Arty Effectiveness vs Tanks

[Anthony P.]

On 7/10/2024 at 1:26 AM, chuckdyke said:

Few years ago 25 pdrs got rid of a Stug III. A direct hit is modelled. The Stug ia roughly 3 by 2 meters while an action square is 8 by 8 meters so the odds are even if a shell hits the action square the odds are. 1:10 to hit the AFV itself let alone an HE on the engine deck. Would a WW2 HE shell penetrate its top armor? 

Heck, I even scored a frontal kill on a StuG like that with HE a while back.

Played the US Downfall campaign. My Pershing started the game with all its AP ammunition greyed out (not sure why; bug reported), so when it spotted a StuG, it started pummeling it with HE until switching to HVAP when it got a direct targeting order on it. But before it had actually reloaded and started shooting at it again, the StuG seemed to have already been beaten into submission by getting HE-smacked (the engine could be heard to stop after the third or so HE hit).

[Centurian52]

47 minutes ago, Anthony P. said:

Heck, I even scored a frontal kill on a StuG like that with HE a while back.

Played the US Downfall campaign. My Pershing started the game with all its AP ammunition greyed out (not sure why; bug reported), so when it spotted a StuG, it started pummeling it with HE until switching to HVAP when it got a direct targeting order on it. But before it had actually reloaded and started shooting at it again, the StuG seemed to have already been beaten into submission by getting HE-smacked (the engine could be heard to stop after the third or so HE hit).

Interesting. You hear about that sort of thing happening in real life (battering an enemy tank into submission with HE, particularly if you know that you can't penetrate the armor with your AP), but I hadn't realized it was possible in game.

[Anthony P.]

Me neither. I think this was enabled by some kind of bug. It's something I've wanted to try out, especially with larger caliber, but in a sense it's really quite hypothetical since the TacAI won't ever actually use HE against armoured targets as long as it still has access to AP ammo.

[Chibot Mk IX]

Also please note tank gun area fire HE round can kill other tanks. That happened during one of my PBEM game in CMBS.

 

My Russia T-72 area fire a wood, one of the HE round hit an unseen T-64BV. Later my opponent says the HE round hit the side low hull causing a huge explosion.

 

I should have that turn's save file somewhere on my hard-drive 

[Chibot Mk IX]

18 hours ago, Chibot Mk IX said:

If my memory is correct, Pelican Pal's testing was focus on the airburst arty vs sub-system.

In the meantime HerrTom's test and analysis (with MATLAB) prove that near miss needs a buff in CM.

 

Also in CM, a direct hit is the best way to disable a tank. However, it is ironic that a direct hit rarely damages the track, whereas a near miss often does.

Pelican's test

 

HerrTom's post

 

[PEB14]

48 minutes ago, Anthony P. said:

Me neither. I think this was enabled by some kind of bug. It's something I've wanted to try out, especially with larger caliber, but in a sense it's really quite hypothetical since the TacAI won't ever actually use HE against armoured targets as long as it still has access to AP ammo.

I had the same experience in a CMRT PBEM when one of my SdKfz 234/3 Stummel pummeled a SU or JSU soviet monster (please don't laugh!) with 75 mm HE shells. So it's not a bug!

[Pelican Pal]

On 7/8/2024 at 8:39 PM, Redwolf said:

Where is Pelican Pal when you need him?

Not playing CM

- Near misses will only damage tracks
- Direct hits will damage the vehicle (this seems under-modeled but whatever)

- Hits on ERA do not count as hitting the vehicle and will therefore only do track damage

 

 

------

 

I've never did much testing of WW2 tanks because they don't really interest me that much. Guess is that they should suffer more damage because this bug should still be present in those games (AFAIK its been around since at least 2013 if not earlier). The reason this is a problem for Combat Mission is because the game is dedicated to low-level simulation so little things like whether a smoke launcher on a tank was sheared off by a fragment matters. As you move into more modern eras there is more and more bits and bobs that could be sheared off (smoke, APS, LWRs, FLIR optics, ERA, RCWS, etc...) and impact combat later on in a battle.

- Laser warning receiver goes off

- tank goes to pop smoke but smoke launcher was damaged by some artillery

- ATGM hits tank and kills it

Stuff like that.

 

 

Also if anyone wants to test this **do not** skip through the turn. People want to shortcut testing and just chug through ~10 minutes to see if some tanks are dead. You need to track each artillery shell and see what damage it does.

 

Edited July 11 by Pelican Pal

[Lethaface]

This is Final Blitzkrieg forum, in WW2 games I never really had problems with arty effectiveness against AFVs. 

For CMBS there was. FWIW I still had screens of old test I did on Oplot-M using both 152mm precision and 203mm. 

This is the same tank in the two screens, cant remember if it were 203mm or 152mm, but it survived at least two direct impacts.

 

 

These were 203mm impacts iirc, one on the cupola and the other blocked by the cloth cover of the breech :). It was still combat capable, although immobilized:

Duplet stopping 203mm.:

 

Anyway I thought @The_Capt had confirmed artillery will change based of what we have seen in Ukraine. Imo there might also be a specific problem with some tanks in CM modern, as I have also seen T-72BM3 getting penetrated by a 120mm mortar in CMBS (iirc didnt destroy it but immobilized / mission kill).

 

[Pelican Pal]

I would expect that near misses will only cause track damage to still be around which could cause a few issues.

1. 20 seconds of MG fire does more subsystem damage than X # of artillery misses. This is the ultimate chip damage and doesn't really matter but I feel like the game should be on the level about it.
2. Vehicles with smoke and remote weapons systems (like the Hetzer MG) will be keeping them when they shouldn't be.
3. The game treats tanks and light vehicles a little bit differently so you might have a WW2 tank with particularly thin skin be resistant to fragmentation penetration/spalling when it shouldn't be.

All said and done its not a huge issues for WW2 but I wouldn't expect there to be no problems from it.