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AP vs Paladins


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I just finished a scenario wherein I dueled with some Paladins.

What some people are reporting is true. The Paladins in some cases took 8-9 120mm AP rounds...half at close range...without effect.

This just doesn't seem right to me. The AP ammo overall seems pretty darned ineffectual, but to be able to pump that many rounds into a lightly armored vehicle without effect is kinda silly.

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The Paladins in some cases took 8-9 120mm AP rounds...half at close range...without effect.
By "without effect", you probably mean "they didn't burn up" which is quite a different thing. I'll bet you a $1.13 that those Paladins which had taken multiple AP rounds had suffered plenty of effects. They probably had destroyed engines, at most one or 2 tires still capabale steering or driving, a dead gunner and/or driver, etc. Just because the thing hasn't finally gone that last inch and started to burn doesn't mean you had no effect.

AP is fantastic for damaging multiple components inside of a target even when it doesn't cause the entire target to brew up. When gunning at an enemy unit, it's easy to fall prey to a black & white judgement of your effects. Either it is burning (and you've gotten a kill credit) - or you feel that nothing at all has happened. In fact, that poor bugger in probably in dire shape. But since he's not yet burning you have no way to see this.

A fun and easy way to play with this is to run a standalone game with only friendly bots. Drop them all in Paladins and give them STOP orders. Now use them as target practice and, after each shot, go to the tac screen and click on them to see what kind of damage they've taken. It's quite informative!

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With the burnfactor, the chance of surviving 9 120mm AP rounds is something like 38 percent. This is if you avoid doing subsystem damage at all.

Are you sure you're penetrating? Are you hitting tires instead?

Where are you hitting?

This is the left side of the chassis internal diagram for the hermes, other paladins are similar:

hermesinternal.jpg

The only thing that will 'kill' a vehicle is destruction of its engine or battery. 25% chance on the engine destruction, 100% chance of the battery. Light green is the engine, light blue is the battery. It's very rare that either subsystem will survive two AP rounds that pass near the center of the target areas, and it's very possible to hit both at once. If you're impacting near the yellow circle, you won't do much damage with any weapon.

The engine is a very big target, and very easy to disable. I recommend attacking this for your first shot. It will make subsequent shots (if even necessary) easier.

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Okay, my AFV of choice is usually the Thor 120mm early and Apollo 120mm later in the game, so I use 120mm almost exclusively (my shot totals are usually 30-60 with about a 20% kill rate in a 30 minute game). I seem to get better single shot kills on the Shrikes, Paladins, and Apollos at the 500 to 1000m range than I do at point blank range. I suppose this might have something to do with shot arching, but still, to have to shoot a Shrike or Paladin 2, 3, and sometimes more from 50-100m is just ludicrous. With a Shrike or ATGM Paladin it is usually fatal. How many times have you come around the corner of a hill or structure and run head on to one of these. You get the first shot off and see it hit them squarely in the center front (usually an AP or HEAT round chambered), and then whoosh, away goes the ATGM and blooey goes your Thor or Apollo. According to every internal diagram I've seen of the Shrike or Paladin an AP round passing from one end to the other of either has to pass through several vital subsystems and a HEAT round has to incinerate and explode them. Thus one shot kill. The shock alone must be like hitting a concrete wall at 50 mph. For them to respond with a precision shot a second or two later is virtually impossible, yet it happens regularly when they don't die instantly. This is what I find a little unlikely (aah, I find it damn ridiculous).

If the ATGM is going to be the best one shot weapon in the game (at the start of a recent CTF game the red capture Shrike, destroyed three Thors in a row with a single shot-I didn't get off a first shot this time), the 120mm has to a similar ability. At close range, I don't think I get better that 30-40% first shot kills on Shrikes and Paladins, maybe less than that with side shots. I get about 50% first shot kills of Thors from the sides. Something just isn't right here. How can the Thors be killed easier than Shrikes and Paladins from the side? Doesn't make sense.

