From time immemorial, like armies converging on the battlefield, the creators of the means of destruction of enemy manpower - weapons and the creators of means of protection of manpower - armor - converged in a constant struggle. Sometimes, in an attempt to "give the fighters a second chance at survival", craftsmen, designers and engineers were forced to make very strange decisions. The situation with the development of tanks in the middle of the 20th century can be considered the clearest illustration of the arms and defense race.
The race of armor and weapons began at the dawn of our history. Ancient blacksmiths-armourers created blades with a pronounced chopping effect. Ancient blacksmiths-armors immediately invented metal thoraxes. Medieval armourers further extended the length of the crossbow shoulder. Armor masters immediately responded by thickening their armor or changing their shape. And then the era of the war of machines began. Tanks drove onto the battlefield and were immediately greeted with artillery. In response, the craftsmen tried to increase the armor. Weapon designers, in turn, increased their calibers even more.
At some point, the race of calibers and thickness of armor just stepped beyond reason. It was no longer possible to continue building up the "sizes". The armor turned out to be too heavy, and the guns too powerful, as a result of which their carriage simply could not withstand them. Armor-piercing shells began to appear, sabot and, of course, cumulative. To resist such "openers", armor engineers had to resort to using a composite multilayer protection from several different materials, as well as to create "additional means counteraction ".
Just one of such "additional funds" was the Soviet system ZET-1. Its creation was due to the fact that after the Second World War, the effectiveness of shaped-charge projectiles almost doubled. The then T-54, T-55 and T-62 were virtually helpless before being hit by the shells mentioned above.
The cumulative jet easily penetrated the upper armor plate with a thickness of 100 mm and an inclination of 55-60 degrees. In order for the armor to withstand, it had to be made twice as thick as at least 215 mm, and preferably up to 250 mm. However, such a solution was extremely impractical, since the thickening of the armor would have made the tanks 8-10 tons heavier. And this is a decrease in speed and maneuverability, an increase in fuel consumption.
Decided to enter, from the other side. In 1964, Soviet engineers presented a prototype of the complex anti-cumulative protection ZET-1. The system consisted of several screens. On the sides of the tank there was additional lamellar protection, the same mysterious wings that can be seen in the photographs of some tanks. Another important element of increased security was installed from the front - a mesh "umbrella", which was deployed on a tank cannon.
The operating principle of the system was quite simple. The point is that the stretched mesh was supposed to catch cumulative projectiles flying from the front and cause them to detonate. directly in the air so that between the point of ejection of the cumulative jet and the tank's armor, there is as much distance. As a result, the hot jet weakened and did not cause such damage to the armor, and with a high degree of probability did not burn through it. This means that the crew of the car survived, and the tank itself remained on the move. For this, metal "wings" were also needed, located on the sides of the vehicle - all in order to distance the place of ejection of the armor-piercing jet from the body of the tank.
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The ZET-1 system was not at all something completely new. Cumulative ammunition was known as early as the Second World War. Moreover, at the same time, the first hand-held anti-tank grenade launchers with cumulative ammunition appeared. By the end of the First World War, the tankers of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition thought of installing passive anti-cumulative protection in the form of nets. The Germans most often put additional metal screens over the armor. It is noteworthy that this method of countering shaped-charge ammunition is used to this day.
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And what about the ZET-1 system? A sad end awaited her. Despite the fact that the leadership gave the green light and ZET-1 began to be produced, the grid did not take root in the tank forces. It was periodically used in exercises, but most of the time the defense spent in the "bins of the motherland" in case of war. After installation, the mesh screen was in the stowed position. The transfer of protection to combat mode took 1-3 minutes, depending on the level of the crew's training. By the end of the 1960s, the Soviet army received tanks with fundamentally new composite armor, which made the mesh countermeasures virtually useless.
Moreover, in 1965 Bogdan Voitsekhovsky received the Lenin Prize for the creation of dynamic tank protection (cubes with TNT). True, then, for a number of reasons, the technology was not put into series, postponing its implementation on the back burner right up to the early 1980s.
If you want to know even more interesting things, you should read about 5 promising Soviet combat aircraftwho were "not allowed" to the front.
Source: https://novate.ru/blogs/070420/54067/