M4 Sherman Takes Out Hetzer From Front! Huh?!

[Col Deadmarsh]

My opponent who is on the attack in July '44 (that means no Tungsten) has just taken out my Hetzer with an AP round from a frontal upper hull hit. Let's break this down, shall we...

A Hetzer has 60mm of armor on the upper hull with a 60 degree angle. My opponent's M4 Sherman's penetration numbers for AP rounds hitting armor at a 60mm slope is 38 at 500 meters and 40 at 0 meters.

Now...how the hell can this round which can only penetrate 40mm of armor take out my Hetzer which has 60mm of armor? This is so far removed from reality that it couldn't possibly happen. And if you think it can, you better have a good explanation.

[Pvt. Ryan]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Colonel_Deadmarsh:

And if you think it can, you better have a good explanation.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

**** Happens.

[Treeburst155]

The same thing happened to me last week. There was even a catastrophic explosion with no surviving crew. The range was about 200-250 meters. It doesn't appear to be common but it does happen.

Treeburst155 out.

[JasonC]

At least two distinct possibilities - one, the M4 Sherman has a (?) after the name (i.e. partially identified), and is really something with a 76mm gun. Two, the Hezter's armor is sloped that much from its tread base on level ground, but that doesn't mean it is sloped that much to the line of fire - e.g. if the Hetzer is pointing downhill, or the M4 is firing down from a hill.

Assuming, of course, it was a front not side, and upper not lower, hull hit, and not a weak point penetration. Because in any of those cases, there is nothing to explain.

Also, remember that the Hetzer armor quality is only 85%, so it is really only going to give ~50mm of effectiveness. At a full 60 degrees (upper hull, no slope) that should still be enough, and most plain 75mm will bounce from the front of Hetzers because of it. Without the full 60 degrees (lower hull 40 from horizontal, or hills, etc), on the other hand...

[Diceman]

Was your Hetzer on a slope? I've lost what I calculated to be nearly impregnable Jagdpanzers becouse they were going down hill, reducing the effective slope of the armor. Or perhaps the Hetzer took a hit in the driver's vision slit? Lastly, maby the vehicle that took out your Hetzer was not the one you thought it was, or it's miss-ID'd? I once possitioned myself to take out a what looked like a harmless M5 Stuart, only to have it blow up my StuG. Turned out to be an M8 Mortor Carriage. HEAT can ruin your day bad.

[PiggDogg]

Maybe that M4 had a slightly arced shot that hit your Hetzer's top.

Maybe the Hetzer armor had a penetratable defect.

Maybe the shot hit the ground just under your Hetzer's front and bounced into the Hetzer's bottom.

Maybe aliens destroyed your Hetzer & you only thought that the M4 wacked you. :eek:

Cheers, Richard

[Shipmonkey25]

Harmless Stuart? I normally use Stuarts for the purpose of Stug hunting!

[Col Deadmarsh]

The Sherman M4 has a positive ID on it. It is though, firing down from a slight hill. My Hetzer is hull down in a ridge slightly below it about 300m away.

As for the armor quality, I thought those numbers showed the result of the armor quality not being 100%. If not, why are there meaningless numbers in the tables then? What would be the purpose of that?

The only thing that I can think of is that the shot was fired at what visually looks like the frontal side. Of course, we don't get the messgage, "Frontal-side" hit (at least I don't think we don't) so maybe that has something to do with it. Are frontal-side shots taken into account with a armor penetration in the middle of the two used, or is there no grey area there--only frontal 60mm and side 30mm?

[Offthewall]

If the Sherman is firing down from a hill on you the effective armor slope on the Hetzer will be less than 60 degrees, which, combined with the 85% armor quality, explains why your Hetzer got smoked.

[dragonwagon]

Hmmm, back in my Squad Leader days that would be known as a critical hit(I know some of u know what I'm talkng about)the round has struck a vunerable part of the tank such as the vision slot or maybe bounced off of the bottom of the manlet or something of that matter. Anyway sometimes when you think everything is gonna go your way it doesn't. That's one of the wonders of battle which this game can show you all to well sometimes.Never underestimate what may happen.

