Armor Protection in WWII

Weird question, but did 2 40mm plates in WWII offer as much protection as 1 80mm plate?
I've been wondering about add-on armor and the feasibility to design a tank that would be relevant from start to finish in the war and could be easily up-armored by design lately.

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >did 2 40mm plates in WWII offer as much protection as 1 80mm plate?
    against HEAT, perhaps even more

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      What about kinetically based penetrators?
      I'm not talking about spaced ammo either (though it might actually be a good idea even if it would weaken one half of the armor and might necessitate replacements from time to time), but literally just 2 slapped on each other.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Depends. Sometimes no. Often, yes. You'd put a harder but brittle plate on the facing and a softer, tougher plate on the back to absorb.

        A few blackpowder era breastplates used this technique.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >You'd put a harder but brittle plate on the facing and a softer, tougher plate on the back to absorb.
          Why?

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            The plate on the front breaks up the penetrator, the plate behind slows the fragments down. I believe modern tank armor uses a special type of ceramic and a special type of polyethylene.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Wouldn't a harder and brittle plate get fricked after the first couple of hits though and get massive cracks throghout?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Not particularly sure anon, but I assume the ceramic is either manufactured and attached in segments or the breaking of the ceramic adds to it's resistance somehow. Or perhaps they just don't care. Hopefully a tanker can come in and explain that as I'm curious now too.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I was actually asking about the WWII steel plate in question. They were able to make steel harder or softer, but I feel like if they make a plate too hard at the front they'd just run into the Russian problem where they couldn't measure temperatures properly, made most of their plates way too hard and then they just broke apart when hit.

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Depends on a lot of things. A high hardness plate in front of a soft/tough plate would tend to shatter uncapped projectiles and decap capped projectiles. If it's at an oblique angle it also tends to turn shells and decrease their penetration as they slap into the second plate more sideways.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      And if you take 2 plates that have the same hardness as if it would just be 1 normal 80mm plate but divided?

      There a hundreds of armor penetration simulations on YT.
      Go watch a few

      I don't trust strangers on youtube, only strangers on /k/.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >And if you take 2 plates that have the same hardness as if it would just be 1 normal 80mm plate but divided?
        Sometimes, but not necessarily. Armor penetration is more complex than you think.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >Sometimes, but not necessarily. Armor penetration is more complex than you think.
          That's literally why I'm asking since:

          https://i.imgur.com/Sh0LRjh.jpg

          Weird question, but did 2 40mm plates in WWII offer as much protection as 1 80mm plate?
          I've been wondering about add-on armor and the feasibility to design a tank that would be relevant from start to finish in the war and could be easily up-armored by design lately.

          >I've been wondering about add-on armor and the feasibility to design a tank that would be relevant from start to finish in the war and could be easily up-armored by design lately.

          Like, what would be the best way to do that?
          The lower plate would actually have to put in work in 39 before getting uparmored in like 41.
          I was thinking about something panther-like with more R&D time and stuff like the interleaved roadwheels swapped out for something more sensible like maybe overlapping wheels, so at worst you have to either only remove no extra wheels to swap one out or 2. Would obviously be pretty big for 39, but the ability to just keep the production going and build support vehicles all based on one chassis would be nice.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >I don't trust strangers on youtube, only strangers on /k/
        There are probably only 2-3 people on /k/ who have ever studied and performed actual Stanag 4569 armour penetration testing, everyone else is just regurgitating what they've seen on YT or been 'explained' to them by some untrained NCO instructor parrotting off powerpoint slides to a mob of half-asleep trainees.
        Go watch some computer simulations on YT directly, it cuts out most of the myths and hypes.

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    There a hundreds of armor penetration simulations on YT.
    Go watch a few

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >and could be easily up-armoured by design lately.
    the problem here is automotive, almost every ww2 German tank ended up exceeding its initial design weight, some to a catastrophic degree

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Yeah that's part of the reason why I was thinking of how to design a tank that could actually take it with the massive increase in weight in mind from the start.
      Tanks were new back then, nobody thought massively armoring up old designs were a thing, that's why so many old designs simply weren't, since they couldn't be armored up properly. The German Pz.IV is the notable excemption.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        The Sherman? The M4A3E2 Jumbo was the same drive train as a stock sherman (HVSS suspension though) with 5, 6 more tons of armor.

        37mm add on the front, total 101mm sloped
        152mm cast turret, 20mm manlet
        76mm, double side armor
        only mod was slightly wider tracks.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >The Sherman? The M4A3E2 Jumbo
          That would be an example of how not to do it, the Chieftain actually has a video on it, literally not usable except in very limited fashion, very carefully and for a very short time. Not only could it never serve as a standard tank, it was only adopted in very limited numbers as an interim solution in the first place because it was extremely prone to reliability issues.
          T34 levels of them, though actually repairable.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >Jumbo
          Literal garbage outside of warthunder, anon.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            yeah so garbage hundreds of shermans were modified with adhoc up armor.

            the need for a heavily armored tank was there.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >yeah so garbage
              Yes, because of
              >the need for a heavily armored tank was there.

              I'm not saying up-armoring the Sherman was a bad idea but the Jumbo was clearly the wrong way to do it.
              Tanks need to work to do work. The Tiger actually had 3 times the maintenance time factored into the design (turned out to be considerably less), while the Jumbo was literally only accepted under the caveat of
              >don't use it too much or too long or too hard or you're fricked, good luck
              Anon's right, Chieftain has a video about it.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Even the fricking pershing was uparmored. one of the biggest threats they faced were ambushes from high caliber AT guns.

    The last running Jumbo bounced a Pak 40 shell within 100 yards/meters and returned fire

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The short version is that, as a general rule, multiple plates will be less effective than a single plate, when talking about taking a hit from an AP projectile. HEAT rounds are a mixed bag, but despite what many seem to think the spaced armor on German tanks wasn't for HEAT warheads, it was meant to disrupt AT rifle rounds before they impact the hull of the tank.

    Armor gets alot more complex on warships, because there's enough space that novel armor concepts can be utilized. For example: Richie in the bottom left has it's 6-7" deck, but then an additional 40mm armor deck below that. Idea being, that if a round or bomb penetrates the main armor deck and detonates, the lower deck will catch the ensuing fragmentation.

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