How does Tank Armor and Ammunition work? 

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How does Tank Armor and Ammunition work? A10:They Don’t

Modern tank warfare: long range dart matches.

As a man whose studied military science and technology for decades, and especially armored warfare, I actually LEARNED NEW THINGS watching this video. *claps* Bravo gentlemen. Bravo!

Meanwhile in War Thunder: *RICOCHET*

"Tank armor stops shells" WoT premium ammo: no it doesn't

4:05 Just to elaborate: the word "melt" was used more to paraphrase the act which actually happens, in which the copper lining does not actually melt, but ACTS as though it were a liquid (despite remaining below its melting point), due to the force that is being put upon it by the explosive charge, and the speed at which it deforms and penetrates the target material

24:20 “a way of hacking into guided munitions” *shows an unguided RPG getting blown to bits*

This video is probably the single most comprehensive and well-research all-in-one piece with detailed explanations of various types of tank armor and ammunition. Really well presented and easy to understand. Especially when you talked about the APSFDS shells and explained how NATO and Russian differ, but also most importantly - WHY it differs (blocky vs slope-y tanks!). Wish watching this was required before posting on WT reddit about ammunition - so many misconceptions clarified in under 30 minutes!

NASA uses 'space(d) armour' on the International Space Station. Even a paint fleck at 17,000 mph has a lot of energy that needs dissipating ;o)

"man I'm always absent for online class" me at 1:25 AM:

Here’s the thing I don’t get about penetration statistics. it can say”800 millilitres of penetration”.800 millilitres of what....Cheese?

Many years ago I visited an old fortified house (16th century) in scotland and found it had cavity walls, when researching this I found it was to reduce the capabilities of cannon and shot.

Man I could talk about this topic for days. Its kinda fascinating in its own way

Could you do a similiar type of video talking about how the armor on tanks are repaired after they had been hit? It really interests me to know what they do to these tanks and how they do it. This video was very great :)

1- shaped charges dont melt the armor they punch through it with the velocity f the explosively formed penitratore at like mach 9 or more 2- spaced armor may not only cause premature detonation but also normalisation at angals that are poorly suited to penetrating the main armor 3- mono block long penitratores do not bend well 4- ceramic reinforced metal armor can also significantly increase he effectiveness of a given thickness of conventional armor

TOP 10 ANIME CROSSOVERS THAT NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED.

Holy hell the amount of views on this video! INSANITY! Looks like we need to do another one of these Mat! :D

Sees upload - gets excited

Pz IV - [Upgrade] Tiger I - [Go back] Tiger II - [I said go back] Maus - [I SAID GO BACK!]

one thing ive always wondered when it comes to spaced armour, in a case with small arms fire would compressed gas or liquid create a more effective armour before its penetrated and rendering it less effective

Honestly, Republic Commando deserves a remaster

Part of the difference between Soviet and NATO ammunition is due to the single piece NATO ammo (except the CR2) and its ability to include a longer penetrator. Soviet / Russian, two piece ammunition (required for their auto-loader systems), can't include that due to the projectile's size. Also NATO ammunition is more resource intensive as NATO can afford the resource / machining allocation.

Love learning awesome info. 7 years ago,World of Tanks made me an armor enthusiast. I really like the War Thunder clips simulating the narrative. Great job!

This is the most entertaining tank education video I've ever seen. Bravo to both of you!

I read somewhere that Chobham Research had found out that their Burlington/Dorchester Ceramic-Composite Armour works best when hit perpendicularly rather than at an angle by a KE penetrator.

Wonderful co-work here, looking forward for some more of this Matt ! Also, what i remember from Alkonafter´s side on this topic, he greatly expressed the limitation of the soviet school auto-loader, as the round cant exceed a certain length, in witch hand-loaded guns have a big advantage, having a great impact on soviet munitions potential especially in modernization terms and into the future. P.S.: What was that at 11:19 ? I want some more of that ... from both of you ! :D :D

8:15 When I was on the Syrian/ Iraqi border ive seen EFPs cut clean through Abrams armor (when they didnt have explosive reactive armor plating on) but ive seen bullet proof glass stop an EFP. When the humvee came back the driver side window was smoking on the outside but the inside the driver was okay. The inner glass was cracked from the heat but no penetration.

