Vehicle protection from artillery shells

[cool breeze]

My only real success with russian artillery without precision rounds (against armour) has been against the AI in pretty silly situations.  Like 30 tanks going in a mob down a narrow forest road and I'm pounding them with like 12 155mm AND 2-6 205mm.  The 205 kills stuff when you put the crater on it, when your lucky, and the 155 kills stuff when you get a direct hit if your lucky, and a if you're luckier some M or K kills with craters.  Occasionally light stuff goes down at a distance from frags but its very rare.  I dunno if Ive ever seen a Bradlely get killed when it wasn't sitting in a crater. 

As far as I recall.

Also, Haiduk says, IRL in the Ukraine right now, the soldiers don't consider armoured vehicles safe places to be, preferring foxholes and such as being more shrapnel proof.   However, in game, I find that unless my IFV's might receive direct fire or precision artillery, inside a IFV is about the safest place to be in an artillery barrage. 

 

And I don't think it's bad how it is I just think it would be better if they added some bigger, faster, higher energy fragments to the artillery, particularly to the airbursts.  and probably a more stripping of subsystems from blast and smaller fragments.  Some of the roof armour seems too tough, but bigger faster frags might fix that.

Edited April 20, 2017 by cool breeze

[A Canadian Cat]

1 hour ago, Armorgunner said:

Are your sure we played the same game?? I did a "new for the day" artillery bombardment of a sittingduck tankforce, and they were in quite good shape after 3 min of heavy bombardment from 18 155mm. 4 out of 12 was imobilized, but only one of those had damage to some subsystems.

No I'm not

My tests were with precision rounds and so between 1 - 3 direct or nearly direct hits. Any tank that was not destroyed was not very capable. It has been a while since I conducted that experiment - I'll have to try it again.

[cool breeze]

I don't think the debate here is so much about how the game gets it when the vehicle gets smacked with precision strikes, but about non precision rounds landing 10 meters behind or to the sides or airbursting above without much if any chance to do real damage. 

[cool breeze]

but it is also about what happens when a 155 lands on or right next to, or a 205 lands nearbyish

[cool breeze]

and I think the pics of 120mm results show those are a bit more effective than the game has it but thats more iffy. 

[DougPhresh]

Airburts should shred anything outside of the armour in my opinion.

[MOS:96B2P]

8 hours ago, DougPhresh said:

Airburts should shred anything outside of the armour in my opinion.

I agree.  Or at least sometimes destroy some subsystems.  Airburst can destroy transports and light armor.  However when used against armor I have only seen airburst destroy tracks on armor.  No subsystem damage. 

[Rinaldi]

7 minutes ago, MOS:96B2P said:

I agree.  Or at least sometimes destroy some subsystems.  Airburst can destroy transports and light armor.  However when used against armor I have only seen airburst destroy tracks on armor.  No subsystem damage. 

Strange. I'll need to test in my PBEM then, in Shock Force airbursting artillery definitely degraded subsystems, outside of tracks. Got it on video, it actually caught me off guard when I realized it was happening from 82mms.

Edited April 21, 2017 by Rinaldi

[MOS:96B2P]

3 minutes ago, Rinaldi said:

<Snip> in Shock Force airbursting artillery definitely degraded subsystems, outside of tracks. <Snip> 

That's interesting and you might be right.  I did some experiments but they were in CMBS and I think one of the WWII titles.  I didn't think to test the older games/engines that CMSF and CMA have.  Let us know what you find out. 

[A Canadian Cat]

I broke out my sanity test scenario to do some checking because @Armorgunner's comment about are we playing the same game had me concerned. This is not statistically significant checking just a few samples to see what's what. All tests involved 155 / 152mm artillery.

Precision Shells

You may recall at one point US precision was toned down and Russian precision was tuned up. The result is that, while at one time, three US precision shells was nearly guaranteed to KO a T90 and three Russian precision shells was not. The current result feels a bit different.

T90 "hit" by three precision shells. One actually hit the others were just close. Not a huge amount of damage but immobilized - mission kill.

At this point though I was a bit concerned that nothing else was damaged...

Three Russian precision "hits". Similar to above one actual hit and two close by. Lots more damage - pretty much a mission kill.

So I lined up a couple of fresh tanks...

Three US precision "hits" this time no direct hits but all close. That's more nasty - pretty much a mission kill.

Notice that for the first one the shells were on the long side and strike to the rear of the tank and did little damage to systems. The second strike landed its shells to the front of the vehicle and caused quite a bit of system damage. Coincidence - who knows I only ran four tests

Three more Russian precision shells again lots of system damage, again shells landed on or to the front of the tank. Pretty much a mission kill.

more...

