Bioseed

Hollow charge penetration is listed in the text above the empty penetration graph.

I would like to know this as well.

I have to wonder how much of this is a realism issue and how much is a result of what people saw in CMx1 and accepted as real. We all have to admit that there is no hard scientific data to tell us exactly how easy it is to hide a man from any number of different tanks in any number of different environments. CMx1 favored the man, TOW favors the tank, but where is the sweet spot?

When I first played CMBO years ago, I couldn't stand it because it was just too different from what I was familiar with. After a few months passed, and I started hearing good things about it, I tried it again and it stuck. TOW was an immediate success for me, though I imagine other people will have my experience with CMBO this time around. Just be patient folks, there is more here than some of you realize.

TOW damage calculations make CMx1 seem like pong to me; I can't go back.

The demo missions never will do it, anyway for whatever its worth: 122mm VBR-471 167 152 142 133 122 100mm UBR-412 171 155 135 115 100 152mm VBR-546 133 125 115 105 90

Cover and concealment are not the same thing, and grass can conceal, as long as the troops are in an area that has an actual grass texture and is not bare land.

Looks like someone got lost in translation

doWnSizer, I had luck with SLI when I changed the SLI mode to "force split-frame rendering" on the nvidia control panel.

75mm M61 89 80 70 (100m, 500m 1000m) 76mm M62A1 117 107 97 76mm UBR-354A 80 70 63 85mm UBR-365 119 105 100

This weapon actually has slightly different numbers in CMBB than it does in CMAK, and here again they are different, and somewhat profoundly. I can't tell if this is just an encyclopedia typo or something bigger, but the numbers listed for the Pzgr39 do seem odd.

Good idea, I just tried this with the mission editor: 1 Panther vs 1 M4A1 at 271meters (had to guess range in the editor) Panther is under my control with regular crew and no ammo, M4A1 has regular crew and M61 ammo. Tanks are placed facing each other frontally with no sides visible. So I load up and let the Sherman start shooting my Panther: hit 1: glacis - no effect hit 2: turret front - no effect hit 3: turret front - no effect hit 4: track - immobilization hit 5: glacis - no effect hit 6: lower hull front - no effect hit 7: glacis - no effect hit 8: turret front- no effect hit 9: glacis - no effect hit 10: glacis - no effect hit 11: glacis - crew panics and leaves tank Second trial hit 1: turret - no effect hit 2: glacis - no effect hit 3: glacis - no effect hit 4: glacis - no effect hit 5: glacis - Panther knocked out So out of 10 total glacis hits by M61 to the Panther at 271m, 8 have no effect, 1 causes the crew to leave, and one destroyed the tank for reasons unknown (perhaps a cumulative damage effect)

Redwolf, just out of curiosity, what have you personally seen in this game that leads you to believe that the mounting angle is not included?

Redwolf, I do realize that the Panther has more turret armor. I have watched many shots on the Panthers to see where they hit, and I can confirm that the only Soviet weapons that can regularly penetrate the Panther front hull are the 122mm and 100mm and even those can't always do it under all conditions. Smaller weapons like the 85mm will bounce off of the Panther's hull unless the tank is on an significant downward slope, in which case it might be possible to penetrate more easily (only saw this once) I haven't tested the British/American weapons on the Panther yet but I would expect similar results.

I just took another look at the TOW manual, and it seems to give an official word on the matter: Damage Calculations The following factors are taken into consideration in the game whenever damage is calculated for various types of objects: ballistics (every weapon in the game has its own ballistics parameters), hit angles, armor at the hit location, shell inertia, high-explosive effect, detonation, blast pressure wave, secondary effects, ricochets, anti-HEAT screens, ammo detonation, and inflammation. The following systems may be disabled: o Chassis: o Transmission; o Engine; o Wheel or tracks o Turret; o Guns; o Machine guns; o Crew

Official word would be nice, but until then I am going to trust the results I have seen in game, and so far my Panthers have been much more survivable than any StuG.

Everything I have seen in this games tells me it does have slope effects. I have even seen a side angle on tank hull increase protection... Are we playing the same game Redwolf?

I didn’t have high hopes for TOW ballistics when I pre-ordered, but after watching a few hundred shots between tanks, I have found a lot of thing to look at. TOW not only gives us the things we knew from CMBB and CMAK such as ricochets, spalling and non-lethal penetrations, but brings in several new features that CM never had. 1. The real paths and absolute hit locations of shots are now visible, so there is no abstraction that sends the shot to ambiguous CM hit locations like “lower hull penetration” 2. The angle of impact for each hit location appears to be calculated by the vertex of the 3d model itself, avoiding the abstraction in CM that forced a vehicle’s “lower hull” or other area into one contiguous surface with one angle of slope. This makes a huge difference, because now tanks with irregular shapes can now have different levels of vulnerability across their surfaces. In a test I did with an empty Panzer II and a 45mm ATG at about 250m, I was able to get a 45mm shot to hit and bounce off of the Panzer II hull front by hitting the nearly horizontal plate that separates the “upper hull” and the “lower hull” The front hull armor normally couldn’t survive a 45mm hit at that distance but this extremely sloped surface can. In CM, this surface did not exist on the Panzer II due to abstraction; it was neither “upper” nor “lower”. A long list of vehicles are affected by this phenomena and now have different levels of survivability than they did in CM because of angle alone. The IS-2 and T-34-85 turret fronts perform much differently now because much of their frontal areas are actually “side” seen from about 75 degrees that can bounce almost anything. Round turrets like those of the Shermans get a bit of a boost as well, and boxier things like the Stug IIIG do not gain much and are therefore much less dominant than in CM, which is probably a good thing for the sake of realism. 3. Both penetrating and non-penetrating hits have a chance of damaging whichever components are closest to the area of impact. We have probably all see the new damage effects on tracks, engine etc by now, but what I didn’t expect is that most (all?) Of these new damage effects can also be caused by non-penetrating hits. Any others? In spite of what some are saying of realism and comparing TOW to CM, I am impressed by this new contender.