Even worse, when I experimented with the 76mm last night (thinking its quick reload might be an advantage), I had to hit a red flag-carrying Apollo about 15 time to kill it. In fact my last shots were after it stopped, smoking like a steam locomotive, I then pumped shot after shot (something like 6-8) directly into the fuel cell area before it finally gave the flag up. Come on, 15 shots from a 76mm to kill a lighty armored Apollo. The funny thing again is that earlier I had destroyed a Thor from about 1000m with about 6-8 shots from the side. It seems to my mind that something is seriously screwed up here.

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For shrikes the problem has gotten much better with both HE, and coax available. Either one shreds them.

Paladins are too hard to kill. For starters 120 Ap should go through the tires without slowing down enough to matter, so anything but a grazing corner shot should proceed right on through the vehicle. 120 AP that breaches the armor should proceed straight through the vehicle making progressively bigger holes as it goes. What the heck is the motor made out of that it stops a round that size? When a lightly armored vehicle is struck by a penetrating large caliber heat round it should die. When a heavily armored vehicle is struck by a penetrating large caliber AP round , it should die, There are just too many things to get broken. Wiring and fuel lines and so on, both rounds have large incendiary effects. The rational design decision if you have a given amount of armor available is to put it on the outside of the vehicle so that unpleasantness inside is avoided.

There is a two small hole effect with light armor and an AP round, but a paladin is not a lightly armored vehicle. It has about half as much armor as a thor or more

Some tanks use blow out panel on their ammo storage, but that just keeps the crew alive, it is still out of action.

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Originally posted by bjarmson:

The shock alone must be like hitting a concrete wall at 50 mph.

Actually, if you want to get technical, it probably wouldn't be - otherwise all that kinetic energy on the firing end would be doing worse. ;)

The 76mm is a very good indicator of what subsystem you're hitting. It's fragmentation is pathetic; you need to hit the subsystem directly in order to kill in any reasonable number of shots. This round can be blocked by other subsystems, however.

You can kill the Thor battery in 3 shots with the 76mm. The apollo battery is located extremely low in the chassis. If it took you 15 shots, you probably weren't really hitting it.

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My first 8 shots, or so, were while I moving quickly so probably hit helter-skelter, but the last 6 plus were while we were both stopped, aimed between the crew compartment and the turret, centered on the chassis. How they could miss the fuel cells I have no idea. Anyway, shouldn't 6 rounds of 76mm make ground round of an Apollo (hell the first 8 rounds should have done that). The Apollo was also taking fire from a 20mm bot, so it soaked up 20, maybe 30 rounds before it died (the flag popped loose).

The hitting a wall at 50 mph was just figurative on my part. I have no idea what it's really like (any engineering types out there want to do the math?). But it still has to be quite a shock just hitting a small vehicle with something almost 5 inches in diameter weighing 100 # or so, going a kilometer a second; even with barrel recoil it causes the 40-50 ton(?) Thor to literally jump off the ground

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Actually, if you want to get technical, it probably wouldn't be - otherwise all that kinetic energy on the firing end would be doing worse. [Wink]
Actually if you want to get technical the unit doing the firing usually has dirty great big recoil dampeners and a barrel that slides in to absorb the hitting a wall at 50mph.

Its not hard to work out the kinetic energy if you know the mass of the round and its muzzle velocity. 0.5*mass*V^2

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it actually leads to a good question if the shrike and the paladin are as unstable as they seem to be when you drive them how come sabot rounds don't pick them up and throw them. This isn't as far fetched as you may think I've read reports of M3 stuarts bieng thrown flying by 88mm hits.

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I made the following assumptions in regards to the momentum, not energy, of a 120 AP round. They are based on approximate Abrams equivalents. vehicle mass 35000 kg ,AP round mass 50 kg( that is probably high but kept the math simple), and muzzle velocity 1750 mps. The muzzle velocity is the unclassified Abrams number. Some basic calcs spit out that the round has the same momentum as the tank when it is going approximately 9 kmh. Its not quite 50 mph but, still a heck of a punch, for lighter vehicles it would be like running into a brick wall. Literally if the round penetrated the armor, bouncing off is complicated, either it is like running into the target with a tank moving a few kph or the round makes another hole in the other side. There are no other choices. What does a paladin mass/weigh again Clay?