 

[A Canadian Cat]

Point targeting

Sorry I only called a point target on one of two near by M1s. The call is on the tank to the left but I placed the other tank nearby to see what happened.

First three rounds, fairly close its and pretty hard on the vehicles (these are the FFE rounds the spotting rounds were off screen):

Three more - not as close as the first three:

 

Three more-ish:

 

And another three:

 

So one mission kill one only track damaged.

More...

 

 

[A Canadian Cat]

Area targeting

This time there are four T90s on the road and I hit them with a fairly tight area target. By that I mean the area just touched the left and right most tank - shells always fall outside the area so I tend to make them tighter than you might intuitively think they should be.

After six rounds one mission kill three untouched:

Six more... and another T90 is mission killed:

 

But there are still more - six more. A little more damage but still a few not feeling much.

Another six rounds. Little new damage but that's two mission killed tanks and one with some damage.

 

 

 

[A Canadian Cat]

So there ya go. @Armorgunner and I are playing the same game It turns out it is possible for a tank to weather a strike with little to no damage. It is just not usual. This was not a statistical test by any means but I still would not sit and let my tanks just take an artillery strike.

With that taste of how the game behaves what do you guys think? To much damage, not enough? Does it make sense that close hits to the front would cause more system damage than close its to the rear?

I honestly don't have a strong opinion pre say and am looking to learn more. Having said that I don't think these results scream - broken either.

For anyone who wants to play in my sand box you can download this test scenario here:

BasicSanityTest.btt

This is my basic test bed. This is what I run the game through when a new build comes out so I can verify that basic stuff still works, drones, precision arty, wire, mines, breaching, RPGs, ATGMs, ERA, amphibian assault, that floating BMPs that get KO'ed sink etc. etc. For this all I did was run a second observer up to the 13th floor and positioned tanks as needed and called for artillery missions. I play this in hot seat so I can move both forces around and skip a head past the boring waiting for those arty guys to do all that math and load the tubes

[cool breeze]

My non expert take is that your test shows that with point detonation, the game doesn't have it way off, at least not for t-90s.   There is damage which is good.  But I think it also shows some of the little details where its off. The crater under the last tank in the last screenshot seems like it should have taken all the ERA of the front hull and probably firepower killed it.  It seems like there is generally do much yellow damage vs red damage to subsystems , and not enough outright kills.  That was a lot of accurate firepower you delivered.  I don't think artillery is usually that accurate IRL.  At least not in the situations its normally used against tanks from which the pics of blown up tanks we got comes from.

[Muzzleflash1990]

I certainly would not qualify anything as broken. I am just trying to understand if what I am experiencing is the an accurate (as can be) representation.

Ian, your results are interesting. What do you to to cause system damage? I tried both airbusting and not-airbusting and it does not matter. I have run the setup shown in this image http://imgur.com/a/pf3S1 about a dozen times now. Most with ordinary point detonation, some runs with airburst, all with 3 batteries of 155mm. My results are very binary: In 100% of the cases, either a vehicle was destroyed, or ended up with only track/wheels damage as the only subsystem damage. Let me repeat that, for all my runs, of the surviving vehicles, none had any subsystem damage that was not wheel/tracks - at all !  For tanks the damage to tracks varied across the scale. For non-tank AFV, all track/wheels damage was at most 'light'/still a variant of green, and no other damage, or crew/squad was hurt. Is possible that some of the vehicles that were severely "hurt" then got destroyed? Not as far as I can tell, and it would have to be all of them then, otherwise I would have noticed.

So my main wondering is: shouldn't there be a larger gray area where vehicles get damaged, perhaps fragment hitting crew/occupants of non-tank AFV, and should more subsystems get destroyed?

Edited April 21, 2017 by Muzzleflash1990

[Armorgunner]

1 hour ago, IanL said:

So there ya go. @Armorgunner and I are playing the same game It turns out it is possible for a tank to weather a strike with little to no damage. It is just not usual. This was not a statistical test by any means but I still would not sit and let my tanks just take an artillery strike.

With that taste of how the game behaves what do you guys think? To much damage, not enough? Does it make sense that close hits to the front would cause more system damage than close its to the rear?

I honestly don't have a strong opinion pre say and am looking to learn more. Having said that I don't think these results scream - broken either.