I'll keep this Info in mind when I'm fitting my lawn mower for the apocalypse

Hey guys, Very informative video. I learned a lot. One point...shells don’t penetrate. Shells don’t go down range. Projectiles do. Shells stay in the tank once the round is fired. Just sayin’. Thanks for your work!

Really great video! Great to know this too! Thanks Matt!

Please note HEAT rounds do not penetrate by melting armor. The penetration is by kinetic energy.

Then there is steel foam armor which acts sort of as a cross between rolled homogenous armor and spaced armor. It is three times as thick for the same weight and is particularly effective against heat and hesh while having at least as much effectiveness against apds as the same weight of rha. Very effective against mines when used as belly armor on vehicles.

I was looking forward to the HE shell explanation/evolution..

I can’t be the only one who thought of the “silver bullet”

I'm a bit late to this video, but I'd like to add an inconsequential bit of info. I was a nuclear Machinist Mate in the US Navy, so I had to learn every imaginable aspect of Uranium and its isotopes-- even on the theoretical quantum level. Uranium (U-92) is actually the most dense naturally-occurring metal that we can produce in significant quantities. It has a very unique atomic structure, unlike other metals. When most metals experience a large force (such as a bullet impacting armor), they deform into a mushroom shape as the material is pushed out of the way from the point of impact. However, when Uranium experiences the same force, it acts very differently. It tends to have a "sharpening" behavior, where the material that has expended its energy begins to chip away, allowing the remaining Uranium to continue on its path relatively unhindered. This helps the depleted Uranium penetrators retain their penetrative ability more efficiently, compared to more traditional steel or Tungsten penetrators. This, coupled with the extreme density of the metal, is what makes DU APFS-DS rounds so potent.

The spaced armor on the leo2a5 and up looks to actually be NERA. A close look shows what looks to be a rubber layer and another steel plate on the inside before the hollow space begins

Thanks... I never thought about that with sloped armour... a round has to go a bit further to penetrate 👍

I'll keep this in mind next time I'm buying my tank shells.

Maraging steels (a portmanteau of "martensitic" and "aging") are steels (iron alloys) that are known for possessing superior strength and toughness without losing malleability, although they cannot hold a good cutting edge. Aging refers to the extended heat-treatment process.

I vote for Matsimii.

Ex tankie here. appreciate your videos on tanks, they are fun to watch. shells are freaking heavy and you throw your back out regularly as a loader, which is why auto load has been a back saver for many a man. Whilst fun as hell to drive, being a tankie is a hot, smelly, dirty unenjoyable job for the majority of the time.

Awesome video guys. Extremely well done. Easy to understand and entertaining.

Well don't underestimate the budget brutes. Denmark has just gathered money for update of 8 more Leopard 2's. Typical end of year budget cleaning. There are situations, where 8 such tanks can be mighty handy.

He didn’t say Mission Failed We’ll Get Em Next Time :(

Glad to listen to ScottishKoala. Hope your friendship is long lasting.

Amazing machines!! Feel like these are becoming obsolete, think they would have a version that's half or quarter the size since there is so much urban wars nowadays

Cumulative projectiles do not burn through armor, but penetrate, relying on the kinetic energy of the cumulative jet, which has a speed of about 10 kilometers per second, or hypersonic speed at the time of explosion.

Very good video! Very detailed but easy to understand :) Im pretty sure the people who has just found armoured fighting vehicles interesting will get most of it. Looking forward to the next one.. as always :D

YEAH! love that opening - ah the slow motion glory

Wasnt the super pershing at 6:45 a one off modification during war? The crew cut up found panther and added its armour to help the tank.

Just that partial penetration in the thumb would ruin the crew's day. All of those blazing hot armor chucks in front of that shell had a hayday in that tank.

On the subject of trigonometry as it relates to the penetrative capability of a round hitting the armour it is worth considering that the targeted tank is not always sitting in a level plane as witnessed by the game play video and the tanks out on the firing range. A tank as it is moving over terrain will pitch and roll in the positive and negative aspects often in combinations of both which will influence the force vectors being applied to the armour by any penetrators. What this all means is that while a theoretical presentation of a round hitting a target tank as it is presented when sitting on a horizontal surface, when it comes to hitting the real tank out on the real uneven ground of a battlefield just what the result will be is open to the variables of just how that tank is presented as a target and just where your round hits the tank.

