The plates are normally impacted by ogival-nosed projectiles on a one stage-gas gun to investigate the influence of material and configuration on the ballistic resistance of target. By changing the material and configuration of target, the ballistic limit and failure modes of the target under various impact conditions are analyzed. All the targets, including monolithic plates, double-layer plates with the same materials and double-layer plates with different materials, are of equal thickness. The velocity data and ballistic attitude image of projectile are acquired by high-speed camera, the residual velocity versus initial velocity curves and ballistic limit velocities of the projectiles are obtained based on experimental data. By analyzing the ballistic limit and surface density of target, the influence of layering order of target on its impact resistance is revealed from the impact efficiency. The experimental results indicate that the monolithic plates have a better ballistic performance than the double-layer plates with the same materials. The layering order affects the ballistic resistance of the double-plates with different materials, the configuration for anti-impact perfarmance is the upper layer of harder material and the lower layer of softer material, and also the layering order of plate on the ballistic resistance decreases with the increase of initial velocity of projectile. Moreover, it reveals that the ballistic resistance of aluminum alloy target is higher than that of steel target under the similar areal density.