They probably should be flipping over in some circumstances

This is at the muzzle, it would trail off in atmosphere depending on air density.

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of course with magic limitless anti-matter (or fusion if you prefer to think of it like I do) Recoil dampening is really easy. All you need to do is put a magnetic coil around the gun and another one fixed to the chassis which is around the gun. Put a charge into the inner coil and shunt the created energy from motion into the outer coil.

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Originally posted by bjarmson:

Okay, my AFV of choice is usually the Thor 120mm early and Apollo 120mm later in the game, so I use 120mm almost exclusively (my shot totals are usually 30-60 with about a 20% kill rate in a 30 minute game). I seem to get better single shot kills on the Shrikes, Paladins, and Apollos at the 500 to 1000m range than I do at point blank range. I suppose this might have something to do with shot arching, but still, to have to shoot a Shrike or Paladin 2, 3, and sometimes more from 50-100m is just ludicrous. With a Shrike or ATGM Paladin it is usually fatal. How many times have you come around the corner of a hill or structure and run head on to one of these. You get the first shot off and see it hit them squarely in the center front (usually an AP or HEAT round chambered), and then whoosh, away goes the ATGM and blooey goes your Thor or Apollo. According to every internal diagram I've seen of the Shrike or Paladin an AP round passing from one end to the other of either has to pass through several vital subsystems and a HEAT round has to incinerate and explode them. Thus one shot kill. The shock alone must be like hitting a concrete wall at 50 mph. For them to respond with a precision shot a second or two later is virtually impossible, yet it happens regularly when they don't die instantly. This is what I find a little unlikely (aah, I find it damn ridiculous).

Your rounds fail because Space Viking Valhalla does not favor you. ;)
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Dark you are correct that some of my number are off, that is why I put them up for inspection, so people could check.

Also my calculations are for momentum, not energy. Momentum is more useful for things like how billiard(pool) ball bounce off of each other. It is also more useful for car crashes and the like in many circumstances. I used it instead of energy in this case because I was curious if Paladins should be rolled over by impact on a regular basis, as well as my driving. :confused:

The theoretical equivalent of running into a truly large bridge support type of concrete wall is to hit a vehicle with the same momentum(mass*velocity) going the other way. That is the general idea was trying to expound upon.

Abrams APDSect. rounds have an energy of six to eight megajoules shortly after leaving the muzzle according to public sources, but the calculations about how much of it go into melting the tip of the sabot and how much into melting the armor, and, and, and quickly get insane. Momentum is easier.

Sabot/KE based missiles that will have 4 to 10 time this amount of energy are in late stage development, by the way.

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Oh, how I've derailed this one.

At any rate, the Apollo might need looking at. There's even a space between the turret and lower hull that the driver name tracething goes clear through.

I'm also wondering if the battery is too low to be intuitive.

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i have to second this thread.

AS i have said many other places i have had similar instances where putting multiple 76mm rounds (i.e. over 10!) at close range and into the side center of mass on apollos and paladdins did almost nothing.

And I have also experienced firing 120m AP at close range do almost nothing to shrikes.

Most often it takes 3 shots to kill these things, so much so that I have STOPPED firing ap at close range into shrilkes and now hit em with coax 20mm if im driving a thor.

Perhaps they had slightly damaged drive systems (moving slower) but they werren't burning and were able to maneuver and fire without affect.

I don't think either scenario is realistic.

Have you seen any of those passenger vehicles in iraq that were hit by abrams in the early part of the invasion?

Not a whole lot left.

Beyond the penetrating effect of the round itself when it hits anythig substantial in the vehicle (such as an engine) that also turns into a whole lot of flying shrapnel.

