Slat Cage Armour

[Cpl Steiner]

Hi,

This will probably sound like a silly point but would it not be possible for the slat cage armour to be optional on the Stryker? I would like to see how they look without it, even if this is not very realistic from a real world point of view.

On a related point, presumably once an RPG hits a Stryker's slat cage armour, there won't be much of it left anyway (the armour I mean). Will the game model this?

[John Kettler]

Cpl Steiner,

I would expect most of the slat armor to survive an RPG hit, assuming it even detonated, largely intact.

The reason? The slat armor's pretty tough and resilient to begin with, and there's not all that much in the way of surface against which blast can act, and it is blast which bends and heaves metal.

I've seen MBT HEAT round hits on real MBTs in classified, now obsolete, studies, and lamp guards and other external items of the same basic dimensions as the slats in slat armor simply detonated the round, taking a few inches maybe out of the bracket, but by no means removing it. It was enough, though, given the HEAT designs of the late 50s and early 60s, to generally prevent the jet from penetrating the tank proper. This may well not be true in these days of acute cone angles and tandem charges.

Regards,

John Kettler

[MikeyD]

I guess the equivalent of a cageless Sryker in Iraq would be the big 4x4 M1117 armored car. Ceramic armor layer rated to .50 cal-ish, though I don't know if its quite the same armor type as Stryker. You definitely don't see much press about how these vehicles are performing (more effective than Humvees, no doubt!). But the Army themselves have said the vehicle's not exactly RPG-proof. I assume they're being deployed with that in mind.

[Battlefront.com]

Sorry, we're not including a "no-cage" option for Strykers. They wouldn't go into Syria that way, so from our perspective there is no reason to include them.

Steve

[Cpl Steiner]

I take your point but I just find the slat armour ugly. It also seems to add a considerable number of polygons to each model, so there might be a game performance justification for removing it as well as an aesthetic one.

Sorry if this sounds like a dumb request but I just thought it would be nice to see the lines of the vehicle without the cage now and again, perhaps for rear-echelon units.

[Kwazydog]

Cpl, if we did remove the armor visually then the engine wouldn’t be able to account for it with regards to hit detection, as it uses true LOS for such things. As such a vehicle without it would be treated as just that. The same is true for reactive armor by the way, allowing shots to find weak spots that the bricks might not cover.

Also its interesting to note that the armor is apparently not designed to detonate an RPG as such, but rather crush the outer casing which then damages the warheads fusing mechanism. Ive read reports of Strykers returning to base with more more than one warhead actually stuck in the slats. This only works on warheads designed before the 80's, but this includes much of the worlds inventory still.

Ill also add that it doesnt look quite so ugly when viewed from higher than eye level, which you often are in game

Dan