Earlier ERA

A military tech thread! Yay!
Explosive Reactive Armor was first proposed in 1949 in the Soviet Union. (Remember the Soviets were at the top of their game then). A few accidents, and hard headedness prevented it from being adopted until much, much, much later.

But WI the Soviet Union decided to accept an early version of ERA in 1949? Would its tanks be able to do a better job against the western tanks in various cold war conflicts. Would this actually be enough to change the tide of any conflicts?

Just curious you know.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
I'm not sure if Soviet engineering could've made reactive armour that worked that well back then, or wasn't prohibitively expensive. Also...the weight couldn't have helped them any. Regardless of what some folks here may say, late-Cold War and post-Cold War books like The Threat by Cockburn and even the Russian General Staff's own The Russian-Afghan War talk about how Soviet tanks after the T-34/T-44 were limited in their size and weight by inefficient and underpowered engines.

It'd be an interesting idea, especially since the British pretty much developed Chobham as soon as they could.

I think a lot of the reason that it was developed when it was was that the threat had changed: the Israelis rolled into Lebanon in 1982 with Sho'ts (modified Centurions) and Magach-7s (modified M-60s) fitted with Blazer in an attempt to negate the effectiveness of the ATGMs that had torn a hole in their armoured formations in 1973.

Perhaps if something different had come out of Korea, like a stouter American defense in the initial thrust through use of small arms convincing the Soviets of the same thing in 1951-52 rather than the Israelis in 1973?
 
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