Can you use concrete as a cheap substitute for tank armor in modern wars?

In a war scenario where your country is running out of steel can you use concrete as armor for tanks in mass production? I know it's far from ideal but maybe it's better than nothing.
Concrete is 3 times lighter than steel and much cheaper. I guess 20-40cm thick glass fiber-concrete between 2-4 cm thick steel plates would worth something. Maybe you can even enhance it further with ceramic balls or some silicate rocks.

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    You're better off scrapping old cars and welding their bits to the glacis then playing with concrete.
    Concrete is weaker than bone.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Concrete is weaker than bone
      Got it OP?
      Just use bones.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        thanks for the idea now I'm stealing it for my own purposes

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        [...]
        Which bones would be the best? Beef?
        What's the steel equivalent of 5cm of beef bones?

        >Your bones are incredibly strong. Ounce for ounce, bone is stronger than steel. One cubic inch of bone can withstand the weight of five standard pickup trucks, give or take a few pounds.
        So why aren't we using bones?

        Fricking KFC bone American tanks

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Concrete is weaker than bone
      Got it OP?
      Just use bones.

      Which bones would be the best? Beef?
      What's the steel equivalent of 5cm of beef bones?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >Your bones are incredibly strong. Ounce for ounce, bone is stronger than steel. One cubic inch of bone can withstand the weight of five standard pickup trucks, give or take a few pounds.
        So why aren't we using bones?

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          If you powder bones and press them,how strong is the resulting material?

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            It's just a ceramic composite at that point.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          bones are strong under compression , you can chop bone like wood with an axe , probably easier

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Couldn't you just cut out rings of bone and layer them between steel?

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          good bones, excellent dentition, and excellent brisiance factors will be yours, but only if you comment "THANK YOU MR.. SKELETAL" in this thread.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >THANK YOU MR.. SKELETAL

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            THANK YOU MR.. SKELETAL

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >THANK YOU MR.. SKELETAL

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            THANK YOU MR.SKELETAL

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            THANK YOU MR. SKELETAL

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >One cubic inch of bone can withstand the weight of five standard pickup trucks, give or take a few pounds.
          HOW MUCH IS THAT IN FOOTBALL FIELDS, DOC?

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            3 cups and a gallon of foot.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          An ounce of bone is stronger than an ounce of steel, but a pound of steel has more ounces than a pound of bone so it works out stronger overall.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          SOON

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >Which bones would be the best?
        The ones of your enemies

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >Your bones are incredibly strong. Ounce for ounce, bone is stronger than steel. One cubic inch of bone can withstand the weight of five standard pickup trucks, give or take a few pounds.
        So why aren't we using bones?

        heres the plan, you guys know those cube watermelons they grow by growing the melon in a box? we grow a huge bone in a tank hull mould.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >your country is running out of steel
      vs:

      >scrapping old cars and welding their bits

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4UGc0DQBik
      its worse than useless, its extremely heavy and does almost nothing to stop enemy rounds from penetrating. just bolt or weld on extra steel plates

      >just bolt or weld on extra steel plates

      Please don't comment on the internet if you can't understand basic speech! You should only read, but never write. Never! It would be better for everyone.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        If you're running out of steel, it's an even dumber idea. You're weighing down your vehicles massively, meaning more wear and tear, meaning your dwindling steel supply has to go into making more replacement parts. All while the increase in protection is barely existent.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Concrete is weaker than bone
      Got it OP?
      Just use bones.

      Checked

      [...]
      Which bones would be the best? Beef?
      What's the steel equivalent of 5cm of beef bones?

      Checked

      >Your bones are incredibly strong. Ounce for ounce, bone is stronger than steel. One cubic inch of bone can withstand the weight of five standard pickup trucks, give or take a few pounds.
      So why aren't we using bones?

      >tfw only concrete in my foundation and walls
      >tfw no bone biohouse stronger than concrete
      Feels bad bone bros
      All I have is the skelton within me

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Skelly within, smelly without.

        https://i.imgur.com/0ZR68h3.jpg

        good bones, excellent dentition, and excellent brisiance factors will be yours, but only if you comment "THANK YOU MR.. SKELETAL" in this thread.

