KV7

In theory they could also add NERA elements but I think the marginal ME is still quite a bit worse than ERA even with pretty thin base armour.

Hijacking this as a proxy for "Chinese tanks thread" : The Chinese seem to have some new and not so great cages:

There are no real economic constraints, the issue is political, i.e. if Russians will tolerate it and if not, do something about it that is a real worry.

It could collapse before that due a mix of defeats and internal resistance making replenishment ineffective and/or continuation of the war politically impossible.

Do you have a link ? The nonlinear effect is odd.

Yes, but with the advantage of stiffness at high strain. I could see applications in sporting apparel where you want some flexibility but also hardness when struck by a puck,ball, stick, sword etc. to reduce bruising damage.

The known advantages of this material are strain hardening, which allows for flexibility but hardening on impact. But for most armour applications flexibility is not desirable if it comes at the cost of lower specific strength, hardness, toughness etc.

This is quite good:

It could be very useful as a general technology but there is not a good reason to think it would be good for armour, there is no indication of superlative mechanical properties

The mass efficiency can be higher or lower with sloping, and this depends on many factors. For high velocity smaller calibre full bore AP (as in a typical ~75 mm WW2 tank gun) sloping improves mass efficiency substantially as the projectile will be deflected, if not a ricochet there will still be deflection away from normal to the plate and so the effective depth increases. However this is reduced for larger bore AP with lower velocity as now the thinner sloping plate can break. For APFSDS you can get a deflection at very sharp angling (80-82 degrees) but at smaller angles it can lower mass efficiency as there is deflection towards normal, and the final portion of the armour can scab even as the LOS distance is still substantial due to internal pressure in the plate. However sloped plates can have high ME as part of some array, where the sloping induces yaw etc. There are some okay simulations of these effects on youtube.

This was quite interesting:

These are related, they are not willing to do the "drastic" measure that would make an impact on this hard problem. Partially there is a political problem because immigration is cheaper and more consistent with the prevailing ideology than "make having children much cheaper and easier to do", but the main opponents of this approach are quite marginalised rightists who also tend to be averse to welfare state expenditures. In most electorates there is a reasonable support for a ~ left wing economic policy and a centrist or even conservative social policy but this view is barely politically represented, likely because it is roughly the opposite of the standard elite viewpoint. But we should not discuss this here, it is not a technical or military matter.

There is a demographic problem, much like most of the developed world. Oddly it is a problems that many counties also seem to not be willing to do anything about, and/or it is a difficult one. Russia, also like many places, has a lot of problems that need to be solved by internal reforms, but for various reasons I have outlined here before, the political class is loath to carry them out.

Pro natalism need have nothing to do with "human waves", roughly the GDP will scale with the working age population and GDP per capita with this as a share of the total population, so there are benefits besides the ability to have a larger army. If the Russian population was now say 50 % bigger quite a lot of things would be possible, this includes infrastructure and military projects. Very roughly the military budget could be 50 % higher while imposing the same per capita burden. GDP per capita might fall a bit with higher population though due to the importance of natural resources.