Tank armor

[GaryChildress]

Does anyone happen to know what the numbers for "armor" for AFVs in the "Device" tab are derrived from? For instance in the database the Matilda II has "120" for its armor value. In the editor it shows millimeters. But from what I gather the actual thickest the armor on a Matilda II gets is 78mm. It looks like similiar results with other tanks, the armor in the editor doesn't match per millimeter with numbers I've found on the net for them. Is there some kind of formula or something that is being used?

Thanks.

[witpqs]

I don't know where they got the numbers from, but remember that sloped armor presents more millimeters of armor to a projectile because of the angle.

[GaryChildress]

Oh boy...wish I could remember some high school geometry. I wonder if the numbers are based on thickness and slope of frontal armor or just the thickest part of the tank or what?

[PaxMondo]

I'm pretty sure it was thickness in mm, but there are adjustors for all of the variables (like slope).

[dr.hal]

This concept is also applicable to ships. Distance and impact angle greatly impact the effective of the round. But i doubt that such detail is taken into account!

[Sardaukar]

ORIGINAL: dr.hal

This concept is also applicable to ships. Distance and impact angle greatly impact the effective of the round. But i doubt that such detail is taken into account!

I know that at least distance is taken into account and I suspect the angle too, at least with distributing hits between deck, superstructure and belt.

[witpqs]

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress

Oh boy...wish I could remember some high school geometry. I wonder if the numbers are based on thickness and slope of frontal armor or just the thickest part of the tank or what?

They can't be just based on thickness of thickest part of armor because there is no parameter for slope angles. AFAIK you got one number - armor. They must be converting to 'effective' thickness in millimeters based on armor thickness, slope angle (if any) and perhaps anything special about the armor on a particular tank (not sure if there was any such thing in WWII).

[witpqs]

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress

Oh boy...wish I could remember some high school geometry.

Download this, free from Microsoft:

Microsoft Matematics 4.0

Download Page

You can just plug in lengths of sides and angles and it will do the trigonometry for you. [;)]

[witpqs]

ORIGINAL: witpqs

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress

Oh boy...wish I could remember some high school geometry.

Download this, free from Microsoft:

Microsoft Matematics 4.0

Download Page

You can just plug in lengths of sides and angles and it will do the trigonometry for you. [;)]

Here is a sample.

Side 'a' is the thickness of the armor, 100mm.
Angle 'C', 90 degrees, is the angle where the full thickness and the flat face meet.

But, the armor is sloped. The external face of the armor runs along side 'b'. Of course the full face of the armor is longer than side 'b'.

Side 'c' is what we are after. It is the thickness of the armor that a projectile will have to go through when fired from ground level.

The angle at which the armor is sloped from the vertical is not part of the triangle. let's call it angle 'D'. It is the part above angle 'A' going all the way to the vertical.

Angle 'A' = 90 degrees - angle 'D'.

But remember that we are dealing with a triangle, and the total of all three angles is always 180 degrees. So:

Angle 'A' = 180 degrees - angle 'C' - angle 'B'.

And we already know that angle 'C' is 90 degrees. So:

Angle 'A' = 180 degrees - 90 degrees - angle 'B', same as Angle 'A' = 90 degrees - angle 'B'.

Compare that formula to the one above for angle 'D', and you see that angle 'D' and angle 'B' are the same. So that gives us:

Angle 'C' = 90 degrees
Angle 'B' = slope of armor away from vertical.
Side 'a' = Thickness of armor.
Solving for side 'c' gives us the effective thickness of the armor.

Plugging in the numbers 100mm thickness of armor and 55 degrees slope, gives us an effective thickness of 174mm. That's just a sample, like you said real world numbers were different that 100mm of armor on a tank! The following illustration of using Microsoft Mathematics to perform the calculations should help.

[Alfred]

ORIGINAL: dr.hal

This concept is also applicable to ships. Distance and impact angle greatly impact the effective of the round. But i doubt that such detail is taken into account!

Actually, within the relatively somewhat "simplified" algorithms used (remember this is a game not a hardcore simulator) that level of detail is taken into account.

Have a read of this thread, in particular post #9.

tm.asp?m=2905617&mpage=1&key=ballistics&#2906593

Trajectory v range is factored into the game code. A great deal of effort has been put into the ballistics characteristics of the various naval guns. However, to get the full benefit of all this effort, you have to play one of the DaBabes scenarios.

What is not factored into the game is the quality of steel used to armour ships and the effectiveness of sloped armour.

Alfred

[Symon]

Oh, what fun it is to ride, in a one horse open sleigh tonight.

The game is an abstraction. An 88 has a nice pen value at 2000m, but only an idiot would shoot a 2pdr at 2000m, so maybe a pen at 2-500m is more appropriate. And armor on a tank is not just the vertical armor slope, but also the horizontal attack angle of the AT gun. And there was lots of tank parts that weren't sloped and weren't armored and so what to do now, Batman. And the vast majority of tank kills were "mission kills" and the last guy on the ground got to recover the wrecks and make them ready for tomorrow. You have a clue about how to do that?

