Landships II

The comment in the caption that the armour on Nixie II was comparatively soft might be the origin of the myth that the

A7Vs used mild steel rather than armour plate which persisted for years. In fact the tests the French Army did on the armour

on Elfriede showed it was made of a similar steel to French armour plate (4% Nickel face hardening steel) and, if anything, was

harder than the French armour.

Charlie

The French armour plate testing results are on this forum (somewhere) - I found the 15mm plate results in a French training manual and 

Marc Romanych found the 30mm plate results in a report at NARA.  

-- Edited by CharlieC on Wednesday 7th of July 2021 11:15:26 PM

There was a thread on A7V armour plate at:

https://landships.activeboard.com/t63367459/a7v-armour-plate-properties/

in that I translated the results for the 15mm plate and compared it to modern EN36 case hardening steel.

Both the side and front plates had similar Brinell hardness suggesting similar depth of case hardening.

I think the myth of soft armour on the A7V comes from a misunderstanding of how armour works - face hardened

armour is not supposed to be totally rigid, and therefore brittle, it's supposed have a hard surface to defeat the penetrating

nose cap of an armour piercing shell but be resilient enough to withstand the explosion of the explosive charge of an AP round.

There was at least one A7V (possibly #527 Lotti) that took multiple hits from French 75mm shells without penetration but the side armour plates

were badly dented.

Charlie