If you're in a tank that gets penetrated by a 76mm round you're not gonna be returning fire without delay, you're stunned, possibly blinded from smoke and likely out of action while you recover your senses.

the clincher for though is that it is easier to knock out a thor at close range than either a shrike or paladin when firing a 76mm andsometimes a 120mmAP.

It's gotten to the point that the 76mm are pretty poor combat vehicles, especially when you can take a 20mm variant which is supremely more effective.

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let the 76 alone!

I've got to second the part about concussion, infantry seems to suffer from near misses, why shouldn't a crew be dazed for a couple of seconds? i don't pretend blurred visuals etc, just 3 or 4 seconds of incapacitation-> the vehicle run the way it was running minus the impact effects

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76mm does very good damage to whatever subsystem it hits. Better than 120mm AP, if you consider the rate of fire. The problem is hitting. The Thor and Apollo have quite a bit of empty space.

I'm having trouble importing the Apollo model, so I have nothing better than the coordinates to judge off of.

It's got the same subsystem sizings as the Thor, but a weaker engine. The battery is very low - so low, that I'm guessing the target area is shaped more like a half-sphere than a full one. This might be the hardest battery to hit in the game. Aim below center-mass on this one, folks.

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120 AP that breaches the armor should proceed straight through the vehicle making progressively bigger holes as it goes. What the heck is the motor made out of that it stops a round that size?
Nothing. 120mm AP goes straight through all internal components without stopping, doing damage as it goes. This is one of its main strengths relative to smaller AP rounds.

The shock alone must be like hitting a concrete wall at 50 mph...same momentum as the tank when it is going approximately 9 kmh..etc.
This would only be true if the target stopped the projectile completely, thereby absorbing all of its momentum. Targets never do this because AP is very good at cutting through things that are in its way. Imagine that the target's armor was as thin and as weak as a sheet of paper and a 120mm AP round went through the paper. How much of a shock would that be to the target? Not very much, since the round would continue through mostly unmolested, retaining its momentum rather than giving it to the target. Ditto with a shot that ricochets without penetrating - all of the round's momentum has not been transferred to the target (the round is still flying!)

This is why in real gunnery it is standard to use HEAT or HE on light targets instead of AP (among other reasons). With a sufficiently light target it's possible to do little damage to the target because the round will simply punch straight through and keep going.

Conversely, the heavier and thicker the target is, the more traumatic AP is going to be against it. This is very important in DropTeam! One of the quirks of AP is that, once you penetrate a target, its going to hurt heavy targets more than it hurts light targets.

The heavier the target's armor, the worse internal fragmentation damage is. Internal fragmentation applies damage in crazy patterns within the target's interior, not just in a straight line along the AP round's flight path. So when you punch through a Thor's frontal armor, you've made a horrible mess inside of the vehicle. Conversely, when you punch through a Shrike's very thin front armor, there is not nearly as much (or as deadly) fragmentation within his interior.

Yurch has previously mentioned the "10% burn factor" of AP rounds. This is not simply a 10% chance of setting the target on fire when hit by AP. This is modelling of igniting the target's armor by the almost instantaneous heat build-up from kinetic friction when an AP rounds manages to punch through the armor. The base factor of 10 that the 120mm AP round has is a starting factor which is used with the target's armor thickness to arrive at a final chance of igniting the target. The higher the target's armor, the higher chance of igniting it due to kinetic friction. So once again, since your AP round passes through the Shrike's thin armor without even slowing down much, there's little chance of igniting the Shrike in this way. Conversely, if your AP round penetrates the thick frontal armor of a Thor, scraping its way through centimeter after hot, digging, scraping, centimeter - then you have a *much* higher chance of igniting that armor due to kinetic friction!

Bottom line: AP is not as lethal against light targets as it is against heavy targets.

Even bottomer line: Use AP on tanks. Use HEAT on Shrikes. Use the right weapon for the right job. A tool that is good for one purpose is not automatically good for all other purposes.

It is not true, in DropTeam or in reality, to make the blanket statement that AP is more deadly than HEAT. Whether this is true or not depends on what is being hit.

