In ww2 the tactical doctrine for German troops was to engage with three PanzerFaust teams two missiles would be fired initially with the most experienced team held back.
I recently read an excellent account of what things were like as a British tank commander in 1994 & 1945 from Normandy onwards - "grim" doesn't do it justice. Imagine as a 19 year old commander of 4 tank platoon being told that your life expectancy was two weeks!
I saw an interesting talk about Soviet WW2 tanks [1] and one of the things it said was the Soviets had done research and determined that a tank survives an average of 14 hours in combat, and in its entire life only needed an engine and transmission able to drive 1500 km
The fighting in Berling was teenagers, sometimes preteens wielding the Faust. They called it "panzerknacken" i.e. "armour knocking" or "armour smashing".
And Russian response in Berlin 1945 was simply take as many spring beds from German homes as available and weld them to the armour. Crude but totaly effective against PanzerFaust.
Similar approaches were / are used to protect against RPGs in Iraq. Literally just welding metal slats to the front to cause them to go off before hitting armor.
The goal of slat armour isn't to detonate the RPG, as the jet from the shaped charge will easily penetrate even with the extra ~50cm of space. In WW2 some US tank crews tried to protect their tanks by piling sandbags on them, but the extra spacing actually made Panzerfausts more effective as the armour piercing jet had more space to fully form before hitting metal.
The goal with the slats is to catch and mangle the incoming warhead, so that it either fails to detonate, or doesn't form the penetrating jet.
