Design
Chobham's precise mechanism for defeating HEAT was uncovered in the 1980s. High speed photography showed that the ceramic material shatters as the HEAT round penetrates, the highly energetic fragments destroying the geometry of the metal jet generated by the hollow shaped charge, greatly diminishing the penetration. The effectiveness of the system was amply demonstrated in Desert Storm, where not a single British Army Challenger tank was lost to enemy tank fire. However, one was destroyed by friendly fire on March 25, 2003 killing two crew members after a HESH round detonated on the commander's hatch causing high velocity fragments to enter the turret. Chobham-type armour is currently in its third generation and is used on modern western tanks such as the British Challenger 2 and the American M1 Abrams.
Read more about this topic: Composite Armour
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“Teaching is the perpetual end and office of all things. Teaching, instruction is the main design that shines through the sky and earth.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)