This is not right at all. First, IEDs are generally not shaped charges. They're bombs.
No arguement. Lots were/are just old Soviet WWII era 152mm shells. Buried in roads. Stuck in a pile of trash or junked car on the roadside. Those aren't too dangerous to an M1. Usually blows a tread, tears up a road wheel or two, screws up torsion bars, etc. Hard on softer targets, but that is to be expected.
What the tankers fear are the old shells with about 1-3kg of copper strapped to the side and lined up with the road.
An RPG-7 can't penetrate the frontal armor on an M1, and it's going to have a much better warhead. Second, the speed of a shaped charge jet tip is on the order of 7 to 14 km/s, not 3 km/s.
RPGs don't do well against the frontal armor. Usually don't make it past the side either. Can't go into the configuration of Chobham as it is still classified (getting the tankers and infantry to sign papers to not disclose what they saw when the armor was penetrated was a pain) but it works pretty well disipating the energy of the shaped charges. But a solid chunk of copper hitting it just cuts right through. Too much energy. And most of the copper blocks were/are going a couple km/s.
Same physics that allow our penetrators to cut through vast amounts of armor, just far more primitive. But as one of my instructors in basic pointed out, an old obsolete rifle will kill you just as dead as the latest in technology.
And just so we're clear, energy is always proportional to the square of velocity.
Energy yes. Momentum no. Just being a little facetious. Sorry.
If you got to deal with the number of sites I did, you tend to develop some 'coping strategies' when talking about IEDs.
And in reply to the many posts positing that the projectile will exit the target in some localized area - I will simply have to disagree. It will turn into a gaseous cloud of immense energy. The original projectile will have a certain amount of momentum that will try to drive it out the back end of the ship. Unless you just barely grazed the target you have hit a fair amount of mass (the armor/hull) that was
part of the ship. This material has the same momentum as the ship does/did - and just absorbed a bunch of energy. It will not be moving to exit the ship in some organized manner. It will just be moving to deposit the energy it has as randomly as it can (per the 2nd L. Therm.). As will every structure in the ship that is 'hit' by this gaseous cloud of energy. The 'particles' of the projectile will still have momentum trying to drive them through the ship, but individually the particles will have considerably less momentum than the objects they are likely to strike. They are likely to be 'stopped/captured' by the structures they impact inside the target. They will still be carrying a large amount of energy that will then be transferred to the structures - which will also begin depositing this energy to the rest of the target. Add in the thermal wave of IR radiation going in every direction this whole cascade is generating and it just gets worse. Unless the ship is very small and made of tinfoil - it is going to absorb a large percentage of the energy from the projectile to its structure - and not just in the path of the projectile.
If you feel that the projectile exits the back, then there isn't much experimental data on what happens to contradict you. I don't know of any organized attempts to shoot 'space vehicles' with 10's of km/s slugs to see just what happens.
I believe that is will look like you placed a large amount of explosives inside the hull. A big flash and detonation, with an expanding cloud of debris after. But to each their own.
Whatever Steve codes for, I will happily work with.