Very good video, thanks for increasing my tank neardyness.

4:03 that was so satisfying to watch

I thought the thing was with the M1 was that the tank originally had the 105mm gun but by the time the Gulf War came around they had already refitted a good deal of them with the M256 120mm gun which is still used on it today.

If I am not mistaken,the thumbnail id from Museum In czech rebublic in Lešany...i was there and tey had a thick "plate" with the shell in it

Optimist: glass is half full Pessimist: glass is half empty M4 Sherman Commander: *_That one bounced!_*

don't mind me i'm just sitting here thinking about how a few wwII time travelers would love to have their hands on this video to bring it back to their own time....

4:12 "As these chemical warheads don'r rely on kinetic energy....." me: LIES!!!!! LIES!!!!! LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLIEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!! *RRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!* lol ;D

13:38 when you fire on a Tiger and it didn't penetrate.

I know some of y'all are gonna judge him for using war thunder for footage examples, but imma remind y'all that this game is so realistic that some dude leaked classified files when he was checking if a turret rotation rate was realistic to the real thing.

interesting info BUT If I'm ever caught on the wrong end of a firing tank, I hope the shells are as far over my head as your explanation of tank ammunition. ;o)

I never knew talking about rods could be so interesting….

this is gonna be bloody good, I can tell......

Nice video guys, I love the levity and banter, and enjoyed it's informative values!

A new technology called electric reactive armour (also termed electromagnetic reactive armour, or colloquially as electric armour) is in development. This armour is made up of two or more conductive plates separated by an air gap or by an insulating material, creating a high-power capacitor.[5][6][7][8][9] In operation, a high-voltage power source charges the armour. When an incoming body penetrates the plates, it closes the circuit to discharge the capacitor, dumping a great deal of energy into the penetrator, which may vaporize it or even turn it into a plasma, significantly diffusing the attack. It is not public knowledge whether this is supposed to function against both kinetic energy penetrators and shaped charge jets, or only the latter. This technology has not yet been introduced on any known operational platform. Another electromagnetic alternative to ERA uses layers of plates of electromagnetic metal with silicone spacers on alternate sides. The damage to the exterior of the armour passes electricity into the plates causing them to magnetically move together. As the process is completed at the speed of electricity the plates are moving when struck by the projectile causing the projectile energy to be deflected whilst the energy is also dissipated in parting the magnetically attracted plates.

1.1 million views!! Congratulations Matt! Keep up the awesome work, we love ya 🇨🇦

Yay! Finally another Matsimus vid! Can you please do a video about the chinese mbt ZTZ99A2? Thank youu!

That face appearing on the top right hand corner after the explosion is too funny

Brilliant video. I actually learned something and I'm huge tank nerd.

I'm buying a fully operational army tank next week, came here for tips.

We just need to equip all tanks with PlOt ArmOuR, then they will be invincible 😜

if you didn't know, the ISS uses a form of spaced armor, basically a Kevlar layer that will help the micrometeoroid literally vaporize and then spread out and splash against the metal plate behind it (which is some form of aluminum or alloy). that's pretty good against something like a grain of sand moving at 20-30 km/s.

Yeah tanks are fun, until its time for maintenance. Sooooo much maintenance. Btw congrats on joining the rca. Its my uncles old regiment. I was a strat myself.

Hey can you do a video on Navy ships (mainly US Navy) there is such a variety of ships and specific roles of each one you could possibly make a mini series on it

TL:DR: Everything's a shopping cart to an atgm

5:39 when you get 300+ ping and 10%+ packet loss

How have you not done this video yet!?

My Opa was a Panzerjager in the 8th PD. At the end of the war he was in the Panzerjager IV L/70. He told me after one battle it looked like a pig was slaughtered in the tank. What happened was the shells hit his tank and didn’t go through. But the armor would flake off and fly through the tank like razor blades cutting anyone in the way. They were all bleeding , but ok.

"Longer rods penetrate more armor" Hehe

Ive never seen him so excited

Something that I've never seen mentioned on You tube is the fact that the Sabot petals can be extremely deadly to friendly troops in front of the tank. OUCH!

Very old but seing those big holes on T-34's or Shermans,done by German simple APCR shells,are awesome.