        >THANK YOU MR.. SKELETAL

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    There are armor simulations on YouTube that show the (in)effectiveness of concrete

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4UGc0DQBik
      its worse than useless, its extremely heavy and does almost nothing to stop enemy rounds from penetrating. just bolt or weld on extra steel plates

      >What's the military equivalent for "bro science"?

      Why is it bro science to ask questions and play with hypotheticals?

      People actually used concrete armor in WW2. At least they tried something in need.

      If you're running out of steel, it's an even dumber idea. You're weighing down your vehicles massively, meaning more wear and tear, meaning your dwindling steel supply has to go into making more replacement parts. All while the increase in protection is barely existent.

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    What's the military equivalent for "bro science"?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >What's the military equivalent for "bro science"?

      Why is it bro science to ask questions and play with hypotheticals?

      People actually used concrete armor in WW2. At least they tried something in need.

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    its worse than useless, its extremely heavy and does almost nothing to stop enemy rounds from penetrating. just bolt or weld on extra steel plates

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    the concrete is on burning

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    No, absolutely not. Non-reinforced concrete is useless. So are sandbags. You need something like an additional upper plate, like the 8th army did with their Shermans, or something like the Super Pershing where you weld shit tons of high grade steel (boilerplate) to the hull.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      8th was scrapping wrecked Sherman’s and panzers for add on armor, some Sherman’s were rocking double front (easy mod since the MG port cut out is the same) and some even had panther frontal plates (80mm) added on

      The jumbo only had an extra 37mm added on for a 101mm sloped front

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        The Jumbos were honestly crazy tough when you think about it, I do often wonder why the US never considered the possibility of handing out WMOs to add spare upper plates to each Sherman in front-line maneuver roles.

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous
  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    No idea how it is with tanks but isnt there an actual thing with concrete boats?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >isnt there an actual thing with concrete boats?
      Yeah but that doesn't have to endure bullets and blasts. That's only for transportation.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Yeah so that would be the same issue why people dont build ceramic cars. On paper it sounds nice but any small crack from overload will lead to critical failure. And there is also crack propagation that leads to critical crack at some point that immidiately breaks the whole thing.
        Metals are bendable which makes them resistent against this, so when they break you wont get the entire thing falling apart after hitting a road bumb

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Modern fiber concrete is pretty resilient. It's much harder to crack. You can even make a bench from it. A 2-3 cm thick fiber concrete plate will endure your weight without cracking.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >It's much harder to crack. You can even make a bench from it. A 2-3 cm thick fiber concrete plate will endure your weight without cracking.
            Fibers won't save your material from critical failure. It will endure your weight because the material is strong, but if a crack propagates enough it will lead to collapse of the entire thing.
            While metal bench would just bend a little, ceramics would just break. That's the main issue.

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    IIRC the bongs tried this during WW2 and figured out that it really wasnt worth it given the added weight.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Most of those were just mobile bunkers for moving around airfields for territorial defence.
      They were highly ineffective but better than doing nothing.

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It's really quite bad at being armor. It doesn't deflection kinetic rounds and it's about 1/15th as effective per thickness as steel. You might as well just have more steel or a steel gap steel and make the steel thicker.

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    no, because armor is not important enough to add enough concrete to make an appreciable difference in protection, given the weight penalty
    you would quickly end up with a machine that would be over-stressed mechanically, which would lead to more parts failure and reduce mobility
    it's better to not be shot at all then it is to not be penetrated, adding a bunch of weight (or a small amount of weight for almost no gain in protection), is antithetical to this idea

