Tank armor made of... wooden boxes?

On Russia's Volgograd 24 TV channel, images of a T-90A main battle tank with wooden boxes surrounding the body and turret have just appeared.

It is known that this T-90A tank belongs to the Southern Military District, participating in an exercise with a hypothetical situation of attacking and destroying rebels hiding in urban areas, based on experience from the actual battlefield in Syria.

The peculiarity of urban combat tanks is that they require the installation of additional armor designed specifically for this particular task.

Russian Army's T-90A tanks are equipped with "additional armor" made of wooden ammunition boxes.

With the characteristics of shaped-charge bullets, the penetrating beam is easily dispersed after detonation if it encounters a large enough gap, which is also the main design principle of composite box armor on tanks today.

The above method of Russian soldiers in the exercise probably also follows the same main idea, the relatively large gap between the two layers of wood that make up the box will more or less reduce the convergence of the penetrating beam.

But to be most effective, box armor must be arranged in many overlapping layers to be strong enough to block an anti-tank bullet like the RPG-7.

In the test below with two layers of 40cm thick bulletproof glass placed a meter apart, the concave penetration beam still did not lose much of its destructive ability.

Testing the RPG-7 bullet at a 40cm thick bulletproof glass wall, it easily passed through the gap to penetrate both.

The fact that the world's leading tank power uses wooden crates as extra armor in exercises is also quite strange and surprising.

According to Dat Viet Newspaper