Main gun HEAT rounds

[Scheuer]

Why can´t tanks fire HEAT ammunition? For example, the T55 main gun ammunition in the game only has 300mm of armor penetration at point blank range, and this then drops off. In reality it also has a HEAT round with 380mm penetration at all ranges. Why is this not represented in the game? It certainly would give the T55 a better chance in the fight against the M60A1.

[Redwolf]

Tank ammo in TacOps generally represents the best all the capabilities of all rounds commonly available to that tank. If needed the Major creates a seperate tank to model important tactical difference, e.g. for some tanks there is a tank with DU and one with tungsteen as maximum penetration.

If you can make a good enough point that this HEAT round is a) common has 380mm penetration and c) doesn't have other disadvantages like much lower hit probability (which is possible to likely) than I assume the Major may consider bumping the T-55 penetration to 380mm max. or creating a new T-55 variant with 380mm penetration at all ranges with lower hit probability.

[Scheuer]

I just assume that the tanks carry different rounds for their main guns, but this is only second hand knowledge, I´m not a professional. The penetration figure is also taken from publicly available sources. HEAT would surely have

lower hit propability, but it would sometimes be worth it.

Some tanks in TacOps fire missiles through their main guns, and I suppose the game engine makes the choice of what ammunition to fire based on an overall kill chance. Why not make the same with HEAT rounds?

[MajorH TacOps Developer]

>Why not make the same with HEAT rounds?

I wanted to avoid the memory and calculation overhead of having separate ammo types for tank main guns. For the most part I was able to do this using a single penetration curve for each weapon rather than a curve for each ammo type. ATGMs fired through tank guns were so different that I was forced to separate them from the normal abstraction.