AP shells dont matter

[thereddaikon]

On 11/1/2019 at 12:49 PM, Cptbarney said:

However it does greatly reduce the cost and also complexity of the vehicle, plus you don't need to make the tank as thickly armoured as others too.

Plus tanks were quite big even with slopped armour so space is a non-issue, except for really smoll tonks or tanks that are quite close to the ground.

But having the armour boxy can make things roomy i guess, but makes the armour weaker (corners, flat surfaces) and heavier just to get the same material for the same protection.

Its why the T-34 and argueably the panther were such great tanks (if they also had more time develop them that would of helped).

That's not entirely true. Sloped armor does come with a practical real world space penalty. It is a tradeoff and not one to be disregarded. The commonly cited three aspects of a tank, speed, armor and firepower are overly simplistic and don't actually reflect reality. The reality is studies conducted during and after WW2 showed that in almost all cases the first tank to fire would win. The first that could identify the target, aim its weapons and fire had the overwhelming advantage. That means crew performance and situational awareness is probably the most important aspect of a tank.

Case in point, compare the combat performance of early and late T-34s. Early production T-34s fared extremely poorly against their German opponents. Not because the Germans had better guns or armor, in Barbarossa we are talking about Pz3's after all, but because the Germans could see the Russians before the Russians could see them. The Germans had a three man turret, a commander's cupola, decent optics that were clear and had good light accumulation and radios. All of those aspects contributed to raising crew efficiency. The early model T-34s had cramped 2 man turrets, optics that actually seemed better on paper in terms of fov but weren't as bright and usually lacked radios. The later T-34s, especially the 85mm model fixed most of these problems. It had a proper turret. The crew had radios and they had more useful combat optics.

Back to sloped armor. The T-34's armor was actually too sloped if you can believe it. Not only did it have a sloped front but it also had sloped sides. This helped with protection, but the Soviets found in practice that sloping your sides brought too many problems. It limited storage volume for things like ammunition and fuel tanks and the Christie suspension also exacerbated this. In future designs like the T-54/55 they went to straight sides with torsion bar suspension.

[Steeltrap]

10 hours ago, Mooncatt said:

Think you've just basically summed up what i was trying to say to start off with 😊

Thanks. I've had the benefit of reading posts in this and other threads, plus have played a fair bit to experiment with certain things, so I put as much of all that together as I could in a way that might provide a statement of the general issues we all tend to think are relevant plus tried to suggest things to do.

I also think the point about devs TELLING US what to expect is important.

As someone who's worked for years in the corporate world as a business improvement consultant, the absence of "expected results" in what is a test phase drives me nuts. If I ask people to test, usually in my case it's process related but is just as relevant for user acceptance testing of a system change, I make it exactly clear what they ought to test and what they ought to see. That way they know what they're meant to do to complete the tests, and they also can document if it produced the expected result (i.e. successful) or something else.

Obviously they aren't directly comparable situations, and the devs aren't going to give us the "under the hood" details to see what's happening, but even some broad guidelines ought to be possible and would help all of us a fair bit I think. We'd have a better picture of what the devs expect us to find as we play, and they'd get more precise feedback.

Should we, for example, see pre-dreadnoughts/old style BBs with armour thickness of up to 12" and amour modifiers up to the maximum 100% bounce all sorts of AP yet explode violently if shot from astern (seems to happen particularly like that) with HE from the same gun whose AP achieved next to nothing?

How is it 5" deck and 3.5" deck extended with +80% quality can take significant damage from a gun whose penetration at the range involved ought not even reach the 9" equivalent if it were the belt, let alone the deck for which of course its pen value is negligible? 

Are both those consequences of flaws in the calculation and/or application of HE penetration and resulting damage, which would seem a possibility? Or are the devs intending everyone to fling HE around and burn everything to the water a la WoWS?

Without their input we're guessing, and in my case hoping like hell the last bit isn't true lol.

Of course it's also possible, if not almost certain, they're running their own tests and capturing the underlying data and scrutinising that. Run all the Naval Academy missions with AI designed fleets fighting each other under AI control, generate large amounts of data able to be analysed against expected values etc.

In which case we're really just giving some broad ideas and a test of how well the game runs on all sorts of different PC builds. Nothing wrong with that I suppose.

Cheers