A lot of the earlier cages people were roasting for being the wrong bar separation width of whatever were welded together from random crap before they started rolling out more mass-produced ones. Lo and behold the armor works and both sides have made use of it, the Russians far more ubiquitously since they actually remember how to mass produce something for military purposes

Before even engaging with this I'd make sure I'm not talking to a reddit NATO shill, its only cope when Russians do it.

Cope cages on Challenger 2's last year.

(He was also telling me that the shed tanks are carrying diesel generators to run point-defense guns. According to him older tank's power-plants can't run the point defense guns so they're using diesel generators strapped to the tanks. and this is bad because if hte generator gets hit hte diesel will catch fire and cook the tank crew alive. I'm pretty sure that's total bullshit because tanks have been designed with protection from incendiary attacks for decades, diesel is notoriously hard to ignite and doesn't explode, and anyway T-72s have giant barrels of spare diesel fuel attached to their rear anyway. While probably not filled in combat, it apparently hasn't been a problem for fifty years so I'm skeptical that 10 or 20 gallons of diesel fuel in a portable generator is somehow going to cook a tank crew alive.)

This analysis is weird, what sort of point defense guns is he talking about? The Russians are mounting diesel generators to some of the turtle tanks but those are there to run the EW (electronic warfare) that's also mounted to the top of the tank. Some of the shed tanks have the EW suite but most don't, although one of the tanks that got popular on twitter was this type of EW tank.

Does anyone have access to any actual science on how various kinds of cage armor are performing against modern drone munitions? I'm really curious because to me this seems really straight forward - If a HEAT round can't detonate at the proper distance from the target it can't defeat the target's armor. And they're saying that's bullshit and this is all cope and doesn't work. And that doesn't pass the smell test to me.

This analysis is from analyzing the effectiveness of WW2 armor skirts on panzers. The nazis added this kind of armor to mitigate damage from kinetic weapons, especially from Soviet anti-tank rifles. This had limited effectiveness against HEAT rounds and could even theoretically improve the effectiveness of a HEAT round. This is due to the jet of the HEAT round needing the proper distance to form and some HEAT rounds just weren't long enough for this full effect.

The shed armor upgrade is mostly against drone attacks from above. It increases the distance that a HEAT round detonates from, and to a much greater degree than classic armor skirts. Not only that but it makes targeting the weak points on the armor much more difficult. It also greatly reduces of the effect of non-HEAT explosives on the tank. On the EW turtle tanks, the shed protects the more delicate EW equipment from small arms fire.

I don't have any actual proper sources. This is a very rapidly developing area of study.

Edit: "Classic" slat armor is actually for a different purpose altogether. It's there to crush RPG warheads and keep them from going off or at least disrupt the formation of the HEAT jet. A large part of an RPG round is hollow, this is necessary to make it a HEAT round instead of just explosive (HE). An RPG hitting correctly spaced slat armor at the proper angle will have the warhead be crushed by the slats. This will either prevent the detonate from working or just disrupt the HEAT jet.

If it was cope then the Ukrainians wouldn’t have copied them, nor the Israelis, Koreans, etc.

The winning argument here is "if it doesn't work why are both sides be doing it? and why would they be coming up with new and better ways to do it?"

Worst that might happen with leaked fuel on the hull is it will smell bad and be a slip hazard. Any tank properly maintained for NBC warfare will have enough seals to keep the fuel from leaking inside. Diesel fuel is hard to ignite and keep lit. IF fuel were to leak inside and ignited, it would be ignited by something that cracked the hull/turret and would have probably already killed the crew.

Most likely issue could be a small fire in the engine compartment, which is most likely separated from the crew compartment by firewalls and/or armor.

Speed of the projectile actually doesn't matter much at all for FPV drones or ATGMs, they help in catching up to the target but both methods utilize HEAT warheads which are not kinetic weapons. Upon impact an inverted cup of copper inside the warhead is heated and propelled forward by the explosion, this metal jet punches through the armor making a relatively tiny hole and igniting/penetrating vital components or the crew, it can also cause spalling on the inside of the vehicle.

Kinetic weapons on the other hand, such as armor piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot rounds fired from main battle tanks, rely on a solid metal core being propelled at high velocities and do lose power over long distances.

What does weaken HEAT warheads is the distance the molten copper jet travels, spaced armor makes sure it detonates farther away from the armor and exposes the heated metal to open air thereby cooling it somewhat before making contact with the actual vehicle. As the other comment said, badly spaced armor can actually increase the effectiveness of HEAT warheads but I'm sure soldiers keep this in mind when doing these types of modifications to their vehicles.

As for the point defense guns, those aren't a thing on vehicles. We have seen small generators plastered on Russian "turtle tanks" but those are to power electronic warfare units on the outside of the spaced armor, these devices block certain radio frequencies in a short radius around the tank in the hopes of breaking the connection between a hostile drone and its operator.