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Tank Gun Damage


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Does anyone agree on the very high frequency of gun barrel damage by shots especially from the front and at long distance (noticed it even happens even at 500 + m) in CM2 WW2? This is to me very unrealistic; in tank battle detailed accounts, gun damage is always mentioned as an exception. And the few pictures taken show gun hit from the side. From the front would mean they are hit exactly in the muzzle brake or on the recoil mechanism near the mantlet (even the thick additional protection of the Elefant for instance, added in the field precisely to protect the ball mount) . Looks very unlikely to me. What are your thoughts?

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Now that you mention it, I haven't seen a 'gun damage' happen in quite awhile. I'm holed through the lower bow, through the turret side, through the gun mantlet. I've had autocannons scour the optics off my vehicle and kill my radios. But no 'gun damage' for a long time. Bear in mind, I never play Panther or Tiger so I don't tend to sit there and allow myself to be pummeled.

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Hull down is worse for German heavy tanks since their armor will naturally block most shots. One of the primary issues that seems to cropping up is that the gunner of a tank has too much information once an enemy is spotted leading to rounds hitting center mass and center mass of a hull down vehicle tends to be the gun.

Part of my suspicion due to playing SABOW in the past and more recently Warthunder. Is that the gunner has a sort of "perfect idea" of what he is shooting at. You never, at least that I can recall, get those situations where the gunner sees a portion of the enemy vehicle and is unable to decipher the center of mass. Think of those shots through heavy forest that we occasionally see posted on the forum. People ask "how can they see through that" and while I don't doubt that the enemy could be seen it more likely is just a portion of the vehicle. Whereas in CM the gunner instantly knows the entire vehicle profile. Another example would be poor weather where you may be able to identify a portion of a vehicle but lose the rest of it in the heavy fog/rain/etc... In CM it appears that the gunners don't have these marginal target acquisitions and instead spot the whole vehicle.

If anyone has gone hunting a decent amount you will likely have experienced similar situations. I've had to let more than a few Deer get away because while I knew exactly where they were I couldn't be sure of a clean shot.

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1 hour ago, bruno2016 said:

often it happens at the first hit, regardless, not only for the german heavies or when u are hull down. its a general pattern 

I don't share this experience at all...

And the same goes for your experience mentioned in your moral thread...

Things happen from time to time...but a general pattern !

No...not in my games

 

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4 minutes ago, com-intern said:

Hull down is worse for German heavy tanks since their armor will naturally block most shots. One of the primary issues that seems to cropping up is that the gunner of a tank has too much information once an enemy is spotted leading to rounds hitting center mass and center mass of a hull down vehicle tends to be the gun.

Part of my suspicion due to playing SABOW in the past and more recently Warthunder. Is that the gunner has a sort of "perfect idea" of what he is shooting at. You never, at least that I can recall, get those situations where the gunner sees a portion of the enemy vehicle and is unable to decipher the center of mass. Think of those shots through heavy forest that we occasionally see posted on the forum. People ask "how can they see through that" and while I don't doubt that the enemy could be seen it more likely is just a portion of the vehicle. Whereas in CM the gunner instantly knows the entire vehicle profile. Another example would be poor weather where you may be able to identify a portion of a vehicle but lose the rest of it in the heavy fog/rain/etc... In CM it appears that the gunners don't have these marginal target acquisitions and instead spot the whole vehicle.

If anyone has gone hunting a decent amount you will likely have experienced similar situations. I've had to let more than a few Deer get away because while I knew exactly where they were I couldn't be sure of a clean shot.

if i read u correctly, u are talking about hull down cases. in my experience, what i report is in open ground. I am just re-playing for instance forest of the wild beasts, CMFI. with the germans. rings a bell? i got a tiger on the main road whose gun got disable by a lurking m10 at 700 m distance. in the same scenario but this time in an open field, another tiger got its gun damaged by a front shot from a 57 AT gun at 700 m too. and in 10 min interval, not after 3 years of replaying ;-). and thats just an example. 