In DropTeam's damage modelling, total overpenetration of a target is not modelled. This means that even if an AP round has sufficient penetration to go entirely through a target and continue on beyond the target, it doesn't. The round stops inside of the first target that it hits. This reduces the workload of physics that your poor computer is already crunching, and it is a mostly harmless simplification. The one place that it causes a significant problem, though, is in the case of tires and other objects that are attached to a chassis. In these cases, the fact that your AP round completely stops if it happens to hit a Paladin's tire, without passing through the tire to also hit the chassis, is really bad. Even if we don't model the projectile continuing through and on to a completely different target, we definitely should at least model overpenetration between tires and other "child" objects of the same target. This is a very easy thing to do, and it will greatly improve the performance of AP rounds against wheeled vehicles. Right now, when shooting at the sides of a wheeled vehicle it is very easy to hit the tires instead of the chassis, making it sometimes very hard to finally get a kill.

If you're in a tank that gets penetrated by a 76mm round you're not gonna be returning fire without delay, you're stunned, possibly blinded from smoke and likely out of action while you recover your senses.
DropTeam does not currently model shocked crew members within a vehicle that has taken fire. You're absolutely right that it should, though. All of the pieces are already there (the way infantry stand around dazed after a blast is actually already there for the tank crew members, but not currently used). Will get it in ASAP.

It's gotten to the point that the 76mm are pretty poor combat vehicles, especially when you can take a 20mm variant which is supremely more effective.
20mm is supremely more effective at point blank range. At medium range, the 76 will pick you apart while your 20mm's are bouncing off of his glacis. If you're armed with a 76, and you're in a knife fight with a 20mm, then he has already won the fight by getting you on his ground.
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Originally posted by ClaytoniousRex:

Yurch has previously mentioned the "10% burn factor" of AP rounds.

Does this mean other rounds will have this burnfactor as well, just starting at zero?

And, do you mean that with a 10% base, this is the minimum factor for the 120mm?

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Other rounds could have this factor, but there aren't plans to add them to any of the other existing rounds now. It would only be used for other high caliber AP around the size of the 120 or bigger (so if you were to create some new, high caliber rounds you could use this value).

The 10% is multiplied with the target's armor thickness and a coefficient. So for the Shrike the final kinetic burn chance is about 1%. For the Thor, the final kinetic burn chance through the thick frontal armor is about 30%.

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Clay, there are a couple of errors in your argument here.

Firstly the Shrike isn't very susceptible to HEAT either. I'd like a dollar for every shrike I've had to put 3 HEAT into.

Now when you talk about the AP causing fragments after penetration you are refering to Spall. Have they suddenly forgotten how to make spall liners?. Anyway light vehicles have light spall liners which catch less of the spall than would a heavy vehicle with subsequently higher amounts of spall lining. This isn't fool proof either and any energy that hits this will be converted into either heat and or motion (every action etc). The bussiness about AP passing through harmlessly is only really applicable to soft skinned vehicles. ANY amount of armour will cause the rounds flight to kink and it will break and tumble. AP rounds are actually designed to break (shear) so that if the end doesn't penetrate the sharp shard will.

Lastly your piece of paper analogy. Tell you what you hold up a piece of paper and I'll fire a 120mm DS round through it. When you pick yourself up off the floor you will probably find you are still holding onto the paper... At least a couple of corners of it. The rest will be a long way behind you in peices.. Why.. because you forgot turbulent wake (Hydrostatic shock when it hits a body). a round causes a vacuum behind it, its this which causes the "crack" of the round that you hear. This the air / methane / whatever rushing into this vortexes and causes in some cases more dammage than the round itself.

The final answer though is stand an empty tin can on a fence and hit it with a .177 flechette / dart at high velocity. Not only will the tin can crumple it will go flying, even if the round exits the far side.

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none of your analogies are applicable. these arnt modern ap rounds. I dont want ap to start getting one jhit kills on light vehicles because that would make them too easy to kill at long range. the speed advantage doesnt help much against ap because it goes so fast. I like that you need to hit the engine with ap before blowing it up with heat.

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