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The protection of the Abrams has gone up more than once.
The M1 has the thinnest.
M1(IP) and M1A1 have the first upgrade.
M1A1(HA) gets 1st gen DU added. Without adding mass, I note.
The heavy common gets 2nd gen DU.
M1A2 SEP v1 gets 3rd gen DU.
The line of sight thickness gets thicker from M1 to M1(IP) on the turret. We noticed because it was harder to get out of the driver's hole.
The question is, how much protection does the line of sight protection provide?
Because this is for a game, I'm not actually looking for the real numbers.
There's a War Thunder page that seems to say that OG Chobham armor is 3x LOS thickness for KE rounds and about 5x for HEAT.
That same War Thunder page misses that the LOS thickness of the IP and A1 turret front changed.
Selecting from more than one online source... The turret face has:
M1 should have 400mm RHAe from KE and 700mm RHAe from HEAT. DR 1,100L.
M1(IP) and M1A1 should have 450mm RHAe from KE and 900mm RHAe from HEAT. DR 1,240L.
M1A1 (HA) should have 610mm RHAe from KE and 1,050mm RHAe from HEAT. DR 1,680L.
M1A1 (HC) should have 940mm RHAe from HE and 1,320mm from RHAe from HEAT. DR 2,590L.
M1A2 SEP v1 should have 960mm RHAe from KE and 1,620mm from HEAT. DR 2,645L.
I might have to make some changes to my T2K conversion in light of this!
Wild that it doubled from start to finish. Out of curiosity, what does the "L" mean after the DR value?
ReplyDeleteDaosus
L for "laminate". Laminate is the GURPS term for all kinds of multi-layer, multi-material armor.
DeleteIt negates the special effects for HESH rounds, making them just HE in terms of effect.
It doubles the DR against HEAT and HEDP rounds (or halves the armor divisor, the math is the same.)
An 'S' would mean spaced armor. This is used for spaced armor or earlier composite armors that pre-date Chobham. It negates HESH and multiplies the DR by 1.5 against HEAT and HEDP.
The doubling of the protection came from a paradigm shift in tank rounds. HEAT was supreme until they started to figure out, and field, composite armors like Chobham. Assuming, correctly, that the Warsaw Pact was figuring out how to nullify HEAT rounds too, more emphasis was put on making kinetic energy penetrators.
DeleteThen the pendulum swung again, "we're vulnerable to KE now!"
I think, at present, we're at a point where bigger gun is needed rather than better projectile for the armor thickness and composition from the front. Drones (and other things), though, are making it possible to hit the thinnest armor on the top surfaces. In addition to being thin, they are almost always just homogeneous metal with no spacing or composite materials.