If you want to know how mesh armour works...

Ole Waru

Elder Lister
i found it interesting, wacha nisaidie wengine:

Having done mobility concepts to death of late, I thought it interesting to do a short thread on vehicle armour, specifically statistical armour (bar and mesh mainly) and tackling a few tropes around it.

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What is bar armour? Also called slat/cage/mesh/net armour, its one of a range of methods collectively called statistical armour, so called as it presents a statistical likelihood of defeating a specific projectile type

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Statistical armour is exclusively for defeat of shaped charge munitions using a double-skinned nose as conductive path for piezoelectric-based fuzing system, including RPG-7/PG-9/PG-15/SPG-9 families
https://twitter.com/JonHawkes275/status/1302874443925139456/photo/1
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Here a pic of typical RPG warhead. Note front portion holds piezoelectric crystals and rear is the fuze. When front impacts target, piezo crystals are crushed and send electrical current to the rear via inner 'skin', causing detonation. Statistical armour targets this mechanism

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Statistical armour designs feature some form of rigid grid to provide a statistical probability that warheads of this type will pass through a gap in the grid (which needs to be smaller than warhead diameter, typically 65-95mm for PG-7 family) rather than directly strike it

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Ole Waru

Elder Lister
As warhead is wider than grid, effect will be to deform it, making inner and outer skins contact. At this point, even if piezo crystals are crushed, when the electric current is sent via the inner skin, it can't reach the rear, because the skins have formed a short-circuit

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The warhead is also critically damaged, neutralising it or degrading its efficacy greatly, and/or catching it so it is stuck in the bars having not impacted the vehicle or (ideally) detonated

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There's an inherent risk of course - plenty of users have to deal with the dreaded mangled (and still live) RPG stuck in the side of the vehicle's bar armour, which is not great, but much better than it having detonated

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The downside is that the RPG needs to pass through the gap correctly for the defeat to work. If it strikes the bars it may initiate and depending on aperture size if it passes in the very centre the deformation of the warhead may be insufficient to neutralise it

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