In reality, Korea only offered to sell the armor, thats why Turkey tried to gain the armor technology from 3 different direction, purchasing armor technology factory in England, then in Finland, and then nurol was able to make bor carbor armor that only US, Turkey and Israel is able to make. On the other hand, just recently, another Turkish company was able to make an armor based on Graphite, which is the only light armor could stand against 762/51 bullet with less than a kg weight on soldier. But disadvantage of it, it has liitle more size compare to bor carbor. Both of them offer at least 2 times less weight that others. The only problem with bor based armor is its little on expensive side, as Turkey started to put them on Turkish ships like ada and istanbul class. Comparing how important is Altay to Turkish people, im sure they will apply it there too.
Most Turks still mistakenly believe that Roketsan designed and produced Altay's Armour package, but this is not true. Altay's Armour package was designed by Samyang Comtech, a South Korean manufacturer of bulletproof equipment, at the request of Otokar, and Roketsan was just a producer of the Armour package.
When I participated in Altay's Armor Package design for three years, four Korean companies in charge of design assistance and technology transfer to Otokar knew that the project would start in 2009 and end in 2013.
But after Altay's first prototype, FTR, was developed in 2012, Otokar suddenly said another requirement. They told us to change the design of Altay's modular armour. Redesigning the Armor structure of the tank was the same difficult task as dismantling and re-creating the tank, and two or three years were far from enough for us. After that, we worked on the additional design of Altay's armour structure until early 2015, and the project ended one years later in 2016.
In the past, South Korea was able to obtain M1 Abrams' Special Armor Plate (SAP) technology implicitly from the United States, and applied the newly developed KSAP based on SAP to K2 through the K1A1 development program. When we completed the Altay FTR, we designed the composite armour with Silicon Carbide (SiC), not Boron Carbide (B4C), and Altay had the same armour structure as Korean Special Armor Plate (KSAP), K2's armour package. We were able to increase the ballistic protection level of Altay's front armour by stacking ceramic layers thicker than K2's ceramic plate when designing Altay's composite armour.
When talking about the excellence of Altay, Turks often tend to blindly believe in boron carbide as a kind of super technology, but in fact, Boron Carbide (B4C) is not much different in hardness from Silicon Carbide (SiC). For boron carbide, Mohs hardness is 9 to 10 and silicon carbide is 9+. In addition, in the case of boron carbide, materials are available relatively cheaply, but the manufacturing process is more demanding than silicon carbide.
In South Korea, Silicon Carbide is cheaper to manufacture due to the development of the semiconductor and electronics industries, so Silicon Carbide is mainly used for tanks and armored vehicles in Korea. The reason why we don't use boron carbide in tanks or armored vehicles in Korea is because of economic problems, not technical problems.
In my personal opinion, if change the material of Altay's composite armour to silicon carbide instead of boron carbide, the production price of Altay may become cheaper in the future.
Because Turkey started fostering the semiconductor industry around the same time as South Korea, and although there are no nano-scale ultra-fine semiconductor process production facilities like Korea, but Turkey still has factory facilities that produce many electronic products. For Turkey, it is clear that silicon carbide is cheaper to produce than boron carbide.