Why don’t rifle bullets detonate explosive reactive armor?

Question

Why don’t rifle bullets detonate explosive reactive armor?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

The impact of the rifle bullets aren’t energetic enough to initiate the explosive in the tiles. The explosive in the reactive armor is designed to detonate when initiated by something like a shaped charge.

A bullet could hit the armor at 0.9 to 1.2 kilometers per second. A shaped charge will advance at around 7km/s.