Bizzare mortar damage behavior

[yurch]

I'm sure many people have seen this. The thor main gun, when under attack with mortar rounds (usually from the hurricane) will often ignite. I think I've seen this with the apollo too, but it's rare it survives such a mortar hit in the first place.

I don't mean the turret. I mean the gun barrel itself. The result is a curious small fire that seems mostly centralized somewhere inside the turret.

The gun doesn't actually have any subsystems in it, so the thor loses no functionality whatsoever. It appears the shot is "destroying" the barrel object, in the same manner an ion destroys an object after melting through the armor. In fact, you can get the same behavior by firing an ion at the thor barrel. Just be prepared to do it for a while. That barrel has 400 armor.

This raises odd questions as to what the mortar round (or more specifically, I suspect it is the shrapnel) is doing. Is the plasma mortar or its resulting fragmentation supposed to have a chance to defeat targets of such high armor value, with a burn factor to boot?

[Dark_au]

I've seen this too from atgm damage.

[yurch]

I think I've seen this once or twice as well with 120mm AP.

Both 120mm AP and the ATGM have a 10% ArmorBurnFactor, an annoying property that completely destroys the physical object it penetrates (turret, chassis, gun, tire) with a fire 10% of the time. Which means, yeah, you could take a round in some corner section or other extraneous geometry and end up without a turret or just plain dead. You also get wierd situations like this cannon fire.

However, the ATGM has a 250 base penetration, which is only slightly better than a HEAT round. To penetrate a 400 armor cannon, it needs to be hit first by a beam 25 times at least. So it's plausable, but that's pretty rare. (EDIT: Other cannons have weaker values) I'm having difficulty reproducing the thor-cannon fire, so perhaps it's a similar situation.

The mortar round itself does not have a burnfactor. I'm convinced the shrapnel has one, but since I can't find a file for it's properties I have no idea of the frequency. What I'd also really like to know at this point is the penetration value of shrapnel. There's a HEBlastFragPenetration set to 100, but this is far too low to ever penetrate a thor anywhere on it's chassis.

[ July 27, 2006, 05:23 PM: Message edited by: yurch ]

[yurch]

With a quick mod, adding the heavy mortar's HEBlast properties to the 120mm HE (hence, many explosions), I got the burning cannon effect to happen on a fresh bot Thor unaffected by beams.

I'm wondering if there's something wierd with shrapnel... either it's (over?)powerful enough to be penetrating that obscenely armored object or something else is up.

Incidentally, getting the explosion to hit the turret front also seems to net you a shrapnel kill on the chassis with a pretty high frequency.