In 1917 the British Royal Armouries tested captured German anti-tank weapons and ammunition versus the Harveyised rolled steel armour being used on the British and French tanks in WW1. Harveyised armour (1865) was a process of burying red hot steel plates in carbon granules and leaving it to cool over a long period of time, which allowed the carbon to be absorbed into the surfaces of the steel plates and increasing the hardness. On the downside it is very prone to spalling. It also cannot be drilled or punched so all holes have to be created before the process takes place. In 1921, when rolled and cast homogenous armour first appeared, they revisited these weapons again in tests for a comparison and measure of improvements in this armour protection advancement. (Vertical test targets at 100 yards range). Harveyised plate Rolled Homogenous plate Mauser 7.92mm. rifle AP K bullet: Up to 19mm. Up to 13mm. Mauser 13mm. anti-tank rifle AP bullet: Up to 30mm. Up to 21mm.

The first sub-caliber anti-tank AP projectiles were not APDS, but HVAP (US Army) or Arrowhead (Russian Army) or APCR (British Army) or Squeeze-Bore (German and British Army). These were full-diameter shot filled with a heavy "Depleted Uranium" (DU) -- from the failed WWII German atomic bomb development work -- (German) or Tungsten/Wolfram Carbide (all nations, including most German projectiles of this type) penetrator but that kept the outer casing for the entire trip to the target. The Squeeze-Bore cannon had a progressive narrowing of the gun tube toward the muzzle so that the projectile that was a full-bore width of a regular cannon at the breach ended up at the muzzle at only about half that diameter, crushing and squeezing the casing around the penetrator until it was a long tail trailing behind the projectile (kind of like an APDS, but the sabot casing, while no longer causing drag in the air, did not discard). This narrowing also built up the pressure behind the projectile and gave it a very high muzzle velocity. The others all were fired from regular guns and the casing flew all the way to the target, causing considerable drag in these very fast, but rather light-weight, projectiles (the penetrator was effective due to its density and narrow diameter making a small hole in very thick armor at right-angles, but the total projectile weight was rather low for its size due to the very light-weight outer casing, which did not go away in flight). APDS had the outer casing turn into a "discarding sabot" that was torn free at the muzzle, allowing the small penetrator to have little drag and penetrate thick armor at rather long range; otherwise, it was similar to the above HVAP/Arrowhead/APCR projectiles. Making a discarding sabot casing tear free without messing up the aim of the gun took some design work to iron out the bugs, so during WWII British APDS had a poor accuracy at other than short-to-medium ranges, though better penetration when it did hit at any range than a regular AP projectile, of course. This was later solved completely. Note that all of these extra-high-speed sub-caliber shot projectiles were capable of penetrating the armor hit in more-or-less one piece, like the regular steel AP shot they replaced. APFSDS is fired at a MUCH higher velocity and essentially melts from the nose tip back as it penetrates, like a melting candle, shortening as it pushes through the armor -- it is a race to see which would go away first, the armor or the projectile. The modern laminated Chobham and succeeding armors tried to enhance the melting of the projectile and reduce melting of the armor so that some of the armor was still there when the projectile was used up. Note that because of this melting effect, angling of armor no longer had much of a glancing effect at high angles that had made it superior to simply making a vertical plate thicker (the TIGER I compared to a JS III, say) -- the dissolving tip of the projectile can no longer push upward on the rest of the projectile to cause it to glance off, as was the major cause of ricochet at high angles in steel AP or the sub-caliber heavy penetrators of WWII. This is why most modern tanks have less sloping of the armor unless that has other improved functions too -- the front of an ABRAMS turret is sloped to the sides since it has to be roughly circular in front to minimize its weight, but it is not tilted back much compared to some late WWII tank turrets, especially Russian. The weight of a backward-tilted plate goes up as it has to be made longer to fit the same vertical area and this no longer gives much of a benefit over the simple SECANT of the tilt angle from vertical (for the weight and the resistance increase, both), unlike against the prior solid shot projectiles of WWII (any kind), where the steel armor used gained a large extra resistance benefit per unit weight at over about 50 degrees from right-angles.

Glass plate armor was abandoned primarily because it required replacement of large sections to repair damage which could be difficult, time consuming and costly depending on access to and modularity of the armor sections. Other kinds of composite armor were somewhat easier to maintain. It still has the potential for practical use in smaller modular pieces if that was incorporated into some design. Fiberglass armor on the other hand has grown in popularity because of its particular characteristics being a reasonable trade off against most threats.

