Hence a tank with sufficient NERA to stop enemy APFSDS rounds will be a lot better than a tank that relies on ERA to degrade the performance of enemy rounds.
Yes, but that is unattainable because once they find out your armour stops their rounds they make new more powerful rounds that your armour can no longer stop.
It does not matter if enemy rounds are stopped by ERA or NERA or APS or base armour... all of these work together to make the tank better protected, and improvements in each field benefit the tank crew as each component can be improved or upgraded.
While something like the T-90M is well protected when you count the ERA but, how well protected do you think it will be when most of that ERA has already detonated?
It really depends... is most of the ERA gone in the first seconds of contact because there are 30 enemies with RPGs repeatedly firing at your tank which is getting overwhelmed and keeps running away... or have you killed 10 enemy tanks and have been hit 6-8 times in the process of killing those enemy tanks...
ERA is relatively cheap and trivial to replace so if you have lost half your ERA coverage head back to your support area and get a few new tiles put on in place of the damaged ones and then head back into combat... ERA tiles are cheap and simple to replace it is not the end of the world if you lose some or most of them... that is them doing their job.
Equally while you are there you can grab some more main gun ammo and reload the APS with munitions too and also smoke grenades and MG ammo.
Real combat is not a video game... I think it is amusing you worrying about losing ERA tiles when one hit to the tracks means you bail and abandon your tank and let the engineers recover it... no sitting for 30 seconds while it automatically repairs.
Depending on the conflict you might remain in the tank because that is actually safest and maintain fire against the enemy while help is sent.
The exact same reason I am suggesting that relying on ERA is foolish.
No one is relying on ERA. ERA serves a purpose... compared with the protection it adds it is cheap and light and simple and easy to replace in the field... unbolt and discard the old tiles and bolt on new tiles and you are ready to go...
I was talking about the composite armour of the T-72B's turret.
It depends on angles and depths of penetration and of course what is hitting it... small arms fire will bounce off and wont leave a scratch. Heavier rounds might leave marks and some will penetrate no matter what.
With ERA on top it makes it harder to penetrate but does not make it impossible... but then the rear of the turret could be penetrated by many modern anti armour weapons.
Could a light tank with some ERA have survived the same situation?
If they could there would be no value in heavier vehicles.
I was suggesting that as ERA panels detonated the tank would be increasingly likely to be hit in an area not protected by ERA and that if a tank relied on ERA that it's protection would then be compromised.
ERA panels on light vehicles is only a more recent thing because ERA reduces penetration but does not stop the penetrator... you need significant base armour behind the ERA to actually stop those rounds. When you see ERA on BMPs it is normally attached to composite external armour boxes.
No Soviet tank relied on ERA or APS, but using both is the most sensible thing with Nakidka over the outside...
One wont stop a HEAT round or APFSDS but the combination of different measures works best and is the most effective.
I never claimed that enemy gunners could hit "weakspots" but, rather that after a few hits a tanks ERA coverage would be poor resulting in a higher probability. of a penetrating hit if that tank relied on ERA for protection.
A vehicle with ERA that has been hit 20 times is still in a better position protection wise than the same vehicle with no ERA where many of those 20 hits might have penetrated the tank armour and killed crew members.
Having to hit a tank multiple times just to get a chance to penetrate sounds like the perfect tank protection to me...
In contrasst the M1 Abrams is one such tank that doesn't employ ERA for its protection. And its stupidly heavy for what it does that it can't be transported to where its needed, and needs billions further in infrastructure upgrades just to allow just this one vehicle type some level of mobility. Its also stupidly expensive, since among other things, it requires significant amounts of highly resilient, but relatively low weight armor materials like titanium for its armor to keep within relaxed weight constraints.
Not to mention the Americans couldn't come up with a diesel engine powerful enough to move it around the battlefield so they converted a helicopter gas turbine engine to power it... creating a huge IR signature and burning fuel that OPEC countries dream everyone needed for their tanks...
Oh yes they have cheap easy to deploy cannon fodder that have vastly inferior protection levels to projects from the late 70's, great if you need to quickly arm your police force, but of questionable value in mechanised warfare.
The T-90 held up just fine against the TOW in Syria the fact that it did not fare so well in Chechnia is more a reflection of the level of knowledge the Chechens had of Soviet military equipment.
If Iraqis had been trained in the US Army and were provided all the anti armour equipment Russia had at its disposal in the late 1990s and 2000s, then no Abrams tank would have survived... and all their helicopters would be shot down too.
If your tanks lack survivability you cannot deploy them against what they cannot hope to survive, the army will need to rely on its Smerch batteries, helicopters and the airforce to destroy all of the enemy tanks before they can even consider sending in their own.
Which is obviously something for HATO to be really scared about because their tanks simply are not better than upgraded T-72s let alone T-90s or Armata T-14s.
Equip the entire army with nothing but pistols because the RVSN will be relied upon to kill all of the enemy soldiers before the army is deployed?
You seem to have the wrong end of the stick... it is the HATO forces that have to keep their tanks in air conditioned and heated tents, it is HATO forces that lack a brand new tank design... their newest ones are from the early 1980s... and while they have a few samples of impressively expensive anti tank weapons... they really don't have enormous numbers of them because they are expensive and they certainly don't have the air defence capacity to protect their anti armour helicopters and CAS jets, let alone bring down new Russian helicopters and jets that are getting all new missiles and capabilities.
ERA is a simple cheap add on level of protection that just makes their vehicles harder to deal with using new and existing ammo for HATO.
HATO doesn't use it because there is no profit in Cheap.
Ironic when the next evolution of HATO is cheap drone swarms... note that word cheap... by the time they have spent billions on this the cheap will be omitted like it was from the F-35 programme which snowballed out of control too... and they will be talking about 10 drones working together as being a drone swarm... scary scary...
The real funny thing is that a drone swarm is both high tech... which the Russians have proved they can do now... and needs to be affordable to be used in the numbers needed to be effective... and both Russia and China can do Cheap too... HATO should be afraid... HATO should be looking at not calling Russia and China enemy so much... but they wont because the US is in charge and they don't want to make money and grow and develop...
It is an poorly designed, inefficient and primitive vehicle with sub par firepower, but at least it can take a few hits
One ancient Konkurs hit to the side of the turret takes them out.
One shot to the track would immobilise them just like any other tank.
A tank with similar specifications but created using Russian tank design methodology (prior to gorbie/yeltsin tank design incompetence) would alleviate many of the issues you mentioned.
Russia wouldn't make a tank that heavy.... look at T-14... that is the tank they make.
Tradeoffs. are. a . thing. You can keep on insisting on whatever it is that tickles your fancy but sooner or later it would have to concede to reality.
Which is why ERA is amazing... it is relatively cheap... anyone who can use a spanner can fit it or remove it... it is not very heavy... and it adds protection to tank armour... it isn't perfect... there is a chance a round could hit the join between two plates and neither works properly... the point is that it is there to improve the protection of the tank, but no one expects it to make it invincible.