As to seeing thru the woods, yes i read all the threads and thats really crazy. In my own example, in a tournament game, had two 76 mm shermans positioned for the past 10 min along the exit edge of a wood, waiting to give flank shots to advancing panthers coming thru the trails of that same wood, some 3-400 m away. These shermans had some light wood in between them and the trail, giving some natural camo. Guess what: when one of the panthers barely popped up from the woods, it immediately spotted my 2 shermans before they cld even see it and react and brewed them up! hence the delusional expression "shermans on the prawl" lol

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I just did a little test of this.

One 57mm AT gun can knock out the guns of two out of three panther tanks frontally in one minute. Distance 500m.

If and only if the panthers are hull down. If not, their guns survive much longer.

Also, an interesting thing is that the gun crew immediately know when they knocked out the tank gun - they then start firing at other tanks.

Edited by Bulletpoint
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Interesting definitely! Brings to me 2 comments: 

1. being hull down mathematically increases the probability of turret/gun/mantlet hits as its the only part of the tank that can be aimed at

2. again... 500 m gun hit... means muzzle brake or recoil opening in the mantlet. 3 such hits in 2 min... do u find the sim realistic? And how come the gun crew can know, other than by seeing a damaged muzzle brake (good luck if u can at 500 m away), if the hit on the mantlet disabled the gun?

All this tends to confirm the bias of the sim. it should treat gun damages from hits more as exceptions

Even from the side gun hits were rare.

 

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Tanks are peer weapon systems to each other. I take this to mean that they're generally good at inflicting lots of casualties and mission-kills on each other even if they're a bit mismatched in tonnage, class, etc. I used to get a bit sassed by how often tanks seemed to de-gun or track each other in the games too but really that's just because tanks are really dangerous to each other. Sorry if this all seams a bit tangential but hang on. 

The Germans tried very hard to avoid matching the Panzer Divisions against opposing armor because there's very few circumstances that wouldn't turn into a bloodbath on both ends. The best outcome possible would still result in lots of mission kills and recoveries so just lots of overall wear-and-tear on the Division. In fact the most preferable section of the frontline anyone wanted to charge their Panzertruppen through would be the section of line held by no one and simply open all the way to Moscow but the Germans knew it wasn't 1760 anymore and Armies were big enough to put up some kind of resistance anywhere you went. So the new hack was to clad several thousand men in armor, get a set of tracks under them, and charge them through a section of the line held only by rifles and maybe some mortars which were about the only kind of weapon systems that you were sure to run into. 

Anti-tank guns change the dynamic quite a bit, but were relatively rare and probably far less frequent than infantry guns which usually lacked a good AP shot. The farther into the war you got encounters with anti-tank guns don't really change all that much because the newer, more powerful guns are offset by their own poor mobility leading them to be highly inflexible and usually limited to obvious road chokepoints. Infantry guns are mostly gone but now the infantry have things like the Bazooka, Panzerschreck making a simple overrun much harder to obtain. The biggest challenge facing you Herr General is that the Americans have enough armor to both set an entire Armored Division aside to match your own Panzer Division, and still have several full strength Armored Divisions in reserve to pounce on your troop even if they manage to easily defeat the Kentucky boys in a stunning upset. The American commander would much prefer to have those Armored Divisions ready for their upcoming offensive into the Rhine of course, but he'll settle for you. 

It's even worse on the Eastern Front, where the Soviet General literally desires to crash as many of his Tank Corps as he has into your Panzer Division. Burying your force under an avalanche of T-34s and IS-2s. You are the objective for his tanks and he has a lot of them. You could try to avoid this naturally but sooner or later the Red Army will launch a classic Deep Battle offensive that breaks through the line somewhere and puts hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable German Infantry in imminent danger of encirclement. We gotta plug the hole with something and it's your Panzers, try not to get trapped with the rest of our beleaguered Army or Goebbels will be left highlighting the heroism of your last stand as the grim silver lining of your "death by internal spalling". 

