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One of the workshops that Fan Wuxian inspected at the end. It is the workshop of armored technology, where there is a laboratory of special alloy armor technology for combat vehicles and ships.

Regarding the confrontation between armor and artillery shells, the earliest can be traced back to the bow and arrow and armor of the cold weapon era, after the beginning of the firearms age, with the rapid development of artillery shells, the armor in the original sense gradually withdrew from the historical stage, this period, the killing of firearms to personnel can only be described as horror.

And this period, that is, from the beginning of the era of firearms to the appearance of tanks, it can be said that the armor is in a state of absolute inferiority, and the infantry only has steel helmets that can provide limited protection for the head, while armored vehicles cannot be used on a large scale because of insufficient power and poor off-road performance, resulting in almost no protection during the infantry charge in the field, and the casualties are shocking.

Things took a major turn for the worse in World War I on September 15, 1916, when forty-nine diamond-shaped steel monsters were thrown into the then stalemate Somme front, crushing the German defenses with rolling tracks. The epoch-making weapon in the history of human land warfare was born, and the British named this weapon TANK in order to keep it secret, which originally meant water tank, and later became the proper name of this weapon, tank, an epoch-making weapon in the history of modern land warfare was born.

In the early days, the defense of the tank relied on riveted high-carbon steel plates, and before World War II, more solid and reliable armor connections such as welding and casting began to be put into use on the tank, coupled with the application of alloy steel and the introduction of the theory of inclined armor, so that the protection level of the tank continued to improve by leaps and bounds.

However, in this period, the improvement of protection is mainly achieved by increasing the thickness of the armor, but the idea of simply relying on increasing the thickness has great limitations, because it is limited by the technical level and passability of the power system, the tank cannot be built too heavy, and the inclined armor seriously limits the space in the car, and does not save weight, so the threat of shells makes the engineers have to find another way, find a way in the material, and improve the protection by changing the composition of the armor material.

The breakthrough was first found on the battleships of the sea at that time, which generally used case-hardened steel in order to improve protection, so German engineers thought of applying case-hardened steel to tanks to improve the protection of tanks.

Of course, this is also related to the poor quality of German steel. German steel plates of the same thickness are often much lower than those produced in the Soviet Union in some key parameters, and although this method takes a lot of time, it is effective, so surface treated alloy steel is widely used in German tanks.

In the battle against the Soviet Union, the Tiger tank, which used 100 mm of case-hardened steel as frontal armor, withstood the attacks of many Soviet armor-piercing shells, and the warheads of many armor-piercing shells were directly shattered by the armor surface, leaving only very shallow traces on the armor, while ordinary shells were directly bounced off.

However, behind the superficial brilliance lies a hidden crisis, because the basic principle of case-hardened armor is to rely on high hardness to cause fatal damage to the incoming warhead to prevent penetration, and after the warhead hardness is high enough or some protective measures are taken, the advantage of case-hardened armor is abolished.

The new armor-piercing projectile relies on its high muzzle velocity and high hardness and high density of heavy metal cores, which makes the hardened layer formed by the case-hardened armor take a lot of man-hours to become useless, and the case-hardened armor completely loses its advantages of survival, and its complex and time-wasting processing technology makes its cost too high, and the loss of efficiency and high cost make the case-hardened armor withdraw from the historical stage. However, it should be said that the case hardened armor was the first armor made of two materials with different physical properties, although it was not very successful, but its position in the history of tank development still needs to be affirmed.

In the post-war years. The world has not come out of the shadow of war, the shadow of the Cold War has once again shrouded the sky over the entire earth, the fierce arms race has once again kicked off, and the tank, as the king of land warfare, is naturally constantly improving with the rapid development of the two huge military machines of NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

In the early post-war period, the internal structure of the tank tended to be reasonable, so that the tank could thicken the main armor as much as possible under the condition that the weight was not increased much, and the physical thickness of the frontal armor of the turret of the mainstream medium tanks in various countries generally increased, and the cast armor became the mainstream, such as the M60 in the United States in the form of full casting of the hull turret, the British Centennial Captain was a semi-cast hull with a cast turret, and the Soviet T-series adopted the form of a welded hull with a cast turret.