Yeah, little buzzy Nazi websites will give you specs up the wazoo. You want to play that way, then more power to you.

[GaryChildress]

I don't mean to start a debate critiquing the methodology of the game (hard to do when I don't even know what it was). I'm just trying to add some German tanks to my scenario and I have no clue what armor values to give them or how to arrive at some that roughly correspond with values of other tanks in the game. So any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

[Natali]

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress
I don't mean to start a debate critiquing the methodology of the game (hard to do when I don't even know what it was). I'm just trying to add some German tanks to my scenario and I have no clue what armor values to give them or how to arrive at some that roughly correspond with values of other tanks in the game. So any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Hey, why not critique it. I do it all the time.

What the game people tell me is to just pick one site and just pick one parameter and use that for everything so everything is uniform. It doesn't matter what they are but it stops the cherry picking of websites to make points.

When I play miniatures my gorup uses a divided box formula for front, rear, side, and turret, upper hull, track. All have different armor specs. We presume the defenders aren't so stupid as to shoot the fromt of a Tiger with a 2-pdr, so each rectangle has a hit % based on the probability a AT gun will fire on it at that aspect. Sounds complicated, but it's really simple once you see the charts.

If you want, you could use the ARMORxAREA for each rectangle divided by TOTAL AREA to get an effective armor for a tank. You might want to use the % hit for the different areas to get a better idea about how vulnerable tanks really were in combat, but WiTP doesn't care about any of that, so it's meaningless. Can't think of anything better to say.

Sami

[GaryChildress]

Thanks but you've lost me. ARMOR x AREA / TOTAL AREA for each "rectangle". What is the "rectangle" are you refering to? [&:]

[Dili]

Probably he means an armored plate.

For this if no one in known is willing to help you with the formulae they arrived to 120, then the less worse you can do is to go to proportional values 78 => 120 x => y

[Natali]

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress

Thanks but you've lost me. ARMOR x AREA / TOTAL AREA for each "rectangle". What is the "rectangle" are you refering to? [&:]

It’s nothing but an average. Not every place on a tank has maximum armor. There’s lots of places to shoot a tank where the armor is thin. Get the area for each of the rectangles. A good book on tanks will tell you how to get the areas. Multiply the area of each of the 14 rectangles by the armor thickness for the rectangles and add it all up and divide by the total area of all 14 rectangles (front and back, left and right). That is a quick and dirty way of getting the average effective all around armor of a tank.

[Symon]

That's actually pretty smart Natali. I don't know from miniatures, so have no clue where you are coming from. But like the concept for something else I'm working on. Would you contact me please?

Ciao. John

[GaryChildress]

ORIGINAL: Natali

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress

Thanks but you've lost me. ARMOR x AREA / TOTAL AREA for each "rectangle". What is the "rectangle" are you refering to? [&:]

It’s nothing but an average. Not every place on a tank has maximum armor. There’s lots of places to shoot a tank where the armor is thin. Get the area for each of the rectangles. A good book on tanks will tell you how to get the areas. Multiply the area of each of the 14 rectangles by the armor thickness for the rectangles and add it all up and divide by the total area of all 14 rectangles (front and back, left and right). That is a quick and dirty way of getting the average effective all around armor of a tank.

Looks pretty ingenious. Does anyone have a recommendation for a book which will give me such areas for pretty much all the tanks of WW2? Thanks. [8D]

[Natali]

The usual old stand-bys and a few websites. There’s many more, but I got tired of typing. [8D]

Christopher F. Foss, The Encyclopedia of Tanks and Armored Fighting Vehicles - The Comprehensive Guide to Over 900 Armored Fighting Vehicles From 1915 to the Present Day, 2002

Peter Chamberlain, and Chris Ellis, British and American Tanks of World War Two, 2000

Peter Chamberlain, and Chris Ellis, British and American Tanks of World War Two, The Complete Illustrated History of British, American, and Commonwealth Tanks 1933-1945, 1969

Peter Chamberlain and Chris Ellis, Tanks of the World, 1915-1945, 1972

Peter Chamberlain and Hilary Doyle, Encyclopedia of German Tanks of World War Two, 1999

Chris Bishop, The Encyclopedia of Weapons of World War II, 1998

Duncan Crow, Tanks of World War II, 1979

Janusz Piekalkiewicz, Tank War 1939-1945, 1986

Tank Data, Aberdeen Proving Grounds Series, 1968

Tank Data 2, Aberdeen Proving Grounds Series, 1969

Dr. S. Hart & Dr. R. Hart, German Tanks of World War II, 1998

http://www.wwiivehicles.com/ lots of tech data
http://www.onwar.com/tanks/ tech data and drawings
http://afvdb.50megs.com/index.html lots of tech data and drawings
http://www.nemo.nu/ibisportal/5pansar/index.htm lots of drawings
http://english.battlefield.ru/ lots of blueprints

[GaryChildress]

But will these books or websites tell me the area of the rectangles you've represented for each tank? For instance most books or websites will tell the mm of armor on a side of the tank and the slope but they don't tell how much area that side consists of.