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

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>>>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
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>>good at disrupting the copper jet partly because copper is a very
>>
>good
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>>conductor (duh) and partly because the jet is in in liquid/gaseous
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>form and
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>>therefore quite easy to disrupt from the nice jet shape that's
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>required
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>>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
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>>penetrator to blow it apart. 
>>
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>I guess Oerjan would be the one who might best comment on this. A
>recent posting on the www.tank-net.org forums claimed that the
>penetrator jet of a hollow charge is not actually liquid or gaseous,
>but still a solid. 
>http://63.99.108.76/ubb/Forum3/HTML/000246.html
>The warhead liner is deformed by the charge into what is, effectively,
>a solid penetrator not too dissimilar to a KE round. I am inclined to
>believe this. Certainly I don't believe the 'gaseous' or 'plasma' or
>'burn-through' variants of the explanation of how a hollw-charge
>warhead works. Photos of hollow-charge damage I have seen all show
>rather clean small holes, which is not what I expect from a liquid
>hitting an object.
>
It is not a liquid or a solid but a plasma ( states of matter are solid,

liquid, gas, plasma and
superconductor now(more?)). It is an ionized gas which is first cousin 
to a blow torch and "burns"
through. Since it is ionized it can be effected by an E/M field and I 
suspect the plan is to
disrupt the jet (like a blow torch that is not adjusted properly) rather

then actually stopping it.

Kinetic rounds should not be effected in that the inertia of kinetic 
rounds is so high that it would
be like stopping a cannon ball with a tennis racket.

Before you start striping off armor this is not the only chemical round 
that there is. The British
used a shaped charge (fire a BB gun at a window and you'll see the 
effect) called a APSH
 (APSH - armor piercing squash head) which passed the inertia but did 
not penetrate. I also
talk with someone who talked about a solid penetrator that would be 
accelerated when
the round hit the vehicle. I got the impression that the penitrator was 
expensive and unstable
so hadn't been continued.

Scott Siebold

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