I now fully understand ERA's utility, I recently bought combat mission black sea, and often times I had light armored vehicles like the striker, and they get penned by everything but small arms, but with era, if I get fired on by man portable at tubes, I often times survive while usually it would be a mission kill, or even well armored tanks, when advancing against a reverse slope defense, got hit by a malyutka atgm by a bmp2, and the reactive armor saved them while theyd be dead.
so yeah just slapping ERA enanches vehicle survivability by alot for cheap, that's especially true for lightly armored vehicles and older armor that's not composite but RHA, if you add cage armor that's even better.
btw theres all this talk about cope cages but vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan already had cage armor just not on the top.
its called a cope cage because its not properly built and engineered to work right.
they just randomly welded or otherwise attached shit on and are hoping it will work like a cargo cult
No. It's called cope cage because originally it was designed to counter top-down attack munitions, like Javelins. It wouldn't work anyway.
Against drones they're ok.
>Against drones they're ok.
drones are constantly destroying tanks with cope cages
>btw theres all this talk about cope cages but vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan already had cage armor just not on the top.
because that shit actually worked against RPGs, the shit ass cope cages didnt work against Javelins
because they're used to trigger a shaped charge fuze early and thus make it dissipate its energy and not pen the armor, not to be armor itself, but the javelin has a tandem charge and it's also a bigger diameter than usual shaped charges like RPGs or at4s
>they're used to trigger a shaped charge fuze early
No moron. Slat armor aka statistical armor only works if it destroys the HEAT's cone before detonation or avoids the detonation.
The standoff meme is just that, a meme.
It's because it wasn't made to stop javelins and any moron that stated that is a brain dead Black person. The top russian brass had to be moronic to tell their tank crews it can stop javelins, it was and in my mind made to stop what happend to tank crews back in the first chechen war which was the rpgs coming down from the top of apartment buildings. Pro-russian posters were spreading and claiming that it can stop javelins but that was bullshit and now pro-ukrainian posters talk about stupid the idea is even though you got Ukraine making and using their own "cope" cages.
All of it started from mis-info and pro-russian homosexuals sniffing their own farts which lead to pro-ukrainians jerking themselves off.
>It's because it wasn't made to stop javelins
it literally was you homosexual because their tanks were getting raped by javelins
the first cope cages were slat armor that is meant to stop RPG heads because they thought that's what javelin is
They had "cope" cages in the early days of the invasion even before the first javelins got into Ukrainian hands.
>in the early days of the invasion
>even before the first javelins got into Ukrainian hands
Did they have NLAWs? It's possible they had a few cages at the start, but they definitely upped the use of them after getting raped by Javelins.
Ukraine had javelins from day 1. They were massively hyped up by western media, the Russians knew Ukraine had them. The first batch of cope cages coveted the hatch and top of the turret. If they were intended as slat armour they'd have covered the whole top of the hull and sides like the "modern" versions we see now(which are meant as anti RPG/drone armour). The cope cage was a cargo cult anti top down munition system that was adapted into something moderately useful as drones proliferated. End of.
> it was and in my mind
Your mind must be a wonderful place.
Is reverse slope a real tactic or is it just Vidya?
yes it's a good tactic because the enemy cannot engage nor observe you directly you from afar and has to come close, so when they arrive you can clearly see them sky lining themselves if your not in a wooded area, while they need to acquire you, and you can fire on them first, while they cant use the range that their vehicles guns have and are forced to engage from a close distance, so they're more vulnerable to at weapons
Before the advent of drones it was considered one of the classics. A pinnacle of good defense.
They're only called cope cages because the Russians did it. Nobody calls the Israeli ones cope cages except with reference to Russia.
yes, because the Russian ones were ineffective
effective standoff armour is called schurzen, or slat armour, or cage armour, or bar armour.
ineffective standoff armour is called [failure to] cope cage
Cool story bro. Putting slats above your turrets don't magically become better when the Israelis do it.
Standoff armour is not a thing unless you can detonate the warhead some 10-20 CDs away, don't have that one study on hand. Slats work against PG-7 and derivatives because they are single point fuzed, crushing the cone anywhere but at the tip shorts the fuze circuit and duds the round.
>CDs
??