At this time, the shaped energy armor-piercing bullet appeared, and its principle is to rely on the energy of the charge itself to pierce the armor, mainly by making the charge into a hollow cylindrical medicine column with a conical hole, and adding a metal cover to the surface of the conical hole, so that when it explodes, it will converge into a metal energy jet with great speed, temperature and pressure, that is, the gathering effect, to destroy the armor.

At that time, the space for tanks to strengthen their defenses by increasing the physical thickness was basically saturated, and it was almost impossible to fight armor-piercing shells by increasing the thickness of armor alone, especially the emergence of anti-tank missiles, which made some people wonder whether the tank had come to an end, and for a time the status of the king of tank land warfare was facing an unprecedented crisis.

But the tank did not sit still, and in 1964 a new tank was introduced to respond to the threat of armor-piercing shells in a completely new way: the epoch-making T-64 tank.

The nose of the hull of this tank adopts a multi-layer composite structure of armor plates, and its structure from the outside to the inside is forged steel plate, ceramic material, high-hardness forged steel plate, glass fiber, ceramic material and anti-neutron material layer. Although the physical thickness is only about 200 millimeters, its protective ability has reached 500 millimeters of ordinary case-hardened steel plates, and the weight has not been significantly improved.

"A simple example can demonstrate the excellent defense capability of the T-64 turret frontally, in an experiment at the Smolensk range, the Soviets used the Tao-1 obtained from the defected Americans for the experiment, first shooting at a homogeneous armor target plate, the result was that it could penetrate the target plate 500 mm thick, and then using the Tao-1 to shoot a scrapped T-64A with a low-cost armor kit full of ammunition and a rabbit in the driver's seat, after a loud bang, The missile accurately hit the front left part of the turret, but did not penetrate it, and the rabbit placed in the tank was also unharmed, after measurement, the missile only dug a hole in the tank, and in the T-64B tank produced later, the front of the turret was also filled with emery, and its defensive capabilities can be imagined. The head of the Armored Technology Laboratory introduced to Fan Wuxian.

The Soviet Union, having tasted the sweetness of composite armor, quickly replaced its tanks with this advanced armor, including retrofitting and retrofitting kits for old tanks, but due to cost constraints, expensive and powerful ceramic composite armor was not widely used in the Soviet Union's huge tank forces. For example, in the Soviet tank forces as a low-end T-72 tank, its hull head has been using simplified composite armor for a considerable period of time, its structure is steel armor on the outside, fiberglass in the middle, and steel armor in the inside, this composite armor is relatively low-cost, and the overall protection effect is acceptable.

However, in this period, the power of anti-tank missiles has increased greatly due to the improvement of technology, which poses a severe challenge to the protection system of tanks, and at this time, Western countries have finally come up with their own composite armor. That is, the famous Chobham composite armor.

Chobham armor is composed of high hardness steel, ceramic bricks and flexible composite materials embedded in the aluminum sleeve, in terms of bullet resistance, its biggest highlight is that it focuses on the use of different materials on the impact of different materials, so that the armor-piercing projectile in the incidence, through different material trajectory deviation, and the flexible material used in it can produce a strong displacement, so as to break the projectile body, to achieve the effect of preventing penetration, this similar to the effect of Tai Chi to use force.

The new challenge forced the Soviets to adopt new measures to maintain their superiority in the field of armor, so they used the new E-type ceramic composite armor on the T-80 tank, a rod-like structure made of titanium alloy restraint ceramic, and then sealed and cast these into the turret of the tank, as far as the hull could be, of course, at a high cost.

"Actually, we have very little information about this, about the latest T-tank, obviously using more advanced technology, but the Russians are very close, and there is no way to get their hands on it." The person in charge of the laboratory said to Fan Wuxi, "But the overall idea is also very enlightening for us. ”

Fan Wuxian nodded, he had no doubt about this, as long as the Chinese knew a little principle, they could make a better product than the original.

Soon, Fan Wuxian came to the design room accompanied by the person in charge of the laboratory, where many employees were designing composite armor, such as adjusting the material ratio, selecting ingredients of different materials for filling, etc., most of the design was completed in the computer.

However, the domestic technology in special alloy steel did start late, although it has been catching up over the years, but because of some reasons in raw materials and other aspects, it has not been able to make more ideal progress.

Although the iron and steel companies under Fan's Investment Group have special alloy laboratories, the time is still short, and they have not been able to develop any exciting products.

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