Russia’s New Armor-Fooling Rocket Grenade Is An “Abrams Killer” Apparently [Explosions]
Posted in: Today's Chili
The new rocket-propelled grenade RPG-30 anti-armor weapon recently unveiled in Russia has a sneaky trick to help it get past active defenses—it fires a tiny decoy rocket flying ahead of the main warhead. This is to confuse defensive systems into attacking the decoy, meaning they’re too busy to successfully defeat the real weapon inbound just a tenth of a second or so behind. The RPG then has a 105-mm tandem warhead that is apparently capable of penetrating 650mm of steel armor, and can defeat reactive explosive armor too, earning it the “Abrams killer” label.
Which is, of course, interestingly ironic since the Abrams M1 typically doesn’t use reactive armor, neither does its UK equivalent main battle tank the Challenger 2—they rely on advanced solid armor instead. And you’d need either a very lucky strike, or many impacts to seriously damage one of these beasts with any type of RPG. Russian tanks, like the T72 and T80, on the other hand, do rely on reactive armor and sometimes employ active defense systems like Arena. Would be interesting to see the RPG-30 pitted against the Future Combat System’s Quick Kill defenses, don’t you think?
Still, makers Bazalt got some military chaps to demonstrate the system recently on TV:[Wired]
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