[Darksheare]

Fieldable lasers are years and generations away.
Microwave 'death rays' are still far in the future despite advances in emission.
It's power generation and sustanence that is the problem there.
Railguns are still out due to power generation.
X-ray lasers are out.
Kinetic projectiles can still be dealt with regardless how fast they go or how thick they are made.
Reactive armor had steel plates added to it to catch and break the tungsten rhenium dart.
The dart was made thicker, the plates were made thicker.
And that's the past generation way of doing it.
Besides.
Remember Chobham armor?
Laminated armor basically.
Hardened face steel or depleted uranium front, ceramic sandwich center, and softer steel backing n it's most basic form.
HEAT has a heck of a time cutting through it from the ceramic sheet, squash rounds can't spall anything, and the whole deal make kinetic penetration difficult at best.

It can still be developed further.
Ceramics have improved generations ahead of what they were when Chobham came out.
And making vented voids creates more trouble for the HEAT rounds.
Add an extra sheet of ceramic inside the void.

The main bugaboo recently about the M1A1 abrams is that it's engine is difficult and unreliable still.
Not as insurmountable as Shinseki bots would have everyone believe.
Gas turbine engines are used in naval vessels all the time.
A similar system can be scaled down as well.
A combined gas turbine and electric system doubles your effective range.
Add a fuel cell in there, and you've got added range and power should you need it.
Kinda like using electric motors to enhance acceleration, in the above theory.

But fuel cells are still in the future.

[tortoise]

Kinetic projectiles can still be dealt with regardless how fast they go or how thick they are made. Reactive armor had steel plates added to it to catch and break the tungsten rhenium dart. The dart was made thicker, the plates were made thicker. And that's the past generation way of doing it. Besides. Remember Chobham armor? Laminated armor basically. Hardened face steel or depleted uranium front, ceramic sandwich center, and softer steel backing n it's most basic form. HEAT has a heck of a time cutting through it from the ceramic sheet, squash rounds can't spall anything, and the whole deal make kinetic penetration difficult at best.

Everything you are describing is pretty dated kinetic energy tech. The state-of-the-art has qualitatively different properties because the energy is much higher. And who would use tungsten? Density is a few items down on the list of properties that matter for the selected material, and tungsten alloys tend to be pretty mediocre compared to, say, uranium (which has a much better crystalline structure to exploit), particularly when driven to high velocities.

It is more like a DU dart that is driven so fast that the outer shell of the dart instantaneously becomes a super-critical uranium fluid as it hits the armor, with a pencil of solid uranium core. The energy density is sufficiently high that no combination of physical materials can dissipate the energy without being multiple meters thick, and the uranium fluid protects the core. Toughness and conformation doesn't matter, because there does not exist a molecular bond strong enough to withstand this type of penetrator behavior. Period.

All armor functions by dissipating energy, both by absorption (e.g. laminate plates) and diffusion (reactive armor and conformation tricks). The latest generation of anti-armor has such a high energy density, velocity, and profile optimality that even the best laminate materials would need to be a multiple meters thick for absorption to work. On top of this, the particular properties of the weapon as it interacts with armor is such that diffusion methods only have marginal utility against it. As a consequence, the only real defense against this type of weapon is several meters of advanced composite armor, which is not practical on a mobile vehicle.

What you end up with is something that has the cross-section and a significant portion of the velocity of an explosively powered plasma jet, yet which has better density and superior structural integrity than a classic kinetic energy dart. In essence, you end up with a weapon that is impervious to both absorption (the weakness of classic KE) AND diffusion (the weakness of HE anti-armor), and multiplying the core lethality components of both. The only plausible mobile defense against this type of weapon is interception.