How thick is modern MBT armor (DR 2000)?

[BraselC5048]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

The DR of an Abrams is generally set at about 1680 and double that for Shaped Charge weapons. This is equivalent to 24 inches of Rolled Homogenous Alloy (steel). RHA is DR70 per inch (25mm). The best steel armor is provably 20% better.

So is the Abrams actually made out of 24" of armor steel, or composite materials that have a higher DR per inch? For that matter, it can't be and still weigh under 100 tons, 24" of steel just weighs too much. And how many inches thick is it, actually?

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Titanium is probably about the same DR per unit of thickness bit only 60% as dense.

You can get higher DRs per unit of weight but most of those armor types are made of materials much less dense than steel. Steel is around 8 gm/cc while a ceramic as dense as glass would only be around 2. Even tough forms of stone are under 3.

Sppacecraft armor might use a lot of spacing too so thickness would be even greater.

If you like your hull thicknesses of 8" to 12"'re going to need a semi-exotic material (and probably just make up your DR numbers). An iridium composite might be about as good as you can get without superscience and iridium has a density around 20.

Actually, I already designed the ships using a tonnage-based system. This is just an exercise in figuring out how many inches thick the armor is, and it's DR, which does not matter for starship combat, where the armor value uses its own rules. Also, you actually need enough mass to stop X-rays and avoid getting the crew killed. The armor's biggest design criteria is to stop directed energy weapons, and having to burn through a carbon composite uses up a lot of energy.

I originally went with plain carbon shipbuilding steel for mass along with carbon composite. If you've got something significantly more dense with better properties against kinetic impact, than I'm all ears. Still, most of the thickness is in the carbon composite armor. Using pretty much present-day materials.

The real question here is what kind of DR per inch are we talking about for advanced composite material armor? I would figure it's more than 70. Would 12-18" thick fit better?