My brain: koalas aren't from Scotland. The other parts of my brain: Shut up, they are now.

Now if only this could apply to MY tank in War Thunder. I'll be in my big bias russian T44-100 and will be able to be pinned in the front by a BT5

Would have been nice to hear what kind of damage these shells do. So far as I know, they typically screw up the crew and control systems before actually damaging the tank.

11:36 putting all the ammo in the front with no additional protection great job Germany

You forgot that there was a silica applique planned to be developed for the M 60. They just sorta never got around to it. But the front of the M 60 is flat and not rounded like previous tanks in the United States because of it. So, the M 60 was supposed to have silica armor packs that could be changed easily. Up armor programs have been done by other countries and are available for purchase on the market. That's a good thing because while the M 60 is an obsolete tank by American standards it's still in active use in many countries.

Is it me or yt deliberatly hides notifications from military/weapon related chanels ? -.-

All my feeble mind got out of this is that armor and anti tank shells are witchcraft and that the effectiveness is unknown unless a large scale battle ensues and we can examine what's left.

Spaced armor can break APFSDS rounds

I had not known about the use of an AP cap and limited length of extra-dense tungsten carbide behind that in the Russian APFSDS. That obviously gives it a different effect as it digs deeper and deeper into the plate, unlike the US monobloc APFSDS, where the effectiveness of the penetrator remains more-or-less the same through any thickness of armor that the projectile still has some rod length left that it reaches at any angle. Note that unlike AP or APDS projectiles, which are decelerated as they pass through the plate and thus can end up embedded in a more-or-less intact condition in a thick-enough nearly-right-angle steel plate, APFSDS projectiles never decelerate, they are simply dissolved nose-end-first in the plate and can only be stopped by completely melting them away (you can call it anything you like, but it has the same effect as a piece of glass just below its melting point when a glass-blower makes it into a bottle or artwork). Spaced plate allows an APFSDS rod to suddenly have nothing containing the nose of the rod that had an instant before been under enormous pressure between the inertia of the lower rod body and the armor in front of and to the sides of it. This huge internal pressure causes the front end of the rod to explode outward in a cone-shaped blast of molten material (it is molten now, once the pressure is no longer there). Suddenly the rod has an appreciable part of its front end gone when it hits the next plate on the far side of the space, so it has that much less length before it is used up in the armor. Also, the tip of the rod is no longer the sharp point (roughly) that it was when it was compressed by the surrounding armor (DU especially erodes in a way that is "self-sharpening" like a pencil point and retains its optimum shape more easily). What happens to those Russian multi-material APFSDS penetrators when they hit a gap in the armor is probably even more complicated and not good for their penetration ability -- they only have one AP cap and that is destroyed on the face of the first plate hit. A long rod penetrator is much like a tuning fork hit very hard on its tip and will vibrate as it moves forward. The time that penetration is occurring is very short, but if the armor can set up some sort of resonance in the rod in a sideways direction, the rod may undulate and actually fold up in a sort of accordion manner as it moves forward, greatly reducing its penetration depth capability. Thus, the laminated armor of different materials can have optimum orders of application and optimum thicknesses and, perhaps, individual tilts (the layers do not have to be parallel to each other, I would think). While doing extensive tests can give you the penetration ability of a given projectile through a given single solid homogeneous, ductile armor plate (RHA or MQ steel) at various obliquities, this will not translate to the laminated (Chobham or other) kind of armor. They will react differently depending on the plate thickness and impact angle and the individual properties of the plate and projectile. In my FACEHARD program at NAVWEAPS.COM I have many variables on top of baseline steel quality that determines how much armor a given shell penetrates under various conditions into various kinds of face-hardened steel side armor used in battleships, many times from actual test results I have or from calculated values from sources that I trust are usually reasonably accurate. One shell may do very well against one plate at right angles but be completely inferior at even a moderate impact angle compared to another seemingly similar design. A real mess...

isn't this identical to the video on TSKs channel?

Nice video thanks also ceramic layer with rubber layer also putting for tank armors especially in Soviet authority in 1980 to 1990

Do you happen to play World of Tanks, or Armored Warfare?

5:25 that lower plate looks amazingly easy to penetrate.