ORIGINAL: Arjuna
Harry,
re armoured units and arty fire. This is another one of those thorny issues that you can never satisfy everyone. If you reduce the impact of arty on AFVs in term of suppression and kills then you will get feedback that arty is not being given due effect. If you increase the effect then you get feedback like yours that armour cannot act aggressively enough. Their are historical facts, case histories etc to support both arguments. Arty did destroy tanks, it did cause units to bunker down or retreat. There are cases where the decision was taken to drive straight through and accept the casualties. So obviously there are a plethora of factors impacting on the decision. Eg commander aggro or judgement or the units recent engagements, the mission priority, the perception of danger and just plain old random effects. We try and factor all of these into the reaction code. Sure we can tweak these further but there must come a time when we say that on balance this is about right. My gut feel at the moment is that it is about right.
I'd be happy to hear from others on this though and I'm prepared to countenance some minor adjustments.
Evidence from the redesign of armored and tactical vehicles to counteract Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) indicates we've learned in the US that tanks or tactical vehicles don't necessarily need to be destroyed to be made ineffective in combat.
In some instances crews are made ineffective from severely shaking and / or bouncing them off the walls inside their armored cocoon / operator's stations by nearby blast concussions.
Given the design of armored vehicle operator stations and soldier protective gear for the World War II era, there's probably some room to allow for certain heavy bombardment / shell explosive load combinations to, as a minimum, demoralize armored formations and in some instances put vehicles out of commission because the crew is incapacitated by the concussive effects of blasts against a vehicle's weight (F = MA).
With the caveat that using calculus to get the right numbers to pass physics wasn't one of my strong points when I studied engineering [;)], I'd guess the zone of demoralizing effect against armored vehicles is possibly the 100-percent kill range of shell effects for bombarding entrenched troops (to eliminate shrapnel as a cause for injury to troops in a buttoned up vehicle) and the vehicle disabling (by crew shaking injuries) is a subset of that range calculated from vehicle weight and shell explosive charge weight if pinpoint accuracy for the F = MA calculation against a specific vehicle is desired.