History
From the invention of tanks through to the Second World War, tank armour increased in thickness to resist the increasing size and power of anti-tank guns. A tank with sufficient armor could resist the largest anti-tank guns then in use.
RHA was common use during this period (combined with other plate alloys and cast steel armor), and the measure of the power of an anti-tank gun was the thickness of RHA it would penetrate. This measure of tank gun effectiveness has remained in use because it is a useful universal measure for the comparison of increased anti-tank gun effectiveness. Different types of armour, some of which do not use steel or even metals, have come into use but depth of penetration of RHA is still used to compare anti-tank weapon effectiveness.
RHA was in common use as the primary armor system until after World War II. A new generation of anti-tank rounds had come into use during World War II which did not use a heavy, tough, high-velocity projectile to defeat steel armour but instead used an explosive charge called a shaped charge to overcome the strength of the steel. The strength, toughness and hardness of RHA was no longer protection against this threat.
Read more about this topic: Rolled Homogeneous Armour
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)