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

Jonathan White schrieb:
> 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
> 
> > 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. 

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.

Greetings