No one blamed the DRDO, at least I never did, so I'm seriously having a hard time to see why you posted this. I've always maintained that it was the Army's fault, that their GSQR was faulty or rather, should I say that by the time the Army top brass were done shifting their goalposts, the rifled guns had gone completely out of favor, in fact, they had become outdated long since!!But the army failed to take note of the radically new developments being worked upon and implemented in terms on main battle tanks (and many other areas to be honest) and neither the DRDO cared to mention them to the Army or may be the scientists were themselves completely oblivious to those aforementioned changes as well, who knows; in which case, the DRDO guys would need to take part of the blame as well.
Which I find extremely weird and an opportunity gone because of their shortsightedness.
Yes but what kind of smooth barrel gun??You see my young friend, the one which had been reverse engineered by the ARDE, was actually the 2A46M main gun from the T 72M1 'Monkey model' export variant, guns which were pathetically under performing even by 80's standards!!You certainly wouldn't wanna put such a main gun in the Arjun, would you??I know I wouldn't, I would rather keep the current rifled one since at least that version can withstand a lot more chamber pressure than the Soviet monkey gun.
Again, who said that??Why are you bombarding us with such irrelevant information??What I asked was, what was so advanced about this ERA panels developed by the DRDO??How is it any different to other legacy systems like the American one (which they used in their TUSK upgrade package onboard the M1 Abrams) or older Soviet ones??You wanna know what advanced is - it would be the Ukrainian Duplet ERA, which uses linear shaped charges instead of just a lump of explosives sandwiched between to steel plates and are far more effecting in defeating, or rather completely obliterating modern APFSDS rods!!Now that is a radically different approach.
Another example would be the Polish ERAWA, where they use a reinforced HHS (high hardness steel, stronger than regular RHA) plate as the front section of the tiles, which can be perforated by the small precursor charges used in tandem heat warheads, which means, they can not be defeated by most modern ATGMs.Granted, they won't be so effective against APFSDS ammo unlike the Duplet nor they are as radically different, but still it's a nice little convenient 'jugad' which gets the job done.
Now, I ask again, what is it that makes DRDO ERA so advanced, do they incorporate such modification catering for today's battlefield needs??
No shit Sherlock!!That's what they are supposed to do, these are heavy ERA panels we are talking about, of course they will be somewhat effective against both types of anti armor warheads no matter what but to what degree is my concern, simply because we do not posses any modern APFSDS rounds to test our different armor types against!!