HE rounds, 120mm and below

[yurch]

Are these supposed to fragment at all? I've never killed anything with 20mm, 76mm or 120mm HE without a direct hit. One would think they are supposed to be good in a slight "area fire" against lightly armored targets such as turrets, tires, shrikes and infantry. As of now it appears these rounds will not be able to kill or damage any of them outside a direct hit.

A glance at the physobject files has them without an HEBlastDiameter or a HEBlastFragPenetration. Does this mean they do not fragment? They appear to be functioning more like HEAT rounds with extremely poor penetration and very poor accuracy.

20mm and 76mm also do not have ShockAmplitudes listed.

Right now it appears thier main use is killing the ion and missile towers (through thier higher then average structural damage) and shrikes from up close. Turrets are too small a target to bother to hit with inaccurate HE, which is suprising given thier single-digit armor values. My preferred ammunition against those is AP for it's accuracy.

[RIPper_SVK]

i find ion to be best against turrets, you can easily hit them with it and you need less than a second to destroy them...i agree that HE is totally innefective against turrets, you cannot hit them.

[Kurtz]

I think I have seen "XXX destroyed Kurtz turret with artillery" when 120 mm HE is used, so it seems possible to kill turrets with fragmentation..

I have also seen "XXX destroyed Kurtz turret with 120 mm HE".

But I have seen som many kil messages for my precious turrets, so maybe I'm just confused.

I have occasionally used 20mm HE in indirect fire (ctrl-M), I wonder what the results were? Might have made the enemy wonder were the fire came from...

[ April 23, 2006, 12:45 PM: Message edited by: Kurtz ]

[yurch]

Well, the bots fire it in huge volleys all the time. Eventually they get lucky and get a direct hit.

[kapps]

I find 20mm HE is effective at close or medium range against turrets while the 120mm is pretty much completely ineffective. My main use of 120mm HE is to attack wheeled vehicles and slow them down...which is funny because HE is so slow, it's hard to get a hit (or tell that you got a hit).

[yurch]

Originally posted by kapps:

My main use of 120mm HE is to attack wheeled vehicles and slow them down...which is funny because HE is so slow, it's hard to get a hit (or tell that you got a hit).

Here's the thing... if they aren't fragmenting, we aren't doing any tire damage unless we actually hit the tires!

[kapps]

Originally posted by yurch:

Here's the thing... if they aren't fragmenting, we aren't doing any tire damage unless we actually hit the tires! [/QB]

Yeah, that's what i meant by saying that it was hard to tell if I got a hit. There should definitely be a radius of fragmentation around the HE rounds.

[kmead]

I was wondering about this as well, as the last time I played I was trying to immobilize a few wheeled vehicles and was hitting them but not damaging them. HE so far is useless or so it appears.

[Rampage]

Assuming that the HEAT round works similarly to the way it does in today's tanks (M1A2 Abrams, British Challenger, German Leopard) it will not have a fragmentation effect. It actually detonates as a directed jet of heat energy(directly forward with a diameter of a couple of inches) that burns into or through the armor/skin of whatever the round hits. That's why a kinetic round (AP) does better with the heavier-armored vehicles, a depleted uranium dart (more mass than the rolled steel of the armor) actually pushes the steel aside and punches through. A HEAT round will usually break through medium to light armor, but may require several hits to burn through the heaviest armor. Again - that's assuming the DropTeam ammo works similarly to today's ammo.

[RIPper_SVK]

HEAT does have some fragmentation in real life, because the explosion of the projectile fragments it's case. but that's a lot weaker fragmentation than in the case of a dedicated HE ammo.

BTW, i find the 20mm HE ammo pretty usefull against turrets. because of the high ROF, it's pretty common that at least 1 projectile from a HE burst hits the turret. and because the turrets have so few hit points, that 1 puny hit is enough to take them down. while on the other hand, the 120mm HE is totally useless.