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In Reply to: RE: Armor to stop bullets posted by Chip647 on July 27, 2015 at 18:10:51
I've fired 30:30 'Accelerator' rounds which EASILY penetrated stuff my .223 firing full metal jacket surplus rounds would NOT.
Energy is Mass x Velocity SQUARED. So, while 30.30 may overlap SOME in bullet weight with a 30.06 or perhaps even a .308, the higher velocity of the .308 provided better downrange ballistics AND penetration.
And while you may think the diameter / thickness rule of thumb good, I'd rather consider frontal area vs velocity.
Tank guns in current service fire a round at nearly a mile-a-second velocity.
Too much is never enough
Follow Ups:
Yeah. Rough rule of thumb. Not counting modern composite, sloping armor seen in many tanks and other armored vehicles.
For instance, the Panzer III MBT originally had 30mm frontal armor. Basically, to combat 20-30mm guns of the time (1939-40). By early 1941, they up-rated the frontal armor to 50mm. To combat 37mm and 50mm AT rounds they faced in Western Europe.
In summer 1941 (Barbarossa), the PzIII met up with heavier Russian armor bearing the 76mm main gun. They once again, uprated the armor to 57mm with stand-off plates. By mid 1942, the Germans started pulling the PzIII from frontlines, due to inability to up-armor and up-gun, anymore.
The relative armor thickness is amazingly close to the round diameter, even today. The Abrahms tank has 110mm sloping, composite armor to combat AT sabot rounds from a 120mm Russian smooth bore.
we are 'mixing metaphors' here.
There are basically 2 ways to penetrate armor.
Kinetic means using mass / velocity and usually a VERY hard penetrator core. Depleted Uranium is one such Very Heavy material and Tungsten Carbide is harder than a whores heart. The WWII tanks you mention used HOMOGENIOUS armor, the 'same' all the way thru. Modern SURFACE treatments can be used to make harder armor which can defeat some AP. I'm not going into any of the 'reactive' schemes.
The other method is using an explosive charge. Some tank rounds do not even need to penetrate to wreck havoc. You can use a round which was called HEP for High Explosive Plastic which will put a pretty big DENT in the outside while the inside is fractured into sharapnel and goes zipping around the inside.
I can't remember the other choices but people are pretty ingenious.
I do know that NAVAL rounds which are designed for VERY long range (say 35,000 yards) will have a flight time OVER 1 minute and terminal velocity of like 500ft/sec which you'd think you could defeat with a tennis racket. But the MASS is huge and it'll go thru a LOT of deck armor (plunging fire) before exploding. A round weighed OVER a ton in flight. OUCH!
Comparing a modern composite suite with OLD homogenious armor is not quite right. The modern stuff is equal to maybe a foot or MORE of the WWII stuff. Maybe MORE? A modern tank round would go thru 2 or 3 of ANYTHING fielded in WWII. And from ANY angle. I'd say that was a true statement up to at least 1000 yards.
Too much is never enough
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