Vanir Ausf B

The M1A1 bazooka uses the M6A1 rocket, which has a dispersion of 8.5 mils. The CMBN manual doesn't say what rocket the M9A1 is assumed to be using, but it is probably the M6A3 which has a dispersion of 6 mils. http://www.scribd.com/doc/13810984/Standard-Ordnance-Items-Catalog-1944-Vol-3 Pages 148-150 I have read that the optical sight on the M9 bazooka had range gradations every 50 yards compared to every 100 yards on the M1A1.

Must... bite.... tongue... If you are happy with a much smaller sample size I won't complain. I can tell you there were no ricochet hits in the first 117 non-penetrating mantlet hits. I'll get a couple hundred more then post up the results. After all, it only takes a few minutes...

LOL That would be interesting. The ricochets that I have seen hit other vehicles have always been of the slowly loop into the air then gently fall to the ground type. They've never done any damage to other tanks, but as poesel noted they can cause casualties to infantry or bailed tank crews.

*sigh* Fine. What's another 5 hours of my life for a "relatively minor issue"? I'll test US 76mm at 800 meters.

Yes, the Panther was a 1944 tank rushed into service in small numbers at least 6 months before it was ready. BTW, getting back to a previous point... I went back and looked at the Isigny test and the aimpoint is listed for all shots fired. All shots were aimed at either the glacis or the "nose", which seems to be what they call the lower hull plate. So they were basically aiming for center of mass.

And how often did this happen with relatively thin (compared to modern tanks) WW2-era steel armor? All of your examples are from modern M1 Abrams tanks with thick composite armor. I have seen a small number of pictures of AP shells stuck in the armor of WW2 tanks, but it was usually not apparent if they had penetrated the interior and it appears to be quite a rare event in any case.

It must be a language barrier thing. I thought you were saying that the Tiger cannot be penetrated through the front turret anymore. In the post you quote I'm kind-of saying the opposite of that.

I said that? I'm not even aware of that.

LOL, Tell the tank crew that those pieces of metal flying around their heads are semantics. Your link is, of course, broken.

A partial penetration is a type of penetration.

Right. What we do know is that the hit distribution was over the frontal area of the tank, not concentrated on any particular spot. Absurd statement. If the chance were raised to say, 3% of rounds that hit the mantlet, and if we were to estimate that around 20% of all hits are on the mantlet then only about 1 in 165 hits on the Panther would be a ricochet onto the deck. And not all of them would necessarily penetrate. Small caliber rounds such as the 37mm on the Greyhound should have a lower chance of penetration compared to 75mm and up. I assume you're joking.

There is no indication or reason to believe that they were aiming for the shot trap or any other specific area. The purpose of those tests was to test ballistic performance of weapons vs. armor, not for the testers to work on their aiming skills.

I don't know who made the diagram -- I found it on a website -- but I'm pretty sure it was just intended to illustrate the general idea. I thought that was what we had been doing.

Thanks, Ken. However, I doubt that watching the behavior of ricochets will be enough to answer that question. I just spent a little time watching ricochets off the Panther glacis -- a uniformly flat plane outside of the machine gun bulge -- and there is a lot of variation in terms of direction, trajectory and velocity. Clearly there is some factor(s) other than angle of impact, which could include random variation. This is probably something only Charles would know. Unfortunately, from the sounds of it he now exists in a separate dimension that only rarely intersects with our own, leaving us to puzzle over test results like Biblical scholars interpreting Old Testament verses.

Anecdotally, yes. No

Thanks for looking into it Steve. :cool: There is no reason that I am aware of to believe that ricochet penetrations were a phenomenon associated with any particular gun or round. As Amizaur pointed out in his excellent post a few pages back, any AP round that fails to penetrate is either going to disintegrate or ricochet. There are no other options. The greater the slope or curvature of the object struck, the greater the chance of ricochet vs. breakup. The fact that the Germans didn't do anything about the shot trap until fall of '44 is more likely a reflection of the fact that the Panther did not comprise a large portion of the German armored inventory in 1943 and early 44 and was a new vehicle with relatively little combat time. In any case, given the huge time sink this testing is I am not inclined to jump into a new round of it unless I have a reason to believe that the results may make a difference in the game, and at this point that seems unlikely.

If the geometry of the Panther mantlet is WYSIWYG then it is a certainty, for the obvious reason that the real Panther mantlet was a round object rather than 8 flat polygons joined together.

Choose any angle or range of angles, no matter how narrow or wide, and it will be the same across the face of the mantlet on the x axis, assuming the projectile approaches from straight-on. That is what I mean by a band. If there is a significant lateral offset then that is different because compound angles come into play. But that is not a favorable scenario for ricochets into the deck. We know of one US test that required 8. Another required around 80 or so, IIRC. Neither needed anything approaching thousands. That this is suggestive rather than definitive is given, but it is very suggestive. There are educated guesses and wild-ass guesses. Let's not lump them together.

While this was certainly true in CMx1 it has always been my understanding that in CMx2 the physical vehicle model is used for ballistics modeling. I am not aware of any exceptions to this, but am open to correction if it has been stated that there are.

First of all I never claimed CMx1 got it right. I was simply using it to illustrate that there are varying levels or rarity, and how vast the differences with CMx2 really are. Second, while it would be fair to say there is no proof that a change would be more realistic, to claim there is no evidence to that effect is not. Unless you don't consider two US tests that produced shot trap ricochets to be evidence?

BTW, all this talk about it being "rare" is missing the point. No one is disputing that it was rare, just not that rare. To put it into perspective, if the incidence of ricochet penetrations in the game were increased by a factor of 100 it would still be more than twice as rare as it was in the CMx1 games.

The hypothetical you describe would still be a band rather than a single point. These speculations seem rather pointless when we already know that the way the shot trap is modeled in the game is physically different than reality. The only evidence that it was as rare as it is in the game is the game itself. It's a circular argument. I will say again: there is no rational explanation for over 1000 rounds ricocheting off a surface inches away from the deck plate with only one of them hitting the deck plate.

Yes, this is something I have been thinking about as well. At the very least, the way the Panther mantlet is modeled in the game will greatly decrease the granularity of results vs. what would be seen with a rounded object.

This would require the mantlet to be irregularly shaped rather than symmetrical.

How many were killed by hits to any other area? This sort of data does not exist. But if shot trap kills were as incredibly rare in real life as they are in the game then the answer would probably have been 0.