Broken Front Window???

I see these are older posts but this happened to us in a  campground in Arizona in our 2021 R-pod 180. Window shattered in the middle of the night while we were asleep. Larger pieces fell into the trailer and on the ground and the rest of the window completely cracked. We had been camped for more than twelve hours when this happened and there was nothing overhanging the site that could have fallen on the camper. Are there any thoughts about this- is this a delayed event from a rock strike or some kind of manufacturing defect with the way the window is manufactured or installed? I see suggestions of putting a cover to protect from rocks but if it isn't a from rock strikes it seems like it would just happen again.

It is certainly common to have a glass fracture propagate well after the original damage. We've all seen it in annealed glass like home windows and windshields. It's much less common in tempered glass like sliding doors, car side windows, and solar modules because the tempering stressed are so high that any defects usually result in a piece of broken glass in the bottom of he tempering furnace, where they just shovel it out and remelt it.

But it does happen. I once had a customer complaint about a bunch of broken solar modules on a big commercial roof array on a building with a tar and gravel roof. Turns out the idiots who installed it walked across the the roof picking up gravel in their shoes, then walked right on the solar modules. That causes tiny cuts in the tempered glass surface compression layer which is only about 1mm thick. Later in thermal cycling the tiny cuts propagated down through that layer into the inner layer which is in tension. Then boom, lots of little tiny pieces of glass held together by the solar laminate.

The compression is tremendous in tempered glass, it has to be around 10000 psi to be called tempered.
You can tell how much tempering the glass has by the size of the broken pieces. Smaller being higher tempering as you'd imagine.

So it would be helpful to get a better description of what the pieces look like. They should all be about the same size from each sheet of glass too or something went really wrong in the glass factory. You describe bigger and smaller pieces, can you give more detail about size and where the pieces came from? This wasn't a double pane insulated glad window was it?

Ok, no problem, the 1 inch max size single pane tells me it's tempered glass. It must have got a little rock chip which worked through the compression layer and released the stored energy in the sheet. Tempered glass is great but not the right stuff for a forward facing window on a moving vehicle. When you replace it cover it while on the road or it will happen again. Or replace it with polycarbonate (Lexan), that stuff is unbreakable.