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Which is the leading cause of its improved effectiveness vs flat armour:

Is it that it presents more steel to the round being fired at it (as demonstrated here)?

OR

Is it that the slope makes it harder for the round to transfer energy to the plate (as the angle will make the shot more likely to slide up/down the plate)?

I think its a little of both.

 Ramki, on Jun 26 2012 - 06:12, said:

this

 Ramki, on Jun 26 2012 - 06:12, said:

yep

It is actually more complicated.

1) highly sloped armor makes it easier for shell to ricochet off armor. This is partly due to the off axis momentum of the round to the engagement point of the round with respect to the direction of round travel and the fact that the panatrating nose of the round may not strike the armor to dig in or the side of the penetrator engages the armor.

2) you have more line of sight armor thickness.

So to be more precise, the sloped armor makes it harder for a shell to properly engage the armor and the slope puts a greater thickness of armor the path of the incoming round and therefore provide more resistance.

Yea it's both. I think 60 degrees is double the armor and 70 degrees is a guaranteed bounce. Saw that on the wiki earlier.

It's both, it provides added thickness to the armor whilst also increasing the chance a round will just glance off. You have to be careful though, a ricocheting round might end up someplace else and damage the tank.

We covered this in some detail elsewhere; sloped armor has to have additional protective benefit beyond thicker LOS depth because if the thicker LOS depth were the only benefit it conferred, sloped armor wouldn't be any lighter.

You would be amazed how many people outright rejected this simple concept that can be trivially proven with high-school level geometry.

If you incorporate real life physics, the shell would hit the armor at an angle, the part of the shell  closer to the armor would receive more impact causing the shell once it hits to be angled toward the parallel side of the tank, so the shell actually scrapes along the side of the tank not just hitting the armor and bounce back the opposite direction the shell came from.

even if the shell does not glance off, the way the energy of the round distributes off sloped armor is much different than from a right angled slab.

distributing kinetic energy is a key factor in preventing armor failure.

you also want as few seams as possible, wherever you have two pieces of armor meet you have an edge effect which massively increases the change of penetration, sloped armor is often designed in such a way as to minimize such meeting points particularly on areas with a high risk of being struck
Edited by Kyphe, Jun 30 2012 - 03:35.