[Col Deadmarsh]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by dragonwagon:

Hmmm, back in my Squad Leader days that would be known as a critical hit(I know some of u know what I'm talkng about)the round has struck a vunerable part of the tank such as the vision slot or maybe bounced off of the bottom of the manlet or something of that matter. Anyway sometimes when you think everything is gonna go your way it doesn't. That's one of the wonders of battle which this game can show you all to well sometimes.Never underestimate what may happen. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I always wondered if such things were modeled. Of course we know about the shot trap but you get a message when that happens. I'm not sure if these "freak things" that are a part of real life are modeled in the game. It's possible that it was merely the fact that the Sherm was at a slightly higher elevation than the Hetz which lessened the degree of the slope.

Either that or the fact that it was a frontal-side hit but I've yet to find out if these exist either.

[Kwazydog]

Just so you guys know the slope that a tank is on definately makes a difference to armour calculations. If a sherman is firing from a high enough hill the Hetzers frontal armour will be at 0 degrees (yes, that would be one big hill ). I would suggest that this is what has happened in this case.

Dan

[Redwolf]

It would be either a lower hull hit or a penetration at a weak spot. The hit message should have told you which. why don't you post it?

[Mace]

Internal armour spalling; hit in a weakpoint (eg the vision slot on the RHS); slope of the armour plate in relation to the incoming round; round type - all these could result in perfectly good tank becoming a wreck.

Mace

[Moriarty]

Sh*t happens ... and then your Hetzer dies.

[ 09-07-2001: Message edited by: Moriarty ]

[Slapdragon]

Any tank can be killed by any other tank if the right combination of events occur.

[Andrew H.]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Colonel_Deadmarsh:

The Sherman M4 has a positive ID on it. It is though, firing down from a slight hill. My Hetzer is hull down in a ridge slightly below it about 300m away.

As for the armor quality, I thought those numbers showed the result of the armor quality not being 100%. If not, why are there meaningless numbers in the tables then? What would be the purpose of that?

The only thing that I can think of is that the shot was fired at what visually looks like the frontal side. Of course, we don't get the messgage, "Frontal-side" hit (at least I don't think we don't) so maybe that has something to do with it. Are frontal-side shots taken into account with a armor penetration in the middle of the two used, or is there no grey area there--only frontal 60mm and side 30mm?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I think the actual armor numbers (non-adjusted for quality) as a way of "showing their work." Plus, if they just listed the Hetzer's front armor as 51mm, everytime a new grog came to the board, he would point out this error.

I think it was a combination of the hill slope, the poor armor quality, and the 300 meter range that did in your Hetzer. Although it was a near thing.

I don't think this is exactly like a critical hit in SL/ASL. A critical hit would be a "penetration at weak spot," which would be shown on the screen.

Your frontal-side question, if I understand it correctly, is a good question, although it's much more complicated than you might think. Others here know more about it than me, but, basically, for all shots, CM calculates the angle of impact and uses that figure to determine the effective thickness of armor. Grossly simplifying, the steeper the angle, the more effective the armor is.

But there are two kinds of angle an armor can have. The first is the regular up and down slope that you see in the stats -- like the 60 degree slope for the front of the Hetzer. The second angle is the angle of deflection, which, basically, is the angle that your shot hits the armor at (this is *different* from the 60 degree angle being reduced from shooting from above.

Here's an example. If you have two tanks directly facing each other on level ground, and one tank has a 60 degree sloped front glacis, the shell fired by the other tank will have to penetrate whatever the effective armor thickness is for that armor at that slope. There is no deflection because the shot hits dead on.

Now if the tanks were not directly facing each other, and a tank rotated it's turret and shot the second tank, the shell might hit the second tank at a 45 degree angle from straight on. *This* angle is called deflection, and it makes a tanks armor seem thicker the same way that the up and down angle does. So in order to calculate the effective armor thickness of a tank, you have to know both the slope of the armor and the deflection of the shot. In the above example, the CM engine would increase the effective armor of the tank because it has a 60 degree slope, and increase the armor's effective thickness *again* because the shot had a 45 degree deflection.

