In my case, I think it probably has to do with the fact that they’re flying in the air, and they need to be as lightweight as humanly possible in order to fly high and better, and that adding armor just weighs them down. Tanks, on the other hand, are ground vehicles, so they’re not as encumbered by their own armor as warplanes and whatever armor they could have equipped themselves with.
Right?
In: Engineering
Missiles don’t even try to hit their target. They just explode near it, and the shrapnel does all the work. More weight = more fuel = more space needed for gas = less space for armor = need more space for life support.
It also doesn’t really matter if a plane takes a hit, even a modern one, if the pilot is intact, and the wings are still on the jet. They can still glide down if needed.
In the instance of tanks, it is also dependent on the terrain. We discovered in Afghanistan that, unlike Iraq, Korea, and Europe, tanks are useless. You just get stuck in the mountains. The soviets fell into that trap as well- we adapted by developing specialized APCs to protect against IEDs and to navigate terrain, since we didn’t have tanks to fight anyway.
You can look at WW2 specifically for a difference in ‘armor vs speed vs aeronautics’ with how visceral dogfights were. Now, air combat is done out of visual range in most instances, and our best tactic for unarmed planes is ‘run away fast’.
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