For anyone who wants to play in my sand box you can download this test scenario here:

BasicSanityTest.btt

This is my basic test bed. This is what I run the game through when a new build comes out so I can verify that basic stuff still works, drones, precision arty, wire, mines, breaching, RPGs, ATGMs, ERA, amphibian assault, that floating BMPs that get KO'ed sink etc. etc. For this all I did was run a second observer up to the 13th floor and positioned tanks as needed and called for artillery missions. I play this in hot seat so I can move both forces around and skip a head past the boring waiting for those arty guys to do all that math and load the tubes

Just did a new test, against a large US sittingduck tankforce. This time half of my arty was the usual 155mm, striking half of the US tankforce. The other half was the 2S7M Mialka 203mm. The 155mm did a few direct hits on top of the M1A2´s with no damage as a result, other than the usual imobilisation of one of them. Not even the mg on top damaged. But when the 203mm Mialka struck the roof of the M1´s there were partial penetrations every time. And those made the tanks M-killed, or at least abandoned with some damage subsystems and 2-4 killed crewmembers. So if you want to kill tanks with arty in CMBS, use the big guns

[cool breeze]

I think the 203mm partially penetrating the roof armour kinda shows my point.

 

Edit to add:  maybe its a euphemism.  I mean I don't expect full penetration before detonation, but partial penetration is a funny way of saying blown the F up. 

Edited April 21, 2017 by cool breeze

[Armorgunner]

1 minute ago, cool breeze said:

I think the 203mm partially penetrating the roof armour kinda shows my point.

For sure, it does. I only answered the post i was named in, so i missed your post. Sorry for that

[A Canadian Cat]

1 hour ago, Muzzleflash1990 said:

Ian, your results are interesting. What do you to to cause system damage? I tried both airbusting and not-airbusting and it does not matter.

No air bursts - all trying to get a direct hit

I have no idea why yours would have been so binary - as you can see I did get a few that were like that but plenty that were not.

[cool breeze]

2 hours ago, Armorgunner said:

For sure, it does. I only answered the post i was named in, so i missed your post. Sorry for that

Wasn't expecting you to respond to me since I'm not saying anything contrary to what you are saying.  your test matches my experience, that the only way to reliably kill an Abrams with artillery in the game is to hit it on the roof with the 203.  Still worth shooting 155 at it, but mostly just cause its such a huge threat that anything that might help should go in. 

 

Some of that binary experience might be about the player experience vs testing in hotseat.  when its the other guys tank thats taken dmg its not so much the subsystem damage you notice at the end of the game AAR, but whether its weapons controls/ main gun still work and its still murderizing your guys.

Edited April 21, 2017 by cool breeze

[Armorgunner]

22 hours ago, IanL said:

So there ya go. @Armorgunner and I are playing the same game It turns out it is possible for a tank to weather a strike with little to no damage. It is just not usual. This was not a statistical test by any means but I still would not sit and let my tanks just take an artillery strike.

With that taste of how the game behaves what do you guys think? To much damage, not enough? Does it make sense that close hits to the front would cause more system damage than close its to the rear?

I honestly don't have a strong opinion pre say and am looking to learn more. Having said that I don't think these results scream - broken either.

For anyone who wants to play in my sand box you can download this test scenario here:

BasicSanityTest.btt

This is my basic test bed. This is what I run the game through when a new build comes out so I can verify that basic stuff still works, drones, precision arty, wire, mines, breaching, RPGs, ATGMs, ERA, amphibian assault, that floating BMPs that get KO'ed sink etc. etc. For this all I did was run a second observer up to the 13th floor and positioned tanks as needed and called for artillery missions. I play this in hot seat so I can move both forces around and skip a head past the boring waiting for those arty guys to do all that math and load the tubes

After some testing, there seems that the Russian tanks take more damage than the M1A2. That could be the difference between our experiences. All my earlier tests were done with Russian arty Vs the M1A2.

[A Canadian Cat]

I'm not sure about that. There were M1s in my test that were a mess and T90s that were nearly unscathed. I have a feeling that the damage is probability based on direction.

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Compared to some of the images we've seen, even the most battered tanks in these tests got off fairly lightly, I think the damage could probably be safely dialled up a tad for direct hits. 

Just my 2c. 

[Armorgunner]

55 minutes ago, IanL said:

I'm not sure about that. There were M1s in my test that were a mess and T90s that were nearly unscathed. I have a feeling that the damage is probability based on direction.

Hmmm that makes it very strange. And you are in 4.0? Not that i see any difference since 3.0, but anyway. 

[Armorgunner]

47 minutes ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Compared to some of the images we've seen, even the most battered tanks in these tests got off fairly lightly, I think the damage could probably be safely dialled up a tad for direct hits. 

Just my 2c. 

Thats my 2 Swedish ören too, but ho know. We might be wrong, but in this one i dont think so.