Now, all of this goes to answer the question you originally asked about "frontal side" hits. The CM engine will determine whether a shot hit the front or the side of a tank based on some sort of probablity model that depends on what percentage of the side was showing. It will use armor base, plus slope, plus deflection to calculate armor thickness. Side armor is usually much weaker than front armor, but if the tanks are almost facing each other, the shell hitting the side would hit with such a great deflection that it would be almost impossible to penetrate...imagine if the angle of deflection was, say, 87 degrees.

So, anyway, that's the simple answer to how it works. Keep in mind, when you watch the blue bar slowly resolve the turn, that CM also has to keep track of deflection at the exact moment that the shell hits the tank. So if a tank is rotating towards you, the engine needs to know exactly how far toward you the tank had rotated at the instant it was hit so that it can apply the proper deflection. (A similar process obtains when you shoot at a rotating turret).

Hope this helps!

[Seanachai]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Slapdragon:

Any tank can be killed by any other tank if the right combination of events occur.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

And the mystification and outrage will be just as great if you're sufficiently clueless about what a dreadfully random Universe we live in.

[Kingfish]

Was the Sherman manned by a Finnish crew?

[M Hofbauer]

Slapdragon:

Any tank can be killed by any other tank if the right combination of events occur.

one has to note though that relatively few Shermans were lost to Bergepanther in 1944/45, even under most favorable conditions.

Andrew Hedges:

So, anyway, that's the simple answer to how it works. Keep in mind, when you watch the blue bar slowly resolve the turn, that CM also has to keep track of deflection at the exact moment that the shell hits the tank.

not true. CM calculates the hit at the moment the shot is being *fired*, not the moment the projectile hits the target.

Kingfish:

Was the Sherman manned by a Finnish crew?

LOL

[Redwolf]

Folks, there is no secret whatsoever about this, but two simple statistical mechanisms.

The lower hull has an angle that doesn't prevent the U.S. 75mm from penetrating. The game has a simple probability for lower hull hit, so a certain number of hits will hit lower hull. If you don't want that, you better go into hull-down position.

The second one is weak spot penetration, which is usually a 1% chance for any hit to reduce armour by 30-50%. On tanks with weak spots the chance may be as high as 10%.

If Col.DM was serious about his question, he would have posted what the exact message on penetration was. The message would have told him which variant of bad luck he experienced. If he doesn't bother to take notice, it is no wonder that he keeps loosing "superiour" tanks. Good for us.

Armour quality is just reduction of thickness for the purpose of penetration calculation.

[ 09-08-2001: Message edited by: redwolf ]

[Diceman]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Shipmonkey25:

Harmless Stuart? I normally use Stuarts for the purpose of Stug hunting!<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

But I had him, had him dead to rights, then suddenly I fond myself running my fingers through a field of wheat; and I thought to myself "where the hell am I?". Wrong thing to say...Dambed HEAT rounds.

[CMplayer]

Last month a car took out a young woman at a crosswalk a few miles from where I live. All four lanes of traffic had stopped to let her pass. What gives???!!!!

Well, some stoned asshole without a driver's license decided to thread between two stopped cars (at about 60mph).

Imagine trying to tell the kids why mom didn't come home that evening. These things send shivers through neighborhoods. The moral is: once you're born into this universe you are f***ed. Period. Resist this and you will be miserable. Accept this and maybe you'll be happy anyway.

So maybe just congratulate your opponent for his nice shot.

[Enoch]

To shed some more light on this mystery it is my game against the Colonel that he is talking about. Actually, it was not my plain vanilla M4 that took out the Hetzer but my M10. Both were sitting on top of a hill about 20m above the Hetzer at 256m range. The M4 bounced a shot off the front armor of the Hetzer less than a second before the the M10 killed it. If you stop the movie you can see the two shells coming in at the Hetzer. Without watching the movie in very slow motion it would be easy to miss this and mistake which tank got the kill.

So, I think this solves some of the mystery in this case.

FYI, that same M10 killed another Hetzer earlier in the game and a few turns after this latest Hetzer kill bagged a StuG. Now that is money well spent.

[CMplayer]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Enoch:

Both were sitting on top of a hill about 20m above the Hetzer at 256m range. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Assuming the Hetzer was on level ground, any math genius out there can calculate the actual armor slope involved?