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Comment by Mizza | Hacker News Reader

I'm very skeptical of this technology. The Russian equivalent is currently deployed on T90s in Syria, but has been shown useless against rebel ATGMs. Ex - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rfyeR-YaJw [War footage, crew survives but maybe NSFW depending on your sensitivity level.]

The tank was disabled but not fatally (it was later repaired and put back in service), but that's just because the T-90 is a great tank and the shot was unlucky. You can see the damaged reactive defense system on the right from after this hit: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cd_gdCnWoAA5tyN.jpg

They said it was because the hatch was open, but I think it's actually because this is pure snake oil. It's just too hard.

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Israel much more advanced version worked pretty well in the recent wars in Gaza.

Such active protection systems is the future of combat. Beside tanks use case, a helmet mounted radar today is able to detect the incoming bullets, so similar system can be built for human body protection. At another scale - a military plane today do see incoming missiles, so similar active protection can very effective there too.

The development of those systems is electronic tech dependent - one need fast precise radar and fast precise calculation for the 2-3 sequential stages of the defense projectile boost as the incoming projectiles of interest are starting from the Mach 2 and all the way to about Mach 6 (RPG with its less than 1 Mach is not that important as new systems like the Israel's one do handle them easily, it is more of a matter of whether your military bought it or not). With modern electronics and computation power the interception of projectiles with up to 6Mach (Russians declare up to 10Mach on Armata tank, though one yet to see it :) becomes real.

The SHTORA on that tank was not turned on. You can tell by the two shtora lights not glowing bright red.

As to why it wasn't on, we have only speculation.

SHTORA is a an old shrapnel system and it causes a lot of collateral damage to infantry around as it was found in Afghanistan war and soldiers (not tankists :) disliked it.

Success is a combination of idea and right implementation. Maybe T-90 suffers from problems with second.

Yeah, but I think that's going to be the case for the foreseeable future for all vendors. They can all make compelling pitches and demo videos, but as far as I know there's no evidence of any of these systems actually working on the battlefield.

Israel's shot a bunch of projectiles out of the air after detecting and calculating their trajectory in flight.

What makes smaller projectiles much harder?

Occlusion. I watch a lot of ATGM videos, and most of the shots are when tanks are parked next to buildings, driving through an urban environment, or perched on a hill, rather than in open terrain. There is very little time to react no close range sensors.

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