/sci/ - Science & Math

>>2259073
It'll really depend on how much mass you want to dedicate to armor.

A typical penetrator used in tank combat has a speed of around 1km/s. To defeat this, you need to use RHAe of about 1000mm's. Modern MBT's sport between 900 and 1500mm's RHAe on their frontal turret.

[RHAe stands for Rolled Homogenous Armor equivlent - basically it's how much pure steel you'd need to stop the penetrator. Modern composite materials and armor design cut the actual thickness and density of armor required however, hence the equivalence.]

To stop a 7 or 8km/s penetrator, you might very well need on the order of 10,000+mm's of RHAe. It's pretty obvious how quickly infeasible this becomes. Especially in order to armor the entire spacecraft, and moreso when you take into consideration just how important it is to reduce mass on a spaceship as much as possible.

If anyone ever actually does armor a spacecraft, it'll be almost entirely on the nose, and the spacecraft itself will be either disk or cone shaped, so as to present the lowest surface area and most armor to the incoming projectile.