metal, too, they should have some
> effect.
I'm obviously not privvy to the research but basic physics allows us to 
have a guess. I suspect the charge difference is very good at disrupting

the copper jet partly because copper is a very good conductor (duh) and 
partly because the jet is in in liquid/gaseous form and therefore quite 
easy to disrupt from the nice jet shape that's required to get best 
penetration. If the penetrator was still solid and was made out of a 
metal that was much less conductive, the charge difference probably 
wouldn't be enough to pump enough energy into the penetrator to blow it 
apart. Even if it did, you'd just end up with a 'shotgun' penetrator 
rather than a solid block which might not help all that much.

One obvious side effect would be it would be good for keeping infantry 
off your vehicle. From now on all soldiers will be supplied with new 
army boots with rubber soles :).

> Guess we need one more armour category in DS2 beyond ablative and
> reactive ;-)
And all tank maintenance engineers will be called 'sparky' :).

					TTFN
						Jon
--
I don't know the answers and I'm trying not to get hung up on the