Inside the Kill Zone: What Happens to a Tank Crew When It’s Hit

Описание: Tank combat footage rarely shows what happens inside the vehicle when it gets hit. This video covers the evolution of anti-tank weapons from the First World War to modern FPV drones, and explains exactly what each type of weapon does to armor and the crew behind it.

You will learn how early tank crews faced "splash" and "spalling" even when rounds failed to penetrate, why German soldiers loaded their rifle bullets backwards to maximize damage against British tanks, and how the shaped charge changed armored warfare by letting a single infantryman threaten any tank on the battlefield. The video explains the engineering behind different ammunition types, from high-explosive squash head rounds that send chunks of interior armor ricocheting through the crew compartment to modern sabot rounds that rely purely on kinetic energy at 1,800 meters per second.

The second half covers how tanks adapted with composite Chobham armor and explosive reactive armor, and why Soviet-designed tanks with carousel autoloaders have a fatal vulnerability that Western designs avoided. The video ends with FPV drones, which have created an unprecedented cost asymmetry where a $500 drone can deliver an RPG warhead to the weakest point on a $5 million tank from miles away. Sources suggest over two-thirds of recent tank losses have come from these drones, and nothing from cope cages to turtle tanks has reliably stopped them.

Chapters:

0:00 What Actually Happens Inside
4:50 When Armor Got Thicker
9:56 The Shaped Charge Changed Everything
13:34 HESH and the Shock Wave Effect
16:40 How Tanks Learned to Fight Back
21:22 The Drone Revolution