Top Ten Tanks

[seabolt]

1) the speed the round is traveling at diesel is a solid, try watersking & falling off at 60MPH may as well hit the ground you bounce.

A full can of diesel almost certainly is going to defeat a last-generation HEAT round in this fashion, functioning as spaced armor. It's also going to fireball (like in the movies, which is far less energy efficient than a proper explosion), drenching the vehicle in heat and smoke (all of that unused energy) and marking its location for the next 5 minutes (this is bad).

I can't fathom how this would be better than simply extending the metal grille from the front around the sides. This led me to think that maybe the fireball was supposed to impact a modern tandem-charge HEAT round. (These are the "TC" rounds in MBT that work wonders; look for them!) The fireball certainly would remain in process when the follow-on charge fired, but its relative force vs a few dozen grams of metal moving at 9000 meters per second would be laughable.

That said, I would suspect that simply acting as spaced armor vs older HEAT ordnance is the intended function. The AFV probably lacks space for proper internal tankage and the designers made lemonade from their lemons. I wouldn't want to be driving the thing in a real fight, that's for sure.

2) diesel is actualy a good explosive, hard to ignite but engines are very inefficent extracting well under half the power. Its used for major demolition work with regular explosives as trigger as its cheap & effective.

As mentioned, diesel just sitting in a can usually is a poor explosive. It refuses to vaporize properly under 120F/49C. (Diesel engines reduce the effective flashpoint via compression, but used to be notoriously hard to start in cold weather for this reason.)

A mostly empty tin of petrol or hot diesel can be an excellent explosive: Under perfect conditions, a single can of the size on that AFV could yield a bang as big as *360* sticks of TNT. (This is a makeshift fuel--air explosive.) But I doubt that's the idea, here. The hazard to the crew from a real explosion would be non-negligible. (This would be an excellent way to snap every neck among them, for starters.) I imagine those tins are kept either topped off or empty, nothing between.

So you have got cheap as chips reactive armour deforming/diffusing the plasma cone before it crosses the space & reaches the armour.

Well, it is cheap, but so's that metal grate on the vehicle's nose. And it doesn't peal off greasy smoke and suffocating heat ...