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Armour
Armour

Armour or armor is protective covering used to prevent damage from being inflicted to an individual or a vehicle through use of direct contact weapons or projectiles, usually during combat....
 with two or more plates spaced a distance apart, called spaced armour. When sloped it reduces the penetrating power of bullets and solid shot as after penetrating each plate they tend to tumble, deflect, deform, or disintegrate; when not sloped it increases anyway the protection offered by the armour because explosive projectiles detonate on it before they reach the inner plates. It has been in use since the First World War, where it was used on the Schneider CA1
Schneider CA1

The Schneider CA1 was the first France tank. It was inspired by the need to overcome the horrors of the trench warfare of the "World War I"....
 and St Chamond
St Chamond (tank)

The St Chamond was the second French heavy tank of the World War I.Overall an inadequate design born of commercial rivalry, the war ended before it was replaced by Mark I ....
 tanks.






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Armour
Armour

Armour or armor is protective covering used to prevent damage from being inflicted to an individual or a vehicle through use of direct contact weapons or projectiles, usually during combat....
 with two or more plates spaced a distance apart, called spaced armour. When sloped it reduces the penetrating power of bullets and solid shot as after penetrating each plate they tend to tumble, deflect, deform, or disintegrate; when not sloped it increases anyway the protection offered by the armour because explosive projectiles detonate on it before they reach the inner plates. It has been in use since the First World War, where it was used on the Schneider CA1
Schneider CA1

The Schneider CA1 was the first France tank. It was inspired by the need to overcome the horrors of the trench warfare of the "World War I"....
 and St Chamond
St Chamond (tank)

The St Chamond was the second French heavy tank of the World War I.Overall an inadequate design born of commercial rivalry, the war ended before it was replaced by Mark I ....
 tanks. Many early-WWII German tanks had spaced armour in the form of armoured skirts, to make their thinner side armour more effective against anti-tank fire.

T34 85 4
The principle of spaced armour protects against high explosive anti-tank
High explosive anti-tank

High Explosive Anti-Tank rounds are made of an explosive shaped charge that uses the Neumann effect to create a very high-velocity jet of metal in a state of superplasticity that can punch through solid vehicle armour....
 (HEAT) projectiles which create a focus
Focus

Focus may refer to:In science, mathematics or computing:*Focus , a point toward which light rays are made to converge*Focus , an earthquake's underground point of origin or hypocenter...
sed jet of plasticised metal, very effective at the focus point, but much less so beyond there. Relatively thin armour plates or even metal mesh, much lighter than fully protective armour, can be attached as side skirts or turret skirts on tanks and other armoured vehicles. This light armour detonates the warhead prematurely so that the jet of molten metal is focussed well before the main armour, becoming relatively ineffective. Factory-made and improvised stand-off armour was introduced in the Second World War to defend against the new Bazooka
Bazooka

A bazooka is one of a series of anti-armor and anti-bunker, man-portable rocket launchers that became famous during World War II. Technically named as the M9 Anti-tank Rocket Launcher, it was also called "stovepipe" and used to deliver high explosives into machine gun nests and hardened bunkers in all WWII theaters....
, Panzerfaust
Panzerfaust

The Panzerfaust was an inexpensive, recoilless Nazi Germany anti-tank weapon of World War II. It consisted of a small, disposable preloaded launch tube firing a high explosive anti-tank warhead, operated by a single soldier....
, and other HEAT weapons.

In response to increasingly effective HEAT warheads, integral spaced armour was reintroduced in the 1960s on the German Leopard 1. There are hollow spaces inside this type of armour, increasing the length of travel from the exterior of the vehicle to the interior for a given weight of armour, to reduce the shaped charge's penetrating power. Sometimes the interior surfaces of these hollow cavities are sloped, presenting angles to the anticipated path of the shaped charge's jet in order to further dissipate its power. For example, a given weight of armour can be distributed in 2 layers 15cm (6in) thick instead of a single 30cm (12in) layer, giving much better protection against shaped charges.

Today light armoured vehicles mount panels of metal rods, known as slat armour or cage armor, and some main battle tanks carry rubber skirts to protect their relatively fragile suspension and front belly armour.

The Whipple shield
Whipple shield

The Whipple shield or Whipple bumper, invented by Fred Whipple, is a type of hypervelocity impact shield used to protect manned and unmanned spacecraft from collisions with small particles whose velocities are measured in kilometers per second....
 uses the principle of spaced armour to protect spacecraft from the impacts of very fast micrometeoroid
Micrometeoroid

A micrometeoroid is a tiny meteoroid; a small particle of rock in space, usually weighing less than a gram. A micrometeor or micrometeorite is such a particle that enters the Earth's atmosphere or falls to Earth....
s. The impact with the first wall melts or breaks up the incoming particle, causing fragments to be spread over a wider area when striking the subsequent walls.