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >given the weight penalty
      >you would quickly end up with a machine that would be over-stressed mechanically
      Concrete is 3 times lighter than steel. So you can have 3 times thicker fiber-concrete armor than your original steel armor to have the same weight. The question is how resilient a 60cm fiber-concrete armor compared to the 20cm steel. Or if it's still much cheaper it can redeem some resilience penalty.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        vs shaped charge 250mm of concrete is about equal 100mm of steel. 2.5 ratio approximately. By weight concrete maybe slithy lighter but you run into problems of absolute thikness and mass.
        To stop lowly RPG-7VM you need about 350mm of steel or 900mm of concrete. ts too heavy anyway in both cases and 900mm thickness of armor block is geometrically difficult to fit into AFV. You are not gonna make protection with such bad armor (bad relativity to the very high penetration of antitank shaped chage weapons), you don't stop shaped charge neither with steel nor with concrete. You need reactive armor (ERA or NERA), less effective armors dont cut in.

        Vs kinetic energy its about 1:4. 100mm=400mm concrete.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Thx for the detailed info.
          Can you give some source on that?

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Buncha old phone books stacked on there should do the trick.

  13. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    You're probably better off using low-grade materials for other shit like say artillery and mortar shells. Those could probably be made with mostly composite materials and glass fiber windings.

  14. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The end of the use of bunkers (Maginot Line) between Germany and France ended around 1943-1944 when the newest generation of shaped charge high explosive artillary shells made the bunkers obsolete. I saw this first hand near Saarland. Pillboxes btfo'd

  15. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    You're better off for volumetric and mass efficiency by making something like the T-55 Enigma's armor package before filling it with water for the sake of quenching jets. The plates are actually configured with rubber sheets with steel and function as NERA.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Water
      https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1064509.pdf
      >Three experiments were conducted to determine the ballistic effectiveness of water against a shaped charge jet. Water depths
      of 500, 1000 and 1500 mm were evaluated. The data suggest that water cannot be assigned one value to describe its ballistic
      efficiency against a shaped charge jet. Calculations show that 500 mm of water had an elemental mass efficiency (e m) = 3.9,
      1000 mm of water had an e m = 2.6, and 1500 mm of water had an e m = 1.8

  16. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Furthermore for shaped charges in the context of WW2 there's early composite armor:
    >In August 1943, American experiments on the general problem of protection against shaped charges began, and by October of that year, a plastic armour much lighter than the steel armour required for the same amount of protection was found. This armour, made by the Flintkote Company, was improved through a series of tests and a modified armour of pure quartz gravel in a mastic of pitch and wood flour was designated HCR2. Tests were also conducted to test plastic armour's ability to protect ships from torpedoes with shaped-charge warheads, but this project was abandoned due to the low probability of these weapons becoming a serious threat and protection of armoured fighting vehicles and concrete fortifications became the priorities.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous
    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >The HCR2, was a mixture of quartz gravel and a mastic composed of asphalt and wood flour. A kit of auxiliary plastic armor was designed by the Flintkote Company for the M4 series of tanks. The armor panels consisted of 10 inches of HCR2 faced with 1 inch aluminum plate. These panels were held in place over the sponsons and around the turret by 1/2 inch steel cables attached to brackets welded to the tank. The plastic armor kit increased the weight of the vehicle by about 8 tons. Tests at Aberdeen in the Fall of 1945 showed that the turret assembly could defeat the German Panzerfaust 100 or the 8.8cm rocket, but both weapons caused some penetrations on the sponsons. The plastic armor also increased the protection against the kinetic energy projectiles such as the 76mm HVAP, but not as much as an equivalent weight of steel. It was also noted that the attachment cables were vulnerable to attack by high explosive rounds sometimes resulting in the complete loss of an armor panel.

  17. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Isn't that just a killdozer?

  18. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The virgin concrete vs the chad pykrete

    Take the pykrete pill: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete

  19. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    "Plastic" armor is what you want

    HCR2, 80% gravel, 5% sawdust, 15% asphalt.

  20. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It's too heavy
    1 kg of concrete is twice as heavy as 1 kg of steel so it's just not practical for use in vehicles

  21. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Why not just make armor out of loose dirt or sand? Just have sand armor around a tank

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