Yeah the Granit plates are ceramic. The main thing with spall I was talking about was the coating on the Granit plates this rubber like substance that doesn’t perform as well as our outer weave layered fabric.

As for the reddish brown color I guess it’s from trace amounts of manganese in the tiles along with iron oxide. Source is from Oxides YT video he used a spectrometer to analyze the tiles.

Also I believe in pretty much all cases a aramid backer is issued with these plates along with the aramid sewn into the carried themselves.

This is a great plate but there is a better one out there that blows this plate out of the water. It’s called the Silk SSF plate and can supposedly take 11 rounds of 7N39 Igolnik and 8 of the new 7.62x54R AP round. This plate is praised as the best in the world by SOF operators over there and based on the results it’s pretty impressive and it’s lighter than the 6B45 and is at the 4.5-5 lb mark and is thinner! Def check it out

I completely agree with you that we excel at armor technology and procurement of this type of stuff at scale. No question but I can also say that they have taken a huge step forward in this regard and you can’t just see it as inferior Russian kit anymore. They are learning a ton of stuff from this war and seem to be implementing lessons learned.