>don't magically become better when the Israelis do it.
whoosh
the point is they work when used correctly
I hate you morons who look at a game and say "ayup that's exactly how it works IRL" especially with things like ERA
combat mission is a good simulator, indent think it's exactly like reality but simulators like combat mission, graviteam tactics, armored brigade, steel beasts, war in east/west are good for a representation of reality
Bla bla bla, all simulations have limitations and ERA and armor modeling is one of the biggest limitations. ERA in particular as its operation is complex and its modeling is hugely simplified, often to just an abstract RHA equivalent, and is not at all representative of real world conditions. All of those titles are subject to many limitations, hell Steel Beasts is often called out on this board for using abstract armor numbers that are not representative of reality, using a single or a couple of armor numbers is a huge assumption to begin with and doesn't match reality. "Having armor on vehicles is good" is not something anyone needs a simulator to understand and simulators often miss the important nuances, only showing you the bigger picture conclusion.
what nuances do they miss in your opinion?
I'm well aware they're limited as I have a lot of hours on them, just curious of your opinion
KE and HEAT protection modelling is very abstracted, AFAIK they just use set values for those with corrections based on angle of incidence and velocity and compared to a similar curve for the projectiles. Armor doesn't work like that in reality though, different projectile diameters, materials, etc. will produce widely different results. Ceramic armors, for example, have behavior that really cannot be compared to steel armor at all, APFSDS impacting onto ceramic armor will continuously erode while the armor more or less stays intact right up until ultimate failure, at which point the projectile can then push through. The erosion rate and the dwell time are variables that cannot be easily accounted for with the generally simplistic armor models used. Composites display even more variance in behavior, aside from the ceramic behavior now changing due to having a metal backer, NERA is often designed such that it causes a shear stress within the projectile, trying to get it to shatter. That's also highly dependent on projectile material and the specifics of how it struck the armor.
For ERA, the modelling is often even more simplistic, directly applying a fixed % degradation in penetration performance, this is what Steel Beasts uses, for example: https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/11473-apfsds-design-vs-heavy-era/?do=findComment&comment=170346 . That's obviously not going to be a good way to simulate that, ERA is even more complex in how it functions, penetration reduction mechanisms can completely change depending on projectile velocity, angle of incidence and the delay in the ERA triggering.
Everything I said above is peanuts compared to HEAT warhead modelling.
Beyond that, there's operational concerns that are not always modeled, ERA detonating will frick up nearby infantry more than just the impacting projectile would do, this is often not modelled and infantry will also stand right next to such vehicles without concern.
Cont. Damage to vehicles due to hits is also often not well modelled. We saw with the Leopard 2 that got hit at the edge of the turret cheek by 3BM42 that while it was withstood, I can't find the article now but the crew stated that their optics got knocked out by the hit. Getting hit is a pretty violent event and sensitive systems can get knocked out despite not taking a direct hit, this is not something games and simulators typically model. On the same topic, webmrel is a T-72B equipped with Kontakt-5 that got hit, presumably by an ATGM or some other HEAT warhead (judging by the small hole made in the armor). The hit and the detonation of the ERA detonated or knocked off all the ERA on the lower part of the front plate, the glacis is dented and the internal armor layers are likely dented too and in contact with each other, which hugely decreases the effectiveness of the armor, the front part of the plate also had a large chunk chipped off, partly showing the internal array. There's a lot of damage to the plates that cannot be seen by the naked eye, such as cracking, microfractures, etc. which will affect its real world performance. I don't think I've ever seen this modeled in a simulator, I also don't think simulators necessarily need this level of fidelity. They're there to train tactics and make broad generalizations in many aspects, not just armor and damage modelling. I would just caution against making conclusions about the effectiveness of X system or Y armor or Z projectile from a simulator and even when making conclusions regarding tactics, you have to keep in mind the limitations of the simulation.
CM games do model individual component damage even if the damage model is a bit weird. Like an autocannon is much more likely to disable a main gun than several big HEAT hits, go figure.
true about armor simulation but I think that for training tactics it's pretty good, although with some simplifications
Yes, that's the point I make in
. Blame moot and his 2000 character limit. As with everything, there's good utility to simulations etc. but you need to keep in mind the context, the conclusions you can come to are only as good as your simulation is.
As people who actually understood the idea has pointed out, cope cages can protect a tank from certain attacks, but not from Javelin
they only protect from grenades so mostly useless
Yes, against grenade drops, but the ones the Ruskies had designed at the beginning of the war were pretty shit for this job though, even in the most charitable interpretation, that they were meant to protect against RPG attacks from rooftops a-la-Grozny, the cages were not really effectively built as slat armor, too much frontage to the horizontal members which raises the probability that it detonates the warhead. They weren't all that far from the top of the turret either so an PG-7V actually has a chance of getting through the top armor if they detonate on the cage, remember even at 2 m away they'll retain ~20% of their penetration (I.E. 60 mm of RHA) which is more than enough to punch through the roof of a T-72, obviously this assumes a perfectly formed penetrator under ideal conditions which would not be the case, but the distance between the cage to the roof isn't anywhere close to 2 m anyways.