I get how it can be sort of annoying to see the "de-gunned" status a lot especially since it seems very abstract. I also think it seems like gun mantlets specifically are a bit too vulnerable. Like lots of hits failing to penetrate sections of the tank with weaker armor but the first hit de gunned my Panther???? Problematic but usually the bigger problem can be the scenario's overall difficulty which the designer didn't consider. Context is important and asking the player to charge through an entire Tank Corp with a pair of Panzer IV's is a thing that can happen and it's super frustrating when there's a whole campaign locked away behind this one scenario you can't get through. I suspect that's where a lot of the real frustration with the game's perceived realism problems comes from.  

Edited by SimpleSimon
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14 hours ago, bruno2016 said:

2. again... 500 m gun hit... means muzzle brake or recoil opening in the mantlet. 3 such hits in 2 min... do u find the sim realistic?

Much of the game seems realistic, but this is one of the things I don't like.

Getting a gun knocked out frontally happens all the time in the game, but I have never seen any WW2 photos of such damage. Only pics of shots that clearly hit the barrel from the side.

This is what should happen when hitting the barrel from the front:

tiger-frontal-gun-baropky2.jpg

 

 

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I always noticed the high frequency if gun damage by hits in several scenarios. I sometimes use heavily armored gun-damaged tanks forward (instead of back to the dressing station) as a diversion for the enemy fire so as to lesser the number of hits on my remaining good order tanks. 

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Yes we all use game tricks. Well using malfunctioning tanks to distract the enemy was used sometimes in real like by the Germans in winter 1941-42 when one of their camps where a few Pz IV’s were positioned were attacked at night by a few T34’s. One or two the the 4-5some PzIV’s were damaged and cldnt fire. No crew inside. The Russians did not know of course and the challenge was to destroy the actual tanks without getting urself unnecessarily exposed by aasting time on dummies. This was even an ASL scenario i played...

nevertheless, doesnt change the fact that these gun killer front hits with even rather small calibers are over represented.... 😛

 

 

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13 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

Much of the game seems realistic, but this is one of the things I don't like.

Getting a gun knocked out frontally happens all the time in the game, but I have never seen any WW2 photos of such damage. Only pics of shots that clearly hit the barrel from the side.

This is what should happen when hitting the barrel from the front:

tiger-frontal-gun-baropky2.jpg

 

 

Here is what a lucky front short by a 57 mm can do sometimes: 

 

854A4B21-E2CB-4B1E-94CE-2A75BEC35CC8.jpeg

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13 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

Much of the game seems realistic, but this is one of the things I don't like.

Getting a gun knocked out frontally happens all the time in the game, but I have never seen any WW2 photos of such damage. Only pics of shots that clearly hit the barrel from the side.

This is what should happen when hitting the barrel from the front:

tiger-frontal-gun-baropky2.jpg

 

 

Oops sorry picked up the wrong pic 😉

more seriously here is the lucky shot ftom a 57mm churchill in tunisia. But was deemed to be very exceptional. And in fact neutralized the driver inside and smashed the radio set, prompting the crew to bail out. The gun was still functioning

AD0D3A81-2CCA-43A0-8B1A-B7DE67F574F1.jpeg

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1 hour ago, bruno2016 said:

Oops sorry picked up the wrong pic 😉

more seriously here is the lucky shot ftom a 57mm churchill in tunisia. But was deemed to be very exceptional. And in fact neutralized the driver inside and smashed the radio set, prompting the crew to bail out. The gun was still functioning

AD0D3A81-2CCA-43A0-8B1A-B7DE67F574F1.jpeg

Yes, I know that Tiger was disabled by that lucky shot.

My point was not about damage to tank hulls, but that shells should glance off barrels when hit from the front. I have still only seen barrel-penetrating hits that are from the side. Never from the front.

Edited by Bulletpoint
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