not to worry, there’s already a counter measure:
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What about avoiding glass entirely? Use conventional reactive armor, and look out via pinhole cameras and screens inside, or synthetic vision via VR?
This brings a possibility of attacking with low-cost low-accuracy rounds to trigger the system. Do it enough times to expend the onboard stores, then use the RPG.
Kapow.
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I’m not sure why anyone would expect bulletproof glass to stop an RPG.
Bulletproof glass is for stopping bullets - small, inert kinetic-energy projectiles, you know?
It’s not meant to stop the plasma plume from an explosive shaped charge.
Different problem entirely.
Want to protect against RPG attack with transparent material? Use two shells of BP glass, with the outer shell some distance from the inner - same principle as slat armor or cage armor - the outer shell causes the warhead to detonate, but the plasma plume dissipates before it reaches the inner shell.
(Of course, like slat or cage armor, it may stop the RPG’s shaped-charge warhead, but it’s still vulnerable to the explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) hurled from roadside IEDs. )
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Placing the glass at an oblique angle would probably work pretty well. RPGs like perpendicular surfaces.
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No, reactive armor is armor that reacts. It is a block of explosives that disrupts the explosive force of a shaped charge that hits it. You are describing an active defense system.
Didn’t you see the video? They try this. It doesn’t help. Slat armor doesn’t just set the shaped charge off early - it is designed to deform the shape of the charge before it goes off. The slats have to be at particular distances from each other to work.
The bulletproof pane would shatter too.
That thing was HEAVY.
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The best defense is to sit thousands of miles away in an office building piloting a drone.
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There’s a Judge Dredd story where he goes to Ireland, and all the Irish judges’ Lawgivers shoot potatoes as I recall.
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Come to think of it… Oh wait, I think I just ruined my own idea:
Turns out that you can’t really cook anything reliably with adiabatic heating. Either it gets completely charred to nothing, or ripped apart by the air resistance, or, or, or.
Dammit! I know we can get something good with “air cooked” potatoes, baked by the very force of the atmosphere. If we get them going fast enough.
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Shaped charges don’t produce plasma plumes. Or superheated liquid jets. The liner is actually plastically deformed during the detonation. Which is to say, it’s actually solid throughout. A neat effect is that you could cut a shaped charge liner into quarters, put it back into the charge, detonate, dig the remains out, and find it still in quarters.
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What about a thermal shielding with a phase change material backing? Heat during the reentry, get the temperature capped for a while by the PCM, and then eject the payload once the assembly decelerates enough and the payload is cooked sufficiently?
I bet it should be doable, with good combination of PCM, ablative lining of the shield, and thermal insulation. Let the thermal energy trickle into the payload in a controlled way, so just right amount gets in, cap the payload temperature with the PCM, cap the absorbed energy amount by limited heat exposure time by ejecting the payload from its housing.
A perfectly cooked steak then could be recovered from its parachute-descending capsule.
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Doing xray diffraction studies on a metal jet moving at supersonic speed was quite a show of technology.
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