Reactive armour developed prior to WWII

[Alternate History Geek]

Seeing as the concept of reactive armour was first floated way back in 1949, might it not be too hard to push it back to before WWII and have the Allies and Axis start the war with some kind of reactive armour? And what would be the knock-on effects?

 

[sharlin]

Would it not be best to put these together in one thread with your APFSDS thread?

 

[Alternate History Geek]

Would it not be best to put these together in one thread with your APFSDS thread?

I'd say no, considering that they have significantly hurdles to overcome before they can be put into production, and that their timeframes were quite different OTL...

 

[Cockroach]

Given HEAT rounds hadn't seen much use prior to WW2 there's not really the need for 'basic' reactive armour and I don't think there's enough no how there to build some of the more advanced reactive armour that's able to take out kinetic energy penetrators.

 

[MattII]

Seeing as the concept of reactive armour was first floated way back in 1949, might it not be too hard to push it back to before WWII and have the Allies and Axis start the war with some kind of reactive armour? And what would be the knock-on effects?

ERA would be quite hard considering that the stuff wasn't actually deployed until the 80s. I suppose NERA might be possible, but considering that the standard shells at the time were simple AP shells, I'm not sure how much more effective this would be than space armour.