Matrix Games Forums

Hi everyone,

I have been watching the info as it passes by when I shoot at armour v armour. I see the dialog that says weapon fires at... and at the end it says pen xxx amrour xxx. I do not understand what these numbers are. I know that the biiger the gun the bigger (in general) the pen #, and the better the armour the bigger (in general) the armour #. But I have seen numbers that just seen crazy. I was shooting a number of panthers into a KV-1e? And was seeing numbers from pen 82 to pen 121 and armour from 153 to armour 715. I know about the penatration tables in the manual and in the game and these do not seem to match up with anything there. Never did take the KV out btw. I did rout him though...lol

Any help would be appreciated.

jam

Jamminji, the first number in the 'hit result' is the armour penetration of the round. This is based on the distance if it's an AP round. When you look at the unit info during the game you can see a penetration table that has the point-blank value and values at 10 hex intervals.

Also the OOB and the encyclopedia can show you the *maximum* value. So if your Panther has the 70L with pen of 188 this applies very rarely in the game..when the kinetic energy is expended the pen value is lower. Also I assume there may be a small 'fudge factor' counted in so that the results aren't always same.

As for the 700+ armour values, that is easily explained..I think it even may be in the manual When there is a possibility of a penetration the armour slopes and the impact angle are counted in. So, even though if the plate is 50mm thick, the actual 'line of sight' armour thickness can easily be hundreds of mm. You should consider such result a glancing hit that bounced away. Heh..had you been around longer you'd seen the 2000+mm armour values the very early versions of SPWaW gave out occasionally.

Hope I didn't confuse you totally...

Voriax

Yes i am a bit of a newbie as far as the technicalities of the game. Your explanation was what I thought, and I am not confused at all.

thanks

There's also, IIRC, a T/D factor. Thickness / Diameter. This determines initial ricochet chances. It is also a real-life factor. Basically...

The higher the T/D ratio, the greater chance of ricochet. 150mm of steel will shrug off 7.62mm of copper-jacketted lead. The ratio is in the neighborhood of 20:1. For all intents and purposes, especially with WWII technology, the strengths of chambers, breeches, barrels, brass, bullets, and powder, a 7.62mm round has no chance of reaching a velocity that would allow it to penetrate 150mm of steel. This is why you'll see PzB39's and other ATR's ricochet a lot, even though technically they may otherwise be able to penetrate the armour. The diameter of the shell is too much smaller than the thickness of the armour it's being thrown against. There's, apparently, some sort of T/D "check" a round has to make before it's allowed to check for penetration.

The T/D factor also means quite a bit when shooting at different armour qualities.

I believe that "low-quality" armour gets penalized especially when T/D is low, for instance.

T/D means quite a lot of things in different calculations.

There's even a chance of rounds shattering.

Can anyone account for these unexpected armor readings for targets with very thick armor? For example, if you take a vehicle with 200mm of frontal armor having little slope, like the Elefant, you'll get results much higher than 200mm. These are with dead on shots and at point blank range. And if there's some kind of flaw in the routine, how come these heavy units weren't adjusted? If you take frontal shots at a tank like the King Tiger, that's all you'll get is readings of over 300mm(if I'm remembering right) unless the "50" rating pops into the equation.

This has been covered before. Along with a random element, the benefits of sloped armour are included. A short google or forum search will teach you the rest.

THe game does not assume that the vehicels are "frozen" in their hexes so their is like +/-15 degrees in verticle and +/- 5 degrees in horizontal (I forget exactly the horizointal is skewed to the positive sincve the rounds have a couple degrees of arc on them) Just because you look to be at 'zero' aspect angle, two consequetive shots can be at slightly different angles. This also means you can hit the side at very extreme angles even from "dead on front".